Title: The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories
Author: Cather, Willa
Language: English
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THE TROLL GARDEN

AND

SELECTED STORIES

By Willa Cather


Contents



_Selected Stories_

     On the Divide
     Eric Hermannson’s Soul
     The Enchanted Bluff
     The Bohemian Girl


_The Troll Garden_

     Flavia and Her Artists
     The Sculptor’s Funeral
     “A Death in the Desert”
      The Garden Lodge
     The Marriage of Phaedra
     A Wagner Matinee
     Paul’s Case



SELECTED STORIES



On the Divide


Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute’s
shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of long
rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the west the
ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber wound along
the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely ambition enough to
crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been for the few stunted
cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks, Canute would have shot
himself years ago. The Norwegians are a timber-loving people, and if
there is even a turtle pond with a few plum bushes around it they seem
irresistibly drawn toward it.

As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any kind,
for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake Creek there
was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built of logs split
in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster. The roof was covered
with earth and was supported by one gigantic beam curved in the shape of
a round arch. It was almost impossible that any tree had ever grown in
that shape. The Norwegians used to say that Canute had taken the log
across his knee and bent it into the shape he wished. There were
two rooms, or rather there was one room with a partition made of ash
saplings interwoven and bound together like big straw basket work. In
one corner there was a cook stove, rusted and broken. In the other a
bed made of unplaned planks and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and
upon it was a heap of dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench
of colossal proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with
a few cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
washbasin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some ragged
clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth, apparently
new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk handkerchief
and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and a badger skin,
and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty snake skins whose
noisy tails rattled ominously every time it opened. The strangest things
in the shanty were the wide windowsills. At first glance they looked as
though they had been ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but
on closer inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a rough
way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as though they
had been cut very slowly and with very awkward instruments. There were
men plowing with little horned imps sitting on their shoulders and on
their horses’ heads. There were men praying with a skull hanging over
their heads and little demons behind them mocking their attitudes. There
were men fighting with big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All
about these pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew
in this world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was
always the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was
a serpent’s head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had felt
its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of them
was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude and
careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had trembled. It
would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men from their evil
geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave and were either
toiling or praying, while the devils were always smiling and dancing.
Several of these boards had been split for kindling and it was evident
that the artist did not value his work highly.

It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into his
shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove, sat
down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire, staring
drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by heart every
individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red shaggy prairie that
stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all the deceitful loveliness
of its early summer, in all the bitter barrenness of its autumn. He had
seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by
drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in
the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones
that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it
stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.

He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily as
though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into the
hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw before the
shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill themselves, and the
snow flakes were settling down over the white leprous patches of frozen
earth where the hogs had gnawed even the sod away. He shuddered and
began to walk, trampling heavily with his ungainly feet. He was the
wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he knew what that meant. Men fear
the winters of the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North
Seas fear the still dark cold of the polar twilight. His eyes fell upon
his gun, and he took it down from the wall and looked it over. He
sat down on the edge of his bed and held the barrel towards his face,
letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid his finger on the trigger.
He was perfectly calm, there was neither passion nor despair in his
face, but the thoughtful look of a man who is considering. Presently
he laid down the gun, and reaching into the cupboard, drew out a pint
bottle of raw white alcohol. Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily.
He washed his face in the tin basin and combed his rough hair and
shaggy blond beard. Then he stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark
clothes that hung on the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in
his hands and tried to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper
collar that was pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped
it under his rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the
cracked, splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he
threw it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
striking off across the level.

It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once in a
while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and sowing,
and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the frosts left
him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things on the Divide.
They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season. Those scorching
dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas seem to dry up the
blood in men’s veins as they do the sap in the corn leaves. Whenever the
yellow scorch creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear,
then the coroners prepare for active duty; for the oil of the country is
burned out and it does not take long for the flame to eat up the wick.
It causes no great sensation there when a Dane is found swinging to his
own windmill tower, and most of the Poles after they have become too
careless and discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut
their throats with.

It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy, but
the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men that have
cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years to try to be
happy in a country as flat and gray and naked as the sea. It is not easy
for men that have spent their youth fishing in the Northern seas to be
content with following a plow, and men that have served in the Austrian
army hate hard work and coarse clothing on the loneliness of the plains,
and long for marches and excitement and tavern company and pretty
barmaids. After a man has passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy
for him to change the habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring
with them to the Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have
squandered in other lands and among other peoples.

Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always taken
liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his first year
of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He exhausted whisky
after a while, and went to alcohol, because its effects were speedier
and surer. He was a big man and with a terrible amount of resistant
force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even to move him. After nine
years of drinking, the quantities he could take would seem fabulous to
an ordinary drinking man. He never let it interfere with his work, he
generally drank at night and on Sundays. Every night, as soon as his
chores were done, he began to drink. While he was able to sit up he
would play on his mouth harp or hack away at his window sills with his
jackknife. When the liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed
and stare out of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and
in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful
loneliness and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he
put mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains that,
because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their
vice, were cursed of God.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is
merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody
man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these, but he was
morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the hells of Dante.
As he lay on his giant’s bed all the horrors of this world and every
other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a man who knew no
joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The skull and the
serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal futileness and of
eternal hate.

When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he was
not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out the
social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him because
of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering brows.
Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal treachery
of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle with the
promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear water
and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before autumn the
lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and hard until it
blisters and cracks open.

So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful stories
of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank.

They said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young
stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous horse
began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood trickling down
into his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused himself from his
kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical courage of a drunken man
leaned forward and wound his arms about the horse’s hind legs and held
them against his breast with crushing embrace. All through the darkness
and cold of the night he lay there, matching strength against strength.
When little Jim Peterson went over the next morning at four o’clock to
go with him to the Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was
on its fore knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story
the Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they
feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.

One spring there moved to the next “eighty” a family that made a great
change in Canute’s life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of the time to be
afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too garrulous to be afraid of
any one who listened to her talk, and Lena, their pretty daughter, was
not afraid of man nor devil. So it came about that Canute went over to
take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he took it alone, After a while
the report spread that he was going to marry Yensen’s daughter, and the
Norwegian girls began to tease Lena about the great bear she was going
to keep house for. No one could quite see how the affair had come about,
for Canute’s tactics of courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently
never spoke to her at all: he would sit for hours with Mary chattering
on one side of him and Ole drinking on the other and watch Lena at her
work. She teased him, and threw flour in his face and put vinegar in
his coffee, but he took her rough jokes with silent wonder, never even
smiling. He took her to church occasionally, but the most watchful and
curious people never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring at her
while she giggled and flirted with the other men.

Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. She came
home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to startle Lena
with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen’s dances, and all the other
esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few weeks Lena’s head was
completely turned, and she gave her father no rest until he let her go
to town to seek her fortune at the ironing board. From the time she came
home on her first visit she began to treat Canute with contempt. She had
bought a plush cloak and kid gloves, had her clothes made by the dress
maker, and assumed airs and graces that made the other women of the
neighborhood cordially detest her. She generally brought with her a
young man from town who waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and
she did not even introduce him to Canute.

The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one of them
down. He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except that he drank
more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully than ever, He lay
around in his den and no one knew what he felt or thought, but little
Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at Lena in church one Sunday
when she was there with the town man, said that he would not give an
acre of his wheat for Lena’s life or the town chap’s either; and Jim’s
wheat was so wondrously worthless that the statement was an exceedingly
strong one.

Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly like the
town man as possible. They had cost him half a millet crop; for
tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they charge for it. He
had hung those clothes in his shanty two months ago and had never put
them on, partly from fear of ridicule, partly from discouragement, and
partly because there was something in his own soul that revolted at the
littleness of the device.

Lena was at home just at this time. Work was slack in the laundry and
Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home, glad enough to get an
opportunity to torment Canute once more.

She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as she worked. Mary
was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding violently about the
young man who was coming out from town that night. The young man had
committed the fatal error of laughing at Mary’s ceaseless babble and had
never been forgiven.

“He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running with him! I do
not see why a daughter of mine should act so. I do not see why the Lord
should visit such a punishment upon me as to give me such a daughter.
There are plenty of good men you can marry.”

Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, “I don’t happen to want to
marry any man right away, and so long as Dick dresses nice and has
plenty of money to spend, there is no harm in my going with him.”

“Money to spend? Yes, and that is all he does with it I’ll be bound. You
think it very fine now, but you will change your tune when you have been
married five years and see your children running naked and your cupboard
empty. Did Anne Hermanson come to any good end by marrying a town man?”

“I don’t know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I know any of the
laundry girls would have Dick quick enough if they could get him.”

“Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too. Now there is
Canuteson who has an ‘eighty’ proved up and fifty head of cattle and--”

“And hair that ain’t been cut since he was a baby, and a big dirty
beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like a pig. Besides
he will keep. I can have all the fun I want, and when I am old and ugly
like you he can have me and take care of me. The Lord knows there ain’t
nobody else going to marry him.”

Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it were red hot. He
was not the kind of man to make a good eavesdropper, and he wished he
had knocked sooner. He pulled himself together and struck the door like
a battering ram. Mary jumped and opened it with a screech.

“God! Canute, how you scared us! I thought it was crazy Lou--he has been
tearing around the neighborhood trying to convert folks. I am afraid as
death of him. He ought to be sent off, I think. He is just as liable as
not to kill us all, or burn the barn, or poison the dogs. He has been
worrying even the poor minister to death, and he laid up with the
rheumatism, too! Did you notice that he was too sick to preach last
Sunday? But don’t stand there in the cold, come in. Yensen isn’t here,
but he just went over to Sorenson’s for the mail; he won’t be gone long.
Walk right in the other room and sit down.”

Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and not noticing
Lena as he passed her. But Lena’s vanity would not allow him to pass
unmolested. She took the wet sheet she was wringing out and cracked him
across the face with it, and ran giggling to the other side of the room.
The blow stung his cheeks and the soapy water flew in his eyes, and
he involuntarily began rubbing them with his hands. Lena giggled with
delight at his discomfiture, and the wrath in Canute’s face grew blacker
than ever. A big man humiliated is vastly more undignified than a little
one. He forgot the sting of his face in the bitter consciousness that
he had made a fool of himself He stumbled blindly into the living room,
knocking his head against the door jamb because he forgot to stoop.
He dropped into a chair behind the stove, thrusting his big feet back
helplessly on either side of him.

Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still and silent,
with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin of his face seemed to
have shriveled up into little wrinkles that trembled when he lowered his
brows. His life had been one long lethargy of solitude and alcohol,
but now he was awakening, and it was as when the dumb stagnant heat of
summer breaks out into thunder.

When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute rose at once.

“Yensen,” he said quietly, “I have come to see if you will let me marry
your daughter today.”

“Today!” gasped Ole.

“Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow. I am tired of living alone.”

Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and stammered
eloquently: “Do you think I will marry my daughter to a drunkard? a man
who drinks raw alcohol? a man who sleeps with rattle snakes? Get out
of my house or I will kick you out for your impudence.” And Ole began
looking anxiously for his feet.

Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and went out into the
kitchen. He went up to Lena and said without looking at her, “Get your
things on and come with me!”

The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily, dropping the
soap, “Are you drunk?”

“If you do not come with me, I will take you--you had better come,” said
Canute quietly.

She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm roughly and
wrenched the sheet from her. He turned to the wall and took down a hood
and shawl that hung there, and began wrapping her up. Lena scratched
and fought like a wild thing. Ole stood in the door, cursing, and Mary
howled and screeched at the top of her voice. As for Canute, he
lifted the girl in his arms and went out of the house. She kicked and
struggled, but the helpless wailing of Mary and Ole soon died away in
the distance, and her face was held down tightly on Canute’s shoulder so
that she could not see whither he was taking her. She was conscious only
of the north wind whistling in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and
of a great breast that heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths.
The harder she struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held the
heels of horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they would crush
the breath from her, and lay still with fear. Canute was striding across
the level fields at a pace at which man never went before, drawing the
stinging north winds into his lungs in great gulps. He walked with his
eyes half closed and looking straight in front of him, only lowering
them when he bent his head to blow away the snow flakes that settled
on her hair. So it was that Canute took her to his home, even as his
bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair frivolous women of the South
in their hairy arms and bore them down to their war ships. For ever and
anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and
with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable
to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it
cannot win by cunning.

When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a chair, where
she sat sobbing. He stayed only a few minutes. He filled the stove
with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge swallow of alcohol and put the
bottle in his pocket. He paused a moment, staring heavily at the weeping
girl, then he went off and locked the door and disappeared in the
gathering gloom of the night.

Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little Norwegian
preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a thundering knock at his
door, and Canute entered, covered with snow and his beard frozen fast to
his coat.

“Come in, Canute, you must be frozen,” said the little man, shoving a
chair towards his visitor.

Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly, “I want you
to come over to my house tonight to marry me to Lena Yensen.”

“Have you got a license, Canute?”

“No, I don’t want a license. I want to be married.”

“But I can’t marry you without a license, man, it would not be legal.”

A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian’s eye. “I want you to come
over to my house to marry me to Lena Yensen.”

“No, I can’t, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like this, and my
rheumatism is bad tonight.”

“Then if you will not go I must take you,” said Canute with a sigh.

He took down the preacher’s bearskin coat and bade him put it on while
he hitched up his buggy. He went out and closed the door softly after
him. Presently he returned and found the frightened minister crouching
before the fire with his coat lying beside him. Canute helped him put it
on and gently wrapped his head in his big muffler. Then he picked him
up and carried him out and placed him in his buggy. As he tucked the
buffalo robes around him he said: “Your horse is old, he might flounder
or lose his way in this storm. I will lead him.”

The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering with
the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could see the
horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding steadily beside
him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him altogether. He had
no idea where they were or what direction they were going. He felt as
though he were being whirled away in the heart of the storm, and he said
all the prayers he knew. But at last the long four miles were over, and
Canute set him down in the snow while he unlocked the door. He saw the
bride sitting by the fire with her eyes red and swollen as though
she had been weeping. Canute placed a huge chair for him, and said
roughly,--

“Warm yourself.”

Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to take her
home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute said simply,

“If you are warm now, you can marry us.”

“My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?” asked the
minister in a trembling voice.

“No, sir, I don’t, and it is disgraceful he should force me into it! I
won’t marry him.”

“Then, Canute, I cannot marry you,” said the minister, standing as
straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.

“Are you ready to marry us now, sir?” said Canute, laying one iron hand
on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher was a good man, but like
most men of weak body he was a coward and had a horror of physical
suffering, although he had known so much of it. So with many qualms of
conscience he began to repeat the marriage service. Lena sat sullenly in
her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood beside her, listening with
his head bent reverently and his hands folded on his breast. When the
little man had prayed and said amen, Canute began bundling him up again.

“I will take you home, now,” he said as he carried him out and placed
him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury of the
storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even the giant
himself to his knees.

After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a
particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that of
vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt nothing
more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had no
inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes
that was final and all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about
a license, but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled
herself by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute
someday, anyway.

She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got up and
began to look about her. She had heard queer tales about the inside of
Canute’s shanty, and her curiosity soon got the better of her rage.
One of the first things she noticed was the new black suit of clothes
hanging on the wall. She was dull, but it did not take a vain woman long
to interpret anything so decidedly flattering, and she was pleased in
spite of herself. As she looked through the cupboard, the general air of
neglect and discomfort made her pity the man who lived there.

“Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get somebody to wash
up his dishes. Batchin’s pretty hard on a man.”

It is easy to pity when once one’s vanity has been tickled. She looked
at the windowsill and gave a little shudder and wondered if the man were
crazy. Then she sat down again and sat a long time wondering what her
Dick and Ole would do.

“It is queer Dick didn’t come right over after me. He surely came, for
he would have left town before the storm began and he might just as
well come right on as go back. If he’d hurried he would have gotten here
before the preacher came. I suppose he was afraid to come, for he
knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the coward!” Her eyes flashed
angrily.

The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly lonesome. It was
an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to be in. She could
hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin, and more
terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm. She remembered
the tales they told of the big log overhead and she was afraid of those
snaky things on the windowsills. She remembered the man who had been
killed in the draw, and she wondered what she would do if she saw crazy
Lou’s white face glaring into the window. The rattling of the door
became unbearable, she thought the latch must be loose and took the
lamp to look at it. Then for the first time she saw the ugly brown snake
skins whose death rattle sounded every time the wind jarred the door.

“Canute, Canute!” she screamed in terror.

Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog getting up and
shaking himself. The door opened and Canute stood before her, white as a
snow drift.

“What is it?” he asked kindly.

“I am cold,” she faltered.

He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and filled
the stove. Then he went out and lay in the snow before the door.
Presently he heard her calling again.

“What is it?” he said, sitting up.

“I’m so lonesome, I’m afraid to stay in here all alone.”

“I will go over and get your mother.” And he got up.

“She won’t come.”

“I’ll bring her,” said Canute grimly.

“No, no. I don’t want her, she will scold all the time.”

“Well, I will bring your father.”

She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up to the
key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak before, so
low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear her.

“I don’t want him either, Canute,--I’d rather have you.”

For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a groan.
With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute stretched in the
snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the doorstep.



Eric Hermannson’s Soul


It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse--a night when the
Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So
it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free Gospeller. The
schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men
and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some mysterious
psychic force. Here and there among this cowering, sweating multitude
crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs of an awakened
conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete divestment of
reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind, which, in the
parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed “the Light.” On the floor
before the mourners’ bench lay the unconscious figure of a man in whom
outraged nature had sought her last resort. This “trance” state is the
highest evidence of grace among the Free Gospellers, and indicates a
close walking with God.

Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and vengeance
of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an almost
prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used to run
between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes of life;
from the most debauched of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a
bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of Nature’s eternal injustice.
The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and the sandy hair was
plastered down over it and then brushed back at an abrupt right angle.
The chin was heavy, the nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip
hung loosely except in his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it
shut like a steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were
deep, rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the
weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
cheeks there was a certain pallor, a greyness caught from many a vigil.
It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that face, some
fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost transfiguring it.
Tonight, as his muscles twitched with emotion, and the perspiration
dropped from his hair and chin, there was a certain convincing power
in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man possessed of a belief, of that
sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, that
transport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition,
under which debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an
artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa
Skinner tonight, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.

It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner’s God
was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for those of
his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star schoolhouse that night.
Poor exiles of all nations; men from the south and the north, peasants
from almost every country of Europe, most of them from the mountainous,
night-bound coast of Norway. Honest men for the most part, but men with
whom the world had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men
sobered by toil and saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for
the dominion of an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
advance guard of a mighty civilization to be.

Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. Tonight Eric
Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience with
a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to play for
some dance. The violin is an object of particular abhorrence to the Free
Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church organ is bitter enough, but
the fiddle they regard as a very incarnation of evil desires, singing
forever of worldly pleasures and inseparably associated with all
forbidden things.

Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago, and
special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son. But
Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which are short
enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide.

He slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in
Genereau’s saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at Chevalier’s
dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went across the dewy
cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play the fiddle for Lena
Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all the Divide country, where
the women are usually too plain and too busy and too tired to depart
from the ways of virtue. On such occasions Lena, attired in a pink
wrapper and silk stockings and tiny pink slippers, would sing to him,
accompanying herself on a battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense
of freedom and experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had
lived in big cities and knew the ways of town folk, who had never worked
in the fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair
and tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who
knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.

Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were not
altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been fleeing
before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his pleasures had
fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that dogged his steps.
The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more was he conscious that
this phantom was gaining upon him, that in time it would track him down.
One Sunday afternoon, late in the fall, when he had been drinking beer
with Lena Hanson and listening to a song which made his cheeks burn, a
rattlesnake had crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust its
ugly head in under the screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he
knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying
coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena
goodbye, and he went there no more.

The final barrier between Eric and his mother’s faith was his violin,
and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his dearest sin,
to the weakness more precious to him than all his strength, In the great
world beauty comes to men in many guises, and art in a hundred forms,
but for Eric there was only his violin.

It stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his only
bridge into the kingdom of the soul.

It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his impassioned
pleading that night.

“_Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_ Is there a Saul here tonight
who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has thrust a spear
into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you are offered this
wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth not and the fire which
will not be quenched. What right have you to lose one of God’s precious
souls? _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_”

A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner’s pale face, for he saw that Eric
Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell upon
his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.

“O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I
tell you the Spirit is coming! just a little more prayer, brothers, a
little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing upon
my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!”

The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual
panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure
fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners’ bench rose a chant of
terror and rapture:


            “Eating honey and drinking wine,
            _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_
            I am my Lord’s and he is mine,
            _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!”_


The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague yearning
of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all the passions
so long, only to fall victims to the barest of them all, fear.

A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson’s bowed head,
and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in the
forest.

The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head, crying
in a loud voice:

“_Lazarus, come forth!_ Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at
sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the life
line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!” The minister threw his
arms out and lifted his quivering face.

Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the lightning
was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and crushed it to
splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the sound was like the
shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.



                              II

For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to which
he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came to spend
a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other manners and
conditions, and there were greater distances between her life and Eric’s
than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek from New York City.
Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at all; but ah! across
what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable chances, do the
unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!

It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had spent
a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still
customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough
it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to
a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did
not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had
not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers’ brawl, nor
wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He
had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been
very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales
together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his
first visit to his father’s ranch since he left it six years before, he
brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter from a sprain
received while skating, and had had too much time for reflection during
those months. She was restless and filled with a desire to see something
of the wild country of which her brother had told her so much. She was
to be married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she
begged him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to all
women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which allures and
terrifies, to run one’s whole soul’s length out to the wind--just once.

It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that strain
of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. They had
slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the acquaintance of the
personnel of a third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined
in a camp of railroad constructors at the world’s end beyond New Castle,
gone through the Black Hills on horseback, fished for trout in Dome
Lake, watched a dance at Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide
in the hills gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all,
before the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on
the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming
sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
sunlight.

Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in this
day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful, talented,
critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four. For the moment
the life and people of the Divide interested her. She was there but a
week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable ennui which travels
faster even than the Vestibule Limited would have overtaken her. The
week she tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson was helping
Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would
have been no story to write.

It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and his
sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse, staring out
into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the gusts of hot wind
that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty miles to the southward.

The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:

“This wind is the real thing; you don’t strike it anywhere else. You
remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
Kansas. It’s the keynote of this country.”

Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued gently:

“I hope it’s paid you, Sis. Roughing it’s dangerous business; it takes
the taste out of things.”

She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
own.

“Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven’t been so happy since we were children and
were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do you know,
I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the world go on its
own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain we used to talk of
last winter were gone for good, as though one could never give one’s
strength out to such petty things any more.”

Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the skyline.

“No, you’re mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can’t shake
the fever of the other life. I’ve tried it. There was a time when the
gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the
sandhills and get rid of it. But it’s all too complex now. You see
we’ve made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they’ve
gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You
couldn’t rest, even here. The war cry would follow you.”

“You don’t waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the art
of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent men.”

“Naturally,” said Wyllis, “since you have decided to marry the most
brilliant talker you know.”

Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot wind
through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.

“Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
interesting as Eric Hermannson?”

“Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
youth in my day, and he’s rather an exception, even now. He has
retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
fancy.”

“Siegfried? Come, that’s rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the others? I
can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being.”

 “Well,” said Wyllis, meditatively, “I don’t read Bourget
as much as my cultured sister, and I’m not so well up in analysis, but
I fancy it’s because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted
suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a
soul somewhere. _Nicht wahr?_”

“Something like that,” said Margaret, thoughtfully, “except that it’s
more than a suspicion, and it isn’t groundless. He has one, and he makes
it known, somehow, without speaking.”

“I always have my doubts about loquacious souls,” Wyllis remarked, with
the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.

Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. “I knew it from the
first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the Bernstein
boy. That kind of blunt pathos can’t be summoned at will in anybody. The
earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes, unconsciously. But last night
when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven’t told you about that
yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the
dark when I was pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs.
Lockhart It’s her household fetish and I’ve forgotten how many pounds of
butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some
inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for
him. I sang just the old things, of course. It’s queer to sing familiar
things here at the world’s end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and the
jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one lived
here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and would
read only the great books that we never get time to read in the world,
and would remember only the great music, and the things that are really
worth while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there. And
of course I played the intermezzo from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ for him;
it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He shuffled his
feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and blurted out that he
didn’t know there was any music like that in the world. Why, there were
tears in his voice, Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I _heard_ his tears.
Then it dawned upon me that it was probably the first good music he had
ever heard in all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does
and never to hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long
for it as we long for other perfect experiences that never come. I
can’t tell you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so
susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had
finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled
brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his
arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told
it slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
to answer Mascagni’s. It overcame me.”

“Poor devil,” said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, “and so
you’ve given him a new woe. Now he’ll go on wanting Grieg and
Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That’s a girl’s
philanthropy for you!”

Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the unusual
luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon as a
necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house. Jerry
sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at Margaret.

“Well, I’ve got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson
will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she isn’t
lookin’ after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will bring his
fiddle--though the French don’t mix with the Norwegians much.”

“Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our trip,
and it’s so nice of you to get it up for us. We’ll see the Norwegians in
character at last,” cried Margaret, cordially.

“See here, Lockhart, I’ll settle with you for backing her in this
scheme,” said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe.
“She’s done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing all
night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage at four
to catch the six o’clock train out of Riverton--well, it’s tommyrot,
that’s what it is!”

“Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide whether
it isn’t easier to stay up all night than to get up at three in the
morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir, I prefer to
keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper.”

“But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired of
dancing.”

“So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and I
intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really wants
to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to go to a
party before. It will be something to remember next month at Newport,
when we have to and don’t want to. Remember your own theory that
contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable. This is my
party and Mr. Lockhart’s; your whole duty tomorrow night will consist in
being nice to the Norwegian girls. I’ll warrant you were adept enough
at it once. And you’d better be very nice indeed, for if there are many
such young Valkyries as Eric’s sister among them, they would simply tie
you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them.”

Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate,
while his sister went on.

“And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?”

Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of his
plowshoe.

“Well, I guess we’ll have a couple dozen. You see it’s pretty hard to
get a crowd together here any more. Most of ‘em have gone over to the
Free Gospellers, and they’d rather put their feet in the fire than shake
‘em to a fiddle.”

Margaret made a gesture of impatience. “Those Free Gospellers have just
cast an evil spell over this country, haven’t they?”

“Well,” said Lockhart, cautiously, “I don’t just like to pass judgment
on any Christian sect, but if you’re to know the chosen by their works,
the Gospellers can’t make a very proud showin’, an’ that’s a fact.
They’re responsible for a few suicides, and they’ve sent a good-sized
delegation to the state insane asylum, an’ I don’t see as they’ve made
the rest of us much better than we were before. I had a little herdboy
last spring, as square a little Dane as I want to work for me, but after
the Gospellers got hold of him and sanctified him, the little beggar
used to get down on his knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour
and let the cattle get into the corn, an’ I had to fire him. That’s
about the way it goes. Now there’s Eric; that chap used to be a hustler
and the spryest dancer in all this section-called all the dances. Now
he’s got no ambition and he’s glum as a preacher. I don’t suppose we can
even get him to come in tomorrow night.”

“Eric? Why, he must dance, we can’t let him off,” said Margaret,
quickly. “Why, I intend to dance with him myself.”

“I’m afraid he won’t dance. I asked him this morning if he’d help us out
and he said, ‘I don’t dance now, any more,’” said Lockhart, imitating
the laboured English of the Norwegian.

“‘The Miller of Hofbau, the Miller of Hofbau, O my Princess!’” chirped
Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.

The red on his sister’s cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
mischievously. “We’ll see about that, sir. I’ll not admit that I am
beaten until I have asked him myself.”

Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the heart
of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay through the most
attractive part of the Divide country, on several occasions Margaret
Elliot and her brother had accompanied him. Tonight Wyllis had business
with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a frisky little
mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the sidesaddle. Margaret
regarded her escort very much as she did the servant who always
accompanied her on long rides at home, and the ride to the village was
a silent one. She was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric
was wrestling with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his
head before.

He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as
though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in
his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he knew
where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first appeared
unto them, never doubted its high origin.

Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid
of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects before him
when his father went down off the North Cape in the long Arctic night,
and his mother, seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had
followed her brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as
young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure and
delicate, like a Swede’s; hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson’s
amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most
dangerous to women.

He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even said
of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to levity, a
vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of those Norwegian
exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a scorching sun, had
repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and
he grew more and more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as
though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate
fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which
lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away.
It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those
Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive,
quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change
comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with
others it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man’s
heart to die.

Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year before
they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy hill where
exiles of all nations grow akin.

The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his people
sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that night at
the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin across his
knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down upon him, and the
gospel of maceration began its work.

_“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,”_ et cetera. The pagan smile
that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when it
destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross
has been, joy will not come again. This man understood things literally:
one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it
was necessary to starve the soul.

The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier
left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that runs
for some three miles through the French settlement, where the prairie
is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of flax and
wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard
poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide
light of the setting sun.

The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, “It will be safe
to run the horses here, won’t it?”

“Yes, I think so, now,” he answered, touching his spur to his pony’s
flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West that
newcomers always ride a horse or two to death before they get broken
in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces and try to
outride the horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped
over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering
in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the
night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her and
rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face. Before, he
had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes,
always with more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let
every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said
that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant
lines that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a
historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long
asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle
together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their
unconscious memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these
details. To him this beauty was something more than colour and line;
it was a flash of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour
because all colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an
embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a
young man’s pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something
more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness, it
troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths before the white
marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing whether they were men or gods.
At times he felt like uncovering his head before it, again the fury
seized him to break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing
and stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms,
and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break
in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted
the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.

Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he
knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a star.

Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in her
saddle.

“This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast,” she said.

Eric turned his eyes away.

“I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear music
like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work,” he asked,
timidly.

Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the
outline of his face, pityingly.

“Well, you might--but you’d lose a good deal else. I shouldn’t like you
to go to New York--and be poor, you’d be out of atmosphere, some
way,” she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: _There he would be
altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one’s trunks
upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque; why
is it?_ “No,” she added aloud, “I shouldn’t like that.”

“Then I not go,” said Eric, decidedly.

Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused and a
trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.

“But I’ll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to dance
with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian dances; they
say you know them all. Won’t you?”

Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they had
done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin across his
knee.

“Yes, I will,” he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered his
soul to hell as he said it.

They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound through
a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a beat of hoofs
ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies start and Eric
rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of them and over the
steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and
wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the plains of
Montana to sell in the farming country. Margaret’s pony made a shrill
sound, a neigh that was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to
meet them, all the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant.
Margaret called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and
caught her pony’s bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was
kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all
about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with their
forefeet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty of the range
that the little beast fought for.

“Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!” Eric called, throwing all his
weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic forefeet that now
beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs that surged and
tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the pony’s head toward him
and crowding her withers against the clay bank, so that she could not
roll.

“Hold tight, tight!” he shouted again, launching a kick at a snorting
animal that reared back against Margaret’s saddle. If she should lose
her courage and fall now, under those hoofs--He struck out again and
again, kicking right and left with all his might. Already the negligent
drivers had galloped into the cut, and their long quirts were whistling
over the heads of the herd. As suddenly as it had come, the struggling,
frantic wave of wild life swept up out of the gulch and on across the
open prairie, and with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony
dropped her head and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and
blood from her bit.

Eric stepped close to Margaret’s side and laid his hand on her saddle.
“You are not hurt?” he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his face in the
soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and that his lips
were working nervously.

“No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!” she
cried in sharp alarm.

He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.

“No, it is not that,” he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched at
his side. “But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains out with
my hands. I would kill them all. I was never afraid before. You are the
only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came like an
angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the
stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little
boy. You are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all
that they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all
eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more than
Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for
heaven. I was never afraid before. If you had fallen--oh, my God!” He
threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the pony’s mane,
leaning limply against the animal like a man struck by some sickness.
His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his laboured breathing. The
horse stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her
hand on Eric’s head and said gently:

“You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?”

“No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe.
I will not frighten you again.” His voice was still husky, but it was
steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.

When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony’s head
until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.

“The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty
thoroughly scared myself,” she said as she took her brother’s arm and
went slowly up the hill toward the house. “No, I’m not hurt, thanks to
Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me. He’s a mighty
fine fellow. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning, dear. I was
pretty well shaken up and I’m going right to bed now. Good night.”

When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the bed
in her riding dress, face downward.

“Oh, I pity him! I pity him!” she murmured, with a long sigh of
exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again, she took
from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at the village
post-office. It was closely written in a long, angular hand, covering a
dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and began:

My Dearest Margaret: if I should attempt to say _how like a winter hath
thine absence been_, I should incur the risk of being tedious. Really,
it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having nothing better to do, and
not caring to go anywhere in particular without you, I remained in the
city until Jack Courtwell noted my general despondency and brought me
down here to his place on the sound to manage some open-air theatricals
he is getting up. _As You Like It_ is of course the piece selected. Miss
Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you had been here to take the part. Miss
Harrison reads her lines well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or
a tomboy; insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings
and highly coloured suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral
setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the emotional
element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind’s facile wit and
really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor
says he is _epris_ of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his
memory is treacherous and his interest fitful.

My new pictures arrived last week on the _Gascogne_. The Puvis de
Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in Paris. A pale
dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow and a stream of anemic water flows
at her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because you admired
it. It is here in all its florid splendour, the whole dominated by a
glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as
you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an easy,
effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line of African
coast in the background recalls memories of you very precious to me. But
it is useless to deny that Constant irritates me. Though I cannot prove
the charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him of
cheapness.

Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of this strange
love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with discussions of
pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid them by.

She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went to open the
window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated, feeling suddenly as
though some danger were lurking outside, some inordinate desire waiting
to spring upon her in the darkness. She stood there for a long time,
gazing at the infinite sweep of the sky.

“Oh, it is all so little, so little there,” she murmured. “When
everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be great?
Why should one try to read highly coloured suggestions into a life like
that? If only I could find one thing in it all that mattered greatly,
one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will life never give me
that one great moment?”

As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum bushes outside.
It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but Margaret started
violently and trembled so that she caught the foot of the bed for
support. Again she felt herself pursued by some overwhelming longing,
some desperate necessity for herself, like the outstretching of
helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air seemed heavy with
sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the words, “I love you more
than Christ who died for me!” ringing in her ears.


                             III

About midnight the dance at Lockhart’s was at its height. Even the old
men who had come to “look on” caught the spirit of revelry and stamped
the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric took the violin from the
Frenchmen, and Minna Oleson sat at the organ, and the music grew more
and more characteristic--rude, half mournful music, made up of the
folksongs of the North, that the villagers sing through the long night
in hamlets by the sea, when they are thinking of the sun, and the
spring, and the fishermen so long away. To Margaret some of it sounded
like Grieg’s _Peer Gynt_ music. She found something irresistibly
infectious in the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and
she felt almost one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom
in them tonight, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous with delight.
Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they caught at it
wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers.
They had a hard life enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing
winters, labour and drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of
their girlhood; a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited
maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower
of their womanhood. But what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the
glass and hot blood in the heart; tonight they danced.

Tonight Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no longer the big,
silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret’s feet and looked hopelessly
into her eyes. Tonight he was a man, with a man’s rights and a man’s
power. Tonight he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was yellow as the heavy
wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes flashed like the blue water
between the ice packs in the north seas. He was not afraid of Margaret
tonight, and when he danced with her he held her firmly. She was tired
and dragged on his arm a little, but the strength of the man was like
an all-pervading fluid, stealing through her veins, awakening under her
heart some nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all
these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips to his
that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some lawless
ancestor, long asleep, were calling out in her tonight, some drop of
a hotter fluid that the centuries had failed to cool, and why, if this
curse were in her, it had not spoken before. But was it a curse, this
awakening, this wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For the
first time in her life her heart held something stronger than herself,
was not this worthwhile? Then she ceased to wonder. She lost sight of
the lights and the faces and the music was drowned by the beating of her
own arteries. She saw only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt
only the warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the
blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping
shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man she
was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding back the
memory of that face with all her strength.

“Let us stop, this is enough,” she whispered. His only answer was to
tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that masterful strength
bear her where it would. She forgot that this man was little more than
a savage, that they would part at dawn. The blood has no memories, no
reflections, no regrets for the past, no consideration of the future.

“Let us go out where it is cooler,” she said when the music stopped;
thinking, _I am growing faint here, I shall be all right in the open
air_. They stepped out into the cool, blue air of the night.

Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians had been
slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into the cooler
atmosphere, as is their custom.

“You like to go up?” asked Eric, close to her ear.

She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. “How high is
it?”

“Forty feet, about. I not let you fall.” There was a note of
irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously
wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of the unusual, when
she was not herself at all, but was living an unreality. Tomorrow, yes,
in a few hours, there would be the Vestibule Limited and the world.

“Well, if you’ll take good care of me. I used to be able to climb, when
I was a little girl.”

Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent. Margaret
wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her life, through
all the routine of the days to come. Above them stretched the great
Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night, with its big, burning
stars, never so cold and dead and far away as in denser atmospheres. The
moon would not be up for twenty minutes yet, and all about the horizon,
that wide horizon, which seemed to reach around the world, lingered a
pale white light, as of a universal dawn. The weary wind brought up to
them the heavy odours of the cornfields. The music of the dance sounded
faintly from below. Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs
swinging down on the ladder. His great shoulders looked more than ever
like those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful
strength in the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men died
forever with the youth of Greece.

“How sweet the corn smells at night,” said Margaret nervously.

“Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think.”

She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled when this
taciturn man spoke again.

“You go away tomorrow?”

“Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now.”

“You not come back any more?”

“No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip halfway across the
continent.”

“You soon forget about this country, I guess.” It seemed to him now
a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that she should
utterly forget this night into which he threw all his life and all his
eternity, that was a bitter thought.

“No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to me for that.
And you won’t be sorry you danced this one night, will you?”

“I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be so happy
again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I only this one. I will
dream sometimes, maybe.”

The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her. It was as
when some great animal composes itself for death, as when a great ship
goes down at sea.

She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and looked
into her eyes.

“You are not always happy, too?” he asked.

“No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think.”

“You have a trouble?”

“Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I
could cure it.”

He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when they
pray, and said falteringly, “If I own all the world, I give him you.”

Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on his.

“Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I should
not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already.”

She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat still
and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed to speak
and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an ultra-refined
civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat
nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third--Can
we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Did she not turn on
Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero
in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: “I am here
still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot
starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I
am its destiny.”

This woman, on a windmill tower at the world’s end with a giant
barbarian, heard that cry tonight, and she was afraid! Ah! the terror
and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then
we have not lived.

“Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has begun
again,” she said.

He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his arm about
her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor’s hammer out in the
cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her, and his hand trembled
as it had done in the dance. His face was level with hers now and the
moonlight fell sharply upon it. All her life she had searched the faces
of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that that look had
never shone for her before, would never shine for her on earth again,
that such love comes to one only in dreams or in impossible places like
this, unattainable always. This was Love’s self, in a moment it would
die. Stung by the agonized appeal that emanated from the man’s whole
being, she leaned forward and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and
again she heard the deep respirations rattle in his throat while
she held them there, and the riotous force under her head became
an engulfing weakness. He drew her up to him until he felt all the
resistance go out of her body, until every nerve relaxed and yielded.
When she drew her face back from his, it was white with fear.

“Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!” she muttered. And the
drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed doom as she
clung to the rounds of the ladder. All that she was to know of love she
had left upon his lips.

“The devil is loose again,” whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric
dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.

But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the time when
he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no quailing then! if ever a
soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates infernal, his should go.
For a moment he fancied he was there already, treading down the tempest
of flame, hugging the fiery hurricane to his breast. He wondered whether
in ages gone, all the countless years of sinning in which men had sold
and lost and flung their souls away, any man had ever so cheated Satan,
had ever bartered his soul for so great a price.

It seemed but a little while till dawn.

The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his sister
said goodbye. She could not meet Eric’s eyes as she gave him her hand,
but as he stood by the horse’s head, just as the carriage moved off, she
gave him one swift glance that said, “I will not forget.” In a moment
the carriage was gone.

Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the water tank and went
to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his horses to the door, a
shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising in his stirrups.
His rugged face was pale and worn with looking after his wayward flock,
with dragging men into the way of salvation.

“Good morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?” he asked,
sternly.

“A dance? Oh, yes, a dance,” replied Eric, cheerfully.

“Certainly you did not dance, Eric?”

“Yes, I danced. I danced all the time.”

The minister’s shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound
discouragement settled over his haggard face. There was almost anguish
in the yearning he felt for this soul.

“Eric, I didn’t look for this from you. I thought God had set his mark
on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like this that
you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O foolish and perverse
generation!”

Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to where the new
day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with light.
As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the morning, something
from the only poetry he had ever read flashed across his mind, and he
murmured, half to himself, with dreamy exultation:

“‘And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
day.’”



The Enchanted Bluff

We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper the
oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand about
us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown stretches
of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of air that had
rested over the water and our clean sand bar grew fresher and smelled of
the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on the flatter shore. The river
was brown and sluggish, like any other of the half-dozen streams that
water the Nebraska corn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of
bald clay bluffs where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat,
twisted tops threw light shadows on the long grass. The western shore
was low and level, with cornfields that stretched to the skyline, and
all along the water’s edge were little sandy coves and beaches where
slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.

The turbulence of the river in springtime discouraged milling, and,
beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did not
concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were left in
undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through the miles
of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and, after the winter
skating season was over and the ice had gone out, the spring freshets
and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement of the year. The
channel was never the same for two successive seasons. Every spring the
swollen stream undermined a bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of
cornfield to the west and whirled the soil away, to deposit it in spumy
mud banks somewhere else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand
bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes
these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to
unseat them; the little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the
yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and
with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them
against the batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood
soon glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that,
even on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
road, trembled along the face of the water.

It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green, that
we built our watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow wands, but
on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added that spring;
a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with ripple marks, and
strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and fish, all as white and dry
as if they had been expertly cured. We had been careful not to mar the
freshness of the place, although we often swam to it on summer evenings
and lay on the sand to rest.

This was our last watch fire of the year, and there were reasons why I
should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the other
boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown High School,
but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first country school in the
Norwegian district. I was already homesick at the thought of quitting
the boys with whom I had always played; of leaving the river, and going
up into a windy plain that was all windmills and cornfields and
big pastures; where there was nothing wilful or unmanageable in the
landscape, no new islands, and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as
often followed the watercourses.

Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were friends
mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler boys, Fritz and
Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were the youngest of us;
ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned hair, weather-stained
faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best mathematician
in school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in the
spring term as if the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz
caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they
lived so much in the water that they were as brown and sandy as the
river itself.

There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who took
half a dozen boys’ story-papers and was always being kept in for reading
detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith, destined by
his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our games, though he
walked like a timid little old man and had a funny, cracked laugh. Tip
worked hard in his father’s grocery store every afternoon, and swept it
out before school in the morning. Even his recreations were laborious.
He collected cigarette cards and tin tobacco-tags indefatigably, and
would sit for hours humped up over a snarling little scroll-saw which he
kept in his attic. His dearest possessions were some little pill bottles
that purported to contain grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from
the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His
father had bought these dull things from a Baptist missionary who
peddled them, and Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their
remote origin.

The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were almost
too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant voice that
we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to read poetry
aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be sure, he was
not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen and should
have finished the High School the year before, but he was always off
somewhere with his gun. Arthur’s mother was dead, and his father, who
was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to send the boy
away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur always begged off
for another year and promised to study. I remember him as a tall, brown
boy with an intelligent face, always lounging among a lot of us little
fellows, laughing at us oftener than with us, but such a soft, satisfied
laugh that we felt rather flattered when we provoked it. In after-years
people said that Arthur had been given to evil ways as a lad, and it is
true that we often saw him with the gambler’s sons and with old Spanish
Fanny’s boy, but if he learned anything ugly in their company he never
betrayed it to us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am
bound to say that he led us into no worse places than the cattail
marshes and the stubble fields. These, then, were the boys who camped
with me that summer night upon the sand bar.

After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for driftwood.
By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen, and the pungent,
weedy smell from the shore increased with the coolness. We threw
ourselves down about the fire and made another futile effort to show
Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it often before, but he
could never be got past the big one.

“You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the bright
one in the middle?” said Otto Hassler; “that’s Orion’s belt, and the
bright one is the clasp.” I crawled behind Otto’s shoulder and sighted
up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip of his steady
forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at night, and they knew a
good many stars.

Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands
clasped under his head. “I can see the North Star,” he announced,
contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. “Anyone might get lost
and need to know that.”

We all looked up at it.

“How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn’t point north
any more?” Tip asked.

Otto shook his head. “My father says that there was another North Star
once, and that maybe this one won’t last always. I wonder what would
happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?”

Arthur chuckled. “I wouldn’t worry, Ott. Nothing’s apt to happen to it
in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good dead
Indians.”

We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world. The
gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a mutinous,
complaining note in it at night, quite different from its cheerful
daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much deeper and more
powerful stream. Our water had always these two moods: the one of sunny
complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate regret.

“Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams,” remarked Otto. “You
could do most any proposition in geometry with ‘em. They always look
as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody’s fortune is all
written out in the stars, don’t they?”

“They believe so in the old country,” Fritz affirmed.

But Arthur only laughed at him. “You’re thinking of Napoleon, Fritzey.
He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles. I guess the
stars don’t keep any close tally on Sandtown folks.”

We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred before
the evening star went down behind the cornfields, when someone cried,
“There comes the moon, and it’s as big as a cart wheel!”

We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us. It
came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing, red as
an angry heathen god.

“When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice their
prisoners on the temple top,” Percy announced.

“Go on, Perce. You got that out of _Golden Days_. Do you believe that,
Arthur?” I appealed.

Arthur answered, quite seriously: “Like as not. The moon was one of
their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where
they used to sacrifice their prisoners.”

As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the
Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the
Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were still
conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.

“Must have been a big cat jumping,” said Fritz. “They do sometimes. They
must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!”

There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current
fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.

“Suppose there ever _was_ any gold hid away in this old river?” Fritz
asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire, his chin on
his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother laughed at him, but
Arthur took his suggestion seriously.

“Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere. Seven
cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his men came up
to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country once.”

Percy looked interested. “Was that before the Mormons went through?”

We all laughed at this.

“Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they came
along this very river. They always followed the watercourses.”

“I wonder where this river really does begin?” Tip mused. That was an
old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain. On the
map the little black line stopped somewhere in western Kansas; but since
rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose
that ours came from the Rockies. Its destination, we knew, was the
Missouri, and the Hassler boys always maintained that we could embark
at Sandtown in floodtime, follow our noses, and eventually arrive at
New Orleans. Now they took up their old argument. “If us boys had grit
enough to try it, it wouldn’t take no time to get to Kansas City and St.
Joe.”

We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler boys
wanted to see the stockyards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted to see
a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not betray
himself.

“Now it’s your turn, Tip.”

Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked
shyly out of his queer, tight little face. “My place is awful far away.
My Uncle Bill told me about it.”

Tip’s Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had
drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had
drifted out again.

“Where is it?”

“Aw, it’s down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren’t no railroads or
anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water before you
get there and have to drink canned tomatoes.”

“Well, go on, kid. What’s it like when you do get there?”

Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.

“There’s a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for
about nine hundred feet. The country’s flat all around it, and this here
rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the Enchanted
Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on top of it. The
sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall. The Indians say
that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards came, there was a
village away up there in the air. The tribe that lived there had some
sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, bung down over the face of the
bluff, and the braves went down to hunt and carried water up in big jars
swung on their backs. They kept a big supply of water and dried meat up
there, and never went down except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe
that made cloth and pottery, and they went up there to get out of the
wars. You see, they could pick off any war party that tried to get up
their little steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and
they had some sort of queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were
Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren’t
fighters, anyhow.

“One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a
kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found
their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few
steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped at
the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the north
came along and massacred ‘em to a man, with all the old folks and women
looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south and left the
village to get down the best way they could. Of course they never got
down. They starved to death up there, and when the war party came back
on their way north, they could hear the children crying from the edge
of the bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn’t see a sign of a
grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there since.”

We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.

“There couldn’t have been many people up there,” Percy demurred. “How
big is the top, Tip?”

“Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn’t look nearly as tall
as it is. The top’s bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of worn away
for several hundred feet up. That’s one reason it’s so hard to climb.”

I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.

“Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along once
and saw that there was a town up there, and that was all.”

Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. “Of course there must be
some way to get up there. Couldn’t people get a rope over someway and
pull a ladder up?”

Tip’s little eyes were shining with excitement. “I know a way. Me and
Uncle Bill talked it over. There’s a kind of rocket that would take a
rope over--lifesavers use ‘em--and then you could hoist a rope ladder
and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight with guy ropes on the
other side. I’m going to climb that there bluff, and I’ve got it all
planned out.”

Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.

“Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of their
idols. There might be ‘most anything up there. Anyhow, I want to see.”

“Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?” Arthur asked.

“Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried to
cut steps in the rock once, but they didn’t get higher than a man can
reach. The Bluff’s all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it’s a boulder
the glaciers left. It’s a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but cactus and
desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the Bluff there’s good
water and plenty of grass. That’s why the bison used to go down there.”

Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a dark,
slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping crane, we knew by
her cry and her long neck. We ran to the edge of the island, hoping we
might see her alight, but she wavered southward along the rivercourse
until we lost her. The Hassler boys declared that by the look of the
heavens it must be after midnight, so we threw more wood on our fire,
put on our jackets, and curled down in the warm sand. Several of us
pretended to doze, but I fancy we were really thinking about Tip’s Bluff
and the extinct people. Over in the wood the ring doves were calling
mournfully to one another, and once we heard a dog bark, far away.
“Somebody getting into old Tommy’s melon patch,” Fritz murmured
sleepily, but nobody answered him. By and by Percy spoke out of the
shadows.

“Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?”

“Maybe.”

“Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?”

“Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell the rest of
us exactly what he finds,” remarked one of the Hassler boys, and to this
we all readily assented.

Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have dreamed about a
race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear that other people were
getting ahead of me and that I was losing my chance. I sat up in my
damp clothes and looked at the other boys, who lay tumbled in uneasy
attitudes about the dead fire. It was still dark, but the sky was blue
with the last wonderful azure of night. The stars glistened like crystal
globes, and trembled as if they shone through a depth of clear water.
Even as I watched, they began to pale and the sky brightened. Day came
suddenly, almost instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue
night, and it was gone. Everywhere the birds began to call, and all
manner of little insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows.
A breeze sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened
corn. The boys rolled over and shook themselves. We stripped and plunged
into the river just as the sun came up over the windy bluffs.

When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out to
our island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted Bluff,
renewing our resolution to find it.


Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the
Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and will go
nowhere that his red touring car cannot carry him. Otto Hassler went
on the railroad and lost his foot braking; after which he and Fritz
succeeded their father as the town tailors.

Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before he
was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was home on one of my
college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer chair under a cottonwood
tree in the little yard behind one of the two Sandtown saloons. He was
very untidy and his hand was not steady, but when he rose, unabashed,
to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as ever. When I had talked
with him for an hour and heard him laugh again, I wondered how it was
that when Nature had taken such pains with a man, from his hands to the
arch of his long foot, she had ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about
Tip Smith’s Bluff, and declared he was going down there just as soon
as the weather got cooler; he thought the Grand Canyon might be worth
while, too.

I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond
the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood. And,
indeed, it was under that very tree that he died one summer morning.

Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married
a slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a
perambulator, and has grown stooped and grey from irregular meals and
broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over, and he
has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in Sandtown I
walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he had balanced his
cash and shut up his store. We took the long way around and sat down on
the schoolhouse steps, and between us we quite revived the romance of
the lone red rock and the extinct people. Tip insists that he still
means to go down there, but he thinks now he will wait until his boy
Bert is old enough to go with him. Bert has been let into the story, and
thinks of nothing but the Enchanted Bluff.



The Bohemian Girl

The transcontinental express swung along the windings of the Sand River
Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young man sat
greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the fierce sunlight
which beat in upon his brown face and neck and strong back. There was
a look of relaxation and of great passivity about his broad shoulders,
which seemed almost too heavy until he stood up and squared them. He
wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue silk necktie with loose ends. His
trousers were wide and belted at the waist, and his short sack coat hung
open. His heavy shoes had seen good service. His reddish-brown hair,
like his clothes, had a foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes
under heavy reddish eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close
shaving, and even the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the
smooth brown of his skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very
white. His head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the
green cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe
summer country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips.
Once, as he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes,
curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight
line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly mockery.
He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in getting excited;
and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when he could. Neither
the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the brakeman’s call disturbed
him. It was not until after the train had stopped that he rose, put on
a Panama hat, took from the rack a small valise and a flute case, and
stepped deliberately to the station platform. The baggage was already
unloaded, and the stranger presented a check for a battered sole-leather
steamer trunk.

“Can you keep it here for a day or two?” he asked the agent. “I may send
for it, and I may not.”

“Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?” demanded the agent
in a challenging tone.

“Just so.”

The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the small trunk,
which was marked “N.E.,” and handed out a claim check without further
comment. The stranger watched him as he caught one end of the trunk and
dragged it into the express room. The agent’s manner seemed to remind
him of something amusing. “Doesn’t seem to be a very big place,” he
remarked, looking about.

“It’s big enough for us,” snapped the agent, as he banged the trunk into
a corner.

That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He chuckled
quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and swung his valise
around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama securely on his head,
turned up his trousers, tucked the flute case under his arm, and started
off across the fields. He gave the town, as he would have said, a wide
berth, and cut through a great fenced pasture, emerging, when he rolled
under the barbed wire at the farther corner, upon a white dusty road
which ran straight up from the river valley to the high prairies, where
the ripe wheat stood yellow and the tin roofs and weathercocks were
twinkling in the fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles,
the sun was sinking and the farm wagons on their way home from town came
rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze. When one of
the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift, he clambered in
willingly. The driver was a thin, grizzled old man with a long lean
neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat’s. “How fur ye goin’?” he
asked, as he clucked to his horses and started off.

“Do you go by the Ericson place?”

“Which Ericson?” The old man drew in his reins as if he expected to stop
again.

“Preacher Ericson’s.”

“Oh, the Old Lady Ericson’s!” He turned and looked at Nils. “La, me! If
you’re goin’ out there you might a’ rid out in the automobile. That’s a
pity, now. The Old Lady Ericson was in town with her auto. You might ‘a’
heard it snortin’ anywhere about the post-office er the butcher shop.”

“Has she a motor?” asked the stranger absently.

“‘Deed an’ she has! She runs into town every night about this time for
her mail and meat for supper. Some folks say she’s afraid her auto won’t
get exercise enough, but I say that’s jealousy.”

“Aren’t there any other motors about here?”

“Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all. But nobody else gets around like
the Old Lady Ericson. She’s out, rain er shine, over the whole county,
chargin’ into town and out amongst her farms, an’ up to her sons’
places. Sure you ain’t goin’ to the wrong place?” He craned his neck and
looked at Nils’ flute case with eager curiosity. “The old woman ain’t
got any piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand. His wife’s musical:
took lessons in Chicago.”

“I’m going up there tomorrow,” said Nils imperturbably. He saw that the
driver took him for a piano tuner.

“Oh, I see!” The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously. He was a
little dashed by the stranger’s noncommunicativeness, but he soon broke
out again.

“I’m one o’ Miss Ericson’s tenants. Look after one of her places. I did
own the place myself once, but I lost it a while back, in the bad years
just after the World’s Fair. Just as well, too, I say. Lets you out o’
payin’ taxes. The Ericsons do own most of the county now. I remember
the old preacher’s favorite text used to be, ‘To them that hath shall be
given.’ They’ve spread something wonderful--run over this here country
like bindweed. But I ain’t one that begretches it to ‘em. Folks is
entitled to what they kin git; and they’re hustlers. Olaf, he’s in the
Legislature now, and a likely man fur Congress. Listen, if that ain’t
the old woman comin’ now. Want I should stop her?”

Nils shook his head. He heard the deep chug-chug of a motor vibrating
steadily in the clear twilight behind them. The pale lights of the car
swam over the hill, and the old man slapped his reins and turned clear
out of the road, ducking his head at the first of three angry snorts
from behind. The motor was running at a hot, even speed, and passed
without turning an inch from its course. The driver was a stalwart woman
who sat at ease in the front seat and drove her car bareheaded. She left
a cloud of dust and a trail of gasoline behind her. Her tenant threw
back his head and sneezed.

“Whew! I sometimes say I’d as lief be _before_ Mrs. Ericson as behind
her. She does beat all! Nearly seventy, and never lets another soul
touch that car. Puts it into commission herself every morning, and keeps
it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day. I never stop work for a drink
o’ water that I don’t hear her a-churnin’ up the road. I reckon her
darter-in-laws never sets down easy nowadays. Never know when she’ll pop
in. Mis’ Otto, she says to me: ‘We’re so afraid that thing’ll blow up
and do Ma some injury yet, she’s so turrible venturesome.’ Says I: ‘I
wouldn’t stew, Mis’ Otto; the old lady’ll drive that car to the funeral
of every darter-in-law she’s got.’ That was after the old woman had
jumped a turrible bad culvert.”

The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying. Just now he was
experiencing something very much like homesickness, and he was wondering
what had brought it about. The mention of a name or two, perhaps;
the rattle of a wagon along a dusty road; the rank, resinous smell of
sunflowers and ironweed, which the night damp brought up from the draws
and low places; perhaps, more than all, the dancing lights of the motor
that had plunged by. He squared his shoulders with a comfortable sense
of strength.

The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady up-grade. The
country, receding from the rough river valley, swelled more and more
gently, as if it had been smoothed out by the wind. On one of the last
of the rugged ridges, at the end of a branch road, stood a grim square
house with a tin roof and double porches. Behind the house stretched a
row of broken, wind-racked poplars, and down the hill slope to the left
straggled the sheds and stables. The old man stopped his horses where
the Ericsons’ road branched across a dry sand creek that wound about the
foot of the hill.

“That’s the old lady’s place. Want I should drive in?” “No, thank you.
I’ll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good night.”

His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old man drove
on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see how the stranger
would be received.

As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive tramp of a horse
coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he flashed out of the road
and stood behind a thicket of wild plum bushes that grew in the sandy
bed. Peering through the dusk, he saw a light horse, under tight
rein, descending the hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a slender
woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an
old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding skirt. She sat lightly in the
saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the distance.
As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air and shied.
She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry exclamation,
_“Blazne!”_ in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let him out into
a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high land, where they
moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the band of faint colour
that lingered in the west. This horse and rider, with their free,
rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to be seen on the face of
the flat country. They seemed, in the last sad light of evening, not to
be there accidentally, but as an inevitable detail of the landscape.

Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck against
the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the hill. When
he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but a light was
shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing in the hog
corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two big wooden
buckets, moving about among them. Halfway between the barn and the
house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path that ran around
to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the screen door into
the lamplit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest room in the house; Nils
remembered that his older brothers used to give dances there when he was
a boy. Beside the stove stood a little girl with two light yellow braids
and a broad, flushed face, peering anxiously into a frying pan. In the
dining-room beyond, a large, broad-shouldered woman was moving about the
table. She walked with an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and
florid, almost without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy.
Nils felt proud of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a
momentary hesitation, or a movement that did not tell. He waited until
she came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside, took her
place at the stove. Then he tapped on the screen door and entered.

“It’s nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren’t looking for me.”

Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at him. “Bring
the lamp, Hilda, and let me look.”

Nils laughed and unslung his valise. “What’s the matter, Mother? Don’t
you know me?”

Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp. “You must be Nils. You don’t look very
different, anyway.”

“Nor you, Mother. You hold your own. Don’t you wear glasses yet?”

“Only to read by. Where’s your trunk, Nils?”

“Oh, I left that in town. I thought it might not be convenient for you
to have company so near threshing-time.”

“Don’t be foolish, Nils.” Mrs. Ericson turned back to the stove. “I
don’t thresh now. I hitched the wheat land onto the next farm and have
a tenant. Hilda, take some hot water up to the company room, and go call
little Eric.”

The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute amazement, took up
the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils a long, admiring look from the
door of the kitchen stairs.

“Who’s the youngster?” Nils asked, dropping down on the bench behind the
kitchen stove.

“One of your Cousin Henrik’s.”

“How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?”

“Six years. There are two boys. One stays with Peter and one with
Anders. Olaf is their guardeen.”

There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky boy peered
wonderingly in through the screen door. He had a fair, gentle face and
big grey eyes, and wisps of soft yellow hair hung down under his cap.
Nils sprang up and pulled him into the kitchen, hugging him and slapping
him on the shoulders. “Well, if it isn’t my kid! Look at the size of
him! Don’t you know me, Eric?”

The boy reddened tinder his sunburn and freckles, and hung his head. “I
guess it’s Nils,” he said shyly.

“You’re a good guesser,” laughed Nils giving the lad’s hand a swing. To
himself he was thinking: “That’s why the little girl looked so friendly.
He’s taught her to like me. He was only six when I went away, and he’s
remembered for twelve years.”

Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling. “You look just like I
thought you would,” he ventured.

“Go wash your hands, Eric,” called Mrs. Ericson. “I’ve got cob corn for
supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you don’t get much of that in
the old country. Here’s Hilda; she’ll take you up to your room. You’ll
want to get the dust off you before you eat.”

Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate, and the
little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him know that his
room was ready. He put out his hand and she took it, with a startled
glance up at his face. Little Eric dropped his towel, threw an arm about
Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze, and then stumbled
out to the porch.

During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of his eight grown
brothers farmed, how their crops were coming on, and how much livestock
they were feeding. His mother watched him narrowly as she talked.
“You’ve got better looking, Nils,” she remarked abruptly, whereupon he
grinned and the children giggled. Eric, although he was eighteen and as
tall as Nils, was always accounted a child, being the last of so many
sons. His face seemed childlike, too, Nils thought, and he had the open,
wandering eyes of a little boy. All the others had been men at his age.

After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on the step
to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him and began
to knit busily. It was one of the few Old World customs she had kept up,
for she could not bear to sit with idle hands.

“Where’s little Eric, Mother?”

“He’s helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own will; I don’t
like a boy to be too handy about the house.”

“He seems like a nice kid.”

“He’s very obedient.”

Nils smiled a little in the dark. It was just as well to shift the line
of conversation. “What are you knitting there, Mother?”

“Baby stockings. The boys keep me busy.” Mrs. Ericson chuckled and
clicked her needles.

“How many grandchildren have you?”

“Only thirty-one now. Olaf lost his three. They were sickly, like their
mother.”

“I supposed he had a second crop by this time!”

“His second wife has no children. She’s too proud. She tears about on
horseback all the time. But she’ll get caught up with, yet. She sets
herself very high, though nobody knows what for. They were low enough
Bohemians she came of. I never thought much of Bohemians; always
drinking.”

Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson knitted on. In
a few moments she added grimly: “She was down here tonight, just before
you came. She’d like to quarrel with me and come between me and Olaf,
but I don’t give her the chance. I suppose you’ll be bringing a wife
home some day.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought much about it.”

“Well, perhaps it’s best as it is,” suggested Mrs. Ericson hopefully.
“You’d never be contented tied down to the land. There was roving blood
in your father’s family, and it’s come out in you. I expect your own
way of life suits you best.” Mrs. Ericson had dropped into a blandly
agreeable tone which Nils well remembered. It seemed to amuse him a
good deal and his white teeth flashed behind his pipe. His mother’s
strategies had always diverted him, even when he was a boy--they were so
flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned to her vigor and force. “They’ve
been waiting to see which way I’d jump,” he reflected. He felt that Mrs.
Ericson was pondering his case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever got used to steady work,” she went on
presently. “Men ain’t apt to if they roam around too long. It’s a pity
you didn’t come back the year after the World’s Fair. Your father picked
up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times, and I expect maybe
he’d have give you a farm, it’s too bad you put off comin’ back so long,
for I always thought he meant to do something by you.”

Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. “I’d have missed a lot
if I had come back then. But I’m sorry I didn’t get back to see father.”

“Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other. Perhaps
you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as you’d have been
with a farm,” said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.

“Land’s a good thing to have,” Nils commented, as he lit another match
and sheltered it with his hand.

His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out. “Only
when you stay on it!” she hastened to say.

Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with a
yawn. “Mother, if you don’t mind, Eric and I will take a little tramp
before bedtime. It will make me sleep.”

“Very well; only don’t stay long. I’ll sit up and wait for you. I like
to lock up myself.”

Nils put his hand on Eric’s shoulder, and the two tramped down the hill
and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond. Neither spoke.
They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his pipe. There was no
moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay faint in the starlight.
Over everything was darkness and thick silence, and the smell of dust
and sunflowers. The brothers followed the road for a mile or more
without finding a place to sit down. Finally, Nils perched on a stile
over the wire fence, and Eric sat on the lower step.

“I began to think you never would come back, Nils,” said the boy softly.

“Didn’t I promise you I would?”

“Yes; but people don’t bother about promises they make to babies. Did
you really know you were going away for good when you went to Chicago
with the cattle that time?”

“I thought it very likely, if I could make my way.”

“I don’t see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could.” Eric rubbed
his shoulder against his brother’s knee.

“The hard thing was leaving home you and father. It was easy enough,
once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got awful homesick; used to cry
myself to sleep. But I’d burned my bridges.”

“You had always wanted to go, hadn’t you?”

“Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood still
by the window?”

Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the grey darkness.

“You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering when they
rustled at night? Well, they always whispered to me about the sea.
Sometimes they said names out of the geography books. In a high wind
they had a desperate sound, like someone trying to tear loose.”

“How funny, Nils,” said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his hand.
“That tree still talks like that, and ‘most always it talks to me about
you.”

They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric whispered
anxiously: “Hadn’t we better go back now? Mother will get tired waiting
for us.” They rose and took a short cut home, through the pasture.


                           II

The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that came with
dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room reflected the glare that
shone through the thin window shades, and he found it impossible to
sleep. He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the hall and up the back
stairs to the half-story room which he used to share with his little
brother. Eric, in a skimpy nightshirt, was sitting on the edge of the
bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair standing up in tufts all
over his head. When he saw Nils, he murmured something confusedly and
hustled his long legs into his trousers. “I didn’t expect you’d be up so
early, Nils,” he said, as his head emerged from his blue shirt.

“Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?” Nils gave him a playful tap
which bent the tall boy up like a clasp knife. “See here: I must teach
you to box.” Nils thrust his hands into his pockets and walked about.
“You haven’t changed things much up here. Got most of my old traps,
haven’t you?”

He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the
dresser. “If this isn’t the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself with!”

The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.

“Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did he do it,
Nils? You were with father when he found Lou, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we drove along,
Lou’s place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought we’d stop and cheer
him up. When we found him father said he’d been dead a couple days. He’d
tied a piece of binding twine round his neck, made a noose in each end,
fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick, and let the stick spring
straight; strangled himself.”

“What made him kill himself such a silly way?”

The simplicity of the boy’s question set Nils laughing. He clapped
little Eric on the shoulder. “What made him such a silly as to kill
himself at all, I should say!”

“Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died on him,
didn’t they?”

“Sure they did; but he didn’t have cholera; and there were plenty of
hogs left in the world, weren’t there?”

“Well, but, if they weren’t his, how could they do him any good?” Eric
asked, in astonishment.

“Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people’s hogs. He
was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig--think of that,
now!” Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and quite embarrassed little
Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and hands at the tin basin. While
he was parting his wet hair at the kitchen looking glass, a heavy tread
sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped his comb. “Gracious, there’s
Mother. We must have talked too long.” He hurried out to the shed,
slipped on his overalls, and disappeared with the milking pails.

Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black hair
shining from the application of a wet brush.

“Good morning, Mother. Can’t I make the fire for you?”

“No, thank you, Nils. It’s no trouble to make a cob fire, and I like to
manage the kitchen stove myself” Mrs. Ericson paused with a shovel full
of ashes in her hand. “I expect you will be wanting to see your brothers
as soon as possible. I’ll take you up to Anders’ place this morning.
He’s threshing, and most of our boys are over there.”

“Will Olaf be there?”

Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between shovels.
“No; Olaf’s wheat is all in, put away in his new barn. He got six
thousand bushel this year. He’s going to town today to get men to finish
roofing his barn.”

“So Olaf is building a new barn?” Nils asked absently.

“Biggest one in the county, and almost done. You’ll likely be here for
the barn-raising. He’s going to have a supper and a dance as soon as
everybody’s done threshing. Says it keeps the voters in good humour. I
tell him that’s all nonsense; but Olaf has a head for politics.”

“Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik’s land?”

Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke curling up about
the cobs. “Yes; he holds it in trust for the children, Hilda and her
brothers. He keeps strict account of everything he raises on it, and
puts the proceeds out at compound interest for them.”

Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up. The door of the
back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms behind her, buttoning
up her long gingham apron as she came. He nodded to her gaily, and she
twinkled at him out of her little blue eyes, set far apart over her wide
cheekbones.

“There, Hilda, you grind the coffee--and just put in an extra handful;
I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong,” said Mrs. Ericson, as she
went out to the shed.

Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the coffee grinder
between her knees and ground so hard that her two braids bobbed and her
face flushed under its broad spattering of freckles. He noticed on her
middle finger something that had not been there last night, and that had
evidently been put on for company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set
garnet stone. As her hand went round and round he touched the ring with
the tip of his finger, smiling.

Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs. Ericson had
disappeared. “My Cousin Clara gave me that,” she whispered bashfully.
“She’s Cousin Olaf’s wife.”


                           III

Mrs. Olaf Ericson--Clara Vavrika, as many people still called her--was
moving restlessly about her big bare house that morning. Her husband had
left for the county town before his wife was out of bed--her lateness
in rising was one of the many things the Ericson family had against her.
Clara seldom came downstairs before eight o’clock, and this morning
she was even later, for she had dressed with unusual care. She put
on, however, only a tight-fitting black dress, which people thereabouts
thought very plain. She was a tall, dark woman of thirty, with a rather
sallow complexion and a touch of dull salmon red in her cheeks, where
the blood seemed to burn under her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly
above her low forehead, was so black that there were distinctly blue
lights in it. Her black eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes
were long and heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a strain
of Tartar or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery determination
and sometimes dull and opaque. Her expression was never altogether
amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or, when she was
animated, sarcastic. She was most attractive in profile, for then one
saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head and delicate ears, and felt
at once that here was a very positive, if not an altogether pleasing,
personality.

The entire management of Mrs. Olaf’s household devolved upon her aunt,
Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty. When Clara
was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna’s life had been spent
in ungrudging service to her niece. Clara, like many self-willed and
discontented persons, was really very apt, without knowing it, to do
as other people told her, and to let her destiny be decided for her
by intelligences much below her own. It was her Aunt Johanna who had
humoured and spoiled her in her girlhood, who had got her off to Chicago
to study piano, and who had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson
as the best match she would be likely to make in that part of the
country. Johanna Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old
country. She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental.
She was so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her
brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her niece
because of her talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but
most of all because of her selfishness.

Clara’s marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna’s particular triumph. She
was inordinately proud of Olaf’s position, and she found a sufficiently
exciting career in managing Clara’s house, in keeping it above the
criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf to keep him from finding
fault with his wife, and in concealing from every one Clara’s domestic
infelicities. While Clara slept of a morning, Johanna Vavrika was
bustling about, seeing that Olaf and the men had their breakfast, and
that the cleaning or the butter-making or the washing was properly begun
by the two girls in the kitchen. Then, at about eight o’clock, she would
take Clara’s coffee up to her, and chat with her while she drank it,
telling her what was going on in the house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently
said that her daughter-in-law would not know what day of the week it
was if Johanna did not tell her every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised and
pitied Johanna, but did not wholly dislike her. The one thing she hated
in her daughter-in-law above everything else was the way in which Clara
could come it over people. It enraged her that the affairs of her son’s
big, barnlike house went on as well as they did, and she used to feel
that in this world we have to wait overlong to see the guilty punished.
“Suppose Johanna Vavrika died or got sick?” the old lady used to say to
Olaf. “Your wife wouldn’t know where to look for her own dish-cloth.”
 Olaf only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did not
die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was looking poorly,
she was never ill. She seldom left the house, and she slept in a little
room off the kitchen. No Ericson, by night or day, could come prying
about there to find fault without her knowing it. Her one weakness was
that she was an incurable talker, and she sometimes made trouble without
meaning to.

This morning Clara was tying a wine-coloured ribbon about her throat
when Johanna appeared with her coffee. After putting the tray on a
sewing table, she began to make Clara’s bed, chattering the while in
Bohemian.

“Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking. I’m going down
presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf. He asked for prune
preserves at breakfast, and I told him I was out of them, and to bring
some prunes and honey and cloves from town.”

Clara poured her coffee. “Ugh! I don’t see how men can eat so much sweet
stuff. In the morning, too!”

Her aunt chuckled knowingly. “Bait a bear with honey, as we say in the
old country.”

“Was he cross?” her niece asked indifferently.

“Olaf? Oh, no! He was in fine spirits. He’s never cross if you know how
to take him. I never knew a man to make so little fuss about bills. I
gave him a list of things to get a yard long, and he didn’t say a word;
just folded it up and put it in his pocket.”

“I can well believe he didn’t say a word,” Clara remarked with a shrug.
“Some day he’ll forget how to talk.”

“Oh, but they say he’s a grand speaker in the Legislature. He knows
when to keep quiet. That’s why he’s got such influence in politics. The
people have confidence in him.” Johanna beat up a pillow and held it
under her fat chin while she slipped on the case. Her niece laughed.

“Maybe we could make people believe we were wise, Aunty, if we held our
tongues. Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson that Norman threw me again last
Saturday and turned my foot? She’s been talking to Olaf.”

Johanna fell into great confusion. “Oh, but, my precious, the old lady
asked for you, and she’s always so angry if I can’t give an excuse.
Anyhow, she needn’t talk; she’s always tearing up something with that
motor of hers.”

When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to dust the
parlour. Since there was not much there to dust, this did not take very
long. Olaf had built the house new for her before their marriage, but
her interest in furnishing it had been short-lived. It went, indeed,
little beyond a bathtub and her piano. They had disagreed about almost
every other article of furniture, and Clara had said she would rather
have her house empty than full of things she didn’t want. The house was
set in a hillside, and the west windows of the parlour looked out above
the kitchen yard thirty feet below. The east windows opened directly
into the front yard. At one of the latter, Clara, while she was dusting,
heard a low whistle. She did not turn at once, but listened intently as
she drew her cloth slowly along the round of a chair. Yes, there it was:

I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls.

She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight, his hat in his
hand, just outside the window. As she crossed the room he leaned against
the wire screen. “Aren’t you at all surprised to see me, Clara Vavrika?”

“No; I was expecting to see you. Mother Ericson telephoned Olaf last
night that you were here.”

Nils squinted and gave a long whistle. “Telephoned? That must have been
while Eric and I were out walking. Isn’t she enterprising? Lift this
screen, won’t you?”

Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the window-sill.
As he stepped into the room she said: “You didn’t think you were going
to get ahead of your mother, did you?”

He threw his hat on the piano. “Oh, I do sometimes. You see, I’m ahead
of her now. I’m supposed to be in Anders’ wheat-field. But, as we were
leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place beside the road and sank
up to the hubs. While they were going for the horses to pull her out,
I cut away behind the stacks and escaped.” Nils chuckled. Clara’s dull
eyes lit up as she looked at him admiringly.

“You’ve got them guessing already. I don’t know what your mother said
to Olaf over the telephone, but be came back looking as if he’d seen
a ghost, and he didn’t go to bed until a dreadful hour--ten o’clock, I
should think. He sat out on the porch in the dark like a graven image.
It had been one of his talkative days, too.” They both laughed, easily
and lightly, like people who have laughed a great deal together; but
they remained standing.

“Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts, too, over
in the threshing field. What’s the matter with them all?”

Clara gave him a quick, searching look. “Well, for one thing, they’ve
always been afraid you have the other will.”

Nils looked interested. “The other will?”

“Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another, but they never
knew what he did with it. They almost tore the old house to pieces
looking for it. They always suspected that he carried on a clandestine
correspondence with you, for the one thing he would do was to get his
own mail himself. So they thought he might have sent the new will to
you for safekeeping. The old one, leaving everything to your mother, was
made long before you went away, and it’s understood among them that it
cuts you out--that she will leave all the property to the others. Your
father made the second will to prevent that. I’ve been hoping you
had it. It would be such fun to spring it on them.” Clara laughed
mirthfully, a thing she did not often do now.

Nils shook his head reprovingly. “Come, now, you’re malicious.”

“No, I’m not. But I’d like something to happen to stir them all up, just
for once. There never was such a family for having nothing ever happen
to them but dinner and threshing. I’d almost be willing to die, just to
have a funeral. _You_ wouldn’t stand it for three weeks.”

Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys with the finger
of one hand. “I wouldn’t? My dear young lady, how do you know what I can
stand? _You_ wouldn’t wait to find out.”

Clara flushed darkly and frowned. “I didn’t believe you would ever come
back--” she said defiantly.

“Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went away.
However, all’s well that ends well, and I haven’t come back to be a
skeleton at the feast. We mustn’t quarrel. Mother will be here with a
search warrant pretty soon.” He swung round and faced her, thrusting his
hands into his coat pockets. “Come, you ought to be glad to see me, if
you want something to happen. I’m something, even without a will. We can
have a little fun, can’t we? I think we can!”

She echoed him, “I think we can!” They both laughed and their eyes
sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when she had put
the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.

“You know, I’m so tickled to see mother,” Nils went on. “I didn’t know
I was so proud of her. A regular pile driver. How about little pigtails,
down at the house? Is Olaf doing the square thing by those children?”

Clara frowned pensively. “Olaf has to do something that looks like the
square thing, now that he’s a public man!” She glanced drolly at Nils.
“But he makes a good commission out of it. On Sundays they all get
together here and figure. He lets Peter and Anders put in big bills for
the keep of the two boys, and he pays them out of the estate. They are
always having what they call accountings. Olaf gets something out of
it, too. I don’t know just how they do it, but it’s entirely a family
matter, as they say. And when the Ericsons say that--” Clara lifted her
eyebrows.

Just then the angry _honk-honk_ of an approaching motor sounded from
down the road. Their eyes met and they began to laugh. They laughed as
children do when they can not contain themselves, and can not explain
the cause of their mirth to grown people, but share it perfectly
together. When Clara Vavrika sat down at the piano after he was gone,
she felt that she had laughed away a dozen years. She practised as if
the house were burning over her head.

When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat of the
motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she made no comment
upon his truancy until she had turned her car and was retracing her
revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf’s big pasture. Then she
remarked dryly:

“If I were you I wouldn’t see too much of Olaf’s wife while you are
here. She’s the kind of woman who can’t see much of men without getting
herself talked about. She was a good deal talked about before he married
her.”

“Hasn’t Olaf tamed her?” Nils asked indifferently.

Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. “Olaf don’t seem to have
much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek enough, but
she was always ailing. And this one has her own way. He says if he
quarreled with her she’d go back to her father, and then he’d lose the
Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks in this district. But when
you find a man under his wife’s thumb you can always be sure there’s a
soft spot in him somewhere.”

Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. “She brought him a good deal
of money, didn’t she, besides the Bohemian vote?”

Mrs. Ericson sniffed. “Well, she has a fair half section in her own
name, but I can’t see as that does Olaf much good. She will have a good
deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don’t marry again. But I don’t
consider a saloonkeeper’s money as good as other people’s money.”

Nils laughed outright. “Come, Mother, don’t let your prejudices carry
you that far. Money’s money. Old Vavrika’s a mighty decent sort of
saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him.”

Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily. “Oh, I know you always stood up for them!
But hanging around there when you were a boy never did you any good,
Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there. There weren’t so many
after her when she married Olaf, let me tell you. She knew enough to
grab her chance.”

Nils settled back in his seat. “Of course I liked to go there, Mother,
and you were always cross about it. You never took the trouble to find
out that it was the one jolly house in this country for a boy to go to.
All the rest of you were working yourselves to death, and the houses
were mostly a mess, full of babies and washing and flies. Oh, it was all
right--I understand that; but you are young only once, and I happened
to be young then. Now, Vavrika’s was always jolly. He played the violin,
and I used to take my flute, and Clara played the piano, and
Johanna used to sing Bohemian songs. She always had a big supper for
us--herrings and pickles and poppy-seed bread, and lots of cake and
preserves. Old Joe had been in the army in the old country, and he could
tell lots of good stories. I can see him cutting bread, at the head of
the table, now. I don’t know what I’d have done when I was a kid if it
hadn’t been for the Vavrikas, really.”

“And all the time he was taking money that other people had worked hard
in the fields for,” Mrs. Ericson observed.

“So do the circuses, Mother, and they’re a good thing. People ought to
get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old Joe.”

“Your father,” Mrs. Ericson said grimly, “liked everybody.”

As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place, Mrs.
Ericson observed, “There’s Olaf’s buggy. He’s stopped on his way from
town.” Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his brother, who was
waiting on the porch.

Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement. His head
was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at a distance,
tried to remember what his brother looked like, he could recall only his
heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils, and pale blue eyes, set far
apart. Olaf’s features were rudimentary: the thing one noticed was the
face itself, wide and flat and pale; devoid of any expression, betraying
his fifty years as little as it betrayed anything else, and powerful by
reason of its very stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked
at him from under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could
ever say what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had always
felt in Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness of
wet loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the most difficult
of his brothers.

“How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?”

“Oh, I may stay forever,” Nils answered gaily. “I like this country
better than I used to.”

“There’s been some work put into it since you left,” Olaf remarked.

“Exactly. I think it’s about ready to live in now--and I’m about ready
to settle down.” Nils saw his brother lower his big head (“Exactly like
a bull,” he thought.) “Mother’s been persuading me to slow down now, and
go in for farming,” he went on lightly.

Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. “Farming ain’t learned in a day,”
 he brought out, still looking at the ground.

“Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly.” Nils had not meant to
antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing it. “Of
course,” he went on, “I shouldn’t expect to make a big success, as you
fellows have done. But then, I’m not ambitious. I won’t want much. A
little land, and some cattle, maybe.”

Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to ask Nils
what he had been doing all these years, that he didn’t have a business
somewhere he couldn’t afford to leave; why he hadn’t more pride than to
come back with only a little sole-leather trunk to show for himself, and
to present himself as the only failure in the family. He did not ask one
of these questions, but he made them all felt distinctly.

“Humph!” Nils thought. “No wonder the man never talks, when he can butt
his ideas into you like that without ever saying a word. I suppose he
uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife all the time. But I guess
she has her innings.” He chuckled, and Olaf looked up. “Never mind
me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing why, like little Eric. He’s another
cheerful dog.”

“Eric,” said Olaf slowly, “is a spoiled kid. He’s just let his mother’s
best cow go dry because he don’t milk her right. I was hoping you’d take
him away somewhere and put him into business. If he don’t do any good
among strangers, he never will.” This was a long speech for Olaf, and as
he finished it he climbed into his buggy.

Nils shrugged his shoulders. “Same old tricks,” he thought. “Hits from
behind you every time. What a whale of a man!” He turned and went round
to the kitchen, where his mother was scolding little Eric for letting
the gasoline get low.


                           IV

Joe Vavrika’s saloon was not in the county seat, where Olaf and Mrs.
Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a little Bohemian
settlement which lay at the other end of the county, ten level miles
north of Olaf’s farm. Clara rode up to see her father almost every day.
Vavrika’s house was, so to speak, in the back yard of his saloon. The
garden between the two buildings was inclosed by a high board fence
as tight as a partition, and in summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden
benches among the gooseberry bushes under his little cherry tree. At
one of these tables Nils Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three
days after his return home. Joe had gone in to serve a customer, and
Nils was lounging on his elbows, looking rather mournfully into his
half-emptied pitcher, when he heard a laugh across the little garden.
Clara, in her riding habit, was standing at the back door of the house,
under the grapevine trellis that old Joe had grown there long ago. Nils
rose.

“Come out and keep your father and me company. We’ve been gossiping all
afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the flies.”

She shook her head. “No, I never come out here any more. Olaf doesn’t
like it. I must live up to my position, you know.”

“You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as you
used to? He _has_ tamed you! Who keeps up these flower-beds?”

“I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the Bohemian
papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is open. What have you
two been doing?”

“Talking, as I told you. I’ve been telling him about my travels. I find
I can’t talk much at home, not even to Eric.”

Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white moth that was
fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves. “I suppose you will
never tell me about all those things.”

“Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf’s house, certainly. What’s the
matter with our talking here?” He pointed persuasively with his hat
to the bushes and the green table, where the flies were singing lazily
above the empty beer glasses.

Clara shook her head weakly. “No, it wouldn’t do. Besides, I am going
now.”

“I’m on Eric’s mare. Would you be angry if I overtook you?”

Clara looked back and laughed. “You might try and see. I can leave you
if I don’t want you. Eric’s mare can’t keep up with Norman.”

Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big Joe, six feet
four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped him on the shoulder.
“Not a Goddamn a your money go in my drawer, you hear? Only next time
you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty.” Joe wagged his fingers in
imitation of the flute player’s position.

“My Clara, she come all-a-time Sundays an’ play for me. She not like to
play at Ericson’s place.” He shook his yellow curls and laughed. “Not a
Goddamn a fun at Ericson’s. You come a Sunday. You like-a fun. No forget
de flute.” Joe talked very rapidly and always tumbled over his English.
He seldom spoke it to his customers, and had never learned much.

Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west of the
village, where the houses and gardens scattered into prairie land and
the road turned south. Far ahead of him, in the declining light, he saw
Clara Vavrika’s slender figure, loitering on horseback. He touched his
mare with the whip, and shot along the white, level road, under the
reddening sky. When he overtook Olaf’s wife he saw that she had been
crying. “What’s the matter, Clara Vavrika?” he asked kindly.

“Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there with
father. I wonder why I ever went away.”

Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women:
“That’s what I’ve been wondering these many years. You were the last
girl in the country I’d have picked for a wife for Olaf. What made you
do it, Clara?”

“I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbours”--Clara tossed her
head. “People were beginning to wonder.”

“To wonder?”

“Yes--why I didn’t get married. I suppose I didn’t like to keep them in
suspense. I’ve discovered that most girls marry out of consideration for
the neighbourhood.”

Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed. “I’d have
gambled that one girl I knew would say, ‘Let the neighbourhood be
damned.’”

Clara shook her head mournfully. “You see, they have it on you, Nils;
that is, if you’re a woman. They say you’re beginning to go off. That’s
what makes us get married: we can’t stand the laugh.”

Nils looked sidewise at her. He had never seen her head droop before.
Resignation was the last thing he would have expected of her. “In your
case, there wasn’t something else?”

“Something else?”

“I mean, you didn’t do it to spite somebody? Somebody who didn’t come
back?”

Clara drew herself up. “Oh, I never thought you’d come back. Not after
I stopped writing to you, at least. _That_ was all over, long before I
married Olaf.”

“It never occurred to you, then, that the meanest thing you could do to
me was to marry Olaf?”

Clara laughed. “No; I didn’t know you were so fond of Olaf.”

Nils smoothed his horse’s mane with his glove. “You know, Clara Vavrika,
you are never going to stick it out. You’ll cut away some day, and I’ve
been thinking you might as well cut away with me.”

Clara threw up her chin. “Oh, you don’t know me as well as you think. I
won’t cut away. Sometimes, when I’m with father, I feel like it. But I
can hold out as long as the Ericsons can. They’ve never got the best of
me yet, and one can live, so long as one isn’t beaten. If I go back to
father, it’s all up with Olaf in politics. He knows that, and he never
goes much beyond sulking. I’ve as much wit as the Ericsons. I’ll never
leave them unless I can show them a thing or two.”

“You mean unless you can come it over them?”

“Yes--unless I go away with a man who is cleverer than they are, and who
has more money.”

Nils whistled. “Dear me, you are demanding a good deal. The Ericsons,
take the lot of them, are a bunch to beat. But I should think the
excitement of tormenting them would have worn off by this time.”

“It has, I’m afraid,” Clara admitted mournfully.

“Then why don’t you cut away? There are more amusing games than this in
the world. When I came home I thought it might amuse me to bully a few
quarter sections out of the Ericsons; but I’ve almost decided I can get
more fun for my money somewhere else.”

Clara took in her breath sharply. “Ah, you have got the other will! That
was why you came home!”

“No, it wasn’t. I came home to see how you were getting on with Olaf.”

Clara struck her horse with the whip, and in a bound she was far ahead
of him. Nils dropped one word, “Damn!” and whipped after her; but she
leaned forward in her saddle and fairly cut the wind. Her long riding
skirt rippled in the still air behind her. The sun was just sinking
behind the stubble in a vast, clear sky, and the shadows drew across the
fields so rapidly that Nils could scarcely keep in sight the dark figure
on the road. When he overtook her he caught her horse by the bridle.
Norman reared, and Nils was frightened for her; but Clara kept her seat.

“Let me go, Nils Ericson!” she cried. “I hate you more than any of
them. You were created to torture me, the whole tribe of you--to make me
suffer in every possible way.”

She struck her horse again and galloped away from him. Nils set his
teeth and looked thoughtful. He rode slowly home along the deserted
road, watching the stars come out in the clear violet sky.

They flashed softly into the limpid heavens, like jewels let fall into
clear water. They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid world. As he
turned across the sand creek, he looked up at the North Star and smiled,
as if there were an understanding between them. His mother scolded him
for being late for supper.


                           V

On Sunday afternoon Joe Vavrika, in his shirt sleeves and carpet
slippers, was sitting in his garden, smoking a long-tasseled porcelain
pipe with a hunting scene painted on the bowl. Clara sat under the
cherry tree, reading aloud to him from the weekly Bohemian papers. She
had worn a white muslin dress under her riding habit, and the leaves
of the cherry tree threw a pattern of sharp shadows over her skirt. The
black cat was dozing in the sunlight at her feet, and Joe’s dachshund
was scratching a hole under the scarlet geraniums and dreaming of
badgers. Joe was filling his pipe for the third time since dinner,
when he heard a knocking on the fence. He broke into a loud guffaw and
unlatched the little door that led into the street. He did not call Nils
by name, but caught him by the hand and dragged him in. Clara stiffened
and the colour deepened under her dark skin. Nils, too, felt a little
awkward. He had not seen her since the night when she rode away from him
and left him alone on the level road between the fields. Joe dragged him
to the wooden bench beside the green table.

“You bring de flute,” he cried, tapping the leather case under Nils’
arm. “Ah, das-a good’ Now we have some liddle fun like old times. I got
somet’ing good for you.” Joe shook his finger at Nils and winked his
blue eye, a bright clear eye, full of fire, though the tiny bloodvessels
on the ball were always a little distended. “I got somet’ing for you
from”--he paused and waved his hand--“Hongarie. You know Hongarie? You
wait!” He pushed Nils down on the bench, and went through the back door
of his saloon.

Nils looked at Clara, who sat frigidly with her white skirts drawn
tight about her. “He didn’t tell you he had asked me to come, did he?
He wanted a party and proceeded to arrange it. Isn’t he fun? Don’t be
cross; let’s give him a good time.”

Clara smiled and shook out her skirt. “Isn’t that like Father? And he
has sat here so meekly all day. Well, I won’t pout. I’m glad you came.
He doesn’t have very many good times now any more. There are so few of
his kind left. The second generation are a tame lot.”

Joe came back with a flask in one hand and three wine glasses caught by
the stems between the fingers of the other. These he placed on the table
with an air of ceremony, and, going behind Nils, held the flask between
him and the sun, squinting into it admiringly. “You know dis, Tokai? A
great friend of mine, he bring dis to me, a present out of Hongarie. You
know how much it cost, dis wine? Chust so much what it weigh in gold.
Nobody but de nobles drink him in Bohemie. Many, many years I save him
up, dis Tokai.” Joe whipped out his official corkscrew and delicately
removed the cork. “De old man die what bring him to me, an’ dis wine he
lay on his belly in my cellar an’ sleep. An’ now,” carefully pouring
out the heavy yellow wine, “an’ now he wake up; and maybe he wake us
up, too!” He carried one of the glasses to his daughter and presented it
with great gallantry.

Clara shook her head, but, seeing her father’s disappointment, relented.
“You taste it first. I don’t want so much.”

Joe sampled it with a beatific expression, and turned to Nils. “You
drink him slow, dis wine. He very soft, but he go down hot. You see!”

After a second glass Nils declared that he couldn’t take any more
without getting sleepy. “Now get your fiddle, Vavrika,” he said as he
opened his flute case.

But Joe settled back in his wooden rocker and wagged his big carpet
slipper. “No-no-no-no-no-no-no! No play fiddle now any more: too much
ache in de finger,” waving them, “all-a-time rheumatic. You play de
flute, te-tety-tetety-te. Bohemie songs.”

“I’ve forgotten all the Bohemian songs I used to play with you and
Johanna. But here’s one that will make Clara pout. You remember how her
eyes used to snap when we called her the Bohemian Girl?” Nils lifted his
flute and began “When Other Lips and Other Hearts,” and Joe hummed the
air in a husky baritone, waving his carpet slipper. “Oh-h-h, das-a fine
music,” he cried, clapping his hands as Nils finished. “Now ‘Marble
Halls, Marble Halls’! Clara, you sing him.”

Clara smiled and leaned back in her chair, beginning softly:

       “I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,
          With vassals and serfs at my knee,”

and Joe hummed like a big bumblebee.

“There’s one more you always played,” Clara said quietly, “I remember
that best.” She locked her hands over her knee and began “The Heart
Bowed Down,” and sang it through without groping for the words. She was
singing with a good deal of warmth when she came to the end of the old
song:

             “For memory is the only friend
             That grief can call its own.”

Joe flashed out his red silk handkerchief and blew his nose, shaking his
head. “No-no-no-no-no-no-no! Too sad, too sad! I not like-a dat. Play
quick somet’ing gay now.”

Nils put his lips to the instrument, and Joe lay back in his chair,
laughing and singing, “Oh, Evelina, Sweet Evelina!” Clara laughed, too.
Long ago, when she and Nils went to high school, the model student of
their class was a very homely girl in thick spectacles. Her name was
Evelina Oleson; she had a long, swinging walk which somehow suggested
the measure of that song, and they used mercilessly to sing it at her.

“Dat ugly Oleson girl, she teach in de school,” Joe gasped, “an’ she
still walks chust like dat, yup-a, yup-a, yup-a, chust like a
camel she go! Now, Nils, we have some more li’l drink. Oh,
yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-_yes_! Dis time you haf to drink, and Clara she
haf to, so she show she not jealous. So, we all drink to your girl. You
not tell her name, eh? No-no-no, I no make you tell. She pretty, eh? She
make good sweetheart? I bet!” Joe winked and lifted his glass. “How soon
you get married?”

Nils screwed up his eyes. “That I don’t know. When she says.”

Joe threw out his chest. “Das-a way boys talks. No way for mans. Mans
say, ‘You come to de church, an’ get a hurry on you.’ Das-a way mans
talks.”

“Maybe Nils hasn’t got enough to keep a wife,” put in Clara ironically.
“How about that, Nils?” she asked him frankly, as if she wanted to know.

Nils looked at her coolly, raising one eyebrow. “Oh, I can keep her, all
right.”

“The way she wants to be kept?”

“With my wife, I’ll decide that,” replied Nils calmly. “I’ll give her
what’s good for her.”

Clara made a wry face. “You’ll give her the strap, I expect, like old
Peter Oleson gave his wife.”

“When she needs it,” said Nils lazily, locking his hands behind his head
and squinting up through the leaves of the cherry tree. “Do you remember
the time I squeezed the cherries all over your clean dress, and Aunt
Johanna boxed my ears for me? My gracious, weren’t you mad! You had both
hands full of cherries, and I squeezed ‘em and made the juice fly all
over you. I liked to have fun with you; you’d get so mad.”

“We _did_ have fun, didn’t we? None of the other kids ever had so much
fun. We knew how to play.”

Nils dropped his elbows on the table and looked steadily across at her.
“I’ve played with lots of girls since, but I haven’t found one who was
such good fun.”

Clara laughed. The late afternoon sun was shining full in her face,
and deep in the back of her eyes there shone something fiery, like the
yellow drops of Tokai in the brown glass bottle. “Can you still play, or
are you only pretending?”

“I can play better than I used to, and harder.”

“Don’t you ever work, then?” She had not intended to say it. It slipped
out because she was confused enough to say just the wrong thing.

“I work between times.” Nils’ steady gaze still beat upon her. “Don’t
you worry about my working, Mrs. Ericson. You’re getting like all the
rest of them.” He reached his brown, warm hand across the table and
dropped it on Clara’s, which was cold as an icicle. “Last call for play,
Mrs. Ericson!” Clara shivered, and suddenly her hands and cheeks grew
warm. Her fingers lingered in his a moment, and they looked at each
other earnestly. Joe Vavrika had put the mouth of the bottle to his lips
and was swallowing the last drops of the Tokai, standing. The sun, just
about to sink behind his shop, glistened on the bright glass, on his
flushed face and curly yellow hair. “Look,” Clara whispered, “that’s the
way I want to grow old.”


                           VI

On the day of Olaf Ericson’s barn-raising, his wife, for once in a way,
rose early. Johanna Vavrika had been baking cakes and frying and boiling
and spicing meats for a week beforehand, but it was not until the day
before the party was to take place that Clara showed any interest in it.
Then she was seized with one of her fitful spasms of energy, and took
the wagon and little Eric and spent the day on Plum Creek, gathering
vines and swamp goldenrod to decorate the barn.

By four o’clock in the afternoon buggies and wagons began to arrive at
the big unpainted building in front of Olaf’s house. When Nils and his
mother came at five, there were more than fifty people in the barn, and
a great drove of children. On the ground floor stood six long tables,
set with the crockery of seven flourishing Ericson families, lent for
the occasion. In the middle of each table was a big yellow pumpkin,
hollowed out and filled with woodbine. In one corner of the barn, behind
a pile of green-and-white striped watermelons, was a circle of chairs
for the old people; the younger guests sat on bushel measures or
barbed-wire spools, and the children tumbled about in the haymow. The
box stalls Clara had converted into booths. The framework was hidden by
goldenrod and sheaves of wheat, and the partitions were covered ‘With
wild grapevines full of fruit. At one of these Johanna Vavrika watched
over her cooked meats, enough to provision an army; and at the next her
kitchen girls had ranged the ice-cream freezers, and Clara was already
cutting pies and cakes against the hour of serving. At the third stall,
little Hilda, in a bright pink lawn dress, dispensed lemonade throughout
the afternoon. Olaf, as a public man, had thought it inadvisable to
serve beer in his barn; but Joe Vavrika had come over with two demijohns
concealed in his buggy, and after his arrival the wagon shed was much
frequented by the men.

“Hasn’t Cousin Clara fixed things lovely?” little Hilda whispered, when
Nils went up to her stall and asked for lemonade.

Nils leaned against the booth, talking to the excited little girl and
watching the people. The barn faced the west, and the sun, pouring in
at the big doors, filled the whole interior with a golden light,
through which filtered fine particles of dust from the haymow, where the
children were romping. There was a great chattering from the stall where
Johanna Vavrika exhibited to the admiring women her platters heaped with
fried chicken, her roasts of beef, boiled tongues, and baked hams
with cloves stuck in the crisp brown fat and garnished with tansy and
parsley. The older women, having assured themselves that there were
twenty kinds of cake, not counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies,
repaired to the corner behind the pile of watermelons, put on their
white aprons, and fell to their knitting and fancywork. They were a fine
company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them
there together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent
long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the
rafters. There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best
black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined hands; and
several of almost heroic frame, not less massive than old Mrs. Ericson
herself. Few of them wore glasses, and old Mrs. Svendsen, a Danish
woman, who was quite bald, wore the only cap among them. Mrs. Oleson,
who had twelve big grandchildren, could still show two braids of yellow
hair as thick as her own wrists. Among all these grandmothers there were
more brown heads than white. They all had a pleased, prosperous air, as
if they were more than satisfied with themselves and with life. Nils,
leaning against Hilda’s lemonade stand, watched them as they sat
chattering in four languages, their fingers never lagging behind their
tongues.

“Look at them over there,” he whispered, detaining Clara as she passed
him. “Aren’t they the Old Guard? I’ve just counted thirty hands. I guess
they’ve wrung many a chicken’s neck and warmed many a boy’s jacket for
him in their time.”

In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the Herculean
labours those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of the cows they
had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted, the
children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had worn
out, the mountains of food they had cooked. It made him dizzy. Clara
Vavrika smiled a hard, enigmatical smile at him and walked rapidly away.
Nils’ eyes followed her white figure as she went toward the house.
He watched her walking alone in the sunlight, looked at her slender,
defiant shoulders and her little hard-set head with its coils of
blue-black hair. “No,” he reflected; “she’d never be like them, not if
she lived here a hundred years. She’d only grow more bitter. You can’t
tame a wild thing; you can only chain it. People aren’t all alike. I
mustn’t lose my nerve.” He gave Hilda’s pigtail a parting tweak and
set out after Clara. “Where to?” he asked, as he came upon her in the
kitchen.

“I’m going to the cellar for preserves.”

“Let me go with you. I never get a moment alone with you. Why do you
keep out of my way?”

Clara laughed. “I don’t usually get in anybody’s way.”

Nils followed her down the stairs and to the far corner of the cellar,
where a basement window let in a stream of light. From a swinging shelf
Clara selected several glass jars, each labeled in Johanna’s careful
hand. Nils took up a brown flask. “What’s this? It looks good.”

“It is. It’s some French brandy father gave me when I was married. Would
you like some? Have you a corkscrew? I’ll get glasses.”

When she brought them, Nils took them from her and put them down on
the window-sill. “Clara Vavrika, do you remember how crazy I used to be
about you?”

Clara shrugged her shoulders. “Boys are always crazy about somebody or
another. I dare say some silly has been crazy about Evelina Oleson. You
got over it in a hurry.”

“Because I didn’t come back, you mean? I had to get on, you know, and it
was hard sledding at first. Then I heard you’d married Olaf.”

“And then you stayed away from a broken heart,” Clara laughed.

“And then I began to think about you more than I had since I first went
away. I began to wonder if you were really as you had seemed to me when
I was a boy. I thought I’d like to see. I’ve had lots of girls, but no
one ever pulled me the same way. The more I thought about you, the
more I remembered how it used to be--like hearing a wild tune you
can’t resist, calling you out at night. It had been a long while since
anything had pulled me out of my boots, and I wondered whether anything
ever could again.” Nils thrust his hands into his coat pockets and
squared his shoulders, as his mother sometimes squared hers, as Olaf, in
a clumsier manner, squared his. “So I thought I’d come back and see. Of
course the family have tried to do me, and I rather thought I’d bring
out father’s will and make a fuss. But they can have their old land;
they’ve put enough sweat into it.” He took the flask and filled the
two glasses carefully to the brim. “I’ve found out what I want from the
Ericsons. Drink _skoal_, Clara.” He lifted his glass, and Clara took
hers with downcast eyes. “Look at me, Clara Vavrika. _Skoal!_”

She raised her burning eyes and answered fiercely: “_Skoal!_”


The barn supper began at six o’clock and lasted for two hilarious
hours. Yense Nelson had made a wager that he could eat two whole fried
chickens, and he did. Eli Swanson stowed away two whole custard pies,
and Nick Hermanson ate a chocolate layer cake to the last crumb. There
was even a cooky contest among the children, and one thin, slablike
Bohemian boy consumed sixteen and won the prize, a gingerbread pig
which Johanna Vavrika had carefully decorated with red candies and burnt
sugar. Fritz Sweiheart, the German carpenter, won in the pickle contest,
but he disappeared soon after supper and was not seen for the rest of
the evening. Joe Vavrika said that Fritz could have managed the pickles
all right, but he had sampled the demijohn in his buggy too often before
sitting down to the table.

While the supper was being cleared away the two fiddlers began to tune
up for the dance. Clara was to accompany them on her old upright piano,
which had been brought down from her father’s. By this time Nils had
renewed old acquaintances. Since his interview with Clara in the cellar,
he had been busy telling all the old women how young they looked, and
all the young ones how pretty they were, and assuring the men that
they had here the best farmland in the world. He had made himself so
agreeable that old Mrs. Ericson’s friends began to come up to her and
tell how lucky she was to get her smart son back again, and please to
get him to play his flute. Joe Vavrika, who could still play very well
when he forgot that he had rheumatism, caught up a fiddle from Johnny
Oleson and played a crazy Bohemian dance tune that set the wheels going.
When he dropped the bow every one was ready to dance.

Olaf, in a frock coat and a solemn made-up necktie, led the grand march
with his mother. Clara had kept well out of _that_ by sticking to the
piano. She played the march with a pompous solemnity which greatly
amused the prodigal son, who went over and stood behind her.

“Oh, aren’t you rubbing it into them, Clara Vavrika? And aren’t you
lucky to have me here, or all your wit would be thrown away.”

“I’m used to being witty for myself. It saves my life.”

The fiddles struck up a polka, and Nils convulsed Joe Vavrika by leading
out Evelina Oleson, the homely schoolteacher. His next partner was a
very fat Swedish girl, who, although she was an heiress, had not been
asked for the first dance, but had stood against the wall in her tight,
high-heeled shoes, nervously fingering a lace handkerchief. She was soon
out of breath, so Nils led her, pleased and panting, to her seat,
and went over to the piano, from which Clara had been watching his
gallantry. “Ask Olena Yenson,” she whispered. “She waltzes beautifully.”

Olena, too, was rather inconveniently plump, handsome in a smooth, heavy
way, with a fine colour and good-natured, sleepy eyes. She was redolent
of violet sachet powder, and had warm, soft, white hands, but she danced
divinely, moving as smoothly as the tide coming in. “There, that’s
something like,” Nils said as he released her. “You’ll give me the next
waltz, won’t you? Now I must go and dance with my little cousin.”

Hilda was greatly excited when Nils went up to her stall and held out
his arm. Her little eyes sparkled, but she declared that she could not
leave her lemonade. Old Mrs. Ericson, who happened along at this moment,
said she would attend to that, and Hilda came out, as pink as her pink
dress. The dance was a schottische, and in a moment her yellow braids
were fairly standing on end. “Bravo!” Nils cried encouragingly. “Where
did you learn to dance so nicely?”

“My Cousin Clara taught me,” the little girl panted.

Nils found Eric sitting with a group of boys who were too awkward or too
shy to dance, and told him that he must dance the next waltz with Hilda.

The boy screwed up his shoulders. “Aw, Nils, I can’t dance. My feet are
too big; I look silly.”

“Don’t be thinking about yourself. It doesn’t matter how boys look.”

Nils had never spoken to him so sharply before, and Eric made haste to
scramble out of his corner and brush the straw from his coat.

Clara nodded approvingly. “Good for you, Nils. I’ve been trying to
get hold of him. They dance very nicely together; I sometimes play for
them.”

“I’m obliged to you for teaching him. There’s no reason why he should
grow up to be a lout.”

“He’ll never be that. He’s more like you than any of them. Only he
hasn’t your courage.” From her slanting eyes Clara shot forth one of
those keen glances, admiring and at the same time challenging, which she
seldom bestowed on any one, and which seemed to say, “Yes, I admire you,
but I am your equal.”

Clara was proving a much better host than Olaf, who, once the supper was
over, seemed to feel no interest in anything but the lanterns. He had
brought a locomotive headlight from town to light the revels, and he
kept skulking about as if he feared the mere light from it might set his
new barn on fire. His wife, on the contrary, was cordial to every one,
was animated and even gay. The deep salmon colour in her cheeks burned
vividly, and her eyes were full of life. She gave the piano over to the
fat Swedish heiress, pulled her father away from the corner where he
sat gossiping with his cronies, and made him dance a Bohemian dance with
her. In his youth Joe had been a famous dancer, and his daughter got
him so limbered up that every one sat around and applauded them. The old
ladies were particularly delighted, and made them go through the dance
again. From their corner where they watched and commented, the old women
kept time with their feet and hands, and whenever the fiddles struck up
a new air old Mrs. Svendsen’s white cap would begin to bob.

Clara was waltzing with little Eric when Nils came up to them, brushed
his brother aside, and swung her out among the dancers. “Remember how
we used to waltz on rollers at the old skating rink in town? I suppose
people don’t do that any more. We used to keep it up for hours. You
know, we never did moon around as other boys and girls did. It was dead
serious with us from the beginning. When we were most in love with each
other, we used to fight. You were always pinching people; your fingers
were like little nippers. A regular snapping turtle, you were. Lord, how
you’d like Stockholm! Sit out in the streets in front of cafes and talk
all night in summer, just like a reception--officers and ladies and
funny English people. Jolliest people in the world, the Swedes, once you
get them going. Always drinking things--champagne and stout mixed,
half-and-half, serve it out of big pitchers, and serve plenty. Slow
pulse, you know; they can stand a lot. Once they light up, they’re
glowworms, I can tell you.”

“All the same, you don’t really like gay people.”

“_I_ don’t?”

“No; I could tell that when you were looking at the old women there this
afternoon. They’re the kind you really admire, after all; women like
your mother. And that’s the kind you’ll marry.”

“Is it, Miss Wisdom? You’ll see who I’ll marry, and she won’t have a
domestic virtue to bless herself with. She’ll be a snapping turtle,
and she’ll be a match for me. All the same, they’re a fine bunch of old
dames over there. You admire them yourself.

“No, I don’t; I detest them.”

“You won’t, when you look back on them from Stockholm or Budapest.
Freedom settles all that. Oh, but you’re the real Bohemian Girl, Clara
Vavrika!” Nils laughed down at her sullen frown and began mockingly to
sing:

       “Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me
       Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?”

Clara clutched his shoulder. “Hush, Nils; every one is looking at you.”

“I don’t care. They can’t gossip. It’s all in the family, as the
Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda’s patrimony amongst them.
Besides, we’ll give them something to talk about when we hit the
trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to them! They haven’t had anything so
interesting to chatter about since the grasshopper year. It’ll give
them a new lease of life. And Olaf won’t lose the Bohemian vote, either.
They’ll have the laugh on him so that they’ll vote two apiece. They’ll
send him to Congress. They’ll never forget his barn party, or us.
They’ll always remember us as we’re dancing together now. We’re making
a legend. Where’s my waltz, boys?” he called as they whirled past the
fiddlers.

The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and began a new
air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell from a quick waltz to
a long, slow glide:

           “When other lips and other hearts
            Their tale of love shall tell,
            In language whose excess imparts
            The power they feel so well.”

The old women applauded vigorously. “What a gay one he is, that Nils!”
 And old Mrs. Svendsen’s cap lurched dreamily from side to side to the
flowing measure of the dance.

          “Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,
          And you’ll remember me.”


                          VII

The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay
yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black
shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep,
crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything seemed to
have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender,
midsummer moon. The splendour of it seemed to transcend human life and
human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one
looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf
under the waves of a great river of melody. Near the road, Nils Ericson
was lying against a straw stack in Olaf’s wheat field. His own life
seemed strange and unfamiliar to him, as if it were something he had
read about, or dreamed, and forgotten. He lay very still, watching the
white road that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields, and
then, at a distance, reappeared over a little hill. At last, against
this white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got up and
walked to the edge of the field. “She is passing the row of poplars
now,” he thought. He heard the padded beat of hoofs along the dusty
road, and as she came into sight he stepped out and waved his arms.
Then, for fear of frightening the horse, he drew back and waited. Clara
had seen him, and she came up at a walk. Nils took the horse by the bit
and stroked his neck.

“What are you doing out so late, Clara Vavrika? I went to the house, but
Johanna told me you had gone to your father’s.”

“Who can stay in the house on a night like this? Aren’t you out
yourself?”

“Ah, but that’s another matter.”

Nils turned the horse into the field.

“What are you doing? Where are you taking Norman?”

“Not far, but I want to talk to you tonight; I have something to say to
you. I can’t talk to you at the house, with Olaf sitting there on the
porch, weighing a thousand tons.”

Clara laughed. “He won’t be sitting there now. He’s in bed by this time,
and asleep--weighing a thousand tons.”

Nils plodded on across the stubble. “Are you really going to spend the
rest of your life like this, night after night, summer after summer?
Haven’t you anything better to do on a night like this than to wear
yourself and Norman out tearing across the country to your father’s
and back? Besides, your father won’t live forever, you know. His little
place will be shut up or sold, and then you’ll have nobody but the
Ericsons. You’ll have to fasten down the hatches for the winter then.”

Clara moved her head restlessly. “Don’t talk about that. I try never to
think of it. If I lost Father I’d lose everything, even my hold over the
Ericsons.”

“Bah! You’d lose a good deal more than that. You’d lose your race,
everything that makes you yourself. You’ve lost a good deal of it now.”

“Of what?”

“Of your love of life, your capacity for delight.”

Clara put her hands up to her face. “I haven’t, Nils Ericson, I haven’t!
Say anything to me but that. I won’t have it!” she declared vehemently.

Nils led the horse up to a straw stack, and turned to Clara, looking
at her intently, as he had looked at her that Sunday afternoon at
Vavrika’s. “But why do you fight for that so? What good is the power
to enjoy, if you never enjoy? Your hands are cold again; what are you
afraid of all the time? Ah, you’re afraid of losing it; that’s what’s
the matter with you! And you will, Clara Vavrika, you will! When I used
to know you--listen; you’ve caught a wild bird in your hand, haven’t
you, and felt its heart beat so hard that you were afraid it would
shatter its little body to pieces? Well, you used to be just like that,
a slender, eager thing with a wild delight inside you. That is how I
remembered you. And I come back and find you--a bitter woman. This is
a perfect ferret fight here; you live by biting and being bitten. Can’t
you remember what life used to be? Can’t you remember that old delight?
I’ve never forgotten it, or known its like, on land or sea.”

He drew the horse under the shadow of the straw stack. Clara felt him
take her foot out of the stirrup, and she slid softly down into his
arms. He kissed her slowly. He was a deliberate man, but his nerves were
steel when he wanted anything. Something flashed out from him like a
knife out of a sheath. Clara felt everything slipping away from her; she
was flooded by the summer night. He thrust his hand into his pocket,
and then held it out at arm’s length. “Look,” he said. The shadow of the
straw stack fell sharp across his wrist, and in the palm of his hand she
saw a silver dollar shining. “That’s my pile,” he muttered; “will you go
with me?”

Clara nodded, and dropped her forehead on his shoulder.

Nils took a deep breath. “Will you go with me tonight?”

“Where?” she whispered softly.

“To town, to catch the midnight flyer.”

Clara lifted her head and pulled herself together. “Are you crazy, Nils?
We couldn’t go away like that.”

“That’s the only way we ever will go. You can’t sit on the bank and
think about it. You have to plunge. That’s the way I’ve always done,
and it’s the right way for people like you and me. There’s nothing so
dangerous as sitting still. You’ve only got one life, one youth, and
you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier.
Most people do that. You’d be better off tramping the roads with me than
you are here.” Nils held back her head and looked into her eyes. “But
I’m not that kind of a tramp, Clara. You won’t have to take in sewing.
I’m with a Norwegian shipping line; came over on business with the New
York offices, but now I’m going straight back to Bergen. I expect
I’ve got as much money as the Ericsons. Father sent me a little to get
started. They never knew about that. There, I hadn’t meant to tell you;
I wanted you to come on your own nerve.”

Clara looked off across the fields. “It isn’t that, Nils, but something
seems to hold me. I’m afraid to pull against it. It comes out of the
ground, I think.”

“I know all about that. One has to tear loose. You’re not needed here.
Your father will understand; he’s made like us. As for Olaf, Johanna
will take better care of him than ever you could. It’s now or never,
Clara Vavrika. My bag’s at the station; I smuggled it there yesterday.”

Clara clung to him and hid her face against his shoulder. “Not tonight,”
 she whispered. “Sit here and talk to me tonight. I don’t want to go
anywhere tonight. I may never love you like this again.”

Nils laughed through his teeth. “You can’t come that on me. That’s not
my way, Clara Vavrika. Eric’s mare is over there behind the stacks, and
I’m off on the midnight. It’s goodbye, or off across the world with me.
My carriage won’t wait. I’ve written a letter to Olaf, I’ll mail it
in town. When he reads it he won’t bother us--not if I know him. He’d
rather have the land. Besides, I could demand an investigation of his
administration of Cousin Henrik’s estate, and that would be bad for a
public man. You’ve no clothes, I know; but you can sit up tonight, and
we can get everything on the way. Where’s your old dash, Clara Vavrika?
What’s become of your Bohemian blood? I used to think you had courage
enough for anything. Where’s your nerve--what are you waiting for?”

Clara drew back her head, and he saw the slumberous fire in her eyes.
“For you to say one thing, Nils Ericson.”

“I never say that thing to any woman, Clara Vavrika.” He leaned back,
lifted her gently from the ground, and whispered through his teeth: “But
I’ll never, never let you go, not to any man on earth but me! Do you
understand me? Now, wait here.”

Clara sank down on a sheaf of wheat and covered her face with her hands.
She did not know what she was going to do--whether she would go or stay.
The great, silent country seemed to lay a spell upon her. The ground
seemed to hold her as if by roots. Her knees were soft under her. She
felt as if she could not bear separation from her old sorrows, from her
old discontent. They were dear to her, they had kept her alive, they
were a part of her. There would be nothing left of her if she were
wrenched away from them. Never could she pass beyond that skyline
against which her restlessness had beat so many times. She felt as if
her soul had built itself a nest there on that horizon at which
she looked every morning and every evening, and it was dear to her,
inexpressibly dear. She pressed her fingers against her eyeballs to shut
it out. Beside her she heard the tramping of horses in the soft earth.
Nils said nothing to her. He put his hands under her arms and lifted her
lightly to her saddle. Then he swung himself into his own.

“We shall have to ride fast to catch the midnight train. A last gallop,
Clara Vavrika. Forward!”

There was a start, a thud of hoofs along the moonlit road, two dark
shadows going over the hill; and then the great, still land stretched
untroubled under the azure night. Two shadows had passed.


                          VII

A year after the flight of Olaf Ericson’s wife, the night train was
steaming across the plains of Iowa. The conductor was hurrying through
one of the day coaches, his lantern on his arm, when a lank, fair-haired
boy sat up in one of the plush seats and tweaked him by the coat.

“What is the next stop, please, sir?”

“Red Oak, Iowa. But you go through to Chicago, don’t you?” He looked
down, and noticed that the boy’s eyes were red and his face was drawn,
as if he were in trouble.

“Yes. But I was wondering whether I could get off at the next place and
get a train back to Omaha.”

“Well, I suppose you could. Live in Omaha?”

“No. In the western part of the State. How soon do we get to Red Oak?”

“Forty minutes. You’d better make up your mind, so I can tell the
baggageman to put your trunk off.”

“Oh, never mind about that! I mean, I haven’t got any,” the boy added,
blushing.

“Run away,” the conductor thought, as he slammed the coach door behind
him.

Eric Ericson crumpled down in his seat and put his brown hand to his
forehead. He had been crying, and he had had no supper, and his head was
aching violently. “Oh, what shall I do?” he thought, as he looked dully
down at his big shoes. “Nils will be ashamed of me; I haven’t got any
spunk.”

Ever since Nils had run away with his brother’s wife, life at home had
been hard for little Eric. His mother and Olaf both suspected him of
complicity. Mrs. Ericson was harsh and faultfinding, constantly wounding
the boy’s pride; and Olaf was always setting her against him.

Joe Vavrika heard often from his daughter. Clara had always been fond of
her father, and happiness made her kinder. She wrote him long accounts
of the voyage to Bergen, and of the trip she and Nils took through
Bohemia to the little town where her father had grown up and where she
herself was born. She visited all her kinsmen there, and sent her father
news of his brother, who was a priest; of his sister, who had married a
horse-breeder--of their big farm and their many children. These letters
Joe always managed to read to little Eric. They contained messages for
Eric and Hilda. Clara sent presents, too, which Eric never dared to take
home and which poor little Hilda never even saw, though she loved to
hear Eric tell about them when they were out getting the eggs together.
But Olaf once saw Eric coming out of Vavrika’s house--the old man had
never asked the boy to come into his saloon--and Olaf went straight to
his mother and told her. That night Mrs. Ericson came to Eric’s room
after he was in bed and made a terrible scene. She could be very
terrifying when she was really angry. She forbade him ever to speak to
Vavrika again, and after that night she would not allow him to go to
town alone. So it was a long while before Eric got any more news of his
brother. But old Joe suspected what was going on, and he carried Clara’s
letters about in his pocket. One Sunday he drove out to see a German
friend of his, and chanced to catch sight of Eric, sitting by the cattle
pond in the big pasture. They went together into Fritz Oberlies’ barn,
and read the letters and talked things over. Eric admitted that things
were getting hard for him at home. That very night old Joe sat down and
laboriously penned a statement of the case to his daughter.

Things got no better for Eric. His mother and Olaf felt that, however
closely he was watched, he still, as they said, “heard.” Mrs. Ericson
could not admit neutrality. She had sent Johanna Vavrika packing back to
her brother’s, though Olaf would much rather have kept her than Anders’
eldest daughter, whom Mrs. Ericson installed in her place. He was not
so highhanded as his mother, and he once sulkily told her that she might
better have taught her granddaughter to cook before she sent Johanna
away. Olaf could have borne a good deal for the sake of prunes spiced in
honey, the secret of which Johanna had taken away with her.

At last two letters came to Joe Vavrika: one from Nils, enclosing a
postal order for money to pay Eric’s passage to Bergen, and one from
Clara, saying that Nils had a place for Eric in the offices of his
company, that he was to live with them, and that they were only waiting
for him to come. He was to leave New York on one of the boats of Nils’
own line; the captain was one of their friends, and Eric was to make
himself known at once.

Nils’ directions were so explicit that a baby could have followed them,
Eric felt. And here he was, nearing Red Oak, Iowa, and rocking backward
and forward in despair. Never had he loved his brother so much, and
never had the big world called to him so hard. But there was a lump in
his throat which would not go down. Ever since nightfall he had been
tormented by the thought of his mother, alone in that big house that
had sent forth so many men. Her unkindness now seemed so little, and her
loneliness so great. He remembered everything she had ever done for him:
how frightened she had been when he tore his hand in the corn-sheller,
and how she wouldn’t let Olaf scold him. When Nils went away he didn’t
leave his mother all alone, or he would never have gone. Eric felt sure
of that.

The train whistled. The conductor came in, smiling not unkindly.
“Well, young man, what are you going to do? We stop at Red Oak in three
minutes.”

“Yes, thank you. I’ll let you know.” The conductor went out, and the boy
doubled up with misery. He couldn’t let his one chance go like this.
He felt for his breast pocket and crackled Nils’ letter to give him
courage. He didn’t want Nils to be ashamed of him. The train stopped.
Suddenly he remembered his brother’s kind, twinkling eyes, that always
looked at you as if from far away. The lump in his throat softened. “Ah,
but Nils, Nils would _understand_!” he thought. “That’s just it about
Nils; he always understands.”

A lank, pale boy with a canvas telescope stumbled off the train to the
Red Oak siding, just as the conductor called, “All aboard!”

The next night Mrs. Ericson was sitting alone in her wooden
rocking-chair on the front porch. Little Hilda had been sent to bed and
had cried herself to sleep. The old woman’s knitting was on her lap, but
her hands lay motionless on top of it. For more than an hour she had not
moved a muscle. She simply sat, as only the Ericsons and the mountains
can sit. The house was dark, and there was no sound but the croaking of
the frogs down in the pond of the little pasture.

Eric did not come home by the road, but across the fields, where no one
could see him. He set his telescope down softly in the kitchen shed, and
slipped noiselessly along the path to the front porch. He sat down on
the step without saying anything. Mrs. Ericson made no sign, and the
frogs croaked on. At last the boy spoke timidly.

“I’ve come back, Mother.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Ericson.

Eric leaned over and picked up a little stick out of the grass.

“How about the milking?” he faltered.

“That’s been done, hours ago.”

“Who did you get?”

“Get? I did it myself. I can milk as good as any of you.”

Eric slid along the step nearer to her. “Oh, Mother, why did you?” he
asked sorrowfully. “Why didn’t you get one of Otto’s boys?”

“I didn’t want anybody to know I was in need of a boy,” said Mrs.
Ericson bitterly. She looked straight in front of her and her mouth
tightened. “I always meant to give you the home farm,” she added.

The boy stared and slid closer. “Oh, Mother,” he faltered, “I don’t care
about the farm. I came back because I thought you might be needing me,
maybe.” He hung his head and got no further.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Ericson. Her hand went out from her suddenly
and rested on his head. Her fingers twined themselves in his soft, pale
hair. His tears splashed down on the boards; happiness filled his heart.



THE TROLL GARDEN



Flavia and Her Artists

As the train neared Tarrytown, Imogen Willard began to wonder why she
had consented to be one of Flavia’s house party at all. She had not felt
enthusiastic about it since leaving the city, and was experiencing a
prolonged ebb of purpose, a current of chilling indecision, under
which she vainly sought for the motive which had induced her to accept
Flavia’s invitation.

Perhaps it was a vague curiosity to see Flavia’s husband, who had been
the magician of her childhood and the hero of innumerable Arabian fairy
tales. Perhaps it was a desire to see M. Roux, whom Flavia had announced
as the especial attraction of the occasion. Perhaps it was a wish to
study that remarkable woman in her own setting.

Imogen admitted a mild curiosity concerning Flavia. She was in the habit
of taking people rather seriously, but somehow found it impossible to
take Flavia so, because of the very vehemence and insistence with which
Flavia demanded it. Submerged in her studies, Imogen had, of late years,
seen very little of Flavia; but Flavia, in her hurried visits to New
York, between her excursions from studio to studio--her luncheons with
this lady who had to play at a matinee, and her dinners with that singer
who had an evening concert--had seen enough of her friend’s handsome
daughter to conceive for her an inclination of such violence and
assurance as only Flavia could afford. The fact that Imogen had shown
rather marked capacity in certain esoteric lines of scholarship, and
had decided to specialize in a well-sounding branch of philology at
the Ecole des Chartes, had fairly placed her in that category of
“interesting people” whom Flavia considered her natural affinities, and
lawful prey.

When Imogen stepped upon the station platform she was immediately
appropriated by her hostess, whose commanding figure and assurance of
attire she had recognized from a distance. She was hurried into a high
tilbury and Flavia, taking the driver’s cushion beside her, gathered up
the reins with an experienced hand.

“My dear girl,” she remarked, as she turned the horses up the street, “I
was afraid the train might be late. M. Roux insisted upon coming up by
boat and did not arrive until after seven.”

“To think of M. Roux’s being in this part of the world at all, and
subject to the vicissitudes of river boats! Why in the world did he come
over?” queried Imogen with lively interest. “He is the sort of man who
must dissolve and become a shadow outside of Paris.”

“Oh, we have a houseful of the most interesting people,” said Flavia,
professionally. “We have actually managed to get Ivan Schemetzkin. He
was ill in California at the close of his concert tour, you know, and he
is recuperating with us, after his wearing journey from the coast. Then
there is Jules Martel, the painter; Signor Donati, the tenor; Professor
Schotte, who has dug up Assyria, you know; Restzhoff, the Russian
chemist; Alcee Buisson, the philologist; Frank Wellington, the novelist;
and Will Maidenwood, the editor of _Woman_. Then there is my second
cousin, Jemima Broadwood, who made such a hit in Pinero’s comedy last
winter, and Frau Lichtenfeld. _Have_ you read her?”

Imogen confessed her utter ignorance of Frau Lichtenfeld, and Flavia
went on.

“Well, she is a most remarkable person; one of those advanced German
women, a militant iconoclast, and this drive will not be long enough to
permit of my telling you her history. Such a story! Her novels were the
talk of all Germany when I was there last, and several of them have been
suppressed--an honor in Germany, I understand. ‘At Whose Door’ has been
translated. I am so unfortunate as not to read German.”

“I’m all excitement at the prospect of meeting Miss Broadwood,”
 said Imogen. “I’ve seen her in nearly everything she does. Her stage
personality is delightful. She always reminds me of a nice, clean,
pink-and-white boy who has just had his cold bath, and come down all
aglow for a run before breakfast.”

“Yes, but isn’t it unfortunate that she will limit herself to those
minor comedy parts that are so little appreciated in this country? One
ought to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, ought one?” The
peculiar, breathy tone in which Flavia always uttered that word “best,”
 the most worn in her vocabulary, always jarred on Imogen and always made
her obdurate.

“I don’t at all agree with you,” she said reservedly. “I thought
everyone admitted that the most remarkable thing about Miss Broadwood is
her admirable sense of fitness, which is rare enough in her profession.”

Flavia could not endure being contradicted; she always seemed to regard
it in the light of a defeat, and usually colored unbecomingly. Now she
changed the subject.

“Look, my dear,” she cried, “there is Frau Lichtenfeld now, coming to
meet us. Doesn’t she look as if she had just escaped out of Valhalla?
She is actually over six feet.”

Imogen saw a woman of immense stature, in a very short skirt and a
broad, flapping sun hat, striding down the hillside at a long, swinging
gait. The refugee from Valhalla approached, panting. Her heavy, Teutonic
features were scarlet from the rigor of her exercise, and her hair,
under her flapping sun hat, was tightly befrizzled about her brow. She
fixed her sharp little eyes upon Imogen and extended both her hands.

“So this is the little friend?” she cried, in a rolling baritone.

Imogen was quite as tall as her hostess; but everything, she reflected,
is comparative. After the introduction Flavia apologized.

“I wish I could ask you to drive up with us, Frau Lichtenfeld.”

“Ah, no!” cried the giantess, drooping her head in humorous caricature
of a time-honored pose of the heroines of sentimental romances. “It has
never been my fate to be fitted into corners. I have never known the
sweet privileges of the tiny.”

Laughing, Flavia started the ponies, and the colossal woman, standing
in the middle of the dusty road, took off her wide hat and waved them
a farewell which, in scope of gesture, recalled the salute of a plumed
cavalier.

When they arrived at the house, Imogen looked about her with keen
curiosity, for this was veritably the work of Flavia’s hands, the
materialization of hopes long deferred. They passed directly into a
large, square hall with a gallery on three sides, studio fashion. This
opened at one end into a Dutch breakfast room, beyond which was the
large dining room. At the other end of the hall was the music room.
There was a smoking room, which one entered through the library
behind the staircase. On the second floor there was the same general
arrangement: a square hall, and, opening from it, the guest chambers,
or, as Miss Broadwood termed them, the “cages.”

When Imogen went to her room, the guests had begun to return from their
various afternoon excursions. Boys were gliding through the halls with
ice water, covered trays, and flowers, colliding with maids and valets
who carried shoes and other articles of wearing apparel. Yet, all this
was done in response to inaudible bells, on felt soles, and in hushed
voices, so that there was very little confusion about it.

Flavia had at last built her house and hewn out her seven pillars; there
could be no doubt, now, that the asylum for talent, the sanatorium of
the arts, so long projected, was an accomplished fact. Her ambition
had long ago outgrown the dimensions of her house on Prairie Avenue;
besides, she had bitterly complained that in Chicago traditions were
against her. Her project had been delayed by Arthur’s doggedly standing
out for the Michigan woods, but Flavia knew well enough that certain of
the _rarae aves_--“the best”--could not be lured so far away from the
seaport, so she declared herself for the historic Hudson and knew no
retreat. The establishing of a New York office had at length overthrown
Arthur’s last valid objection to quitting the lake country for three
months of the year; and Arthur could be wearied into anything, as those
who knew him knew.

Flavia’s house was the mirror of her exultation; it was a temple to the
gods of Victory, a sort of triumphal arch. In her earlier days she had
swallowed experiences that would have unmanned one of less torrential
enthusiasm or blind pertinacity. But, of late years, her determination
had told; she saw less and less of those mysterious persons with
mysterious obstacles in their path and mysterious grievances against the
world, who had once frequented her house on Prairie Avenue. In the stead
of this multitude of the unarrived, she had now the few, the select,
“the best.” Of all that band of indigent retainers who had once fed at
her board like the suitors in the halls of Penelope, only Alcee Buisson
still retained his right of entree. He alone had remembered that
ambition hath a knapsack at his back, wherein he puts alms to oblivion,
and he alone had been considerate enough to do what Flavia had expected
of him, and give his name a current value in the world. Then, as
Miss Broadwood put it, “he was her first real one,”--and Flavia, like
Mohammed, could remember her first believer.

“The House of Song,” as Miss Broadwood had called it, was the outcome
of Flavia’s more exalted strategies. A woman who made less a point of
sympathizing with their delicate organisms, might have sought to plunge
these phosphorescent pieces into the tepid bath of domestic life;
but Flavia’s discernment was deeper. This must be a refuge where the
shrinking soul, the sensitive brain, should be unconstrained; where
the caprice of fancy should outweigh the civil code, if necessary. She
considered that this much Arthur owed her; for she, in her turn, had
made concessions. Flavia had, indeed, quite an equipment of epigrams
to the effect that our century creates the iron genii which evolve its
fairy tales: but the fact that her husband’s name was annually painted
upon some ten thousand threshing machines in reality contributed very
little to her happiness.

Arthur Hamilton was born and had spent his boyhood in the West Indies,
and physically he had never lost the brand of the tropics. His father,
after inventing the machine which bore his name, had returned to the
States to patent and manufacture it. After leaving college, Arthur had
spent five years ranching in the West and traveling abroad. Upon his
father’s death he had returned to Chicago and, to the astonishment of
all his friends, had taken up the business--without any demonstration
of enthusiasm, but with quiet perseverance, marked ability, and amazing
industry. Why or how a self-sufficient, rather ascetic man of thirty,
indifferent in manner, wholly negative in all other personal relations,
should have doggedly wooed and finally married Flavia Malcolm was a
problem that had vexed older heads than Imogen’s.

While Imogen was dressing she heard a knock at her door, and a young
woman entered whom she at once recognized as Jemima Broadwood--“Jimmy”
 Broadwood she was called by people in her own profession. While there
was something unmistakably professional in her frank _savoir-faire_,
“Jimmy’s” was one of those faces to which the rouge never seems to
stick. Her eyes were keen and gray as a windy April sky, and so far from
having been seared by calcium lights, you might have fancied they had
never looked on anything less bucolic than growing fields and country
fairs. She wore her thick, brown hair short and parted at the side; and,
rather than hinting at freakishness, this seemed admirably in keeping
with her fresh, boyish countenance. She extended to Imogen a large,
well-shaped hand which it was a pleasure to clasp.

“Ah! You are Miss Willard, and I see I need not introduce myself. Flavia
said you were kind enough to express a wish to meet me, and I preferred
to meet you alone. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Why, certainly not,” said Imogen, somewhat disconcerted and looking
hurriedly about for matches.

“There, be calm, I’m always prepared,” said Miss Broadwood, checking
Imogen’s flurry with a soothing gesture, and producing an oddly
fashioned silver match-case from some mysterious recess in her dinner
gown. She sat down in a deep chair, crossed her patent-leather Oxfords,
and lit her cigarette. “This matchbox,” she went on meditatively, “once
belonged to a Prussian officer. He shot himself in his bathtub, and I
bought it at the sale of his effects.”

Imogen had not yet found any suitable reply to make to this rather
irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her cordially: “I’m
awfully glad you’ve come, Miss Willard, though I’ve not quite decided
why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you. Flavia gave me your
thesis to read.”

“Why, how funny!” ejaculated Imogen.

“On the contrary,” remarked Miss Broadwood. “I thought it decidedly
lacked humor.”

“I meant,” stammered Imogen, beginning to feel very much like Alice
in Wonderland, “I meant that I thought it rather strange Mrs. Hamilton
should fancy you would be interested.”

Miss Broadwood laughed heartily. “Now, don’t let my rudeness frighten
you. Really, I found it very interesting, and no end impressive. You
see, most people in my profession are good for absolutely nothing else,
and, therefore, they have a deep and abiding conviction that in some
other line they might have shone. Strange to say, scholarship is the
object of our envious and particular admiration. Anything in type
impresses us greatly; that’s why so many of us marry authors or
newspapermen and lead miserable lives.” Miss Broadwood saw that she had
rather disconcerted Imogen, and blithely tacked in another direction.
“You see,” she went on, tossing aside her half-consumed cigarette, “some
years ago Flavia would not have deemed me worthy to open the pages of
your thesis--nor to be one of her house party of the chosen, for that
matter. I’ve Pinero to thank for both pleasures. It all depends on the
class of business I’m playing whether I’m in favor or not. Flavia is
my second cousin, you know, so I can say whatever disagreeable things I
choose with perfect good grace. I’m quite desperate for someone to laugh
with, so I’m going to fasten myself upon you--for, of course, one can’t
expect any of these gypsy-dago people to see anything funny. I don’t
intend you shall lose the humor of the situation. What do you think of
Flavia’s infirmary for the arts, anyway?”

“Well, it’s rather too soon for me to have any opinion at all,” said
Imogen, as she again turned to her dressing. “So far, you are the only
one of the artists I’ve met.”

“One of them?” echoed Miss Broadwood. “One of the _artists_? My offense
may be rank, my dear, but I really don’t deserve that. Come, now,
whatever badges of my tribe I may bear upon me, just let me divest you
of any notion that I take myself seriously.”

Imogen turned from the mirror in blank astonishment and sat down on the
arm of a chair, facing her visitor. “I can’t fathom you at all,
Miss Broadwood,” she said frankly. “Why shouldn’t you take yourself
seriously? What’s the use of beating about the bush? Surely you know
that you are one of the few players on this side of the water who have
at all the spirit of natural or ingenuous comedy?”

“Thank you, my dear. Now we are quite even about the thesis, aren’t
we? Oh, did you mean it? Well, you _are_ a clever girl. But you see it
doesn’t do to permit oneself to look at it in that light. If we do, we
always go to pieces and waste our substance astarring as the unhappy
daughter of the Capulets. But there, I hear Flavia coming to take you
down; and just remember I’m not one of them--the artists, I mean.”


Flavia conducted Imogen and Miss Broadwood downstairs. As they reached
the lower hall they heard voices from the music room, and dim figures
were lurking in the shadows under the gallery, but their hostess led
straight to the smoking room. The June evening was chilly, and a fire
had been lighted in the fireplace. Through the deepening dusk, the
firelight flickered upon the pipes and curious weapons on the wall and
threw an orange glow over the Turkish hangings. One side of the smoking
room was entirely of glass, separating it from the conservatory, which
was flooded with white light from the electric bulbs. There was about
the darkened room some suggestion of certain chambers in the Arabian
Nights, opening on a court of palms. Perhaps it was partially this
memory-evoking suggestion that caused Imogen to start so violently when
she saw dimly, in a blur of shadow, the figure of a man, who sat smoking
in a low, deep chair before the fire. He was long, and thin, and brown.
His long, nerveless hands drooped from the arms of his chair. A brown
mustache shaded his mouth, and his eyes were sleepy and apathetic. When
Imogen entered he rose indolently and gave her his hand, his manner
barely courteous.

“I am glad you arrived promptly, Miss Willard,” he said with an
indifferent drawl. “Flavia was afraid you might be late. You had a
pleasant ride up, I hope?”

“Oh, very, thank you, Mr. Hamilton,” she replied, feeling that he did
not particularly care whether she replied at all.

Flavia explained that she had not yet had time to dress for dinner,
as she had been attending to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who had become faint
after hurting his finger in an obdurate window, and immediately excused
herself As she left, Hamilton turned to Miss Broadwood with a rather
spiritless smile.

“Well, Jimmy,” he remarked, “I brought up a piano box full of fireworks
for the boys. How do you suppose we’ll manage to keep them until the
Fourth?”

“We can’t, unless we steel ourselves to deny there are any on the
premises,” said Miss Broadwood, seating herself on a low stool by
Hamilton’s chair and leaning back against the mantel. “Have you seen
Helen, and has she told you the tragedy of the tooth?”

“She met me at the station, with her tooth wrapped up in tissue paper.
I had tea with her an hour ago. Better sit down, Miss Willard;” he rose
and pushed a chair toward Imogen, who was standing peering into the
conservatory. “We are scheduled to dine at seven, but they seldom get
around before eight.”

By this time Imogen had made out that here the plural pronoun, third
person, always referred to the artists. As Hamilton’s manner did not
spur one to cordial intercourse, and as his attention seemed directed
to Miss Broadwood, insofar as it could be said to be directed to anyone,
she sat down facing the conservatory and watched him, unable to decide
in how far he was identical with the man who had first met Flavia
Malcolm in her mother’s house, twelve years ago. Did he at all remember
having known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her
so, after all these years? Had some remnant of her childish affection
for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed caves of her
consciousness, and had she really expected to find it possible to be
fond of him again? Suddenly she saw a light in the man’s sleepy eyes,
an unmistakable expression of interest and pleasure that fairly startled
her. She turned quickly in the direction of his glance, and saw Flavia,
just entering, dressed for dinner and lit by the effulgence of her most
radiant manner. Most people considered Flavia handsome, and there was
no gainsaying that she carried her five-and-thirty years splendidly. Her
figure had never grown matronly, and her face was of the sort that does
not show wear. Its blond tints were as fresh and enduring as enamel--and
quite as hard. Its usual expression was one of tense, often strained,
animation, which compressed her lips nervously. A perfect scream of
animation, Miss Broadwood had called it, created and maintained by
sheer, indomitable force of will. Flavia’s appearance on any scene
whatever made a ripple, caused a certain agitation and recognition, and,
among impressionable people, a certain uneasiness, For all her sparkling
assurance of manner, Flavia was certainly always ill at ease and, even
more certainly, anxious. She seemed not convinced of the established
order of material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling
that walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly
to the winds in irretrievable entanglement. At least this was the
impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so manifestly
false.

Hamilton’s keen, quick, satisfied glance at his wife had recalled to
Imogen all her inventory of speculations about them. She looked at him
with compassionate surprise. As a child she had never permitted herself
to believe that Hamilton cared at all for the woman who had taken him
away from her; and since she had begun to think about them again, it
had never occurred to her that anyone could become attached to Flavia in
that deeply personal and exclusive sense. It seemed quite as irrational
as trying to possess oneself of Broadway at noon.

When they went out to dinner Imogen realized the completeness of
Flavia’s triumph. They were people of one name, mostly, like kings;
people whose names stirred the imagination like a romance or a melody.
With the notable exception of M. Roux, Imogen had seen most of them
before, either in concert halls or lecture rooms; but they looked
noticeably older and dimmer than she remembered them.

Opposite her sat Schemetzkin, the Russian pianist, a short, corpulent
man, with an apoplectic face and purplish skin, his thick, iron-gray
hair tossed back from his forehead. Next to the German giantess sat the
Italian tenor--the tiniest of men--pale, with soft, light hair, much
in disorder, very red lips, and fingers yellowed by cigarettes. Frau
Lichtenfeld shone in a gown of emerald green, fitting so closely as to
enhance her natural floridness. However, to do the good lady justice,
let her attire be never so modest, it gave an effect of barbaric
splendor. At her left sat Herr Schotte, the Assyriologist, whose
features were effectually concealed by the convergence of his hair and
beard, and whose glasses were continually falling into his plate.
This gentleman had removed more tons of earth in the course of his
explorations than had any of his confreres, and his vigorous attack upon
his food seemed to suggest the strenuous nature of his accustomed toil.
His eyes were small and deeply set, and his forehead bulged fiercely
above his eyes in a bony ridge. His heavy brows completed the leonine
suggestion of his face. Even to Imogen, who knew something of his work
and greatly respected it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone
Age to be altogether an agreeable dinner companion. He seemed, indeed,
to have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of life
which he continually studied.

Frank Wellington, the young Kansas man who had been two years out of
Harvard and had published three historical novels, sat next to Mr. Will
Maidenwood, who was still pale from his recent sufferings and carried
his hand bandaged. They took little part in the general conversation,
but, like the lion and the unicorn, were always at it, discussing,
every time they met, whether there were or were not passages in Mr.
Wellington’s works which should be eliminated, out of consideration
for the Young Person. Wellington had fallen into the hands of a great
American syndicate which most effectually befriended struggling authors
whose struggles were in the right direction, and which had guaranteed
to make him famous before he was thirty. Feeling the security of his
position he stoutly defended those passages which jarred upon the
sensitive nerves of the young editor of _Woman_. Maidenwood, in the
smoothest of voices, urged the necessity of the author’s recognizing
certain restrictions at the outset, and Miss Broadwood, who joined the
argument quite without invitation or encouragement, seconded him with
pointed and malicious remarks which caused the young editor manifest
discomfort. Restzhoff, the chemist, demanded the attention of the entire
company for his exposition of his devices for manufacturing ice cream
from vegetable oils and for administering drugs in bonbons.

Flavia, always noticeably restless at dinner, was somewhat apathetic
toward the advocate of peptonized chocolate and was plainly concerned
about the sudden departure of M. Roux, who had announced that it would
be necessary for him to leave tomorrow. M. Emile Roux, who sat at
Flavia’s right, was a man in middle life and quite bald, clearly without
personal vanity, though his publishers preferred to circulate only those
of his portraits taken in his ambrosial youth. Imogen was considerably
shocked at his unlikeness to the slender, black-stocked Rolla he had
looked at twenty. He had declined into the florid, settled heaviness of
indifference and approaching age. There was, however, a certain look of
durability and solidity about him; the look of a man who has earned the
right to be fat and bald, and even silent at dinner if he chooses.

Throughout the discussion between Wellington and Will Maidenwood, though
they invited his participation, he remained silent, betraying no sign
either of interest or contempt. Since his arrival he had directed most
of his conversation to Hamilton, who had never read one of his twelve
great novels. This perplexed and troubled Flavia. On the night of his
arrival Jules Martel had enthusiastically declared, “There are schools
and schools, manners and manners; but Roux is Roux, and Paris sets
its watches by his clock.” Flavia had already repeated this remark to
Imogen. It haunted her, and each time she quoted it she was impressed
anew.

Flavia shifted the conversation uneasily, evidently exasperated and
excited by her repeated failures to draw the novelist out. “Monsieur
Roux,” she began abruptly, with her most animated smile, “I remember so
well a statement I read some years ago in your ‘Mes Etudes des Femmes’
to the effect that you had never met a really intellectual woman. May I
ask, without being impertinent, whether that assertion still represents
your experience?”

“I meant, madam,” said the novelist conservatively, “intellectual in
a sense very special, as we say of men in whom the purely intellectual
functions seem almost independent.”

“And you still think a woman so constituted a mythical personage?”
 persisted Flavia, nodding her head encouragingly.

“_Une Meduse_, madam, who, if she were discovered, would transmute us
all into stone,” said the novelist, bowing gravely. “If she existed at
all,” he added deliberately, “it was my business to find her, and
she has cost me many a vain pilgrimage. Like Rudel of Tripoli, I have
crossed seas and penetrated deserts to seek her out. I have, indeed,
encountered women of learning whose industry I have been compelled
to respect; many who have possessed beauty and charm and perplexing
cleverness; a few with remarkable information and a sort of fatal
facility.”

“And Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and your own Mme. Dudevant?” queried
Flavia with that fervid enthusiasm with which she could, on occasion,
utter things simply incomprehensible for their banality--at her feats of
this sort Miss Broadwood was wont to sit breathless with admiration.

“Madam, while the intellect was undeniably present in the performances
of those women, it was only the stick of the rocket. Although this
woman has eluded me I have studied her conditions and perturbances as
astronomers conjecture the orbits of planets they have never seen.
if she exists, she is probably neither an artist nor a woman with a
mission, but an obscure personage, with imperative intellectual needs,
who absorbs rather than produces.”

Flavia, still nodding nervously, fixed a strained glance of
interrogation upon M. Roux. “Then you think she would be a woman whose
first necessity would be to know, whose instincts would be satisfied
only with the best, who could draw from others; appreciative, merely?”

The novelist lifted his dull eyes to his interlocutress with an
untranslatable smile and a slight inclination of his shoulders. “Exactly
so; you are really remarkable, madam,” he added, in a tone of cold
astonishment.

After dinner the guests took their coffee in the music room, where
Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum ragtime, and give his
celebrated imitation of the boardingschool girl’s execution of Chopin.
He flatly refused to play anything more serious, and would practice only
in the morning, when he had the music room to himself. Hamilton and M.
Roux repaired to the smoking room to discuss the necessity of extending
the tax on manufactured articles in France--one of those conversations
which particularly exasperated Flavia.

After Schemetzkin had grimaced and tortured the keyboard with malicious
vulgarities for half an hour, Signor Donati, to put an end to his
torture, consented to sing, and Flavia and Imogen went to fetch Arthur
to play his accompaniments. Hamilton rose with an annoyed look and
placed his cigarette on the mantel. “Why yes, Flavia, I’ll accompany
him, provided he sings something with a melody, Italian arias or
ballads, and provided the recital is not interminable.”

“You will join us, M. Roux?”

“Thank you, but I have some letters to write,” replied the novelist,
bowing.

As Flavia had remarked to Imogen, “Arthur really played accompaniments
remarkably well.” To hear him recalled vividly the days of her
childhood, when he always used to spend his business vacations at her
mother’s home in Maine. He had possessed for her that almost hypnotic
influence which young men sometimes exert upon little girls. It was a
sort of phantom love affair, subjective and fanciful, a precocity of
instinct, like that tender and maternal concern which some little girls
feel for their dolls. Yet this childish infatuation is capable of
all the depressions and exaltations of love itself, it has its bitter
jealousies, cruel disappointments, its exacting caprices.

Summer after summer she had awaited his coming and wept at his
departure, indifferent to the gayer young men who had called her their
sweetheart and laughed at everything she said. Although Hamilton never
said so, she had been always quite sure that he was fond of her. When
he pulled her up the river to hunt for fairy knolls shut about by low,
hanging willows, he was often silent for an hour at a time, yet she
never felt he was bored or was neglecting her. He would lie in the sand
smoking, his eyes half-closed, watching her play, and she was always
conscious that she was entertaining him. Sometimes he would take a copy
of “Alice in Wonderland” in his pocket, and no one could read it as he
could, laughing at her with his dark eyes, when anything amused him.
No one else could laugh so, with just their eyes, and without moving a
muscle of their face. Though he usually smiled at passages that seemed
not at all funny to the child, she always laughed gleefully, because he
was so seldom moved to mirth that any such demonstration delighted her
and she took the credit of it entirely to herself Her own inclination
had been for serious stories, with sad endings, like the Little Mermaid,
which he had once told her in an unguarded moment when she had a cold,
and was put to bed early on her birthday night and cried because she
could not have her party. But he highly disapproved of this preference,
and had called it a morbid taste, and always shook his finger at her
when she asked for the story. When she had been particularly good, or
particularly neglected by other people, then he would sometimes melt
and tell her the story, and never laugh at her if she enjoyed the “sad
ending” even to tears. When Flavia had taken him away and he came no
more, she wept inconsolably for the space of two weeks, and refused
to learn her lessons. Then she found the story of the Little Mermaid
herself, and forgot him.

Imogen had discovered at dinner that he could still smile at one
secretly, out of his eyes, and that he had the old manner of outwardly
seeming bored, but letting you know that he was not. She was intensely
curious about his exact state of feeling toward his wife, and more
curious still to catch a sense of his final adjustment to the conditions
of life in general. This, she could not help feeling, she might get
again--if she could have him alone for an hour, in some place where
there was a little river and a sandy cove bordered by drooping willows,
and a blue sky seen through white sycamore boughs.

That evening, before retiring, Flavia entered her husband’s room, where
he sat in his smoking jacket, in one of his favorite low chairs.

“I suppose it’s a grave responsibility to bring an ardent, serious young
thing like Imogen here among all these fascinating personages,” she
remarked reflectively. “But, after all, one can never tell. These grave,
silent girls have their own charm, even for facile people.”

“Oh, so that is your plan?” queried her husband dryly. “I was wondering
why you got her up here. She doesn’t seem to mix well with the faciles.
At least, so it struck me.”

Flavia paid no heed to this jeering remark, but repeated, “No, after
all, it may not be a bad thing.”

“Then do consign her to that shaken reed, the tenor,” said her husband
yawning. “I remember she used to have a taste for the pathetic.”

“And then,” remarked Flavia coquettishly, “after all, I owe her mother a
return in kind. She was not afraid to trifle with destiny.”

But Hamilton was asleep in his chair.


Next morning Imogen found only Miss Broadwood in the breakfast room.

“Good morning, my dear girl, whatever are you doing up so early? They
never breakfast before eleven. Most of them take their coffee in their
room. Take this place by me.”

Miss Broadwood looked particularly fresh and encouraging in her blue
serge walking skirt, her open jacket displaying an expanse of stiff,
white shirt bosom, dotted with some almost imperceptible figure, and
a dark blue-and-white necktie, neatly knotted under her wide, rolling
collar. She wore a white rosebud in the lapel of her coat, and decidedly
she seemed more than ever like a nice, clean boy on his holiday. Imogen
was just hoping that they would breakfast alone when Miss Broadwood
exclaimed, “Ah, there comes Arthur with the children. That’s the reward
of early rising in this house; you never get to see the youngsters at
any other time.”

Hamilton entered, followed by two dark, handsome little boys. The girl,
who was very tiny, blonde like her mother, and exceedingly frail, he
carried in his arms. The boys came up and said good morning with an ease
and cheerfulness uncommon, even in well-bred children, but the little
girl hid her face on her father’s shoulder.

“She’s a shy little lady,” he explained as he put her gently down in her
chair. “I’m afraid she’s like her father; she can’t seem to get used to
meeting people. And you, Miss Willard, did you dream of the White Rabbit
or the Little Mermaid?”

“Oh, I dreamed of them all! All the personages of that buried
civilization,” cried Imogen, delighted that his estranged manner of the
night before had entirely vanished and feeling that, somehow, the old
confidential relations had been restored during the night.

“Come, William,” said Miss Broadwood, turning to the younger of the two
boys, “and what did you dream about?”

“We dreamed,” said William gravely--he was the more assertive of the two
and always spoke for both--“we dreamed that there were fireworks hidden
in the basement of the carriage house; lots and lots of fireworks.”

His elder brother looked up at him with apprehensive astonishment, while
Miss Broadwood hastily put her napkin to her lips and Hamilton dropped
his eyes. “If little boys dream things, they are so apt not to come
true,” he reflected sadly. This shook even the redoubtable William, and
he glanced nervously at his brother. “But do things vanish just because
they have been dreamed?” he objected.

“Generally that is the very best reason for their vanishing,” said
Arthur gravely.

“But, Father, people can’t help what they dream,” remonstrated Edward
gently.

“Oh, come! You’re making these children talk like a Maeterlinck
dialogue,” laughed Miss Broadwood.

Flavia presently entered, a book in her hand, and bade them all good
morning. “Come, little people, which story shall it be this morning?”
 she asked winningly. Greatly excited, the children followed her into
the garden. “She does then, sometimes,” murmured Imogen as they left the
breakfast room.

“Oh, yes, to be sure,” said Miss Broadwood cheerfully. “She reads a
story to them every morning in the most picturesque part of the garden.
The mother of the Gracchi, you know. She does so long, she says, for the
time when they will be intellectual companions for her. What do you say
to a walk over the hills?”

As they left the house they met Frau Lichtenfeld and the bushy
Herr Schotte--the professor cut an astonishing figure in golf
stockings--returning from a walk and engaged in an animated conversation
on the tendencies of German fiction.

“Aren’t they the most attractive little children,” exclaimed Imogen as
they wound down the road toward the river.

“Yes, and you must not fail to tell Flavia that you think so. She will
look at you in a sort of startled way and say, ‘Yes, aren’t they?’ and
maybe she will go off and hunt them up and have tea with them, to fully
appreciate them. She is awfully afraid of missing anything good, is
Flavia. The way those youngsters manage to conceal their guilty presence
in the House of Song is a wonder.”

“But don’t any of the artist-folk fancy children?” asked Imogen.

“Yes, they just fancy them and no more. The chemist remarked the other
day that children are like certain salts which need not be actualized
because the formulae are quite sufficient for practical purposes. I
don’t see how even Flavia can endure to have that man about.”

“I have always been rather curious to know what Arthur thinks of it
all,” remarked Imogen cautiously.

“Thinks of it!” ejaculated Miss Broadwood. “Why, my dear, what would any
man think of having his house turned into an hotel, habited by freaks
who discharge his servants, borrow his money, and insult his neighbors?
This place is shunned like a lazaretto!”

“Well, then, why does he--why does he--” persisted Imogen.

“Bah!” interrupted Miss Broadwood impatiently, “why did he in the first
place? That’s the question.”

“Marry her, you mean?” said Imogen coloring.

“Exactly so,” said Miss Broadwood sharply, as she snapped the lid of her
matchbox.

“I suppose that is a question rather beyond us, and certainly one which
we cannot discuss,” said Imogen. “But his toleration on this one point
puzzles me, quite apart from other complications.”

“Toleration? Why this point, as you call it, simply is Flavia. Who could
conceive of her without it? I don’t know where it’s all going to end,
I’m sure, and I’m equally sure that, if it were not for Arthur,
I shouldn’t care,” declared Miss Broadwood, drawing her shoulders
together.

“But will it end at all, now?”

“Such an absurd state of things can’t go on indefinitely. A man isn’t
going to see his wife make a guy of herself forever, is he? Chaos
has already begun in the servants’ quarters. There are six different
languages spoken there now. You see, it’s all on an entirely false
basis. Flavia hasn’t the slightest notion of what these people are
really like, their good and their bad alike escape her. They, on the
other hand, can’t imagine what she is driving at. Now, Arthur is worse
off than either faction; he is not in the fairy story in that he sees
these people exactly as they are, _but_ he is utterly unable to see
Flavia as they see her. There you have the situation. Why can’t he see
her as we do? My dear, that has kept me awake o’ nights. This man who
has thought so much and lived so much, who is naturally a critic, really
takes Flavia at very nearly her own estimate. But now I am entering upon
a wilderness. From a brief acquaintance with her you can know nothing of
the icy fastnesses of Flavia’s self-esteem. It’s like St. Peter’s; you
can’t realize its magnitude at once. You have to grow into a sense of
it by living under its shadow. It has perplexed even Emile Roux, that
merciless dissector of egoism. She has puzzled him the more because he
saw at a glance what some of them do not perceive at once, and what will
be mercifully concealed from Arthur until the trump sounds; namely, that
all Flavia’s artists have done or ever will do means exactly as much to
her as a symphony means to an oyster; that there is no bridge by which
the significance of any work of art could be conveyed to her.”

“Then, in the name of goodness, why does she bother?” gasped Imogen.
“She is pretty, wealthy, well-established; why should she bother?”

“That’s what M. Roux has kept asking himself. I can’t pretend to analyze
it. She reads papers on the Literary Landmarks of Paris, the Loves of
the Poets, and that sort of thing, to clubs out in Chicago. To Flavia
it is more necessary to be called clever than to breathe. I would give a
good deal to know that glum Frenchman’s diagnosis. He has been
watching her out of those fishy eyes of his as a biologist watches a
hemisphereless frog.”

For several days after M. Roux’s departure Flavia gave an embarrassing
share of her attention to Imogen. Embarrassing, because Imogen had the
feeling of being energetically and futilely explored, she knew not for
what. She felt herself under the globe of an air pump, expected to yield
up something. When she confined the conversation to matters of general
interest Flavia conveyed to her with some pique that her one endeavor
in life had been to fit herself to converse with her friends upon those
things which vitally interested them. “One has no right to accept their
best from people unless one gives, isn’t it so? I want to be able to
give--!” she declared vaguely. Yet whenever Imogen strove to pay her
tithes and plunged bravely into her plans for study next winter, Flavia
grew absent-minded and interrupted her by amazing generalizations or
by such embarrassing questions as, “And these grim studies really have
charm for you; you are quite buried in them; they make other things seem
light and ephemeral?”

“I rather feel as though I had got in here under false pretenses,”
 Imogen confided to Miss Broadwood. “I’m sure I don’t know what it is
that she wants of me.”

“Ah,” chuckled Jemima, “you are not equal to these heart to heart talks
with Flavia. You utterly fail to communicate to her the atmosphere of
that untroubled joy in which you dwell. You must remember that she gets
no feeling out of things herself, and she demands that you impart yours
to her by some process of psychic transmission. I once met a blind girl,
blind from birth, who could discuss the peculiarities of the Barbizon
school with just Flavia’s glibness and enthusiasm. Ordinarily Flavia
knows how to get what she wants from people, and her memory is
wonderful. One evening I heard her giving Frau Lichtenfeld some random
impressions about Hedda Gabler which she extracted from me five years
ago; giving them with an impassioned conviction of which I was never
guilty. But I have known other people who could appropriate your stories
and opinions; Flavia is infinitely more subtle than that; she can
soak up the very thrash and drift of your daydreams, and take the very
thrills off your back, as it were.”

After some days of unsuccessful effort, Flavia withdrew herself, and
Imogen found Hamilton ready to catch her when she was tossed afield.
He seemed only to have been awaiting this crisis, and at once their
old intimacy reestablished itself as a thing inevitable and beautifully
prepared for. She convinced herself that she had not been mistaken in
him, despite all the doubts that had come up in later years, and this
renewal of faith set more than one question thumping in her brain. “How
did he, how can he?” she kept repeating with a tinge of her childish
resentment, “what right had he to waste anything so fine?”

When Imogen and Arthur were returning from a walk before luncheon one
morning about a week after M. Roux’s departure, they noticed an absorbed
group before one of the hall windows. Herr Schotte and Restzhoff sat
on the window seat with a newspaper between them, while Wellington,
Schemetzkin, and Will Maidenwood looked over their shoulders. They
seemed intensely interested, Herr Schotte occasionally pounding his
knees with his fists in ebullitions of barbaric glee. When imogen
entered the hall, however, the men were all sauntering toward the
breakfast room and the paper was lying innocently on the divan. During
luncheon the personnel of that window group were unwontedly animated and
agreeable all save Schemetzkin, whose stare was blanker than ever, as
though Roux’s mantle of insulting indifference had fallen upon him, in
addition to his own oblivious self-absorption. Will Maidenwood seemed
embarrassed and annoyed; the chemist employed himself with making polite
speeches to Hamilton. Flavia did not come down to lunch--and there was
a malicious gleam under Herr Schotte’s eyebrows. Frank Wellington
announced nervously that an imperative letter from his protecting
syndicate summoned him to the city.

After luncheon the men went to the golf links, and Imogen, at the first
opportunity, possessed herself of the newspaper which had been left on
the divan. One of the first things that caught her eye was an article
headed “Roux on Tuft Hunters; The Advanced American Woman as He Sees
Her; Aggressive, Superficial, and Insincere.” The entire interview was
nothing more nor less than a satiric characterization of Flavia, aquiver
with irritation and vitriolic malice. No one could mistake it; it was
done with all his deftness of portraiture. Imogen had not finished the
article when she heard a footstep, and clutching the paper she started
precipitately toward the stairway as Arthur entered. He put out his
hand, looking critically at her distressed face.

“Wait a moment, Miss Willard,” he said peremptorily, “I want to see
whether we can find what it was that so interested our friends this
morning. Give me the paper, please.”

Imogen grew quite white as he opened the journal. She reached forward
and crumpled it with her hands. “Please don’t, please don’t,” she
pleaded; “it’s something I don’t want you to see. Oh, why will you? it’s
just something low and despicable that you can’t notice.”

Arthur had gently loosed her hands, and he pointed her to a chair. He
lit a cigar and read the article through without comment. When he had
finished it he walked to the fireplace, struck a match, and tossed the
flaming journal between the brass andirons.

“You are right,” he remarked as he came back, dusting his hands with his
handkerchief. “It’s quite impossible to comment. There are extremes of
blackguardism for which we have no name. The only thing necessary is to
see that Flavia gets no wind of this. This seems to be my cue to act;
poor girl.”

Imogen looked at him tearfully; she could only murmur, “Oh, why did you
read it!”

Hamilton laughed spiritlessly. “Come, don’t you worry about it. You
always took other people’s troubles too seriously. When you were little
and all the world was gay and everybody happy, you must needs get the
Little Mermaid’s troubles to grieve over. Come with me into the music
room. You remember the musical setting I once made you for the Lay of
the Jabberwock? I was trying it over the other night, long after you
were in bed, and I decided it was quite as fine as the Erl-King music.
How I wish I could give you some of the cake that Alice ate and make you
a little girl again. Then, when you had got through the glass door into
the little garden, you could call to me, perhaps, and tell me all the
fine things that were going on there. What a pity it is that you ever
grew up!” he added, laughing; and Imogen, too, was thinking just that.

At dinner that evening, Flavia, with fatal persistence, insisted upon
turning the conversation to M. Roux. She had been reading one of his
novels and had remembered anew that Paris set its watches by his clock.
Imogen surmised that she was tortured by a feeling that she had not
sufficiently appreciated him while she had had him. When she first
mentioned his name she was answered only by the pall of silence that
fell over the company. Then everyone began to talk at once, as though
to correct a false position. They spoke of him with a fervid, defiant
admiration, with the sort of hot praise that covers a double purpose.
Imogen fancied she could see that they felt a kind of relief at what the
man had done, even those who despised him for doing it; that they felt
a spiteful hate against Flavia, as though she had tricked them, and a
certain contempt for themselves that they had been beguiled. She was
reminded of the fury of the crowd in the fairy tale, when once the child
had called out that the king was in his night clothes. Surely these
people knew no more about Flavia than they had known before, but the
mere fact that the thing had been said altered the situation. Flavia,
meanwhile, sat chattering amiably, pathetically unconscious of her
nakedness.

Hamilton lounged, fingering the stem of his wineglass, gazing down the
table at one face after another and studying the various degrees
of self-consciousness they exhibited. Imogen’s eyes followed his,
fearfully. When a lull came in the spasmodic flow of conversation,
Arthur, leaning back in his chair, remarked deliberately, “As for M.
Roux, his very profession places him in that class of men whom society
has never been able to accept unconditionally because it has never been
able to assume that they have any ordered notion of taste. He and
his ilk remain, with the mountebanks and snake charmers, people
indispensable to our civilization, but wholly unreclaimed by it; people
whom we receive, but whose invitations we do not accept.”

Fortunately for Flavia, this mine was not exploded until just before the
coffee was brought. Her laughter was pitiful to hear; it echoed through
the silent room as in a vault, while she made some tremulously light
remark about her husband’s drollery, grim as a jest from the dying. No
one responded and she sat nodding her head like a mechanical toy and
smiling her white, set smile through her teeth, until Alcee Buisson and
Frau Lichtenfeld came to her support.

After dinner the guests retired immediately to their rooms, and Imogen
went upstairs on tiptoe, feeling the echo of breakage and the dust of
crumbling in the air. She wondered whether Flavia’s habitual note of
uneasiness were not, in a manner, prophetic, and a sort of unconscious
premonition, after all. She sat down to write a letter, but she found
herself so nervous, her head so hot and her hands so cold, that she
soon abandoned the effort, just as she was about to seek Miss Broadwood,
Flavia entered and embraced her hysterically.

“My dearest girl,” she began, “was there ever such an unfortunate and
incomprehensible speech made before? Of course it is scarcely necessary
to explain to you poor Arthur’s lack of tact, and that he meant nothing.
But they! Can they be expected to understand? He will feel wretchedly
about it when he realizes what he has done, but in the meantime? And M.
Roux, of all men! When we were so fortunate as to get him, and he made
himself so unreservedly agreeable, and I fancied that, in his way,
Arthur quite admired him. My dear, you have no idea what that speech has
done. Schemetzkin and Herr Schotte have already sent me word that they
must leave us tomorrow. Such a thing from a host!” Flavia paused, choked
by tears of vexation and despair.

Imogen was thoroughly disconcerted; this was the first time she had ever
seen Flavia betray any personal emotion which was indubitably genuine.
She replied with what consolation she could. “Need they take it
personally at all? It was a mere observation upon a class of people--”

“Which he knows nothing whatever about, and with whom he has no
sympathy,” interrupted Flavia. “Ah, my dear, you could not be _expected_
to understand. You can’t realize, knowing Arthur as you do, his entire
lack of any aesthetic sense whatever. He is absolutely _nil_, stone deaf
and stark blind, on that side. He doesn’t mean to be brutal, it is
just the brutality of utter ignorance. They always feel it--they are so
sensitive to unsympathetic influences, you know; they know it the moment
they come into the house. I have spent my life apologizing for him and
struggling to conceal it; but in spite of me, he wounds them; his very
attitude, even in silence, offends them. Heavens! Do I not know? Is
it not perpetually and forever wounding me? But there has never been
anything so dreadful as this--never! If I could conceive of any possible
motive, even!”

“But, surely, Mrs. Hamilton, it was, after all, a mere expression of
opinion, such as we are any of us likely to venture upon any subject
whatever. It was neither more personal nor more extravagant than many of
M. Roux’s remarks.”

“But, Imogen, certainly M. Roux has the right. It is a part of his
art, and that is altogether another matter. Oh, this is not the only
instance!” continued Flavia passionately, “I’ve always had that narrow,
bigoted prejudice to contend with. It has always held me back. But
this--!”

“I think you mistake his attitude,” replied Imogen, feeling a flush that
made her ears tingle. “That is, I fancy he is more appreciative than he
seems. A man can’t be very demonstrative about those things--not if he
is a real man. I should not think you would care much about saving the
feelings of people who are too narrow to admit of any other point of
view than their own.” She stopped, finding herself in the impossible
position of attempting to explain Hamilton to his wife; a task which,
if once begun, would necessitate an entire course of enlightenment which
she doubted Flavia’s ability to receive, and which she could offer only
with very poor grace.

“That’s just where it stings most”--here Flavia began pacing the
floor--“it is just because they have all shown such tolerance and have
treated Arthur with such unfailing consideration that I can find no
reasonable pretext for his rancor. How can he fail to see the value of
such friendships on the children’s account, if for nothing else! What
an advantage for them to grow up among such associations! Even though he
cares nothing about these things himself he might realize that. Is there
nothing I could say by way of explanation? To them, I mean? If someone
were to explain to them how unfortunately limited he is in these
things--”

“I’m afraid I cannot advise you,” said Imogen decidedly, “but that, at
least, seems to me impossible.”

Flavia took her hand and glanced at her affectionately, nodding
nervously. “Of course, dear girl, I can’t ask you to be quite frank with
me. Poor child, you are trembling and your hands are icy. Poor Arthur!
But you must not judge him by this altogether; think how much he misses
in life. What a cruel shock you’ve had. I’ll send you some sherry, Good
night, my dear.”

When Flavia shut the door Imogen burst into a fit of nervous weeping.

Next morning she awoke after a troubled and restless night. At eight
o’clock Miss Broadwood entered in a red and white striped bathrobe.

“Up, up, and see the great doom’s image!” she cried, her eyes sparkling
with excitement. “The hall is full of trunks, they are packing. What
bolt has fallen? It’s you, _ma cherie_, you’ve brought Ulysses
home again and the slaughter has begun!” she blew a cloud of smoke
triumphantly from her lips and threw herself into a chair beside the
bed.

Imogen, rising on her elbow, plunged excitedly into the story of the
Roux interview, which Miss Broadwood heard with the keenest interest,
frequently interrupting her with exclamations of delight. When Imogen
reached the dramatic scene which terminated in the destruction of the
newspaper, Miss Broadwood rose and took a turn about the room, violently
switching the tasselled cords of her bathrobe.

“Stop a moment,” she cried, “you mean to tell me that he had such a
heaven-sent means to bring her to her senses and didn’t use it--that he
held such a weapon and threw it away?”

“Use it?” cried Imogen unsteadily. “Of course he didn’t! He bared his
back to the tormentor, signed himself over to punishment in that speech
he made at dinner, which everyone understands but Flavia. She was here
for an hour last night and disregarded every limit of taste in her
maledictions.”

“My dear!” cried Miss Broadwood, catching her hand in inordinate delight
at the situation, “do you see what he has done? There’ll be no end to
it. Why he has sacrificed himself to spare the very vanity that devours
him, put rancors in the vessels of his peace, and his eternal jewel
given to the common enemy of man, to make them kings, the seed of Banquo
kings! He is magnificent!”

“Isn’t he always that?” cried Imogen hotly. “He’s like a pillar of
sanity and law in this house of shams and swollen vanities, where people
stalk about with a sort of madhouse dignity, each one fancying himself a
king or a pope. If you could have heard that woman talk of him! Why,
she thinks him stupid, bigoted, blinded by middleclass prejudices. She
talked about his having no aesthetic sense and insisted that her artists
had always shown him tolerance. I don’t know why it should get on my
nerves so, I’m sure, but her stupidity and assurance are enough to drive
one to the brink of collapse.”

“Yes, as opposed to his singular fineness, they are calculated to do
just that,” said Miss Broadwood gravely, wisely ignoring Imogen’s tears.
“But what has been is nothing to what will be. Just wait until Flavia’s
black swans have flown! You ought not to try to stick it out; that would
only make it harder for everyone. Suppose you let me telephone your
mother to wire you to come home by the evening train?”

“Anything, rather than have her come at me like that again. It puts me
in a perfectly impossible position, and he _is_ so fine!”

“Of course it does,” said Miss Broadwood sympathetically, “and there
is no good to be got from facing it. I will stay because such things
interest me, and Frau Lichtenfeld will stay because she has no money to
get away, and Buisson will stay because he feels somewhat responsible.
These complications are interesting enough to cold-blooded folk
like myself who have an eye for the dramatic element, but they are
distracting and demoralizing to young people with any serious purpose in
life.”

Miss Broadwood’s counsel was all the more generous seeing that, for her,
the most interesting element of this denouement would be eliminated by
Imogen’s departure. “If she goes now, she’ll get over it,” soliloquized
Miss Broadwood. “If she stays, she’ll be wrung for him and the hurt may
go deep enough to last. I haven’t the heart to see her spoiling things
for herself.” She telephoned Mrs. Willard and helped Imogen to pack. She
even took it upon herself to break the news of Imogen’s going to Arthur,
who remarked, as he rolled a cigarette in his nerveless fingers:

“Right enough, too. What should she do here with old cynics like you and
me, Jimmy? Seeing that she is brim full of dates and formulae and other
positivisms, and is so girt about with illusions that she still casts
a shadow in the sun. You’ve been very tender of her, haven’t you? I’ve
watched you. And to think it may all be gone when we see her next. ‘The
common fate of all things rare,’ you know. What a good fellow you
are, anyway, Jimmy,” he added, putting his hands affectionately on her
shoulders.

Arthur went with them to the station. Flavia was so prostrated by the
concerted action of her guests that she was able to see Imogen only
for a moment in her darkened sleeping chamber, where she kissed her
hysterically, without lifting her head, bandaged in aromatic vinegar.
On the way to the station both Arthur and Imogen threw the burden of
keeping up appearances entirely upon Miss Broadwood, who blithely rose
to the occasion. When Hamilton carried Imogen’s bag into the car, Miss
Broadwood detained her for a moment, whispering as she gave her a large,
warm handclasp, “I’ll come to see you when I get back to town; and, in
the meantime, if you meet any of our artists, tell them you have left
Caius Marius among the ruins of Carthage.”



The Sculptor’s Funeral

A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little
Kansas town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already
twenty minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over everything; in
the pale starlight the line of bluffs across the wide, white meadows
south of the town made soft, smoke-colored curves against the clear sky.
The men on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other,
their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats
open, their shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from
time to time toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along
the river shore. They conversed in low tones and moved about restlessly,
seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them. There was but one of
the company who looked as though he knew exactly why he was there; and
he kept conspicuously apart; walking to the far end of the platform,
returning to the station door, then pacing up the track again, his chin
sunk in the high collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping
forward, his gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by a
tall, spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled
out from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning his
neck forward until his back made the angle of a jackknife three-quarters
open.

“I reckon she’s agoin’ to be pretty late ag’in tonight, Jim,” he
remarked in a squeaky falsetto. “S’pose it’s the snow?”

“I don’t know,” responded the other man with a shade of annoyance,
speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew
fiercely and thickly in all directions.

The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the other
side of his mouth. “It ain’t likely that anybody from the East will come
with the corpse, I s’pose,” he went on reflectively.

“I don’t know,” responded the other, more curtly than before.

“It’s too bad he didn’t belong to some lodge or other. I like an
order funeral myself. They seem more appropriate for people of some
reputation,” the spare man continued, with an ingratiating concession
in his shrill voice, as he carefully placed his toothpick in his vest
pocket. He always carried the flag at the G. A. R. funerals in the town.

The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up the
siding. The spare man shuffled back to the uneasy group. “Jim’s ez full
ez a tick, ez ushel,” he commented commiseratingly.

Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet
on the platform. A number of lanky boys of all ages appeared as suddenly
and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from the
waiting room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove,
or half-asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from
baggage trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from
the driver’s seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding.
They straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and
a flash of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold,
vibrant scream, the world-wide call for men. It stirred them like the
note of a trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming
home tonight, in his boyhood.

The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh
lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of shivering
poplars that sentineled the meadows, the escaping steam hanging in gray
masses against the pale sky and blotting out the Milky Way. In a moment
the red glare from the headlight streamed up the snow-covered track
before the siding and glittered on the wet, black rails. The burly man
with the disheveled red beard walked swiftly up the platform toward
the approaching train, uncovering his head as he went. The group of
men behind him hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and
awkwardly followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd
shuffled up to the express car just as the door was thrown open,
the spare man in the G. A. B. suit thrusting his head forward with
curiosity. The express messenger appeared in the doorway, accompanied by
a young man in a long ulster and traveling cap.

“Are Mr. Merrick’s friends here?” inquired the young man.

The group on the platform swayed and shuffled uneasily. Philip Phelps,
the banker, responded with dignity: “We have come to take charge of the
body. Mr. Merrick’s father is very feeble and can’t be about.”

“Send the agent out here,” growled the express messenger, “and tell the
operator to lend a hand.”

The coffin was got out of its rough box and down on the snowy platform.
The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed a
close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which lay
across the black cover. No one said anything. The baggage man stood by
his truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and
the fireman dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and
long oilcan, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of
the dead sculptor’s pupils who had come with the body, looked about him
helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of that black,
uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of an individual to be
addressed.

“None of Mr. Merrick’s brothers are here?” he asked uncertainly.

The man with the red heard for the first time stepped up and joined the
group. “No, they have not come yet; the family is scattered. The body
will be taken directly to the house.” He stooped and took hold of one of
the handles of the coffin.

“Take the long hill road up, Thompson--it will be easier on the horses,”
 called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of the hearse
and prepared to mount to the driver’s seat.

Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: “We didn’t
know whether there would be anyone with him or not,” he explained. “It’s
a long walk, so you’d better go up in the hack.” He pointed to a single,
battered conveyance, but the young man replied stiffly: “Thank you, but
I think I will go up with the hearse. If you don’t object,” turning to
the undertaker, “I’ll ride with you.”

They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight tip the
long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village were
shining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on every
side, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide as the
soft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence.

When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,
weatherbeaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that
had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front
yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the
sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung
on one hinge and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young
stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of the front
door.

The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse,
was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched
open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow
and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: “My boy, my boy! And this
is how you’ve come home to me!”

As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of
unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular,
dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs.
Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: “Come, come, Mother; you
mustn’t go on like this!” Her tone changed to one of obsequious
solemnity as she turned to the banker: “The parlor is ready, Mr.
Phelps.”

The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the
undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large,
unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish,
and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass
prisms and before a “Rogers group” of John Alden and Priscilla,
wreathed with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening
conviction that there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had
somehow arrived at the wrong destination. He looked painfully about
over the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the
hand-painted china plaques and panels, and vases, for some mark of
identification, for something that might once conceivably have belonged
to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his friend in the
crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls hanging above the
piano that he felt willing to let any of these people approach the
coffin.

“Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy’s face,” wailed
the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully,
almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses
of strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then,
almost incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about
her face--a kind of brutal handsomeness, even, but it was scarred and
furrowed by violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions
that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long
nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines
on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her
forehead; her teeth were large and square and set far apart--teeth that
could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed
about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being
drawn into the whirlpool.

The daughter--the tall, rawboned woman in crepe, with a mourning comb in
her hair which curiously lengthened her long face sat stiffly upon the
sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her
lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of the
coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in
the house, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and
gentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavens
walked over and stood beside her.

Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail,
odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept gray hair and a dingy beard,
tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up
to the coffin and stood, rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his
hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife’s orgy of grief
that he had no consciousness of anything else.

“There, there, Annie, dear, don’t take on so,” he quavered timidly,
putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned
with a cry and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he
tottered a little. He did not even glance toward the coffin, but
continued to look at her with a dull, frightened, appealing expression,
as a spaniel looks at the whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and
burned with miserable shame. When his wife rushed from the room her
daughter strode after her with set lips. The servant stole up to the
coffin, bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen,
leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and the father to themselves. The old man
stood trembling and looking down at his dead son’s face. The sculptor’s
splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid stillness than in
life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wide forehead; the face
seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that beautiful and chaste
repose which we expect to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were
so drawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the
chin was thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life
had been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once wholly relax
the tension and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he
were still guarding something precious and holy, which might even yet be
wrested from him.

The old man’s lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to
the lawyer with timid deference: “Phelps and the rest are comin’ back to
set up with Harve, ain’t they?” he asked. “Thank ‘ee, Jim, thank ‘ee.”
 He brushed the hair back gently from his son’s forehead. “He was a good
boy, Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest
of ‘em all--only we didn’t none of us ever onderstand him.” The tears
trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor’s coat.

“Martin, Martin. Oh, Martin! come here,” his wife wailed from the top of
the stairs. The old man started timorously: “Yes, Annie, I’m coming.” He
turned away, hesitated stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then
he reached back and patted the dead man’s hair softly, and stumbled from
the room.

“Poor old man, I didn’t think he had any tears left. Seems as if his
eyes would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep,”
 remarked the lawyer.

Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been
in the room the young man had scarcely seen anyone else; but now, from
the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird’s florid face and bloodshot
eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not
finding before--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in
someone, even here.

The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by
dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that of
a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept plucking
at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by
the window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling
pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked
behind him, staring down into the master’s face. He could not help
wondering what link there could have been between the porcelain vessel
and so sooty a lump of potter’s clay.

From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door
opened the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for
having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had
been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in
the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and
masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust the
lawyer went into the dining room and closed the door into the kitchen.

“Poor Roxy’s getting it now,” he remarked when he came back. “The
Merricks took her out of the poorhouse years ago; and if her loyalty
would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would
curdle your blood. She’s the mulatto woman who was standing in here a
while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there
never was anybody like her for demonstrative piety and ingenious
cruelty. She made Harvey’s life a hell for him when he lived at home;
he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how he kept himself so
sweet.”

“He was wonderful,” said Steavens slowly, “wonderful; but until tonight
I have never known how wonderful.”

“That is the true and eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come
even from such a dung heap as this,” the lawyer cried, with a sweeping
gesture which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within
which they stood.

“I think I’ll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close
I am beginning to feel rather faint,” murmured Steavens, struggling with
one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so
he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came
over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist, and sent the
window up a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had
been gradually climbing into his throat for the last half-hour left him
with but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this
place with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well
enough now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often
on his master’s lips!

He remembered that once, when Merrick returned from a visit home, he
brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a
thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee;
while a full-lipped, full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up
by a single gallows, stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to
call her attention to a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by
the tender and delicate modeling of the thin, tired face, had asked him
if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush that had burned up
in the sculptor’s face.

The lawyer was sitting in a rocking chair beside the coffin, his head
thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,
puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal
a feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard.
Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor’s keen glance, he opened
his eyes.

“Was he always a good deal of an oyster?” he asked abruptly. “He was
terribly shy as a boy.”

“Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so,” rejoined Steavens.
“Although he could be very fond of people, he always gave one the
impression of being detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was
reflective, and rather distrustful of himself--except, of course, as
regarded his work. He was surefooted enough there. He distrusted men
pretty thoroughly and women even more, yet somehow without believing ill
of them. He was determined, indeed, to believe the best, but he seemed
afraid to investigate.”

“A burnt dog dreads the fire,” said the lawyer grimly, and closed his
eyes.

Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood.
All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose
tastes were refined beyond the limits of the reasonable--whose mind was
an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions, and so sensitive that
the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall would
be etched and held there forever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic
word in his fingertips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed
its holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored it to its
pristine loveliness, like the Arabian prince who fought the enchantress
spell for spell. Upon whatever he had come in contact with, he had left
a beautiful record of the experience--a sort of ethereal signature; a
scent, a sound, a color that was his own.

Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master’s life; neither
love nor wine, as many had conjectured, but a blow which had fallen
earlier and cut deeper than these could have done--a shame not his, and
yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very boyhood. And
without--the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a
desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened
and old, and noble with traditions.

At eleven o’clock the tall, flat woman in black crepe entered, announced
that the watchers were arriving, and asked them “to step into the dining
room.” As Steavens rose the lawyer said dryly: “You go on--it’ll be a
good experience for you, doubtless; as for me, I’m not equal to that
crowd tonight; I’ve had twenty years of them.”

As Steavens closed the door after him be glanced back at the lawyer,
sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his
hand.

The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express car
shuffled into the dining room. In the light of the kerosene lamp they
separated and became individuals. The minister, a pale, feeble-looking
man with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a
small side table and placed his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat
down behind the stove and tilted his chair back comfortably against the
wall, fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two
bankers, Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner table,
where they could finish their discussion of the new usury law and its
effect on chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man
with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal-and-lumber
dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard
coal-burner, their feet on the nickelwork. Steavens took a book from
his pocket and began to read. The talk around him ranged through various
topics of local interest while the house was quieting down. When it
was clear that the members of the family were in bed the Grand Army man
hitched his shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on
the rounds of his chair.

“S’pose there’ll be a will, Phelps?” he queried in his weak falsetto.

The banker laughed disagreeably and began trimming his nails with a
pearl-handled pocketknife.

“There’ll scarcely be any need for one, will there?” he queried in his
turn.

The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his
knees still nearer his chin. “Why, the ole man says Harve’s done right
well lately,” he chirped.

The other banker spoke up. “I reckon he means by that Harve ain’t asked
him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his
education.”

“Seems like my mind don’t reach back to a time when Harve wasn’t bein’
edycated,” tittered the Grand Army man.

There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief and
blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap.
“It’s too bad the old man’s sons didn’t turn out better,” he remarked
with reflective authority. “They never hung together. He spent money
enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle farms and he might as well have
poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse
what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man’s bottom
farm, they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust
everything to tenants and was cheated right and left.”

“Harve never could have handled stock none,” interposed the cattleman.
“He hadn’t it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought
Sander’s mules for eight-year-olds, when everybody in town knew that
Sander’s father-in-law give ‘em to his wife for a wedding present
eighteen years before, an’ they was full-grown mules then.”

Everyone chuckled, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees with a spasm
of childish delight.

“Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was
never fond of work,” began the coal-and-lumber dealer. “I mind the last
time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn
helpin’ his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was
patchin’ up the fence, Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in
his ladylike voice: ‘Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.’”

“That’s Harve for you,” approved the Grand Army man gleefully. “I kin
hear him howlin’ yet when he was a big feller in long pants and his
mother used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin’ the
cows git foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin’ ‘em home from
pasture. He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onc’t--a pure Jersey and the
best milker I had, an’ the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was
watchin’ the sun set acros’t the marshes when the anamile got away; he
argued that sunset was oncommon fine.”

“Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to
school,” said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate,
judicial tone. “There was where he got his head full of traipsing to
Paris and all such folly. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course
in some first-class Kansas City business college.”

The letters were swimming before Steavens’s eyes. Was it possible that
these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing
to them? The very name of their town would have remained forever buried
in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world
in connection with Harvey Merrick’s. He remembered what his master had
said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs
had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked
his pupil to send his body home. “It’s not a pleasant place to be lying
while the world is moving and doing and bettering,” he had said with a
feeble smile, “but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the
place we came from in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look
at me; and after they have had their say I shan’t have much to fear from
the judgment of God. The wings of the Victory, in there”--with a weak
gesture toward his studio--“will not shelter me.”

The cattleman took up the comment. “Forty’s young for a Merrick to cash
in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along with
whisky.”

“His mother’s people were not long-lived, and Harvey never had a robust
constitution,” said the minister mildly. He would have liked to say
more. He had been the boy’s Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of
him; but he felt that he was not in a position to speak. His own sons
had turned out badly, and it was not a year since one of them had made
his last trip home in the express car, shot in a gambling house in the
Black Hills.

“Nevertheless, there is no disputin’ that Harve frequently looked upon
the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommon
fool of him,” moralized the cattleman.

Just then the door leading into the parlor rattled loudly, and everyone
started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out.
His red face was convulsed with anger, and the Grand Army man ducked
his head when he saw the spark in his blue, bloodshot eye. They were all
afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he could twist the law to suit his
client’s needs as no other man in all western Kansas could do; and
there were many who tried. The lawyer closed the door gently behind him,
leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking his head a little
to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the courtroom, ears were
always pricked up, as it usually foretold a flood of withering sarcasm.

“I’ve been with you gentlemen before,” he began in a dry, even tone,
“when you’ve sat by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town;
and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied when
you checked them up. What’s the matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputable
young men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It might almost
seem to a stranger that there was some way something the matter with
your progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young lawyer
you ever turned out, after he had come home from the university as
straight as a die, take to drinking and forge a check and shoot himself?
Why did Bill Merrit’s son die of the shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why
was Mr. Thomas’s son, here, shot in a gambling house? Why did young
Adams burn his mill to beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?”

The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist
quietly on the table. “I’ll tell you why. Because you drummed
nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they wore
knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as you’ve been carping
here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their
models, as our grandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams.
But the boys, worse luck, were young and raw at the business you put
them to; and how could they match coppers with such artists as Phelps
and Elder? You wanted them to be successful rascals; they were only
unsuccessful ones--that’s all the difference. There was only one boy
ever raised in this borderland between ruffianism and civilization who
didn’t come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out
than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels. Lord, Lord,
how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is fond of saying that he could buy
and sell us all out any time he’s a mind to; but he knew Harve wouldn’t
have given a tinker’s damn for his bank and all his cattle farms put
together; and a lack of appreciation, that way, goes hard with Phelps.

“Old Nimrod, here, thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as
Nimrod and me!”

“Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man’s money--fell
short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the
very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in
the county court; and we all know that the old man came out of that
partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I’m
getting personal, and I’d better be driving ahead at what I want to
say.”

The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on:
“Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead
in earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We
meant to be great men. Even I, and I haven’t lost my sense of humor,
gentlemen, I meant to be a great man. I came back here to practice, and
I found you didn’t in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me
to be a shrewd lawyer--oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him
an increase of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new
county survey that would put the widow Wilson’s little bottom farm
inside his south line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per cent a month
and get it collected; old Stark here wanted to wheedle old women up in
Vermont into investing their annuities in real estate mortgages that are
not worth the paper they are written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough,
and you’ll go on needing me; and that’s why I’m not afraid to plug the
truth home to you this once.

“Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me
to be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you’ll
stand up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul you couldn’t dirty
and whose hands you couldn’t tie. Oh, you’re a discriminating lot of
Christians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey’s name in
some Eastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and,
again, times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away
from all this hog wallow, doing his great work and climbing the big,
clean upgrade he’d set for himself.

“And we? Now that we’ve fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and
hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little
Western town know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey
Merrick wouldn’t have given one sunset over your marshes for all you’ve
got put together, and you know it. It’s not for me to say why, in the
inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from
this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to
know that the drivel he’s been hearing here tonight is the only
tribute any truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick,
side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers
of Sand City--upon which town may God have mercy!”

The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught up
his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand Army
man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck about
at his fellows.


Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services.
Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start East
without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from him
again, and left his address on the lawyer’s table; but if Laird found
it, he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had
loved must have gone underground with Harvey Merrick’s coffin; for it
never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the
Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps’s sons, who had got into
trouble out there by cutting government timber.



“A Death in the Desert”

Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the
aisle was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a
conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged
him to be a traveling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an
adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool
and clean under almost any circumstances.

The “High Line Flyer,” as this train was derisively called among
railroad men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the
monotonous country between Holdridge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond
man and himself the only occupants of the car were two dusty,
bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the Exposition at Chicago,
and who were earnestly discussing the cost of their first trip out of
Colorado. The four uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment
of fine, yellow dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold
powder. It blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through
which they passed, until they were one color with the sagebrush and
sandhills. The gray-and-yellow desert was varied only by occasional
ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of station houses,
where the spindling trees and sickly vines in the bluegrass yards made
little green reserves fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.

As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through
the car windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies’ permission to
remove his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirt sleeves, with a
black silk handkerchief tucked carefully about his collar. He had seemed
interested in Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdridge, and
kept glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of
the window, as though he were trying to recall something. But wherever
Everett went someone was almost sure to look at him with that curious
interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the
stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his
seat, half-closed his eyes, and began softly to whistle the “Spring
Song” from _Proserpine_, the cantata that a dozen years before had made
its young composer famous in a night. Everett had heard that air on
guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins at college glees, on cottage organs
in New England hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on
sleighbells at a variety theater in Denver. There was literally no way
of escaping his brother’s precocity. Adriance could live on the other
side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in
his mature achievements, but his brother had never been able to outrun
_Proserpine_, and here he found it again in the Colorado sand hills. Not
that Everett was exactly ashamed of _Proserpine_; only a man of genius
could have written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius
outgrows as soon as he can.

Everett unbent a trifle and smiled at his neighbor across the aisle.
Immediately the large man rose and, coming over, dropped into the seat
facing Hilgarde, extending his card.

“Dusty ride, isn’t it? I don’t mind it myself; I’m used to it. Born and
bred in de briar patch, like Br’er Rabbit. I’ve been trying to place you
for a long time; I think I must have met you before.”

“Thank you,” said Everett, taking the card; “my name is Hilgarde. You’ve
probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him.”

The traveling man brought his hand down upon his knee with such
vehemence that the solitaire blazed.

“So I was right after all, and if you’re not Adriance Hilgarde, you’re
his double. I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess!
I never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played
the piano score of _Proserpine_ through to us once at the Chicago Press
Club. I used to be on the _Commercial_ there before I began
to travel for the publishing department of the concern. So you’re
Hilgarde’s brother, and here I’ve run into you at the jumping-off place.
Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn’t it?”

The traveling man laughed and offered Everett a cigar, and plied him
with questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to
talk to Everett about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted
at a Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.

The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o’clock, late by a matter of four
hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness
except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office
overtime on a summer night. When Everett alighted from the train he
walked down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as
to what direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near
the crossing, and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and
her figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was
too dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the
switch engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the
headlight threw a strong glare of light on his face. Suddenly the woman
in the phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started
forward and caught the horse’s head, but the animal only lifted its
ears and whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly
still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed
to her face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the
phaeton, crying, “Katharine, dear, what is the matter?”

Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his
hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most
impossible places, especially by women, but this cry out of the night
had shaken him.

While Everett was breakfasting the next morning, the headwaiter leaned
over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him
in the parlor. Everett finished his coffee and went in the direction
indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His
whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique
was not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was
something below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His
thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show gray about the ears, and
his bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were
locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of
responsibilities; yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an
incongruous diffidence in his address.

“Good morning, Mr. Hilgarde,” he said, extending his hand; “I found your
name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I’m afraid my sister
startled you at the station last night, Mr. Hilgarde, and I’ve come
around to apologize.”

“Ah! The young lady in the phaeton? I’m sure I didn’t know whether I
had anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe the
apology.”

The man colored a little under the dark brown of his face.

“Oh, it’s nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see,
my sister used to be a pupil of your brother’s, and it seems you favor
him; and when the switch engine threw a light on your face it startled
her.”

Everett wheeled about in his chair. “Oh! _Katharine_ Gaylord! Is it
possible! Now it’s you who have given me a turn. Why, I used to know her
when I was a boy. What on earth--”

“Is she doing here?” said Gaylord, grimly filling out the pause. “You’ve
got at the heart of the matter. You knew my sister had been in bad
health for a long time?”

“No, I had never heard a word of that. The last I knew of her she was
singing in London. My brother and I correspond infrequently and seldom
get beyond family matters. I am deeply sorry to hear this. There are
more reasons why I am concerned than I can tell you.”

The lines in Charley Gaylord’s brow relaxed a little.

“What I’m trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you. I
hate to ask you, but she’s so set on it. We live several miles out of
town, but my rig’s below, and I can take you out anytime you can go.”

“I can go now, and it will give me real pleasure to do so,” said
Everett, quickly. “I’ll get my hat and be with you in a moment.”

When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley
Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and
settled back into his own element.

“You see, I think I’d better tell you something about my sister before
you see her, and I don’t know just where to begin. She traveled
in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his
concerts; but I don’t know just how much you know about her.”

“Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted
of his pupils, and that when I knew her she was very young and very
beautiful and turned my head sadly for a while.”

Everett saw that Gaylord’s mind was quite engrossed by his grief. He was
wrought up to the point where his reserve and sense of proportion had
quite left him, and his trouble was the one vital thing in the world.
“That’s the whole thing,” he went on, flicking his horses with the whip.

“She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn’t come of a great
family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago,
and then to New York, and then to Europe, where she went up like
lightning, and got a taste for it all; and now she’s dying here like a
rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can’t fall back into ours.
We’ve grown apart, some way--miles and miles apart--and I’m afraid she’s
fearfully unhappy.”

“It’s a very tragic story that you are telling me, Gaylord,” said
Everett. They were well out into the country now, spinning along over
the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged-blue outline of the
mountains before them.

“Tragic!” cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, “my God, man, nobody
will ever know how tragic. It’s a tragedy I live with and eat with and
sleep with, until I’ve lost my grip on everything. You see she had made
a good bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It’s
her lungs, you know. I’ve got money enough to send her anywhere, but the
doctors all say it’s no use. She hasn’t the ghost of a chance. It’s just
getting through the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before
she came to me. She just wrote that she was all run down. Now that she’s
here, I think she’d be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won’t
leave. She says it’s easier to let go of life here, and that to go East
would be dying twice. There was a time when I was a brakeman with a run
out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little thing I could carry on my
shoulder, when I could get her everything on earth she wanted, and she
hadn’t a wish my $80 a month didn’t cover; and now, when I’ve got a
little property together, I can’t buy her a night’s sleep!”

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord’s present status in the world
might be, he had brought the brakeman’s heart up the ladder with him,
and the brakeman’s frank avowal of sentiment. Presently Gaylord went on:

“You can understand how she has outgrown her family. We’re all a pretty
common sort, railroaders from away back. My father was a conductor. He
died when we were kids. Maggie, my other sister, who lives with me, was
a telegraph operator here while I was getting my grip on things. We had
no education to speak of. I have to hire a stenographer because I can’t
spell straight--the Almighty couldn’t teach me to spell. The things that
make up life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there’s scarcely a point
where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old times
when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in a church
choir in Bird City. But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that if she can see
just one person like you, who knows about the things and people she’s
interested in, it will give her about the only comfort she can have
now.”

The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord’s hand as they drew up before a
showily painted house with many gables and a round tower. “Here we are,”
 he said, turning to Everett, “and I guess we understand each other.”

They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom Gaylord
introduced as “my sister, Maggie.” She asked her brother to show Mr.
Hilgarde into the music room, where Katharine wished to see him alone.

When Everett entered the music room he gave a little start of surprise,
feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some
New York studio that he had always known. He wondered which it was of
those countless studios, high up under the roofs, over banks and
shops and wholesale houses, that this room resembled, and he looked
incredulously out of the window at the gray plain that ended in the
great upheaval of the Rockies.

The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed him. Was it
a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it merely the studio
atmosphere that seemed so individual and poignantly reminiscent here
in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading chair and looked keenly about him.
Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the
piano. Then it all became clear to him: this was veritably his brother’s
room. If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that
Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them
and leaving almost before the renovator’s varnish had dried, it was at
least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance’s taste was so manifest
that the room seemed to exhale his personality.

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord,
taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her
eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a
tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree
of embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first
youth, thoroughly sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of
what her brother had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank,
confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the
curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had
more good will than confidence toward the world, and the bravado of
her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest that was almost
discontent. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay
in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, lifegiving
quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a sort of perpetual
_salutat_ to the world. Her head, Everett remembered as peculiarly
well-shaped and proudly poised. There had been always a little of the
imperatrix about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old
impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly she
stood alone.

Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him
and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A very tall woman
advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak, she
coughed slightly; then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle
husky: “You see I make the traditional Camille entrance--with the cough.
How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde.”

Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not
looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming,
he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not
reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds
of her white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp
outlines of her emaciated body, but the stamp of her disease was
there; simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be
disguised or evaded. The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a
swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately
long, and her hands were transparently white and cold to the touch. The
changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head,
the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks,
all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key--older,
sadder, softer.

She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows.
“I know I’m not an inspiring object to look upon, but you must be quite
frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we’ve no
time to lose. And if I’m a trifle irritable you won’t mind?--for I’m
more than usually nervous.”

“Don’t bother with me this morning, if you are tired,” urged Everett. “I
can come quite as well tomorrow.”

“Gracious, no!” she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humor
that he remembered as a part of her. “It’s solitude that I’m tired to
death of--solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister,
not content with reading the prayers for the sick, called on me this
morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his
duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think
he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature
of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to
me--condoning it, you know--and trying to patch up my peace with my
conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my
talent.”

Everett laughed. “Oh! I’m afraid I’m not the person to call after such
a serious gentleman--I can’t sustain the situation. At my best I don’t
reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble
uses you will devote yourself?”

Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed:
“I’m not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn’t study
that method.”

She laughed and went on nervously: “The parson’s not so bad. His English
never offends me, and he has read Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_, all five
volumes, and that’s something. Then, he has been to New York, and that’s
a great deal. But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York;
Charley says you’re just on from there. How does it look and taste and
smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons
of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what
does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or
have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden
Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes
of weather? Who has your brother’s old studio now, and what misguided
aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall?
What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink
there in the world nowadays? You see, I’m homesick for it all, from the
Battery to Riverside. Oh, let me die in Harlem!” She was interrupted
by a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her
discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met
in town during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter. He was
diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he found in
his pocket, some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in
the production of the _Rheingold_, when he became conscious that she was
looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.

Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through
half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his
explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back in his pocket. As
he did so she said, quietly: “How wonderfully like Adriance you are!”
 and he felt as though a crisis of some sort had been met and tided over.

He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that
made them seem quite boyish. “Yes, isn’t it absurd? It’s almost as
awkward as looking like Napoleon--but, after all, there are some
advantages. It has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will
make you.”

Katharine smiled and gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her
lashes. “Oh, it did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you
were then, and how you used to stare at people and then blush and look
cross if they paid you back in your own coin. Do you remember that night
when you took me home from a rehearsal and scarcely spoke a word to me?”

“It was the silence of admiration,” protested Everett, “very crude and
boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful. Perhaps you suspected
something of the sort? I remember you saw fit to be very grown-up and
worldly.

“I believe I suspected a pose; the one that college boys usually affect
with singers--‘an earthen vessel in love with a star,’ you know. But it
rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your
brother’s pupils. Or had you an omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that
always met the occasion?”

“Don’t ask a man to confess the follies of his youth,” said Everett,
smiling a little sadly; “I am sensitive about some of them even now. But
I was not so sophisticated as you imagined. I saw my brother’s pupils
come and go, but that was about all. Sometimes I was called on to play
accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a
carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they
never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you
speak of.”

“Yes”, observed Katharine, thoughtfully, “I noticed it then, too; but it
has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have
lived such different lives. It’s not merely an ordinary family likeness
of feature, you know, but a sort of interchangeable individuality;
the suggestion of the other man’s personality in your face like an air
transposed to another key. But I’m not attempting to define it; it’s
beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle--well, uncanny,”
 she finished, laughing.

“I remember,” Everett said seriously, twirling the pencil between his
fingers and looking, as he sat with his head thrown back, out under the
red window blind which was raised just a little, and as it swung back
and forth in the wind revealed the glaring panorama of the desert--a
blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here
and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged-blue outline
of the mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds--“I
remember, when I was a little fellow I used to be very sensitive about
it. I don’t think it exactly displeased me, or that I would have had it
otherwise if I could, but it seemed to me like a birthmark, or something
not to be lightly spoken of. People were naturally always fonder of
Ad than of me, and I used to feel the chill of reflected light pretty
often. It came into even my relations with my mother. Ad went abroad to
study when he was absurdly young, you know, and mother was all broken
up over it. She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was sort of
generally understood among us that she’d have made burnt offerings of us
all for Ad any day. I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone
on the porch in the summer dusk she used sometimes to call me to her and
turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and
kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance.”

“Poor little chap,” said Katharine, and her tone was a trifle huskier
than usual. “How fond people have always been of Adriance! Now tell me
the latest news of him. I haven’t heard, except through the press, for
a year or more. He was in Algeria then, in the valley of the Chelif,
riding horseback night and day in an Arabian costume, and in his
usual enthusiastic fashion he had quite made up his mind to adopt the
Mohammedan faith and become as nearly an Arab as possible. How many
countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder? Probably he was playing
Arab to himself all the time. I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke
in Florence once for weeks together.”

“Oh, that’s Adriance,” chuckled Everett. “He is himself barely long
enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn’t hear
from him while he was an Arab; I missed that.”

“He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it must be in
the publisher’s hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his
letter, and have lost touch with him.”

Everett drew a letter from his pocket. “This came about a month ago.
It’s chiefly about his new opera, which is to be brought out in London
next winter. Read it at your leisure.”

“I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure you will
come again. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever you like; but if
there is anything new in the world, in mercy let me hear it. For nine
months I have heard nothing but ‘The Baggage Coach Ahead’ and ‘She Is My
Baby’s Mother.’”

He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his
remarkable physical likeness to his brother and trying to discover in
just what it consisted. She told herself that it was very much as though
a sculptor’s finished work had been rudely copied in wood. He was of
a larger build than Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy,
while those of his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was
of the same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by
continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April color,
but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance’s were always
points of highlight, and always meaning another thing than the thing
they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why this earnest man should
so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face that was as gay as his
was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though
his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so
mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words. A
contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and of her
affections, had once said to him that the shepherd boys who sang in the
Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde; and the
comparison had been appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred
to quote.


As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that
night, he was a victim to random recollections. His infatuation for
Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his
boyish love affairs, and had long disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was
painfully timid in everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt
had withdrawn him from the society of women. The fact that it was all so
done and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her
life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and loss. He
bethought himself of something he had read about “sitting by the hearth
and remembering the faces of women without desire,” and felt himself an
octogenarian.

He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his
brother’s studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he
had wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He
had sat there in the box while his brother and Katharine were called
back again and again after the last number, watching the roses go up
over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano,
brooding, in his sullen boy’s heart, upon the pride those two felt in
each other’s work--spurring each other to their best and beautifully
contending in song. The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering line
drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame set about
those splendid children of genius. He walked back to his hotel alone
and sat in his window staring out on Madison Square until long after
midnight, resolving to beat no more at doors that he could never enter
and realizing more keenly than ever before how far this glorious world
of beautiful creations lay from the paths of men like himself. He told
himself that he had in common with this woman only the baser uses of
life.

Everett’s week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of
release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of
the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging
him to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his
business engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord’s
ponies, or fishing in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his
room writing letters or reading. In the afternoon he was usually at his
post of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions
about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the
compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played
the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a
stopgap all his life. He remembered going through a looking glass
labyrinth when he was a boy and trying gallery after gallery, only at
every turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was not
his own, but his brother’s. No matter what his mission, east or west,
by land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother’s
business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining
current of Adriance Hilgarde’s. It was not the first time that his duty
had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his
brother’s imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no
attempt to analyze the situation or to state it in exact terms; but
he felt Katharine Gaylord’s need for him, and he accepted it as a
commission from his brother to help this woman to die. Day by day he
felt her demands on him grow more imperious, her need for him grow more
acute and positive; and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation
to her his own individuality played a smaller and smaller part. His
power to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with
his brother’s life. He understood all that his physical resemblance
meant to her. He knew that she sat by him always watching for some
common trick of gesture, some familiar play of expression, some illusion
of light and shadow, in which he should seem wholly Adriance. He knew
that she lived upon this and that her disease fed upon it; that it sent
shudders of remembrance through her and that in the exhaustion which
followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet and
dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine garden,
and not of bitterness and death.

The question which most perplexed him was, “How much shall I know? How
much does she wish me to know?” A few days after his first meeting with
Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother to write her. He had merely
said that she was mortally ill; he could depend on Adriance to say the
right thing--that was a part of his gift. Adriance always said not
only the right thing, but the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His
phrases took the color of the moment and the then-present condition, so
that they never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He
always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion
of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing, the
opportune, graceful, exquisite thing--except, when he did very cruel
things--bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his,
just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful;
lavishing upon those near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich
nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were
no longer near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance’s gift.

Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily
call at the gaily painted ranch house, he found Katharine laughing like
a schoolgirl. “Have you ever thought,” she said, as he entered the
music room, “how much these seances of ours are like Heine’s ‘Florentine
Nights,’ except that I don’t give you an opportunity to monopolize the
conversation as Heine did?” She held his hand longer than usual, as
she greeted him, and looked searchingly up into his face. “You are the
kindest man living; the kindest,” she added, softly.

Everett’s gray face colored faintly as he drew his hand away, for
he felt that this time she was looking at him and not at a whimsical
caricature of his brother. “Why, what have I done now?” he asked,
lamely. “I can’t remember having sent you any stale candy or champagne
since yesterday.”

She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a
book and held it out, smiling. “You got him to write it. Don’t say you
didn’t, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was
a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with
the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you
didn’t know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata,
the most ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me
directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the letter;
I think you would better read it aloud to me.”

Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window seat in which she
reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter,
his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that
it was a long one--wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance,
who was tender with his valet and his stable boy, with his old gondolier
and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.

The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the
fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy, with the warm
fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running
water, as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago.
The sky was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful
Moorish arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had
sketched an outline of them on the margin of his notepaper. The
subtleties of Arabic decoration had cast an unholy spell over him,
and the brutal exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily
forgotten. The Alhambra itself had, from the first, seemed perfectly
familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court,
sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode into
Andalusia. The letter was full of confidences about his work, and
delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and comradeship, and
of her own work, still so warmly remembered and appreciatively discussed
everywhere he went.

As Everett folded the letter he felt that Adriance had divined the thing
needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was
consistently egotistical and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing,
yet it was just what she had wanted. A strong realization of his
brother’s charm and intensity and power came over him; he felt the
breath of that whirlwind of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming
all in his path, and himself even more resolutely than he consumed
others. Then he looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay
before him. “Like him, isn’t it?” she said, quietly.

“I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see him next you
can do that for me. I want you to tell him many things for me, yet they
can all be summed up in this: I want him to grow wholly into his best
and greatest self, even at the cost of the dear boyishness that is half
his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?”

“I know perfectly well what you mean,” answered Everett, thoughtfully.
“I have often felt so about him myself. And yet it’s difficult to
prescribe for those fellows; so little makes, so little mars.”

Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with
feverish earnestness. “Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean;
his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they
take him at their own estimate. He can kindle marble, strike fire from
putty, but is it worth what it costs him?”

“Come, come,” expostulated Everett, alarmed at her excitement. “Where is
the new sonata? Let him speak for himself.”

He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was
indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the most
ambitious work he had done up to that time and marked the transition
from his purely lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett played
intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems
peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything
in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.

“How he has grown!” she cried. “What the three last years have done for
him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the
tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the soul. This is the
tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my
tragedy, as I lie here spent by the racecourse, listening to the feet of
the runners as they pass me. Ah, God! The swift feet of the runners!”

She turned her face away and covered it with her straining hands.
Everett crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. In all
the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an occasional
ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat. Her
courage had become a point of pride with him, and to see it going
sickened him.

“Don’t do it,” he gasped. “I can’t stand it, I really can’t, I feel it
too much. We mustn’t speak of that; it’s too tragic and too vast.”

When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old,
brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not
shed. “No, I won’t be so ungenerous; I will save that for the watches
of the night when I have no better company. Now you may mix me another
drink of some sort. Formerly, when it was not _if_ I should ever sing
Brunnhilde, but quite simply when I _should_ sing Brunnhilde, I was
always starving myself and thinking what I might drink and what I might
not. But broken music boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no
one cares whether they lose their figure. Run over that theme at the
beginning again. That, at least, is not new. It was running in his head
when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at
the dinner table. He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn
came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him, and he decided
to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch with the theme during
his illness. Do you remember those frightful days? All the people who
have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself! When
I got word from Florence that he had been ill I was in Nice filling
a concert engagement. His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I
reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had
taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the
library--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture
and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,
looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, you
know. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking jacket
lent no color to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill
he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the
last strokes to the score of his _Souvenirs d’Automne_. He was as I
most like to remember him: so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he
usually is, but just contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness
that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain poured
down in torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and
sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls of
that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me! There were
no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard
features of the bronze Dante, like the reflection of purgatorial flames,
and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated
the gloom at all, Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness
of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire
and suffer to make up one such life as his. Somehow the wind with all
its world-pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes,
and the wave came up in both of us at once--that awful, vague, universal
pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope--and we were
like two clinging together on a spar in midocean after the shipwreck of
everything. Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind
that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights,
announcing that Madam had returned, _‘and in the book we read no more
that night.’_”

She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with the hard,
bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a
glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn like a mask through so
many years, had gradually changed even the lines of her face completely,
and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing
critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself. Everett dropped
his head upon his hand and sat looking at the rug. “How much you have
cared!” he said.

“Ah, yes, I cared,” she replied, closing her eyes with a long-drawn sigh
of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went on: “You can’t imagine
what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is
to be able to tell it to someone. I used to want to shriek it out to the
world in the long nights when I could not sleep. It seemed to me that I
could not die with it. It demanded some sort of expression. And now that
you know, you would scarcely believe how much less sharp the anguish of
it is.”

Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. “I was not sure how
much you wanted me to know,” he said.

“Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your
face, when you came that day with Charley. I flatter myself that I have
been able to conceal it when I chose, though I suppose women always
think that. The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people
are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little
before we begin to discern. But I wanted you to know; you are so like
him that it is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now
that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his
compassion, for we none of us dare pity the dead. Since it was what my
life has chiefly meant, I should like him to know. On the whole I am not
ashamed of it. I have fought a good fight.”

“And has he never known at all?” asked Everett, in a thick voice.

“Oh! Never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomed
to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he
doesn’t find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some
discourtesy and is miserable about it. He has a genuine fondness for
everyone who is not stupid or gloomy, or old or preternaturally ugly.
Granted youth and cheerfulness, and a moderate amount of wit and some
tact, and Adriance will always be glad to see you coming around the
corner. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries
and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic;
we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our turns. It was his
kindness that was hardest. I have pretty well used my life up at
standing punishment.”

“Don’t; you’ll make me hate him,” groaned Everett.

Katharine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. “It wasn’t
in the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of
it. Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to
him, and I drank my doom greedily enough.”

Everett rose and stood hesitating. “I think I must go. You ought to be
quiet, and I don’t think I can hear any more just now.”

She put out her hand and took his playfully. “You’ve put in three weeks
at this sort of thing, haven’t you? Well, it may never be to your glory
in this world, perhaps, but it’s been the mercy of heaven to me, and it
ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be.”

Everett knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: “I stayed because I wanted
to be with you, that’s all. I have never cared about other women since I
met you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and
I could not leave you if I would.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. “No, no; don’t
tell me that. I have seen enough of tragedy, God knows. Don’t show me
any more just as the curtain is going down. No, no, it was only a boy’s
fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it
for a moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. If some fancy of
that sort had been left over from boyhood, this would rid you of it,
and that were well. Now go, and you will come again tomorrow, as long as
there are tomorrows, will you not?” She took his hand with a smile that
lifted the mask from her soul, that was both courage and despair, and
full of infinite loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:

     For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;
     If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
     If not, why then, this parting was well made.

The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he
went out.

On the night of Adriance Hilgarde’s opening concert in Paris Everett sat
by the bed in the ranch house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle
that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it
forever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left
already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious
animal life were left to do battle with death. She labored under a
delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the
Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work.
When she aroused from her stupor it was only to ask the porter to waken
her half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate with him about
the delays and the roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the
nurse were left alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a
couch outside the door. Everett sat looking at the sputtering night lamp
until it made his eyes ache. His head dropped forward on the foot of the
bed, and he sank into a heavy, distressful slumber. He was dreaming of
Adriance’s concert in Paris, and of Adriance, the troubadour, smiling
and debonair, with his boyish face and the touch of silver gray in
his hair. He heard the applause and he saw the roses going up over the
footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, and the
petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the floor. Down
this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his
prima donna by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish eyes.

The nurse touched him on the shoulder; he started and awoke. She
screened the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake
and conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm
and began to fan her. She laid her hands lightly on his hair and looked
into his face with eyes that seemed never to have wept or doubted. “Ah,
dear Adriance, dear, dear,” she whispered.

Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of
art was over for Katharine.

Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the
westbound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had
nothing to say to each other. Everett’s bags were piled on the truck,
and his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he
gazed again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord’s
impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close,
had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the
wrench of farewell.

As the train pulled in Everett wrung Gaylord’s hand among the crowd of
alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, en route
to the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast
during the stop. Everett heard an exclamation in a broad German dialect,
and a massive woman whose figure persistently escaped from her stays in
the most improbable places rushed up to him, her blond hair disordered
by the wind, and glowing with joyful surprise she caught his coat sleeve
with her tightly gloved hands.

“_Herr Gott_, Adriance, _lieber Freund_,” she cried, emotionally.

Everett quickly withdrew his arm and lifted his hat, blushing. “Pardon
me, madam, but I see that you have mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde.
I am his brother,” he said quietly, and turning from the crestfallen
singer, he hurried into the car.



The Garden Lodge

When Caroline Noble’s friends learned that Raymond d’Esquerre was to
spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill his
engagement for the London opera season, they considered it another
striking instance of the perversity of things. That the month was May,
and the most mild and florescent of all the blue-and-white Mays the
middle coast had known in years, but added to their sense of wrong.
D’Esquerre, they learned, was ensconced in the lodge in the apple
orchard, just beyond Caroline’s glorious garden, and report went that
at almost any hour the sound of the tenor’s voice and of Caroline’s
crashing accompaniment could be heard floating through the open windows,
out among the snowy apple boughs. The Sound, steel-blue and dotted with
white sails, was splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge. The
garden to the left and the orchard to the right had never been so
riotous with spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to
accommodate Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to whom
the witchery of Freya could be attributed; the last woman, as her
friends affirmed, to at all adequately appreciate and make the most of
such a setting for the great tenor.

Of course, they admitted, Caroline was musical--well, she ought to
be!--but in that, as in everything, she was paramountly cool-headed,
slow of impulse, and disgustingly practical; in that, as in everything
else, she had herself so provokingly well in hand. Of course, it would
be she, always mistress of herself in any situation, she, who would
never be lifted one inch from the ground by it, and who would go on
superintending her gardeners and workmen as usual--it would be she who
got him. Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why she
did get him, and it but nettled them the more.

Caroline’s coolness, her capableness, her general success, especially
exasperated people because they felt that, for the most part, she
had made herself what she was; that she had cold-bloodedly set about
complying with the demands of life and making her position comfortable
and masterful. That was why, everyone said, she had married Howard
Noble. Women who did not get through life so well as Caroline, who could
not make such good terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did
not find their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well,
or manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all they
did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, and called her
hard.

The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite policy, which
Caroline gave, was far from a false one; but there was this to be said
for her--that there were extenuating circumstances which her friends
could not know.

If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she was apt to
regard with distrust everything which inclined toward extravagance, it
was not because she was unacquainted with other standards than her own,
or had never seen another side of life. She had grown up in Brooklyn,
in a shabby little house under the vacillating administration of her
father, a music teacher who usually neglected his duties to write
orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have no especial
need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile
self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labor that
brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labor that brought him
only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the
orchestra everything under heaven except melody.

It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in. The mother, who
idolized her husband as the music lord of the future, was left to a
lifelong battle with broom and dustpan, to neverending conciliatory
overtures to the butcher and grocer, to the making of her own gowns
and of Caroline’s, and to the delicate task of mollifying Auguste’s
neglected pupils.

The son, Heinrich, a painter, Caroline’s only brother, had inherited all
his father’s vindictive sensitiveness without his capacity for slavish
application. His little studio on the third floor had been much
frequented by young men as unsuccessful as himself, who met there to
give themselves over to contemptuous derision of this or that artist
whose industry and stupidity had won him recognition. Heinrich, when he
worked at all, did newspaper sketches at twenty-five dollars a week. He
was too indolent and vacillating to set himself seriously to his art,
too irascible and poignantly self-conscious to make a living, too much
addicted to lying late in bed, to the incontinent reading of poetry, and
to the use of chloral to be anything very positive except painful. At
twenty-six he shot himself in a frenzy, and the whole wretched affair
had effectually shattered his mother’s health and brought on the decline
of which she died. Caroline had been fond of him, but she felt a certain
relief when he no longer wandered about the little house, commenting
ironically upon its shabbiness, a Turkish cap on his head and a
cigarette hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers.

After her mother’s death Caroline assumed the management of that
bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste’s
pupils had been frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and
the general atmosphere of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste
himself was writing a symphonic poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory
of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she was called upon to face
this tangle of difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly.
The house had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague,
distressing, unsatisfied yearnings had brought it low enough. Her
mother, thirty years before, had eloped and left Germany with her music
teacher, to give herself over to lifelong, drudging bondage at the
kitchen range. Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the house
had been a sort of mystic worship of things distant, intangible and
unattainable. The family had lived in successive ebullitions of generous
enthusiasm, in talk of masters and masterpieces, only to come down to
the cold facts in the case; to boiled mutton and to the necessity of
turning the dining-room carpet. All these emotional pyrotechnics had
ended in petty jealousies, in neglected duties, and in cowardly fear of
the little grocer on the corner.

From her childhood she had hated it, that humiliating and uncertain
existence, with its glib tongue and empty pockets, its poetic ideals and
sordid realities, its indolence and poverty tricked out in paper roses.
Even as a little girl, when vague dreams beset her, when she wanted to
lie late in bed and commune with visions, or to leap and sing because
the sooty little trees along the street were putting out their first
pale leaves in the sunshine, she would clench her hands and go to
help her mother sponge the spots from her father’s waistcoat or press
Heinrich’s trousers. Her mother never permitted the slightest question
concerning anything Auguste or Heinrich saw fit to do, but from the
time Caroline could reason at all she could not help thinking that many
things went wrong at home. She knew, for example, that her father’s
pupils ought not to be kept waiting half an hour while he discussed
Schopenhauer with some bearded socialist over a dish of herrings and a
spotted tablecloth. She knew that Heinrich ought not to give a dinner on
Heine’s birthday, when the laundress had not been paid for a month and
when he frequently had to ask his mother for carfare. Certainly Caroline
had served her apprenticeship to idealism and to all the embarrassing
inconsistencies which it sometimes entails, and she decided to deny
herself this diffuse, ineffectual answer to the sharp questions of life.

When she came into the control of herself and the house she refused
to proceed any further with her musical education. Her father, who had
intended to make a concert pianist of her, set this down as another
item in his long list of disappointments and his grievances against
the world. She was young and pretty, and she had worn turned gowns and
soiled gloves and improvised hats all her life. She wanted the luxury of
being like other people, of being honest from her hat to her boots, of
having nothing to hide, not even in the matter of stockings, and she was
willing to work for it. She rented a little studio away from that house
of misfortune and began to give lessons. She managed well and was the
sort of girl people liked to help. The bills were paid and Auguste went
on composing, growing indignant only when she refused to insist that
her pupils should study his compositions for the piano. She began to
get engagements in New York to play accompaniments at song recitals.
She dressed well, made herself agreeable, and gave herself a chance.
She never permitted herself to look further than a step ahead, and set
herself with all the strength of her will to see things as they are and
meet them squarely in the broad day. There were two things she feared
even more than poverty: the part of one that sets up an idol and the
part of one that bows down and worships it.

When Caroline was twenty-four she married Howard Noble, then a widower
of forty, who had been for ten years a power in Wall Street. Then, for
the first time, she had paused to take breath. It took a substantialness
as unquestionable as his; his money, his position, his energy, the big
vigor of his robust person, to satisfy her that she was entirely safe.
Then she relaxed a little, feeling that there was a barrier to be
counted upon between her and that world of visions and quagmires and
failure.

Caroline had been married for six years when Raymond d’Esquerre came
to stay with them. He came chiefly because Caroline was what she was;
because he, too, felt occasionally the need of getting out of Klingsor’s
garden, of dropping down somewhere for a time near a quiet nature, a
cool head, a strong hand. The hours he had spent in the garden lodge
were hours of such concentrated study as, in his fevered life, he seldom
got in anywhere. She had, as he told Noble, a fine appreciation of the
seriousness of work.

One evening two weeks after d’Esquerre had sailed, Caroline was in the
library giving her husband an account of the work she had laid out for
the gardeners. She superintended the care of the grounds herself. Her
garden, indeed, had become quite a part of her; a sort of beautiful
adjunct, like gowns or jewels. It was a famous spot, and Noble was very
proud of it.

“What do you think, Caroline, of having the garden lodge torn down and
putting a new summer house there at the end of the arbor; a big rustic
affair where you could have tea served in midsummer?” he asked.

“The lodge?” repeated Caroline looking at him quickly. “Why, that seems
almost a shame, doesn’t it, after d’Esquerre has used it?”

Noble put down his book with a smile of amusement.

“Are you going to be sentimental about it? Why, I’d sacrifice the whole
place to see that come to pass. But I don’t believe you could do it for
an hour together.”

“I don’t believe so, either,” said his wife, smiling.

Noble took up his book again and Caroline went into the music room to
practice. She was not ready to have the lodge torn down. She had gone
there for a quiet hour every day during the two weeks since d’Esquerre
had left them. It was the sheerest sentiment she had ever permitted
herself. She was ashamed of it, but she was childishly unwilling to let
it go.

Caroline went to bed soon after her husband, but she was not able to
sleep. The night was close and warm, presaging storm. The wind had
fallen, and the water slept, fixed and motionless as the sand. She rose
and thrust her feet into slippers and, putting a dressing gown over
her shoulders, opened the door of her husband’s room; he was sleeping
soundly. She went into the hall and down the stairs; then, leaving the
house through a side door, stepped into the vine-covered arbor that led
to the garden lodge. The scent of the June roses was heavy in the still
air, and the stones that paved the path felt pleasantly cool through the
thin soles of her slippers. Heat-lightning flashed continuously from the
bank of clouds that had gathered over the sea, but the shore was flooded
with moonlight and, beyond, the rim of the Sound lay smooth and shining.
Caroline had the key of the lodge, and the door creaked as she opened
it. She stepped into the long, low room radiant with the moonlight which
streamed through the bow window and lay in a silvery pool along the
waxed floor. Even that part of the room which lay in the shadow was
vaguely illuminated; the piano, the tall candlesticks, the picture
frames and white casts standing out as clearly in the half-light as
did the sycamores and black poplars of the garden against the still,
expectant night sky. Caroline sat down to think it all over. She had
come here to do just that every day of the two weeks since d’Esquerre’s
departure, but, far from ever having reached a conclusion, she had
succeeded only in losing her way in a maze of memories--sometimes
bewilderingly confused, sometimes too acutely distinct--where there was
neither path, nor clue, nor any hope of finality. She had, she realized,
defeated a lifelong regimen; completely confounded herself by falling
unaware and incontinently into that luxury of reverie which, even as
a little girl, she had so determinedly denied herself, she had been
developing with alarming celerity that part of one which sets up an idol
and that part of one which bows down and worships it.

It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d’Esquerre to come
at all. She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in
self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of him
which had always troubled and perplexed her. She knew that she had
reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to so much
that she had never really doubted she would be equal to this. She had
come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her own malleability and
endurance; she had done so much with herself that she had come to think
that there was nothing which she could not do; like swimmers, overbold,
who reckon upon their strength and their power to hoard it, forgetting
the ever-changing moods of their adversary, the sea.

And d’Esquerre was a man to reckon with. Caroline did not deceive
herself now upon that score. She admitted it humbly enough, and since
she had said good-by to him she had not been free for a moment from
the sense of his formidable power. It formed the undercurrent of her
consciousness; whatever she might be doing or thinking, it went on,
involuntarily, like her breathing, sometimes welling up until suddenly
she found herself suffocating. There was a moment of this tonight,
and Caroline rose and stood shuddering, looking about her in the blue
duskiness of the silent room. She had not been here at night before, and
the spirit of the place seemed more troubled and insistent than ever it
had in the quiet of the afternoons. Caroline brushed her hair back from
her damp forehead and went over to the bow window. After raising it
she sat down upon the low seat. Leaning her head against the sill, and
loosening her nightgown at the throat, she half-closed her eyes
and looked off into the troubled night, watching the play of the
heat-lightning upon the massing clouds between the pointed tops of the
poplars.

Yes, she knew, she knew well enough, of what absurdities this spell was
woven; she mocked, even while she winced. His power, she knew, lay not
so much in anything that he actually had--though he had so much--or
in anything that he actually was, but in what he suggested, in what he
seemed picturesque enough to have or be and that was just anything
that one chose to believe or to desire. His appeal was all the more
persuasive and alluring in that it was to the imagination alone, in that
it was as indefinite and impersonal as those cults of idealism which
so have their way with women. What he had was that, in his mere
personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that something
without which--to women--life is no better than sawdust, and to the
desire for which most of their mistakes and tragedies and astonishingly
poor bargains are due.

D’Esquerre had become the center of a movement, and the Metropolitan
had become the temple of a cult. When he could be induced to cross the
Atlantic, the opera season in New York was successful; when he
could not, the management lost money; so much everyone knew. It was
understood, too, that his superb art had disproportionately little to do
with his peculiar position. Women swayed the balance this way or that;
the opera, the orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a
cost, were but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes
and even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the mere
mechanics of the beautiful illusion.

Caroline understood all this; tonight was not the first time that she
had put it to herself so. She had seen the same feeling in other people,
watched for it in her friends, studied it in the house night after night
when he sang, candidly putting herself among a thousand others.

D’Esquerre’s arrival in the early winter was the signal for a feminine
hegira toward New York. On the nights when he sang women flocked to
the Metropolitan from mansions and hotels, from typewriter desks,
schoolrooms, shops, and fitting rooms. They were of all conditions
and complexions. Women of the world who accepted him knowingly as they
sometimes took champagne for its agreeable effect; sisters of charity
and overworked shopgirls, who received him devoutly; withered women who
had taken doctorate degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism
spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt
afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all
entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues
of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped
upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering
the pack again.

There were the maimed, even; those who came on crutches, who were pitted
by smallpox or grotesquely painted by cruel birth stains. These, too,
entered with him into enchantment. Stout matrons became slender girls
again; worn spinsters felt their cheeks flush with the tenderness of
their lost youth. Young and old, however hideous, however fair, they
yielded up their heat--whether quick or latent--sat hungering for the
mystic bread wherewith he fed them at this eucharist of sentiment.

Sometimes, when the house was crowded from the orchestra to the last row
of the gallery, when the air was charged with this ecstasy of fancy,
he himself was the victim of the burning reflection of his power. They
acted upon him in turn; he felt their fervent and despairing appeal to
him; it stirred him as the spring drives the sap up into an old tree;
he, too, burst into bloom. For the moment he, too, believed again,
desired again, he knew not what, but something.

But it was not in these exalted moments that Caroline had learned to
fear him most. It was in the quiet, tired reserve, the dullness, even,
that kept him company between these outbursts that she found that
exhausting drain upon her sympathies which was the very pith
and substance of their alliance. It was the tacit admission of
disappointment under all this glamour of success--the helplessness of
the enchanter to at all enchant himself--that awoke in her an illogical,
womanish desire to in some way compensate, to make it up to him.

She had observed drastically to herself that it was her eighteenth year
he awoke in her--those hard years she had spent in turning gowns and
placating tradesmen, and which she had never had time to live. After
all, she reflected, it was better to allow one’s self a little youth--to
dance a little at the carnival and to live these things when they are
natural and lovely, not to have them coming back on one and demanding
arrears when they are humiliating and impossible. She went over tonight
all the catalogue of her self-deprivations; recalled how, in the light
of her father’s example, she had even refused to humor her innocent
taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began to teach, after
her mother’s death, she had struck out one little indulgence after
another, reducing her life to a relentless routine, unvarying as
clockwork. It seemed to her that ever since d’Esquerre first came into
the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that
followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of
life.

The storm had held off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was
stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless. Everything seemed
pervaded by a poignant distress; the hush of feverish, intolerable
expectation. The still earth, the heavy flowers, even the growing
darkness, breathed the exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt
that she ought to go; that it was wrong to stay; that the hour and the
place were as treacherous as her own reflections. She rose and began to
pace the floor, stepping softly, as though in fear of awakening someone,
her figure, in its thin drapery, diaphanously vague and white. Still
unable to shake off the obsession of the intense stillness, she sat down
at the piano and began to run over the first act of the _Walkure_, the
last of his roles they had practiced together; playing listlessly and
absently at first, but with gradually increasing seriousness. Perhaps it
was the still heat of the summer night, perhaps it was the heavy odors
from the garden that came in through the open windows; but as she played
there grew and grew the feeling that he was there, beside her, standing
in his accustomed place. In the duet at the end of the first act she
heard him clearly: _“Thou art the Spring for which I sighed in Winter’s
cold embraces.”_ Once as he sang it, he had put his arm about her,
his one hand under her heart, while with the other he took her right
from the keyboard, holding her as he always held _Sieglinde_ when he
drew her toward the window. She had been wonderfully the mistress of
herself at the time; neither repellent nor acquiescent. She remembered
that she had rather exulted, then, in her self-control--which he had
seemed to take for granted, though there was perhaps the whisper of a
question from the hand under her heart. _“Thou art the Spring for which
I sighed in Winter’s cold embraces.”_ Caroline lifted her hands quickly
from the keyboard, and she bowed her head in them, sobbing.

The storm broke and the rain beat in, spattering her nightdress until
she rose and lowered the windows. She dropped upon the couch and began
fighting over again the battles of other days, while the ghosts of the
slain rose as from a sowing of dragon’s teeth, The shadows of things,
always so scorned and flouted, bore down upon her merciless and
triumphant. It was not enough; this happy, useful, well-ordered life
was not enough. It did not satisfy, it was not even real. No, the other
things, the shadows-they were the realities. Her father, poor Heinrich,
even her mother, who had been able to sustain her poor romance and keep
her little illusions amid the tasks of a scullion, were nearer happiness
than she. Her sure foundation was but made ground, after all, and the
people in Klingsor’s garden were more fortunate, however barren the
sands from which they conjured their paradise.

The lodge was still and silent; her fit of weeping over, Caroline
made no sound, and within the room, as without in the garden, was the
blackness of storm. Only now and then a flash of lightning showed a
woman’s slender figure rigid on the couch, her face buried in her hands.

Toward morning, when the occasional rumbling of thunder was heard no
more and the beat of the raindrops upon the orchard leaves was steadier,
she fell asleep and did not waken until the first red streaks of dawn
shone through the twisted boughs of the apple trees. There was a moment
between world and world, when, neither asleep nor awake, she felt her
dream grow thin, melting away from her, felt the warmth under her heart
growing cold. Something seemed to slip from the clinging hold of her
arms, and she groaned protestingly through her parted lips, following
it a little way with fluttering hands. Then her eyes opened wide and she
sprang up and sat holding dizzily to the cushions of the couch, staring
down at her bare, cold feet, at her laboring breast, rising and falling
under her open nightdress.

The dream was gone, but the feverish reality of it still pervaded her
and she held it as the vibrating string holds a tone. In the last hour
the shadows had had their way with Caroline. They had shown her the
nothingness of time and space, of system and discipline, of closed doors
and broad waters. Shuddering, she thought of the Arabian fairy tale in
which the genie brought the princess of China to the sleeping prince
of Damascus and carried her through the air back to her palace at dawn.
Caroline closed her eyes and dropped her elbows weakly upon her knees,
her shoulders sinking together. The horror was that it had not come
from without, but from within. The dream was no blind chance; it was the
expression of something she had kept so close a prisoner that she had
never seen it herself, it was the wail from the donjon deeps when the
watch slept. Only as the outcome of such a night of sorcery could the
thing have been loosed to straighten its limbs and measure itself with
her; so heavy were the chains upon it, so many a fathom deep, it was
crushed down into darkness. The fact that d’Esquerre happened to be on
the other side of the world meant nothing; had he been here, beside her,
it could scarcely have hurt her self-respect so much. As it was, she was
without even the extenuation of an outer impulse, and she could scarcely
have despised herself more had she come to him here in the night three
weeks ago and thrown herself down upon the stone slab at the door there.

Caroline rose unsteadily and crept guiltily from the lodge and along the
path under the arbor, terrified lest the servants should be stirring,
trembling with the chill air, while the wet shrubbery, brushing against
her, drenched her nightdress until it clung about her limbs.

At breakfast her husband looked across the table at her with concern.
“It seems to me that you are looking rather fagged, Caroline. It was a
beastly night to sleep. Why don’t you go up to the mountains until this
hot weather is over? By the way, were you in earnest about letting the
lodge stand?”

Caroline laughed quietly. “No, I find I was not very serious. I haven’t
sentiment enough to forego a summer house. Will you tell Baker to come
tomorrow to talk it over with me? If we are to have a house party, I
should like to put him to work on it at once.”

Noble gave her a glance, half-humorous, half-vexed. “Do you know I am
rather disappointed?” he said. “I had almost hoped that, just for once,
you know, you would be a little bit foolish.”

“Not now that I’ve slept over it,” replied Caroline, and they both rose
from the table, laughing.



The Marriage of Phaedra

The sequence of events was such that MacMaster did not make his
pilgrimage to Hugh Treffinger’s studio until three years after that
painter’s death. MacMaster was himself a painter, an American of the
Gallicized type, who spent his winters in New York, his summers in
Paris, and no inconsiderable amount of time on the broad waters between.
He had often contemplated stopping in London on one of his return trips
in the late autumn, but he had always deferred leaving Paris until the
prick of necessity drove him home by the quickest and shortest route.

Treffinger was a comparatively young man at the time of his death, and
there had seemed no occasion for haste until haste was of no avail.
Then, possibly, though there had been some correspondence between them,
MacMaster felt certain qualms about meeting in the flesh a man who in
the flesh was so diversely reported. His intercourse with Treffinger’s
work had been so deep and satisfying, so apart from other appreciations,
that he rather dreaded a critical juncture of any sort. He had always
felt himself singularly inept in personal relations, and in this case he
had avoided the issue until it was no longer to be feared or hoped for.
There still remained, however, Treffinger’s great unfinished picture,
the _Marriage of Phaedra_, which had never left his studio, and of which
MacMaster’s friends had now and again brought report that it was the
painter’s most characteristic production.

The young man arrived in London in the evening, and the next morning
went out to Kensington to find Treffinger’s studio. It lay in one of the
perplexing bystreets off Holland Road, and the number he found on a
door set in a high garden wall, the top of which was covered with broken
green glass and over which a budding lilac bush nodded. Treffinger’s
plate was still there, and a card requesting visitors to ring for the
attendant. In response to MacMaster’s ring, the door was opened by a
cleanly built little man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that
had been made for an ampler figure. He had a fresh complexion, eyes of
that common uncertain shade of gray, and was closely shaven except for
the incipient muttonchops on his ruddy cheeks. He bore himself in
a manner strikingly capable, and there was a sort of trimness and
alertness about him, despite the too-generous shoulders of his coat. In
one hand he held a bulldog pipe, and in the other a copy of _Sporting
Life_. While MacMaster was explaining the purpose of his call he noticed
that the man surveyed him critically, though not impertinently. He was
admitted into a little tank of a lodge made of whitewashed stone, the
back door and windows opening upon a garden. A visitor’s book and a pile
of catalogues lay on a deal table, together with a bottle of ink and
some rusty pens. The wall was ornamented with photographs and colored
prints of racing favorites.

“The studio is h’only open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays,”
 explained the man--he referred to himself as “Jymes”--“but of course we
make exceptions in the case of pynters. Lydy Elling Treffinger ‘erself
is on the Continent, but Sir ‘Ugh’s orders was that pynters was to ‘ave
the run of the place.” He selected a key from his pocket and threw open
the door into the studio which, like the lodge, was built against the
wall of the garden.

MacMaster entered a long, narrow room, built of smoothed planks, painted
a light green; cold and damp even on that fine May morning. The room was
utterly bare of furniture--unless a stepladder, a model throne, and a
rack laden with large leather portfolios could be accounted such--and
was windowless, without other openings than the door and the skylight,
under which hung the unfinished picture itself. MacMaster had never
seen so many of Treffinger’s paintings together. He knew the painter
had married a woman with money and had been able to keep such of
his pictures as he wished. These, with all of his replicas and
studies, he had left as a sort of common legacy to the younger men of
the school he had originated.

As soon as he was left alone MacMaster sat down on the edge of the model
throne before the unfinished picture. Here indeed was what he had come
for; it rather paralyzed his receptivity for the moment, but gradually
the thing found its way to him.

At one o’clock he was standing before the collection of studies done for
_Boccaccio’s Garden_ when he heard a voice at his elbow.

“Pardon, sir, but I was just about to lock up and go to lunch. Are
you lookin’ for the figure study of Boccaccio ‘imself?” James queried
respectfully. “Lydy Elling Treffinger give it to Mr. Rossiter to take
down to Oxford for some lectures he’s been agiving there.”

“Did he never paint out his studies, then?” asked MacMaster with
perplexity. “Here are two completed ones for this picture. Why did he
keep them?”

“I don’t know as I could say as to that, sir,” replied James, smiling
indulgently, “but that was ‘is way. That is to say, ‘e pynted out very
frequent, but ‘e always made two studies to stand; one in watercolors
and one in oils, before ‘e went at the final picture--to say nothink
of all the pose studies ‘e made in pencil before he begun on the
composition proper at all. He was that particular. You see, ‘e wasn’t so
keen for the final effect as for the proper pyntin’ of ‘is pictures. ‘E
used to say they ought to be well made, the same as any other h’article
of trade. I can lay my ‘and on the pose studies for you, sir.” He
rummaged in one of the portfolios and produced half a dozen drawings,
“These three,” he continued, “was discarded; these two was the pose he
finally accepted; this one without alteration, as it were.”

“That’s in Paris, as I remember,” James continued reflectively. “It went
with the _Saint Cecilia_ into the Baron H---‘s collection. Could you
tell me, sir, ‘as ‘e it still? I don’t like to lose account of them, but
some ‘as changed ‘ands since Sir ‘Ugh’s death.”

“H---‘s collection is still intact, I believe,” replied MacMaster. “You
were with Treffinger long?”

“From my boyhood, sir,” replied James with gravity. “I was a stable boy
when ‘e took me.”

“You were his man, then?”

“That’s it, sir. Nobody else ever done anything around the studio.
I always mixed ‘is colors and ‘e taught me to do a share of the
varnishin’; ‘e said as ‘ow there wasn’t a ‘ouse in England as could
do it proper. You ayn’t looked at the _Marriage_ yet, sir?” he asked
abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating with his
thumb the picture under the north light.

“Not very closely. I prefer to begin with something simpler; that’s
rather appalling, at first glance,” replied MacMaster.

“Well may you say that, sir,” said James warmly. “That one regular
killed Sir ‘Ugh; it regular broke ‘im up, and nothink will ever convince
me as ‘ow it didn’t bring on ‘is second stroke.”

When MacMaster walked back to High Street to take his bus his mind was
divided between two exultant convictions. He felt that he had not
only found Treffinger’s greatest picture, but that, in James, he had
discovered a kind of cryptic index to the painter’s personality--a clue
which, if tactfully followed, might lead to much.

Several days after his first visit to the studio, MacMaster wrote to
Lady Mary Percy, telling her that he would be in London for some time
and asking her if he might call. Lady Mary was an only sister of Lady
Ellen Treffinger, the painter’s widow, and MacMaster had known her
during one winter he spent at Nice. He had known her, indeed, very well,
and Lady Mary, who was astonishingly frank and communicative upon
all subjects, had been no less so upon the matter of her sister’s
unfortunate marriage.

In her reply to his note Lady Mary named an afternoon when she would be
alone. She was as good as her word, and when MacMaster arrived he
found the drawing room empty. Lady Mary entered shortly after he was
announced. She was a tall woman, thin and stiffly jointed, and her body
stood out under the folds of her gown with the rigor of cast iron.
This rather metallic suggestion was further carried out in her heavily
knuckled hands, her stiff gray hair, and her long, bold-featured face,
which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.

“Really,” said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and giving him a sort
of military inspection through her nose glasses, “really, I had begun to
fear that I had lost you altogether. It’s four years since I saw you
at Nice, isn’t it? I was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from
you.”

“I was in New York then.”

“It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?”

“Can you ask?” replied MacMaster gallantly.

Lady Mary smiled ironically. “But for what else, incidentally?”

“Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger’s studio and his
unfinished picture. Since I’ve been here, I’ve decided to stay the
summer. I’m even thinking of attempting to do a biography of him.”

“So that is what brought you to London?”

“Not exactly. I had really no intention of anything so serious when I
came. It’s his last picture, I fancy, that has rather thrust it upon me.
The notion has settled down on me like a thing destined.”

“You’ll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a destiny,”
 remarked Lady Mary dryly. “Isn’t there rather a surplus of books on that
subject already?”

“Such as they are. Oh, I’ve read them all”--here MacMaster faced Lady
Mary triumphantly. “He has quite escaped your amiable critics,” he
added, smiling.

“I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not much on
art,” said Lady Mary with tolerant good humor. “We leave that to peoples
who have no physique. Treffinger made a stir for a time, but it
seems that we are not capable of a sustained appreciation of such
extraordinary methods. In the end we go back to the pictures we find
agreeable and unperplexing. He was regarded as an experiment, I fancy;
and now it seems that he was rather an unsuccessful one. If you’ve come
to us in a missionary spirit, we’ll tolerate you politely, but we’ll
laugh in our sleeve, I warn you.”

“That really doesn’t daunt me, Lady Mary,” declared MacMaster blandly.
“As I told you, I’m a man with a mission.”

Lady Mary laughed her hoarse, baritone laugh. “Bravo! And you’ve come to
me for inspiration for your panegyric?”

MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. “Not altogether for that
purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about the advisability
of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the matter. It seems scarcely
legitimate to go on without asking her to give some sort of grace to my
proceedings, yet I feared the whole subject might be painful to her. I
shall rely wholly upon your discretion.”

“I think she would prefer to be consulted,” replied Lady Mary
judicially. “I can’t understand how she endures to have the wretched
affair continually raked up, but she does. She seems to feel a sort of
moral responsibility. Ellen has always been singularly conscientious
about this matter, insofar as her light goes,--which rather puzzles me,
as hers is not exactly a magnanimous nature. She is certainly trying to
do what she believes to be the right thing. I shall write to her, and
you can see her when she returns from Italy.”

“I want very much to meet her. She is, I hope, quite recovered in every
way,” queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.

“No, I can’t say that she is. She has remained in much the same
condition she sank to before his death. He trampled over pretty much
whatever there was in her, I fancy. Women don’t recover from wounds of
that sort--at least, not women of Ellen’s grain. They go on bleeding
inwardly.”

“You, at any rate, have not grown more reconciled,” MacMaster ventured.

“Oh I give him his dues. He was a colorist, I grant you; but that is
a vague and unsatisfactory quality to marry to; Lady Ellen Treffinger
found it so.”

“But, my dear Lady Mary,” expostulated MacMaster, “and just repress me
if I’m becoming too personal--but it must, in the first place, have been
a marriage of choice on her part as well as on his.”

Lady Mary poised her glasses on her large forefinger and assumed an
attitude suggestive of the clinical lecture room as she replied. “Ellen,
my dear boy, is an essentially romantic person. She is quiet about it,
but she runs deep. I never knew how deep until I came against her on the
issue of that marriage. She was always discontented as a girl; she found
things dull and prosaic, and the ardor of his courtship was agreeable
to her. He met her during her first season in town. She is handsome, and
there were plenty of other men, but I grant you your scowling brigand
was the most picturesque of the lot. In his courtship, as in everything
else, he was theatrical to the point of being ridiculous, but Ellen’s
sense of humor is not her strongest quality. He had the charm of
celebrity, the air of a man who could storm his way through anything
to get what he wanted. That sort of vehemence is particularly effective
with women like Ellen, who can be warmed only by reflected heat, and she
couldn’t at all stand out against it. He convinced her of his necessity;
and that done, all’s done.”

“I can’t help thinking that, even on such a basis, the marriage should
have turned out better,” MacMaster remarked reflectively.

“The marriage,” Lady Mary continued with a shrug, “was made on the basis
of a mutual misunderstanding. Ellen, in the nature of the case, believed
that she was doing something quite out of the ordinary in accepting him,
and expected concessions which, apparently, it never occurred to him to
make. After his marriage he relapsed into his old habits of incessant
work, broken by violent and often brutal relaxations. He insulted her
friends and foisted his own upon her--many of them well calculated to
arouse aversion in any well-bred girl. He had Ghillini constantly at the
house--a homeless vagabond, whose conversation was impossible. I don’t
say, mind you, that he had not grievances on his side. He had probably
overrated the girl’s possibilities, and he let her see that he was
disappointed in her. Only a large and generous nature could have borne
with him, and Ellen’s is not that. She could not at all understand that
odious strain of plebeian pride which plumes itself upon not having
risen above its sources.”

As MacMaster drove back to his hotel he reflected that Lady Mary Percy
had probably had good cause for dissatisfaction with her brother-in-law.
Treffinger was, indeed, the last man who should have married into
the Percy family. The son of a small tobacconist, he had grown up a
sign-painter’s apprentice; idle, lawless, and practically letterless
until he had drifted into the night classes of the Albert League, where
Ghillini sometimes lectured. From the moment he came under the eye and
influence of that erratic Italian, then a political exile, his life
had swerved sharply from its old channel. This man had been at once
incentive and guide, friend and master, to his pupil. He had taken the
raw clay out of the London streets and molded it anew. Seemingly he had
divined at once where the boy’s possibilities lay, and had thrown aside
every canon of orthodox instruction in the training of him. Under
him Treffinger acquired his superficial, yet facile, knowledge of the
classics; had steeped himself in the monkish Latin and medieval romances
which later gave his work so naive and remote a quality. That was the
beginning of the wattle fences, the cobble pave, the brown roof beams,
the cunningly wrought fabrics that gave to his pictures such a richness
of decorative effect.

As he had told Lady Mary Percy, MacMaster had found the imperative
inspiration of his purpose in Treffinger’s unfinished picture,
the _Marriage of Phaedra_. He had always believed that the key to
Treffinger’s individuality lay in his singular education; in the _Roman
de la Rose_, in Boccaccio, and Amadis, those works which had literally
transcribed themselves upon the blank soul of the London street boy,
and through which he had been born into the world of spiritual things.
Treffinger had been a man who lived after his imagination; and his mind,
his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to
the last been colored by the trend of his early training. There was in
him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the
religious mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century. In
the _Marriage of Phaedra_ MacMaster found the ultimate expression of
this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger’s point of view.

As in all Treffinger’s classical subjects, the conception was wholly
medieval. This Phaedra, just turning from her husband and maidens to
greet her husband’s son, giving him her first fearsome glance from
under her half-lifted veil, was no daughter of Minos. The daughter of
_heathenesse_ and the early church she was; doomed to torturing visions
and scourgings, and the wrangling of soul with flesh. The venerable
Theseus might have been victorious Charlemagne, and Phaedra’s maidens
belonged rather in the train of Blanche of Castile than at the Cretan
court. In the earlier studies Hippolytus had been done with a more pagan
suggestion; but in each successive drawing the glorious figure had been
deflowered of something of its serene unconsciousness, until, in the
canvas under the skylight, he appeared a very Christian knight.
This male figure, and the face of Phaedra, painted with such magical
preservation of tone under the heavy shadow of the veil, were plainly
Treffinger’s highest achievements of craftsmanship. By what labor he had
reached the seemingly inevitable composition of the picture--with its
twenty figures, its plenitude of light and air, its restful distances
seen through white porticoes--countless studies bore witness.

From James’s attitude toward the picture MacMaster could well conjecture
what the painter’s had been. This picture was always uppermost in
James’s mind; its custodianship formed, in his eyes, his occupation.
He was manifestly apprehensive when visitors--not many came
nowadays--lingered near it. “It was the _Marriage_ as killed ‘im,” he
would often say, “and for the matter ‘o that, it did like to ‘av been
the death of all of us.”

By the end of his second week in London MacMaster had begun the notes
for his study of Hugh Treffinger and his work. When his researches
led him occasionally to visit the studios of Treffinger’s friends and
erstwhile disciples, he found their Treffinger manner fading as the
ring of Treffinger’s personality died out in them. One by one they were
stealing back into the fold of national British art; the hand that
had wound them up was still. MacMaster despaired of them and confined
himself more and more exclusively to the studio, to such of Treffinger’s
letters as were available--they were for the most part singularly
negative and colorless--and to his interrogation of Treffinger’s man.

He could not himself have traced the successive steps by which he was
gradually admitted into James’s confidence. Certainly most of his adroit
strategies to that end failed humiliatingly, and whatever it was that
built up an understanding between them must have been instinctive and
intuitive on both sides. When at last James became anecdotal, personal,
there was that in every word he let fall which put breath and blood into
MacMaster’s book. James had so long been steeped in that penetrating
personality that he fairly exuded it. Many of his very phrases,
mannerisms, and opinions were impressions that he had taken on like wet
plaster in his daily contact with Treffinger. Inwardly he was lined
with cast-off epitheliums, as outwardly he was clad in the painter’s
discarded coats. If the painter’s letters were formal and perfunctory,
if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory,
and often apparently insincere--still, MacMaster felt himself not
entirely without authentic sources. It was James who possessed
Treffinger’s legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his pose.
Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work, as it seemed,
had the man invariably been himself. James had known him in the one
attitude in which he was entirely honest; their relation had fallen
well within the painter’s only indubitable integrity. James’s report
of Treffinger was distorted by no hallucination of artistic insight,
colored by no interpretation of his own. He merely held what he
had heard and seen; his mind was a sort of camera obscura. His very
limitations made him the more literal and minutely accurate.

One morning, when MacMaster was seated before the _Marriage of Phaedra_,
James entered on his usual round of dusting.

“I’ve ‘eard from Lydy Elling by the post, sir,” he remarked, “an’ she’s
give h’orders to ‘ave the ‘ouse put in readiness. I doubt she’ll be ‘ere
by Thursday or Friday next.”

“She spends most of her time abroad?” queried MacMaster; on the subject
of Lady Treffinger James consistently maintained a very delicate
reserve.

“Well, you could ‘ardly say she does that, sir. She finds the ‘ouse a
bit dull, I daresay, so durin’ the season she stops mostly with Lydy
Mary Percy, at Grosvenor Square. Lydy Mary’s a h’only sister.” After a
few moments he continued, speaking in jerks governed by the rigor of his
dusting: “H’only this morning I come upon this scarfpin,” exhibiting a
very striking instance of that article, “an’ I recalled as ‘ow Sir ‘Ugh
give it me when ‘e was acourting of Lydy Elling. Blowed if I ever see a
man go in for a ‘oman like ‘im! ‘E was that gone, sir. ‘E never went in
on anythink so ‘ard before nor since, till ‘e went in on the _Marriage_
there--though ‘e mostly went in on things pretty keen; ‘ad the measles
when ‘e was thirty, strong as cholera, an’ come close to dyin’ of ‘em.
‘E wasn’t strong for Lydy Elling’s set; they was a bit too stiff for
‘im. A free an’ easy gentleman, ‘e was; ‘e liked ‘is dinner with a few
friends an’ them jolly, but ‘e wasn’t much on what you might call big
affairs. But once ‘e went in for Lydy Elling ‘e broke ‘imself to new
paces; He give away ‘is rings an’ pins, an’ the tylor’s man an’ the
‘aberdasher’s man was at ‘is rooms continual. ‘E got ‘imself put up
for a club in Piccadilly; ‘e starved ‘imself thin, an’ worrited ‘imself
white, an’ ironed ‘imself out, an’ drawed ‘imself tight as a bow string.
It was a good job ‘e come a winner, or I don’t know w’at’d ‘a been to
pay.”

The next week, in consequence of an invitation from Lady Ellen
Treffinger, MacMaster went one afternoon to take tea with her. He was
shown into the garden that lay between the residence and the studio,
where the tea table was set under a gnarled pear tree. Lady Ellen rose
as he approached--he was astonished to note how tall she was--and greeted
him graciously, saying that she already knew him through her sister.
MacMaster felt a certain satisfaction in her; in her reassuring poise
and repose, in the charming modulations of her voice and the indolent
reserve of her full, almond eyes. He was even delighted to find her
face so inscrutable, though it chilled his own warmth and made the open
frankness he had wished to permit himself impossible. It was a long
face, narrow at the chin, very delicately featured, yet steeled by an
impassive mask of self-control. It was behind just such finely cut,
close-sealed faces, MacMaster reflected, that nature sometimes hid
astonishing secrets. But in spite of this suggestion of hardness he
felt that the unerring taste that Treffinger had always shown in larger
matters had not deserted him when he came to the choosing of a wife, and
he admitted that he could not himself have selected a woman who looked
more as Treffinger’s wife should look.

While he was explaining the purpose of his frequent visits to the studio
she heard him with courteous interest. “I have read, I think, everything
that has been published on Sir Hugh Treffinger’s work, and it seems to
me that there is much left to be said,” he concluded.

“I believe they are rather inadequate,” she remarked vaguely. She
hesitated a moment, absently fingering the ribbons of her gown, then
continued, without raising her eyes; “I hope you will not think me too
exacting if I ask to see the proofs of such chapters of your work as
have to do with Sir Hugh’s personal life. I have always asked that
privilege.”

MacMaster hastily assured her as to this, adding, “I mean to touch on
only such facts in his personal life as have to do directly with his
work--such as his monkish education under Ghillini.”

“I see your meaning, I think,” said Lady Ellen, looking at him with
wide, uncomprehending eyes.

When MacMaster stopped at the studio on leaving the house he stood for
some time before Treffinger’s one portrait of himself, that brigand of
a picture, with its full throat and square head; the short upper lip
blackened by the close-clipped mustache, the wiry hair tossed down over
the forehead, the strong white teeth set hard on a short pipestem. He
could well understand what manifold tortures the mere grain of the man’s
strong red and brown flesh might have inflicted upon a woman like Lady
Ellen. He could conjecture, too, Treffinger’s impotent revolt against
that very repose which had so dazzled him when it first defied his
daring; and how once possessed of it, his first instinct had been to
crush it, since he could not melt it.

Toward the close of the season Lady Ellen Treffinger left town.
MacMaster’s work was progressing rapidly, and he and James wore away
the days in their peculiar relation, which by this time had much of
friendliness. Excepting for the regular visits of a Jewish picture
dealer, there were few intrusions upon their solitude. Occasionally
a party of Americans rang at the little door in the garden wall,
but usually they departed speedily for the Moorish hall and tinkling
fountain of the great show studio of London, not far away.

This Jew, an Austrian by birth, who had a large business in Melbourne,
Australia, was a man of considerable discrimination, and at once
selected the _Marriage of Phaedra_ as the object of his especial
interest. When, upon his first visit, Lichtenstein had declared the
picture one of the things done for time, MacMaster had rather warmed
toward him and had talked to him very freely. Later, however, the man’s
repulsive personality and innate vulgarity so wore upon him that, the
more genuine the Jew’s appreciation, the more he resented it and the
more base he somehow felt it to be. It annoyed him to see Lichtenstein
walking up and down before the picture, shaking his head and blinking
his watery eyes over his nose glasses, ejaculating: “Dot is a chem, a
chem! It is wordt to gome den dousant miles for such a bainting, eh? To
make Eurobe abbreciate such a work of ardt it is necessary to take it
away while she is napping. She has never abbreciated until she has lost,
but,” knowingly, “she will buy back.”

James had, from the first, felt such a distrust of the man that he would
never leave him alone in the studio for a moment. When Lichtenstein
insisted upon having Lady Ellen Treffinger’s address James rose to the
point of insolence. “It ayn’t no use to give it, noway. Lydy Treffinger
never has nothink to do with dealers.” MacMaster quietly repented his
rash confidences, fearing that he might indirectly cause Lady Ellen
annoyance from this merciless speculator, and he recalled with chagrin
that Lichtenstein had extorted from him, little by little, pretty much
the entire plan of his book, and especially the place in it which the
_Marriage of Phaedra_ was to occupy.

By this time the first chapters of MacMaster’s book were in the hands
of his publisher, and his visits to the studio were necessarily less
frequent. The greater part of his time was now employed with the
engravers who were to reproduce such of Treffinger’s pictures as he
intended to use as illustrations.

He returned to his hotel late one evening after a long and vexing day at
the engravers to find James in his room, seated on his steamer trunk by
the window, with the outline of a great square draped in sheets resting
against his knee.

“Why, James, what’s up?” he cried in astonishment, glancing inquiringly
at the sheeted object.

“Ayn’t you seen the pypers, sir?” jerked out the man.

“No, now I think of it, I haven’t even looked at a paper. I’ve been at
the engravers’ plant all day. I haven’t seen anything.”

James drew a copy of the _Times_ from his pocket and handed it to him,
pointing with a tragic finger to a paragraph in the social column. It
was merely the announcement of Lady Ellen Treffinger’s engagement to
Captain Alexander Gresham.

“Well, what of it, my man? That surely is her privilege.”

James took the paper, turned to another page, and silently pointed to
a paragraph in the art notes which stated that Lady Treffinger had
presented to the X--gallery the entire collection of paintings and
sketches now in her late husband’s studio, with the exception of his
unfinished picture, the _Marriage Of Phaedra_, which she had sold for
a large sum to an Australian dealer who had come to London purposely to
secure some of Treffinger’s paintings.

MacMaster pursed up his lips and sat down, his overcoat still on.
“Well, James, this is something of a--something of a jolt, eh? It never
occurred to me she’d really do it.”

“Lord, you don’t know ‘er, sir,” said James bitterly, still staring at
the floor in an attitude of abandoned dejection.

MacMaster started up in a flash of enlightenment, “What on earth have
you got there, James? It’s not-surely it’s not--”

“Yes, it is, sir,” broke in the man excitedly. “It’s the _Marriage_
itself. It ayn’t agoing to H’Australia, no’ow!”

“But man, what are you going to do with it? It’s Lichtenstein’s property
now, as it seems.”

“It ayn’t, sir, that it ayn’t. No, by Gawd, it ayn’t!” shouted James,
breaking into a choking fury. He controlled himself with an effort
and added supplicatingly: “Oh, sir, you ayn’t agoing to see it go to
H’Australia, w’ere they send convic’s?” He unpinned and flung aside the
sheets as though to let _Phaedra_ plead for herself.

MacMaster sat down again and looked sadly at the doomed masterpiece.
The notion of James having carried it across London that night rather
appealed to his fancy. There was certainly a flavor about such a
highhanded proceeding. “However did you get it here?” he queried.

“I got a four-wheeler and come over direct, sir. Good job I ‘appened to
‘ave the chaynge about me.”

“You came up High Street, up Piccadilly, through the Haymarket and
Trafalgar Square, and into the Strand?” queried MacMaster with a relish.

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir,” assented James with surprise.

MacMaster laughed delightedly. “It was a beautiful idea, James, but I’m
afraid we can’t carry it any further.”

“I was thinkin’ as ‘ow it would be a rare chance to get you to take the
_Marriage_ over to Paris for a year or two, sir, until the thing blows
over?” suggested James blandly.

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question, James. I haven’t the right stuff
in me for a pirate, or even a vulgar smuggler, I’m afraid.” MacMaster
found it surprisingly difficult to say this, and he busied himself with
the lamp as he said it. He heard James’s hand fall heavily on the trunk
top, and he discovered that he very much disliked sinking in the man’s
estimation.

“Well, sir,” remarked James in a more formal tone, after a protracted
silence; “then there’s nothink for it but as ‘ow I’ll ‘ave to make way
with it myself.”

“And how about your character, James? The evidence would be heavy
against you, and even if Lady Treffinger didn’t prosecute you’d be done
for.”

“Blow my character!--your pardon, sir,” cried James, starting to his
feet. “W’at do I want of a character? I’ll chuck the ‘ole thing, and
damned lively, too. The shop’s to be sold out, an’ my place is gone
any’ow. I’m agoing to enlist, or try the gold fields. I’ve lived too
long with h’artists; I’d never give satisfaction in livery now. You know
‘ow it is yourself, sir; there ayn’t no life like it, no’ow.”

For a moment MacMaster was almost equal to abetting James in his theft.
He reflected that pictures had been whitewashed, or hidden in the crypts
of churches, or under the floors of palaces from meaner motives, and to
save them from a fate less ignominious. But presently, with a sigh, he
shook his head.

“No, James, it won’t do at all. It has been tried over and over again,
ever since the world has been agoing and pictures amaking. It was tried
in Florence and in Venice, but the pictures were always carried away in
the end. You see, the difficulty is that although Treffinger told you
what was not to be done with the picture, he did not say definitely what
was to be done with it. Do you think Lady Treffinger really understands
that he did not want it to be sold?”

“Well, sir, it was like this, sir,” said James, resuming his seat on the
trunk and again resting the picture against his knee. “My memory is as
clear as glass about it. After Sir ‘Ugh got up from ‘is first stroke, ‘e
took a fresh start at the _Marriage_. Before that ‘e ‘ad been working
at it only at night for a while back; the _Legend_ was the big picture
then, an’ was under the north light w’ere ‘e worked of a morning. But
one day ‘e bid me take the _Legend_ down an’ put the _Marriage_ in its
place, an’ ‘e says, dashin’ on ‘is jacket, ‘Jymes, this is a start for
the finish, this time.’

“From that on ‘e worked at the night picture in the mornin’--a thing
contrary to ‘is custom. The _Marriage_ went wrong, and wrong--an’ Sir
‘Ugh agettin’ seedier an’ seedier every day. ‘E tried models an’ models,
an’ smudged an’ pynted out on account of ‘er face goin’ wrong in the
shadow. Sometimes ‘e layed it on the colors, an’ swore at me an’ things
in general. He got that discouraged about ‘imself that on ‘is low days
‘e used to say to me: ‘Jymes, remember one thing; if anythink ‘appens to
me, the _Marriage_ is not to go out of ‘ere unfinished. It’s worth the
lot of ‘em, my boy, an’ it’s not agoing to go shabby for lack of pains.’
‘E said things to that effect repeated.

“He was workin’ at the picture the last day, before ‘e went to ‘is club.
‘E kept the carriage waitin’ near an hour while ‘e put on a stroke an’
then drawed back for to look at it, an’ then put on another, careful
like. After ‘e ‘ad ‘is gloves on, ‘e come back an’ took away the brushes
I was startin’ to clean, an’ put in another touch or two. ‘It’s acomin’,
Jymes,’ ‘e says, ‘by gad if it ayn’t.’ An’ with that ‘e goes out. It was
cruel sudden, w’at come after.

“That night I was lookin’ to ‘is clothes at the ‘ouse when they brought
‘im ‘ome. He was conscious, but w’en I ran downstairs for to ‘elp lift
‘im up, I knowed ‘e was a finished man. After we got ‘im into bed ‘e
kept lookin’ restless at me and then at Lydy Elling and ajerkin’ of ‘is
‘and. Finally ‘e quite raised it an’ shot ‘is thumb out toward the wall.
‘He wants water; ring, Jymes,’ says Lydy Elling, placid. But I knowed ‘e
was pointin’ to the shop.

“‘Lydy Treffinger,’ says I, bold, ‘he’s pointin’ to the studio. He means
about the _Marriage_; ‘e told me today as ‘ow ‘e never wanted it sold
unfinished. Is that it, Sir ‘Ugh?’

“He smiled an’ nodded slight an’ closed ‘is eyes. ‘Thank you, Jymes,’
says Lydy Elling, placid. Then ‘e opened ‘is eyes an’ looked long and
‘ard at Lydy Elling.

“‘Of course I’ll try to do as you’d wish about the picture, ‘Ugh, if
that’s w’at’s troublin’ you,’ she says quiet. With that ‘e closed ‘is
eyes and ‘e never opened ‘em. He died unconscious at four that mornin’.

“You see, sir, Lydy Elling was always cruel ‘ard on the _Marriage_. From
the first it went wrong, an’ Sir ‘Ugh was out of temper pretty constant.
She came into the studio one day and looked at the picture an ‘asked
‘im why ‘e didn’t throw it up an’ quit aworriting ‘imself. He answered
sharp, an’ with that she said as ‘ow she didn’t see w’at there was to
make such a row about, no’ow. She spoke ‘er mind about that picture,
free; an’ Sir ‘Ugh swore ‘ot an’ let a ‘andful of brushes fly at ‘is
study, an’ Lydy Elling picked up ‘er skirts careful an’ chill, an’
drifted out of the studio with ‘er eyes calm and ‘er chin ‘igh. If there
was one thing Lydy Elling ‘ad no comprehension of, it was the usefulness
of swearin’. So the _Marriage_ was a sore thing between ‘em. She is
uncommon calm, but uncommon bitter, is Lydy Elling. She’s never come
anear the studio since that day she went out ‘oldin’ up of ‘er skirts.
W’en ‘er friends goes over she excuses ‘erself along o’ the strain.
Strain--Gawd!” James ground his wrath short in his teeth.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, James, and it’s our only hope. I’ll see
Lady Ellen tomorrow. The _Times_ says she returned today. You take the
picture back to its place, and I’ll do what I can for it. If anything is
done to save it, it must be done through Lady Ellen Treffinger herself,
that much is clear. I can’t think that she fully understands the
situation. If she did, you know, she really couldn’t have any motive--”
 He stopped suddenly. Somehow, in the dusky lamplight, her small,
close-sealed face came ominously back to him. He rubbed his forehead
and knitted his brows thoughtfully. After a moment he shook his head
and went on: “I am positive that nothing can be gained by highhanded
methods, James. Captain Gresham is one of the most popular men in
London, and his friends would tear up Treffinger’s bones if he were
annoyed by any scandal of our making--and this scheme you propose would
inevitably result in scandal. Lady Ellen has, of course, every legal
right to sell the picture. Treffinger made considerable inroads upon
her estate, and, as she is about to marry a man without income, she
doubtless feels that she has a right to replenish her patrimony.”

He found James amenable, though doggedly skeptical. He went down into
the street, called a carriage, and saw James and his burden into it.
Standing in the doorway, he watched the carriage roll away through
the drizzling mist, weave in and out among the wet, black vehicles and
darting cab lights, until it was swallowed up in the glare and confusion
of the Strand. “It is rather a fine touch of irony,” he reflected,
“that he, who is so out of it, should be the one to really care. Poor
Treffinger,” he murmured as, with a rather spiritless smile, he turned
back into his hotel. “Poor Treffinger; _sic transit gloria_.”

The next afternoon MacMaster kept his promise. When he arrived at Lady
Mary Percy’s house he saw preparations for a function of some sort, but
he went resolutely up the steps, telling the footman that his business
was urgent. Lady Ellen came down alone, excusing her sister. She was
dressed for receiving, and MacMaster had never seen one so beautiful.
The color in her cheeks sent a softening glow over her small, delicately
cut features.

MacMaster apologized for his intrusion and came unflinchingly to the
object of his call. He had come, he said, not only to offer her his
warmest congratulations, but to express his regret that a great work of
art was to leave England.

Lady Treffinger looked at him in wide-eyed astonishment. Surely, she
said, she had been careful to select the best of the pictures for the
X--- gallery, in accordance with Sir Hugh Treffinger’s wishes.

“And did he--pardon me, Lady Treffinger, but in mercy set my mind at
rest--did he or did he not express any definite wish concerning this one
picture, which to me seems worth all the others, unfinished as it is?”

Lady Treffinger paled perceptibly, but it was not the pallor of
confusion. When she spoke there was a sharp tremor in her smooth voice,
the edge of a resentment that tore her like pain. “I think his man has
some such impression, but I believe it to be utterly unfounded. I cannot
find that he ever expressed any wish concerning the disposition of the
picture to any of his friends. Unfortunately, Sir Hugh was not always
discreet in his remarks to his servants.”

“Captain Gresham, Lady Ellingham, and Miss Ellingham,” announced a
servant, appearing at the door.

There was a murmur in the hall, and MacMaster greeted the smiling
Captain and his aunt as he bowed himself out.

To all intents and purposes the _Marriage of Phaedra_ was already
entombed in a vague continent in the Pacific, somewhere on the other
side of the world.



A Wagner Matinee

I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy,
blue-lined notepaper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska
village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had
been carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was
from my Uncle Howard and informed me that his wife had been left a small
legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it would
be necessary for her to go to Boston to attend to the settling of
the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station and render her
whatever services might be necessary. On examining the date indicated
as that of her arrival I found it no later than tomorrow. He had
characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for
a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.

The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure,
at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of
recollection so wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my
hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of
my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the familiar
surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farm boy
my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands
cracked and sore from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb
tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her
parlor organ, fumbling the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she,
beside me, made canvas mittens for the huskers.

The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for
the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my
aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was not until
I got her into the carriage that she seemed really to recognize me. She
had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black
with soot, and her black bonnet gray with dust, during the journey. When
we arrived at my boardinghouse the landlady put her to bed at once and I
did not see her again until the next morning.

Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt’s appearance she
considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt’s misshapen figure
with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who
have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef Land, or their
health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a
music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter
sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the
Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she
had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the
village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of
those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one
sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she
returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of
this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the
reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with
him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money,
had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the
railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section themselves
by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had
tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They
built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose
inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they got
from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of
provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For
thirty years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles from the
homestead.

But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of all this, and must have been
considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman. Beneath the
soiled linen duster which, on her arrival, was the most conspicuous
feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress, whose
ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself unquestioningly
into the hands of a country dressmaker. My poor aunt’s figure, however,
would have presented astonishing difficulties to any dressmaker.
Originally stooped, her shoulders were now almost bent together over her
sunken chest. She wore no stays, and her gown, which trailed unevenly
behind, rose in a sort of peak over her abdomen. She wore ill-fitting
false teeth, and her skin was as yellow as a Mongolian’s from constant
exposure to a pitiless wind and to the alkaline water which hardens the
most transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather.

I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my
boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years
when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three
meals--the first of which was ready at six o’clock in the morning-and
putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at
her ironing board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me
recite Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my
drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at
her ironing or mending, that I read my first Shakespeare’, and her old
textbook on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands.
She taught me my scales and exercises, too--on the little parlor organ,
which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she
had not so much as seen any instrument, but an accordion that belonged
to one of the Norwegian farmhands. She would sit beside me by the hour,
darning and counting while I struggled with the “Joyous Farmer,” but she
seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious
woman; she had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her
martyrdom was not wholly sordid. Once when I had been doggedly beating
out some easy passages from an old score of _Euryanthe_ I had found
among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my
eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously,
“Don’t love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear
boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that.”

When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival she was still in
a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she was in the
city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for hungrily half
a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick throughout the journey
that she had no recollection of anything but her discomfort, and, to all
intents and purposes, there were but a few hours of nightmare between
the farm in Red Willow County and my study on Newbury Street. I had
planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon, to repay her for some
of the glorious moments she had given me when we used to milk together
in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because I was more than usually
tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to me, would tell me
of the splendid performance of the _Huguenots_ she had seen in Paris,
in her youth. At two o’clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner
program, and I intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her
I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it. Indeed, for her own sake,
I could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the
long struggle mercifully ended at last. I suggested our visiting the
Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too
timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about various
changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had
forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to
a certain weakling calf, “old Maggie’s calf, you know, Clark,” she
explained, evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was
further troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about
the freshly opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if
it were not used directly.

I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas and
found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their
respective situations, and had once possessed the piano score of _The
Flying Dutchman_. I began to think it would have been best to get her
back to Red Willow County without waking her, and regretted having
suggested the concert.

From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle
less passive and inert, and for the first time seemed to perceive her
surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware
of the absurdities of her attire, or might experience some painful
embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been
dead for a quarter of a century. But, again, I found how superficially
I had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal,
almost as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a
museum watches the froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his
pedestal-separated from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. I have
seen this same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at
Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard
faces unshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as solitary as though
they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon, conscious that certain
experiences have isolated them from their fellows by a gulf no
haberdasher could bridge.

We sat at the extreme left of the first balcony, facing the arch of our
own and the balcony above us, veritable hanging gardens, brilliant as
tulip beds. The matinee audience was made up chiefly of women. One
lost the contour of faces and figures--indeed, any effect of line
whatever-and there was only the color of bodices past counting, the
shimmer of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer: red, mauve, pink,
blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the
colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and
there the dead shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them
as though they had been so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette.

When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little
stir of anticipation and looked with quickening interest down over the
rail at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar
thing that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her
weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul,
for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh
from plowing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as
in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving
a shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of
their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the
instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-shaded
lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the cellos and the bass viols
in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows-I
recalled how, in the first orchestra I had ever heard, those long bow
strokes seemed to draw the heart out of me, as a conjurer’s stick reels
out yards of paper ribbon from a hat.

The first number was the _Tannhauser_ overture. When the horns drew out
the first strain of the Pilgrim’s chorus my Aunt Georgiana clutched
my coat sleeve. Then it was I first realized that for her this broke a
silence of thirty years; the inconceivable silence of the plains. With
the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg
theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense
of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat; and I saw again the
tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress;
the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin pitted with
sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain-gullied clay banks about the naked
house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dishcloths were always
hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flat world
of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak;
to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the conquests of
peace, dearer bought than those of war.

The overture closed; my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said
nothing. She sat staring at the orchestra through a dullness of thirty
years, through the films made little by little by each of the three
hundred and sixty-five days in every one of them. What, I wondered, did
she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day I knew, and her
musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of
a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart’s operas and
Meyerbeer’s, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain
melodies of Verdi’s. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house she
used to sit by my cot in the evening--when the cool, night wind blew
in through the faded mosquito netting tacked over the window, and I lay
watching a certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield--and
sing “Home to our mountains, O, let us return!” in a way fit to break
the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.

I watched her closely through the prelude to _Tristan and Isolde_,
trying vainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and
winds might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows
that drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a
summer shower. Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left
to at all comprehend this power which had kindled the world since she
had left it? I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat
silent upon her peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility
throughout the number from _The Flying Dutchman_, though her fingers
worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though, of themselves, they
were recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor old hands!
They had been stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and
lift and knead with; the palms unduly swollen, the fingers bent and
knotted--on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a wedding
ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands I
remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days.

Soon after the tenor began the “Prize Song,” I heard a quick drawn
breath and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were
glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in
my eyes as well. It never really died, then--the soul that can suffer so
excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only;
like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and
yet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout the
development and elaboration of the melody.

During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I
questioned my aunt and found that the “Prize Song” was not new to her.
Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a
young German, a tramp cowpuncher, who had sung the chorus at Bayreuth,
when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a
Sunday morning he used to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands’
bedroom which opened off the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots
and saddle, singing the “Prize Song,” while my aunt went about her work
in the kitchen. She had hovered about him until she had prevailed upon
him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this step,
insofar as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of
this divine melody. Shortly afterward he had gone to town on the Fourth
of July, been drunk for several days, lost his money at a faro table,
ridden a saddled Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured
collarbone. All this my aunt told me huskily, wanderingly, as though she
were talking in the weak lapses of illness.

“Well, we have come to better things than the old _Trovatore_ at any
rate, Aunt Georgie?” I queried, with a well-meant effort at jocularity.

Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth.
From behind it she murmured, “And you have been hearing this ever
since you left me, Clark?” Her question was the gentlest and saddest of
reproaches.

The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the
_Ring_, and closed with Siegfried’s funeral march. My aunt wept quietly,
but almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rainstorm.
From time to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights which studded the
ceiling, burning softly under their dull glass globes; doubtless they
were stars in truth to her. I was still perplexed as to what measure of
musical comprehension was left to her, she who had heard nothing but
the singing of gospel hymns at Methodist services in the square frame
schoolhouse on Section Thirteen for so many years. I was wholly unable
to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds, or worked into
bread, or milked into the bottom of a pail.

The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the
shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what
happy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that
before the last numbers she had been carried out where the myriad graves
are, into the gray, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some
world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope
has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.

The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering
and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my
kinswoman made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped its green felt
cover over his instrument; the flute players shook the water from their
mouthpieces; the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the
stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.

I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. “I don’t
want to go, Clark, I don’t want to go!”

I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay
the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted
house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed
ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting
turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.



Paul’s Case

_A Study in Temperament_

It was Paul’s afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh
High School to account for his various misdemeanors. He had been
suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal’s
office and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the
faculty room suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle outgrown, and
the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn;
but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he
wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red
carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow
felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy
under the ban of suspension.

Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders
and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical
brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort
of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large,
as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter
about them which that drug does not produce.

When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there Paul stated,
politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie,
but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensable
for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their
respective charges against him, which they did with such a rancor and
aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case, Disorder and
impertinence were among the offenses named, yet each of his instructors
felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of
the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the
boy’s; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which
he seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had
been making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English
teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul
had started back with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind
him. The astonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt and
embarrassed had he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and
definitely personal as to be unforgettable. In one way and another he
had made all his teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same
feeling of physical aversion. In one class he habitually sat with his
hand shading his eyes; in another he always looked out of the window
during the recitation; in another he made a running commentary on the
lecture, with humorous intention.

His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized
by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell
upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He stood
through it smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips
were continually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows
that was contemptuous and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys
than Paul had broken down and shed tears under that baptism of fire, but
his set smile did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort
was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of
his overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that held his
hat. Paul was always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel
that people might be watching him and trying to detect something.
This conscious expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish
mirthfulness, was usually attributed to insolence or “smartness.”

As the inquisition proceeded one of his instructors repeated an
impertinent remark of the boy’s, and the Principal asked him whether he
thought that a courteous speech to have made a woman. Paul shrugged his
shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I didn’t mean to be polite or impolite,
either. I guess it’s a sort of way I have of saying things regardless.”

The Principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether he didn’t
think that a way it would be well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said
he guessed so. When he was told that he could go he bowed gracefully and
went out. His bow was but a repetition of the scandalous red carnation.

His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling
of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which
none of them understood. He added: “I don’t really believe that smile of
his comes altogether from insolence; there’s something sort of haunted
about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. I happen to know that he
was born in Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there
of a long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow.”

The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one
saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm
afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing board, and his master
had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn
and wrinkled like an old man’s about the eyes, the lips twitching even
in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from
his teeth.

His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to
have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling
in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the
gruesome game of intemperate reproach. Some of them remembered having
seen a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors.

As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the “Soldiers’ Chorus” from
_Faust_, looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some of
his teachers were not there to writhe under his lightheartedness. As it
was now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher
at Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper. When
he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open and, as it was
chilly outside, he decided to go up into the picture gallery--always
deserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli’s gay studies
of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two that always
exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the
old guard, who sat in one corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch
over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the peace
and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a
while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought
him to look at his watch, it was after seven o’clock, and he rose with
a start and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus, peering out from
the cast room, and an evil gesture at the Venus de Milo as he passed her
on the stairway.

When Paul reached the ushers’ dressing room half a dozen boys were there
already, and he began excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one
of the few that at all approached fitting, and Paul thought it very
becoming-though he knew that the tight, straight coat accentuated his
narrow chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always
considerably excited while he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning
of the strings and the preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music
room; but tonight he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and
plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down
on the floor and sat on him.

Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of
the house to seat the early comers. He was a model usher; gracious and
smiling he ran up and down the aisles; nothing was too much trouble
for him; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were his
greatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought
him a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As
the house filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the
color came to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were
a great reception and Paul were the host. Just as the musicians came out
to take their places, his English teacher arrived with checks for the
seats which a prominent manufacturer had taken for the season. She
betrayed some embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a
hauteur which subsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was startled
for a moment, and had the feeling of wanting to put her out; what
business had she here among all these fine people and gay colors? He
looked her over and decided that she was not appropriately dressed and
must be a fool to sit downstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably
been sent her out of kindness, he reflected as he put down a seat for
her, and she had about as much right to sit there as he had.

When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long
sigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done before the Rico. It was
not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul,
but the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and
potent spirit within him; something that struggled there like the genie
in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of
life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into
unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came on Paul forgot even
the nastiness of his teacher’s being there and gave himself up to
the peculiar stimulus such personages always had for him. The soloist
chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the
mother of many children; but she wore an elaborate gown and a tiara, and
above all she had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine
upon her, which, in Paul’s eyes, made her a veritable queen of Romance.

After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he
got to sleep, and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He had
the feeling of not being able to let down, of its being impossible to
give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could
be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew and, after
hastily changing his clothes in the dressing room, slipped out to the
side door where the soprano’s carriage stood. Here he began pacing
rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.

Over yonder, the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square
through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like
those of a lighted cardboard house under a Christmas tree. All the
actors and singers of the better class stayed there when they were in
the city, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived there
in the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people
go in and out, longing to enter and leave schoolmasters and dull care
behind him forever.

At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who
helped her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial _auf
wiedersehen_ which set Paul to wondering whether she were not an old
sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to the hotel, walking
so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the singer alighted,
and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors that were opened by a
Negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that the door was
ajar it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself
go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an
exotic, tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease.
He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought into the
dining room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen them in
the supper party pictures of the _Sunday World_ supplement. A quick
gust of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was
startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel
driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty
overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the
concert hall were out and that the rain was driving in sheets between
him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what
he wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
pantomime--but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as the
rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to
shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.

He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to
come sometime; his father in his nightclothes at the top of the stairs,
explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that
were forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow
wallpaper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collarbox, and
over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John
Calvin, and the framed motto, “Feed my Lambs,” which had been worked in
red worsted by his mother.

Half an hour later Paul alighted from his car and went slowly down
one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a highly
respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and
where businessmen of moderate means begot and reared large families of
children, all of whom went to Sabbath school and learned the shorter
catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as
exactly alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which
they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of
loathing. His home was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He
approached it tonight with the nerveless sense Of defeat, the hopeless
feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had
always had when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street
he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies
of living he experienced all the physical depression which follows a
debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house
penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless,
colorless mass of everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things
and soft lights and fresh flowers.

The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul
felt to the sight of it all: his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold
bathroom with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping
spiggots; his father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking
out from his nightshirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was
so much later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and
reproaches. Paul stopped short before the door. He felt that he could
not be accosted by his father tonight; that he could not toss again on
that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his father that he
had no carfare and it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of
the boys and stayed all night.

Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the
house and tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised it
cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There he
stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made, but the
floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. He
found a soapbox, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that
streamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of
rats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the
dark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such
reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out
of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened,
Paul’s head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard
him getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a
burglar? Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand,
and he had cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been
horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose
a day should come when his father would remember that night, and
wish there had been no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last
supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.

The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken
by the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to
church and Sabbath school, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons
the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out on their front stoops and
talked to their neighbors on the next stoop, or called to those across
the street in neighborly fashion. The men usually sat on gay cushions
placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in
their Sunday “waists,” sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; there
were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of
a kindergarten. The men on the steps--all in their shirt sleeves,
their vests unbuttoned--sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs
comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told
anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They
occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their
own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their
legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons’ progress at
school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in
their toy banks.

On this last Sunday of November Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest
step of his stoop, staring into the street, while his sisters, in their
rockers, were talking to the minister’s daughters next door about how
many shirtwaists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles
someone had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm,
and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls
made lemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher,
ornamented with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought
very fine, and the neighbors always joked about the suspicious color of
the pitcher.

Today Paul’s father sat on the top step, talking to a young man who
shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young
man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his
father’s dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a
ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, nearsighted
eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved
about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel
corporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with
a future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he was now barely
twenty-six--he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order to curb his
appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of
wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief’s advice, oft
reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first
woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to
be an angular schoolmistress, much older than he, who also wore thick
glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all nearsighted, like
herself.

The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the
Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business,
arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home,
and “knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy.” His
father told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of
putting in an electric railway plant in Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth;
he had an awful apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got
there. Yet he rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings that
were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces
in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo
appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of these
cash boys who had become famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy
stage.

After supper was over and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul
nervously asked his father whether he could go to George’s to get some
help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for carfare. This
latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not
like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul
whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that
he ought not to leave his schoolwork until Sunday; but he gave him the
dime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up
in the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that he
thought a boy ought to be earning a little.

Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the dishwater from
his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over his
fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in
his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his
arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown
car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days and began to live
again.

The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one
of the downtown theaters was an acquaintance of Paul’s, and the boy
had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever
he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment
loitering about Charley Edwards’s dressing room. He had won a place
among Edwards’s following not only because the young actor, who could
not afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he
recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term “vocation.”

It was at the theater and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the
rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul’s fairy tale,
and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he
inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he breathed
like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing
or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic things. The moment the cracked
orchestra beat out the overture from _Martha_, or jerked at the serenade
from _Rigoletto_, all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his
senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.

Perhaps it was because, in Paul’s world, the natural nearly always wore
the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to
him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of
life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies,
wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the inescapable odors
of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad
men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.

It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly
the stage entrance of that theater was for Paul the actual portal of
Romance. Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all
Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float
about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there,
with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women
who never saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of
that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy toil, Paul had
his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-white
Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.

Several of Paul’s teachers had a theory that his imagination had been
perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever
read at all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or
corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his
friends urged upon him--well, he got what he wanted much more quickly
from music; any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ.
He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his
imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures
enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stagestruck--not,
at any rate, in the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no
desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He
felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see,
to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out,
blue league after blue league, away from everything.

After a night behind the scenes Paul found the schoolroom more than ever
repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the prosy men who never wore
frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes; the women with their dull
gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositions that
govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for
a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them
that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a jest,
anyway. He had autographed pictures of all the members of the stock
company which he showed his classmates, telling them the most incredible
stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with
the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the
flowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and his
audience grew listless, he became desperate and would bid all the boys
good-by, announcing that he was going to travel for a while; going to
Naples, to Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back,
conscious and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he should have
to defer his voyage until spring.

Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his
instructors know how heartily he despised them and their homilies, and
how thoroughly he was appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice
that he had no time to fool with theorems; adding--with a twitch of
the eyebrows and a touch of that nervous bravado which so perplexed
them--that he was helping the people down at the stock company; they
were old friends of his.

The upshot of the matter was that the Principal went to Paul’s father,
and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at
Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his stead; the doorkeeper
at the theater was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley
Edwards remorsefully promised the boy’s father not to see him again.

The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul’s
stories reached them--especially the women. They were hardworking women,
most of them supporting indigent husbands or brothers, and they laughed
rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid
inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father that Paul’s
was a bad case.


The eastbound train was plowing through a January snowstorm; the dull
dawn was beginning to show gray when the engine whistled a mile out of
Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy
slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window glass with his hand, and peered
out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom
lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the
fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks
protruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a
gang of laborers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.

Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He
had made the all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he was
ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly because he
was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburgh businessman, who might
have noticed him in Denny & Carson’s office. When the whistle awoke him,
he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an
uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still
sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed
oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled.
Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.

When he arrived at the Jersey City station he hurried through his
breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him.
After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman
and had himself driven to a men’s-furnishings establishment that was
just opening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying
with endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put
on in the fitting room; the frock coat and dress clothes he had bundled
into the cab with his linen. Then he drove to a hatter’s and a shoe
house. His next errand was at Tiffany’s, where he selected his silver
and a new scarf pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked,
he said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway and had his
purchases packed into various traveling bags.

It was a little after one o’clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and
after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from
Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he
had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story
plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in
advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping room, sitting room, and bath.

Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry into New
York. He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in
his scrapbook at home there were pages of description about New York
hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. When he was shown to his sitting
room on the eighth floor he saw at a glance that everything was as it
should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the
place did not realize, so he rang for the bellboy and sent him down for
flowers. He moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting
away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the
flowers came he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot
bath. Presently he came out of his white bathroom, resplendent in his
new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe. The
snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely
see across the street, but within the air was deliciously soft and
fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the taboret beside the
couch, and threw himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself with
a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste,
he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last
twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about.
Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of
the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.

It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the
theater and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the
whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of
opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised him was his own
courage-for he realized well enough that he had always been tormented by
fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of
the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of
his body tighter and tighter. Until now he could not remember the time
when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy
it was always there--behind him, or before, or on either side. There had
always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not
look, but from which something seemed always to be watching him--and
Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.

But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last
thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.

Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but
yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny &
Carson’s deposit, as usual--but this time he was instructed to leave the
book to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and
nearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book
and quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a
new deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his
returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for
a full day’s holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable
pretext. The bankbook, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or
Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From
the time he slipped the bank notes into his pocket until he boarded the
night train for New York, he had not known a moment’s hesitation. It was
not the first time Paul had steered through treacherous waters.

How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done;
and this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the
stairs. He watched the snowflakes whirling by his window until he fell
asleep.

When he awoke, it was three o’clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with
a start; half of one of his precious days gone already! He spent more
than an hour in dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully
in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of
boy he had always wanted to be.

When he went downstairs Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue
toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen’s
wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the winter twilight; boys
in woolen mufflers were shoveling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages
made fine spots of color against the white street. Here and there on
the corners were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass
cases, against the sides of which the snowflakes stuck and melted;
violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley--somehow vastly more
lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow.
The Park itself was a wonderful stage winterpiece.

When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased and the tune of
the streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed
from the hotels that reared their dozen stories fearlessly up into
the storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream of
carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by other
streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the
entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were
running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk, up and
down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above,
about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of
thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every
side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of
wealth.

The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of
realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances,
the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the
snowflakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.

When Paul went down to dinner the music of the orchestra came floating
up the elevator shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into
the thronged corridor, and he sank back into one of the chairs against
the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the
bewildering medley of color--he had, for a moment, the feeling of
not being able to stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own
people, he told himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through
the writing rooms, smoking rooms, reception rooms, as though he were
exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him
alone.

When he reached the dining room he sat down at a table near a window.
The flowers, the white linen, the many-colored wineglasses, the gay
toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulating
repetitions of the _Blue Danube_ from the orchestra, all flooded Paul’s
dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne
was added--that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed
in his glass--Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at
all. This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this
was what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his
past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where
fagged-looking businessmen got on the early car; mere rivets in a
machine they seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with combings of children’s
hair always hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their
clothes. Cordelia Street--Ah, that belonged to another time and country;
had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night,
from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such
shimmering textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this
one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.

He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to
meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to
look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage properties
were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in
his lodge at the Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid of his nervous
misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire
to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his
surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to
wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his attire to reassure
himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.

He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting room to go to bed that
night, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window.
When he went to sleep it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom;
partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should
wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no
horrible suspicion of yellow wallpaper, or of Washington and Calvin
above his bed.

Sunday morning the city was practically snowbound. Paul breakfasted
late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy,
a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a “little flyer” over
Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town,
and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the
hotel until seven o’clock the next morning. They had started out in the
confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the
elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to
make his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o’clock in the
afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for icewater, coffee, and
the Pittsburgh papers.

On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There
was this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in
no way made himself conspicuous. Even under the glow of his wine he was
never boisterous, though he found the stuff like a magician’s wand for
wonder-building. His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his
excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the
gray winter twilights in his sitting room; his quiet enjoyment of his
flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette, and his sense of
power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with
himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every
day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for
pleasure, even at school; but to be noticed and admired, to assert his
difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal
more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful
pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, “dress
the part.” It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His
golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he
could.

On the eighth day after his arrival in New York he found the whole
affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth of
detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a
low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy’s father had
refunded the full amount of the theft and that they had no intention of
prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and expressed
his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and his Sabbath-school
teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that end. The rumor
had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel,
and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home.

Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak
to the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse than
jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him
finally and forever. The gray monotony stretched before him in
hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath school, Young People’s Meeting, the
yellow-papered room, the damp dishtowels; it all rushed back upon him
with a sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra
had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The
sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him
with his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror,
With something of the old childish belief in miracles with which he
had so often gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and
dashed whistling down the corridor to the elevator.

He had no sooner entered the dining room and caught the measure of the
music than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of
claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all-sufficient.
The glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again,
and for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he
was game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than
ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank
his wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate
beings born to the purple, was he not still himself and in his own
place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci music and
looked about him, telling himself over and over that it had paid.

He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the chill sweetness
of his wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have
caught an outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches before
now. But the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too
uncertain then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been
too sharp. If he had to choose over again, he would do the same thing
tomorrow. He looked affectionately about the dining room, now gilded
with a soft mist. Ah, it had paid indeed!

Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and
feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had
slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his
tongue and throat were parched and burnt. There came upon him one of
those fateful attacks of clearheadedness that never occurred except when
he was physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still,
closed his eyes, and let the tide of things wash over him.

His father was in New York; “stopping at some joint or other,” he told
himself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon
him like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and
he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that
stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding
itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York,
and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his dressing
table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up from
dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the looks of
it.

He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again
to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the
world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid of
anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the
dark corner at last and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there, but
somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything
clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he
had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he
sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way,
so he went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry.

When Paul arrived in Newark he got off the train and took another cab,
directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town.
The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the open
fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks
projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul
dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his
mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an
actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered
every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless old woman from whom
he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had
got his ticket, and all of his fellow passengers on the ferry. His mind,
unable to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and
deftly at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part
of the ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter
burning on his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his
mouth as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little
hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him,
he stopped and sat down.

The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed,
their red glory all over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had
seen in the glass cases that first night must have gone the same way,
long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of
their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass; and it was a losing
game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which
the world is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat
and scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he
dozed awhile, from his weak condition, seemingly insensible to the cold.

The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet,
remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late.
He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering,
his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he
glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When
the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste
occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had
left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before,
the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown
swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his
limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism
was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped
back into the immense design of things.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Troll Garden, and Selected Stories" ***

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