Title: Tioba and Other Tales
Author: Colton, Arthur
Language: English
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TIOBA

AND OTHER TALES

By Arthur Colton

With a Frontispiece by A. B. Frost

New York

Henry Holt And Company

1903


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DEDICATED TO

A. G. BRINSMADE



TIOBA

FROM among the birches and pines, where we pitched our moving tent, you
looked over the flat meadow-lands; and through these went a river,
slow and almost noiseless, wandering in the valley as if there were
no necessity of arriving anywhere at appointed times. “What is the
necessity?” it said softly to any that would listen. And there was none;
so that for many days the white tent stood among the trees, overlooking
the haycocks in the meadows. It was enough business in hand to study the
philosophy and the subtle rhetoric of Still River.

Opposite rose a strangely ruined mountain-side. There was a nobly-poised
head and plenteous chest, the head three thousand feet nearer the
stars--which was little enough from their point of view, no doubt, but
to us it seemed a symbol of something higher than the stars, something
beyond them forever waiting and watching.

From its feet upward half a mile the mountain was one raw wound. The
shivered roots and tree-trunks stuck out helplessly from reddish soil,
boulders were crushed and piled in angry heaps, veins of granite ripped
open--the skin and flesh of the mountain tom off with a curse, and the
bones made a mockery. The wall of the precipice rose far above this
desolation, and, beyond, the hazy forests went up a mile or more clear
to the sky-line. The peak stood over all, not with triumph or with
shame, but with the clouds and stars.

It was a cloudy day, with rifts of sunlight. An acre of light crept
down the mountain: so you have seen, on the river-boats at night, the
search-light feeling, fingering along the shore.

In the evening an Arcadian, an elderly man and garrulous, came up to see
what it might be that glimmered among his pulp-trees. He was a surprise,
and not as Arcadian as at first one might presume, for he sold milk and
eggs and blueberries at a price to make one suddenly rich. His name was
Fargus, and he it was whose hay-cutter clicked like a locust all day
in the meadow-lands. He came and made himself amiable beside us, and
confided anything we might care to know which experience had left with
him.

“That’s Tioba,” he said. “That’s the name of that mountain.” And he
told us the story of one whom he called “Jim Hawks,” and of the fall of
Tioba.

She’s a skinned mountain [he said]. She got wet inside and slid. Still
River used to run ten rods further in, and there was a cemetery,
too, and Jim Hawks’s place; and the cemetery’s there yet, six rods
underground, but the creek shied off and went through my plough-land
scandalous.

Now, Jim Hawks was a get-there kind, with a clawed face--by a wildcat,
yes, sir. Tioba got there; and Jim he was a wicked one. I’ve been
forty years in this valley, with the Petersons and the Storrses and the
Merimys at Canada Center, all good, quiet folk. And nothing happened to
us, for we did nothing to blame, till Jim came, and Tioba ups and drops
on him.

Now look at it, this valley! There’ve been landslides over beyond in
Helder’s valley, but there’s only one in mine. Looks as if the devil
gone spit on it. It’s Jim Hawks’s trail.

He come one day with a buckboard and a yellow horse, and he says:

“Sell me that land from here up the mountain.”

“Who be you?” says I.

“Jim Hawks,” says he, and that’s all he appeared to know about it. And
he bought the land, and put up a house close to the mountain, so you
could throw a cat down his chimney if you wanted to, or two cats if you
had ‘em.

He was a long, swing-shouldered man, with a light-colored mustache and a
kind of flat gray eye that you couldn’t see into. You look into a man’s
eye naturally to see what his intentions are. Well, Jim Hawks’s eye
appeared to have nothing to say on the subject. And as to that, I told
my wife it was none of our business if he didn’t bring into the valley
anything but his name and a bit of money sufficient.

He got his face clawed by a wildcat by being reckless with it; and he
ran a deer into Helder’s back yard once and shot it, and licked Helder
for claiming the deer. He was the recklessest chap! He swings his fist
into Helder’s face, and he says:

“Shoot, if you got a gun. If you hain’t, get out!”

I told Jim that was no place to put a house, on account of Tioba
dropping rocks off herself whenever it rained hard and the soil got
mushy. I told him Tioba’d as soon drop a rock on his head as into his
gridiron.

You can’t see Canada Center from here. There’s a post-office there, and
three houses, the Petersons’, the Storrses’ and the Merimys’. Merimy’s
house got a peaked roof on it. I see Jeaney Merimy climb it after her
kitten a-yowling on the ridge. She wasn’t but six years old then, and
she was gritty the day she was born. Her mother--she’s old Peterson’s
daughter--she whooped, and I fetched Jeaney down with Peterson’s ladder.
Jeaney Merimy grew up, and she was a tidy little thing. The Storrs boys
calculated to marry her, one of ‘em, only they weren’t enterprising; and
Jeaney ups and goes over to Eastport one day with Jim Hawks--cuts out
early in the morning, and asks nobody. Pretty goings on in this valley!
Then they come back when they were ready, and Jim says:

“What you got to say about it, Merimy?”

Merimy hadn’t nothing to say about it, nor his wife hadn’t nothing
to say, nor Peterson, nor the Storrs boys. Dog-gone it! Nobody hadn’t
nothing to say; that is, they didn’t say it to Jim.

That was five years ago, the spring they put up the Redman Hotel at
Helder’s. People’s come into these parts now thicker’n bugs. They have
a band that plays music at the Redman Hotel. But in my time I’ve seen
sights. The bears used to scoop my chickens. You could hear wildcats
‘most any night crying in the brush. I see a black bear come down
Jumping Brook over there, slapping his toes in the water and grunting
like a pig. Me, I was ploughing for buckwheat.

Jeaney Merimy went over to Eastport with her hair in a braid, and came
back with it put up like a crow’s nest on top of her head. She was a
nice-looking girl, Jeaney, and born gritty, and it didn’t do her any
good.

I says to Jim: “Now, you’re always looking for fighting,” says I. “Now,
me, I’m for peaceable doings. If you’re looking for fighting any time,
you start in beyond me.

“You!” says Jim. “I’d as soon scrap with a haystack.”

I do know how it would be, doing with a haystack that way, but you take
it from Jim’s point of view, and you see it wouldn’t be what he’d care
for; and you take it from my point of view, and you see I didn’t poke
into Jim’s business. That’s natural good sense. Only I’m free to say
he was a wicked one, ‘stilling whiskey on the back side of Tioba, and
filling up the Storrs boys with it, and them gone to the devil off East
where the railroads are. And laying Peterson to his front door, drunk.
My, he didn’t know any more’n his front door! “He’s my grandfather,”
 says Jim. “That’s the humor of it”--meaning he was Jeaney’s grandfather.
And mixing the singularest drinks, and putting ‘em into an old man named
Fargus, as ought to known better. My wife she said so, and she knew. I
do’ know what Jeaney Merimy thought, but I had my point of view on that.
Jim got drunk himself on and off, and went wilder’n a wildcat, and
slid over the mountains the Lord knows where. Pretty goings on in this
valley!

This is a good climate if you add it all up and take the average. But
sometimes it won’t rain till you’re gray waiting for it, and sometimes
it will snow so the only way to get home is to stay inside, and
sometimes it will rain like the bottom fallen out of a tub. The way of
it is that when you’ve lived with it forty years you know how to add up
and take the average.

That summer Tioba kept her head out of sight from June to September
mainly. She kept it done up in cotton, as you might say, and she leaked
in her joints surprising. She’s a queer mountain that way. Every now and
then she busts out a spring and dribbles down into Still River from a
new place.

In September they were all dark days and drizzly nights, and there was
often the two sounds of the wind on Tioba that you hear on a bad night.
One of ‘em is a kind of steady grumble and hiss that’s made with the
pine-needles and maybe the tons of leaves shaking and falling. The other
is the toot of the wind in the gullies on edges of rock. But if you
stand in the open on a bad night and listen, you’d think Tioba was
talking to you. Maybe she is.

It come along the middle of September, and it was a bad night, drizzly,
and Tioba talking double. I went over to the Hawkses’ place early to
borrow lantern-oil, and I saw Jeaney Merimy sitting over the fire
alone, and the wind singing in the chimney. “Jim hasn’t come,” she says,
speaking quiet; and she gets me the lantern-oil. After, when I went
away, she didn’t seem to notice; and what with the wind in the chimney,
and Jeaney sitting alone with her big black eyes staring, and Tioba
talking double, and the rain drizzling, and the night falling, I felt
queer enough to expect a ghost to be standing at my gate. And I came
along the road, and there _was_ one!

Yes, sir; she was a woman in a gray, wet cloak, standing at my gate, and
a horse and buggy in the middle of the road.

“‘Mighty!” says I, and drops my oil-can smack in the mud.

“Does Mr. Hawks live here?” she says, seeing me standing like a tomfool
in the mud.

“No, ma’am,” says I. “That’s his place across the flat half a mile. He
ain’t at home, but his wife is.”

The wind blew her cloak around her sharp, and I could see her face,
though it was more or less dark. She was some big and tall, and her face
was white and wet with the rain. After a while she says:

“He’s married?”

“Yes, ma’am. You’d better not--‘Mighty, ma’am!” says I, “where you
going?”

She swung herself into the buggy quicker’n women are apt to do, and she
whops the horse around and hits him a lick, and off he goes, splashing
and galloping. Me, I was beat. But I got so far as to think if she
wasn’t a ghost, maybe Jim Hawks would as lief she would be, and if
she didn’t drive more careful she’d be liable to oblige him that way.
Because it stands to reason a woman don’t come looking for a man on a
bad night, and cut away like that, unless she has something uncommon
on her mind. I heard the buggy-wheels and the splash of the horse dying
away; and then there was nothing in the night but the drip of the rain
and Tioba talking double--_um-hiss, toot-toot._

Then I went into the house, and didn’t tell my wife about it, she
disliking Jim on account of his singular drinks, which had a tidy taste,
but affecting a man sudden and surprising. My wife she went off to bed,
and I sat by the fire, feeling like there was more wrong in the world
than common. And I kept thinking of Jeaney Merimy sitting by herself off
there beyond the rain, with the wind singing in the chimney, and Tioba
groaning and tooting over her. Then there was the extra woman looking
for Jim; and it seemed to me if I was looking for Jim on a dark night,
I’d want to let him know beforehand it was all peaceable, so there
wouldn’t be a mistake, Jim being a sudden man and not particular. I had
the extra woman on my mind, so that after some while it seemed to me she
had come back and was driving _splish-splash_ around my house, though it
was only the wind. I was that foolish I kept counting how many times she
went round the house, and it was more than forty; and sometimes she came
so close to the front door I thought she’d come through it--_bang!_

Then somebody rapped sudden at the door, and I jumped, and my chair went
slap under the table, and I says, “Come in,” though I’d rather it would
have stayed out, and in walks Jim Hawks. “‘Mighty!” says I. “I thought
you was a horse and buggy.”

He picked up my chair and sat in it himself, rather cool, and began to
dry off.

“Horse and buggy?” says he. “Looking for me?”

I just nodded, seeing he appeared to know all about it.

“Saw ‘em in Eastport,” says he. “I suppose she’s over there”--meaning
his place. “Gone down the road! You don’t say! Now, I might have known
she wouldn’t do what you might call a rational thing. Never could bet
on that woman. If there was one of two things she’d be likely to do, she
wouldn’t do either of ‘em.”

“Well,” says I, “speaking generally, what might she want of you?”

Jim looks at me kind of absent minded, rubbing his hair the wrong way.

“Now, look at it, Fargus,” he says. “It ain’t reasonable. Now, she and
me, we got married about five years ago. And she had a brother named Tom
Cheever, and Tom and I didn’t agree, and naturally he got hurt; not
but that he got well again--that is, partly. And she appeared to have
different ideas from me, and she appeared to think she’d had enough of
me, and I took that to be reasonable. Now, here she wants me to come
back and behave myself, cool as you please. And me inquiring why, she
acts like the country was too small for us both. I don’t see it that way
myself.” And he shook his head, stretching his hands out over the fire.

“I don’t see either end of it,” says I. “You’re a bad one, Jim, a
downright bad one.”

“That’s so. It’s Jeaney you mean,” he says, looking kind of interested.
“It’ll be hell for Jeaney, won’t it?”

The wind and rain was whooping round the house so we could hardly hear
each other. It was like a wild thing trying to get in, which didn’t know
how to do it, and wouldn’t give up; and then you’d hear like something
whimpering, and little fingers tapping at the window-glass.

My opinion of Jim Hawks was that I didn’t seem to get on to him, and
that’s my opinion up to now; and it appeared to me then that Jim might
be the proper explanation himself of anything the extra woman did which
seemed unreasonable; but I didn’t tell him that, because I didn’t see
rightly what it would mean if I said it.

Jim got up and stretched his legs. “Now, I tell you, Fargus,” says he,
“I’m going to put the thing to Jeaney, being a clipper little woman,
not to say sharp. If it comes to the worst, I daresay Canada Center will
give us a burying; or if she wants to slide over the mountains with me,
there’s no trouble about it; or if she’d rather go her own way, and me
mine, that’s reasonable; or if she says to do nothing but hold the fort,
why, that’s all right, too, only Canada Center would be likely to take a
hand, and then there’d surely be trouble, on account of me getting mad.
Now, I have to say to you, Fargus, that you’ve been as friendly as a man
could be, as things are; and maybe you’ve seen the last of me, and maybe
you wouldn’t mind if you had.”

“Speaking generally,” says I, “you’re about right, Jim.”

With that he laughed, and went out, pulling the door to hard against the
storm.

Next day the rain came streaming down, and my cellar was flooded, and
the valley was full of the noise of the flood brooks. I kept looking
toward the Hawkses’ place, having a kind of notion something would blow
up there. It appeared to me there was too much gunpowder in that family
for the house to stay quiet. Besides, I saw Tioba had been dropping
rocks in the night, and there were new boulders around. One had ploughed
through Jim’s yard, and the road was cut up frightful. The boulder in
Jim’s yard looked as if it might be eight feet high. I told my wife the
Hawkses ought to get out of there, and she said she didn’t care, she
being down on Jim on account of his mixed drinks, which had a way of
getting under a man, I’m free to say, and heaving him up.

About four o’clock in the afternoon it come off misty, and I started
over to tell Jim he’d better get out; and sudden I stops and looks,
for there was a crowd coming from Canada Center--the Storrses and the
Petersons and the Merimys, and the extra woman in a buggy with Henry
Hall, who was county sheriff then. “Well, ‘Mighty!” says I.

They pulled up in front of Jim’s place, and I took it they were going to
walk in and settle things prompt. But you see, when I got there, it was
Jim a-standing by his door with his rifle, and the sheriff and Canada
Center was squeezing themselves through the gate and Jim shooting off
sideways at the pickets on his fence. And the sheriff ups and yelled:

“Here, you Jim Hawks! That ain’t any way to do.”

Then Jim walks down the road with his rifle over his arm, and Jeaney
Merimy comes to the door. She looked some mad and some crying, a little
of both.

“Hall,” says he, “you turn your horse and go back where you come from.
Maybe I’ll see you by and by. The rest of you go back to Canada Center,
and if Jeaney wants anything of you she’ll come and say so. You go,
now!”

And they went. The extra woman drove off with the sheriff, hanging her
head, and the sheriff saying, “You’ll have to come to time, Jim Hawks,
soon or late.” Jeaney Merimy sat in the door with her head hung down,
too; and the only one as ought to have been ashamed, he was walking
around uppish, like he meant to call down Tioba for throwing rocks into
his yard. Then Jeaney sees me, and she says:

“You’re all down on Jim. There’s no one but me to stand up for Jim.”

She began to cry, while Jim cocked his head and looked at her curious.
And she kept saying, “There’s no one but me to stand up for Jim.”

That was a queer way for her to look at it.

Now, that night set in, like the one before, with a drizzling rain. It
was the longest wet weather I ever knew. I kept going to the window to
look at the light over at the Hawkses’ and wonder what would come of
it, till it made my wife nervous, and she’s apt to be sharp when she’s
nervous, so I quit. And the way Tioba talked double that night was
terrible--_um-hiss, toot-toot_, hour after hour; and no sleep for me and
my wife, being nervous.

I do’ know what time it was, or what we heard. All I know is, my wife
jumps up with a yell, and I jumps up too, and I know we were terrible
afraid and stood listening maybe a minute. It seemed like there was
almost dead silence in the night, only the um-m went on, but no hissing
and no tooting, and if there was any sound of the rain or wind I
don’t recollect it. And then, “Um!” says Tioba, louder and louder and
_louder!_ till there was no top nor bottom to it, and the whole infernal
world went to pieces, and pitched me and my wife flat on the floor.

The first I knew, there was dead silence again; or maybe my hearing was
upset, for soon after I began to hear the rain buzzing away quietly.
Then I got up and took a lantern, and my wife grabs me.

“You ain’t going a step!” says she, and the upshot was we both went, two
old folks that was badly scared and bound to find out why. We went along
the road, looking about us cautious; and of a sudden, where the road
ought to be, we ran into a bank of mud that went up out of seeing in the
night. Then my wife sat down square in the road and began a-crying, and
I knew Tioba had fallen down.

Now, there’s Tioba, and that’s how she looked next morning, only
worse--more mushy and generally clawed up, with the rain still falling
dismal, and running little gullies in the mud like a million snakes.

According to my guess, Jim and Jeaney and the cemetery were about ten
rods in, or maybe not more than eight. Anyway, I says to Peterson, and
he agreed with me, that there wasn’t any use for a funeral. I says: “God
A’mighty buried ‘em to suit himself.” It looked like he didn’t think
much of the way Canada Center did its burying, seeing the cemetery was
took in and buried over again. Peterson and me thought the same on that
point. And we put up the white stone, sort of on top of things, that
maybe you’ve noticed, and lumped the folk in the cemetery together, and
put their names on it, and a general epitaph; but not being strong
on the dates, we left them out mostly. We put Jeaney Merimy with her
family, but Canada Center was singularly united against letting Jim in.

“You puts his name on no stone with me or mine,” says Merimy, and
I’m not saying but what he was right. Yes, sir; Merimy had feelings,
naturally. But it seemed to me when a man was a hundred and fifty feet
underground, more or less, there ought to be some charity; and maybe I
had a weakness for Jim, though my wife wouldn’t hear of him, on account
of his drinks, which were slippery things. Anyway, I takes a chisel
and a mallet, and I picks out a boulder on the slide a decent ways from
Canada Center’s monument, and I cuts in it, “Jim Hawks”; and then I cuts
in it an epitaph that I made myself, and it’s there yet:


                   HERE LIES JIM HAWKS, KILLED BY ROCKS.

                   HE DIDN’T ACT THE WAY HE OUGHT.

                   THAT’S ALL I’ll SAY OF JIM.

                   HERE HE LIES, WHAT’S LEFT OF HIM.


And I thought that stated the facts, though the second line didn’t
rhyme really even. Speaking generally, Tioba appeared to have dropped
on things about the right time, and that being so, why not let it pass,
granting Merimy had a right to his feelings?

Now, neither Sheriff Hall nor the extra woman showed up in the valley
any more, so it seemed likely they had heard of Tioba falling, and
agreed Jim wouldn’t be any good, if they could find him. It was two
weeks more before I saw the sheriff, him driving through, going over to
Helder’s. I saw him get out of his buggy to see the monument, and I went
up after, and led him over to show Jim’s epitaph, which I took to be a
good epitaph, except the second line.

Now, what do you think he did? Why, he busted out a-haw-hawing
ridiculous, and it made me mad.

“Shut up!” says I. “What’s ailing you?”

“Haw-haw!” says he. “Jim ain’t there! He’s gone down the road.”

“I believe you’re a blamed liar,” says I; and the sheriff sobered up,
being mad himself, and he told me this.

“Jim Hawks,” says he, “came into East-port that night, meaning business.
He routed me out near twelve o’clock, and the lady staying at my house
she came into it, too, and there we had it in the kitchen at twelve
o’clock, the lady uncommon hot, and Jim steaming wet in his clothes and
rather cool. He says: ‘I’m backing Jeaney now, and she tells me to come
in and settle it to let us alone, and she says we’ll hand over all we’ve
got and leave. That appears to be her idea, and being hers, I’ll put it
as my own.’ Now, the lady, if you’d believe it, she took on fearful, and
wouldn’t hear to reason unless he’d go with her, though what her idea
was of a happy time with Jim Hawks, the way he was likely to act, I give
it up. But she cried and talked foolish, till I see Jim was awful bored,
but I didn’t see there was much for me to do. Then Jim got up at last,
and laughed very unpleasant, and he says: ‘It’s too much bother. I’ll go
with you, Annie, but I think you’re a fool.’ And they left next morning,
going south by train.”

That’s what Sheriff Hall said to me then and there. Well, now, I’m an
old man, and I don’t know as I’m particular clever, but it looks to me
as if God A’mighty and Tioba had made a mistake between ‘em. Else how
come they hit at Jim Hawks so close as that and missed him? And what was
the use of burying Jeaney Merimy eight rods deep, who was a good girl
all her life, and was for standing up for Jim, and him leaving her
because the extra woman got him disgusted? Maybe she’d rather Tioba
would light on her, that being the case--maybe she would have; but she
never knew what the case was.

That epitaph is there yet, as you might say, waiting for him to come
and get under it; but it don’t seem to have the right point now, and it
don’t state the facts any more, except the second line, which is more
facts than rhyme. And Tioba is the messiest-look-ing mountain in these
parts. And now, I say, Jim Hawks was in this valley little more than a
year, and he blazed his trail through the Merimy family, and the Storrs
family, and the Peterson family, and there’s Tioba Mountain, and that’s
his trail.

No, sir; I don’t get on to it. I hear Tioba talking double some nights,
sort of uneasy, and it seems to me she isn’t on to it either, and has
her doubts maybe she throwed herself away. And there’s the cemetery six
to ten rods underground, with a monument to forty-five people on top,
and an epitaph to Jim Hawks that ain’t so, except the second line, there
being no corpse to fit it.

Canada Center thinks they’d fit Jim to it if he came round again; but
they wouldn’t: for he was a wicked one, but sudden to act, and he was
reckless, and he kept his luck. For Tioba drawed off and hit at him,
slap! and he dodged her.



A MAN FOR A’ THAT


COMPANY A was cut up at Antietam, so that there was not enough of it
left for useful purposes, and Deacon Andrew Terrell became a member
of Company G, which nicknamed him “‘is huliness.” Company A came from
Dutchess County. There was a little white church in the village of
Brewster, and a little white house with a meagre porch where that good
woman, Mrs. Terrell, had stood and shed several tears as the deacon
walked away down the street, looking extraordinary in his regimentals.
She dried her eyes, settled down to her sewing in that quiet south
window, and hoped he would remember to keep his feet dry and not lose
the cough drops. That part of Dutchess County was a bit of New England
spilled over. New England has been spilling over these many years.

The deacon took the cough drops regularly; he kept his gray chin beard
trimmed with a pair of domestic scissors, and drilling never persuaded
him to move his large frame with other than the same self-conscious
restraint; his sallow face had the same set lines. There is something in
the Saxon’s blood that will not let him alter with circumstances, and it
is by virtue of it that he conquers in the end.

But no doorkeeper in the house of God--the deacon’s service in the
meeting-house at Brewster--who should come perforce to dwell in the
tents of wickedness would pretend to like it. Besides, Company G had no
tents. It came from the lower wards of the great city. Dinkey Cott, that
thin-legged, stunted, imp-faced, hardened little Bowery sprout, put his
left fist in the deacon’s eye the first day of their acquaintance, and
swore in the pleasantest manner possible.

The deacon cuffed him, because he had been a schoolmaster in his day,
and did not understand how he would be despised for knocking Dinkey down
in that amateur fashion, and the lieutenant gave them both guard duty
for fighting in the ranks.

The deacon declared “that young man Cott hadn’t no moral ideas,” and did
his guard duty in bitterness and strict conscience to the last minute of
it. Dinkey put his thumb to his nose and offered to show the lieutenant
how the thing should have been done, and that big man laughed, and both
forgot about the guard duty.

Dinkey had no sense whatever of personal dignity, which was partly what
the deacon meant by “moral ideas,” nor reverence for anything above or
beneath. He did not harbor any special anger, either, and only enough
malice to point his finger at the elder man, whenever he saw him, and
snicker loudly to the entertainment of Company G.

Dinkey’s early recollections had to do with the cobblestones of Mulberry
Bend and bootblacking on Pearl Street. Deacon Terrell’s began with a
lonely farm where there were too many potato hills to hoe, a little
schoolhouse where arithmetic was taught with a ferrule, a white
meeting-house where the wrath of God was preached with enthusiasm; both
seemed far enough away from the weary tramp, tramp, the picket duty, and
the camp at last one misty night in thick woods on the Stafford hills,
looking over the Rappahannock to the town of Fredericksburg.

What happened there was not clear to Company G. There seemed to be a
deal of noise and hurrying about, cannon smoke in the valley and cannon
smoke on the terraces across the valley. Somebody was building pontoon
bridges, therefore it seemed likely somebody wanted to get across. They
were having hard luck with the bridges. That was probably the enemy on
the ridge beyond.

There seemed to be no end to him, anyway; up and down the valley, mile
beyond mile, the same line of wooded heights and drifting smoke.

And the regiment found itself crossing a shaky pontoon bridge on a
Saturday morning in the mist and climbing the bank into a most battered
and tired-looking little town, which was smoldering sulkily with burned
buildings and thrilling with enormous noise. There they waited for
something else to happen. The deacon felt a lump in his throat, stopping
his breath.

“Git out o’ me tracks!” snickered Dinkey Cott behind him. “I’ll step on
yer.”

Dinkey had never seemed more impish, unholy and incongruous. They seemed
to stand there a long time. The shells kept howling and whizzing around;
they howled till they burst, and then they whizzed. And now and then
some one would cry out and fall. It was bad for the nerves. The men were
growling.

“Aw, cap, give us a chance!”

“It ain’t my fault, boys. I got to wait for orders, same as you.”

Dinkey poked the deacon’s legs with the butt of his rifle.

“Say, it’s rotten, ain’t it? Say, cully, my ma don’t like me full o’
holes. How’s yours?”

The other gripped his rifle tight and thought of nothing in particular.

Was it five hours that passed, or twenty, or one? Then they started, and
the town was gone behind their hurrying feet. Over a stretch of broken
level, rush and tramp and gasping for breath; fences and rocks ahead,
clumps of trees and gorges; ground growing rougher and steeper, but that
was nothing. If there was anything in the way you went at it and left
it behind. You plunged up a hill, and didn’t notice it. You dove into a
gully, and it wasn’t there. Time was a liar, obstacles were scared and
ran away. But half-way up the last pitch ran a turnpike, with a stone
wall in front that spit fire and came nearer and nearer. It seemed
creeping down viciously to meet you. Up, up, till the powder of the guns
almost burned the deacon’s face, and the smoke was so thick he could
only see the red flashes.

And then suddenly he was alone. At least there was no one in sight, for
the smoke was very thick. Company G all dead, or fallen, or gone back.
There was a clump of brambles to his left. He dropped to the ground,
crept behind it and lay still. The roar went on, the smoke rolled down
over him and sometimes a bullet would clip through the brambles, but
after a time the small fire dropped off little by little, though the
cannon still boomed on.

His legs were numb and his heart beating his sides like a drum. The
smoke was blowing away down the slope. He lifted his head and peered
through the brambles; there was the stone wall not five rods away, all
lined along the top with grimy faces. A thousand rifles within as
many yards, wanting nothing better than to dig a round hole in him. He
dropped his head and closed his eyes.

His thoughts were so stunned that the slowly lessening cannonade seemed
like a dream, and he hardly noticed when it had ceased, and he began
to hear voices, cries of wounded men and other men talking. There was
a clump of trees to the right, and two or three crows in the treetops
cawing familiarly. An hour or two must have passed, for the sun was down
and the river mist creeping up. He lay on his back, staring blankly at
the pale sky and shivering a little with the chill.

A group of men came down and stood on the rocks above. They could
probably see him, but a man on his back with his toes up was nothing
particular there. They talked with a soft drawl. “Doggonedest clean-up I
ever saw.”

“They hadn’t no business to come up heah, yuh know. They come some
distance, now.”

“Shuah! We ain’t huntin’ rabbits. What’d yuh suppose?”

Then they went on.

The mist came up white and cold and covered it all over. He could not
see the wall any longer, though he could hear the voices. He turned on
his face and crawled along below the brambles and rocks to where the
clump of trees stood with a deep hollow below them. They were chestnut
trees. Some one was sitting in the hollow with his back against the
roots.

During the rush Dinkey Cott fairly enjoyed himself. The sporting blood
in him sang in his ears, an old song that the leopard knows, it may be,
waiting in the mottled shadow, that the rider knows on the race course,
the hunter in the snow--the song of a craving that only excitement
satisfies. The smoke blew in his face. He went down a hollow and up the
other side. Then something hot and sudden came into the middle of him
and he rolled back against the roots of a great tree.

“Hully gee! I’m plunked!” he grumbled disgustedly.

For the time he felt no pain, but his blood ceased to sing in his ears.
Everything seemed to settle down around him, blank and dull and angry.
He felt as if either the army of the North or the army of the South had
not treated him rightly. If they had given him a minute more he might
have clubbed something worth while. He sat up against a tree, wondered
what his chance was to pull through, thought it poor, and thought he
would sell it for a drink.

The firing dropped off little by little, and the mist was coming up.
Dinkey began to see sights. His face and hands were hot, and things
seemed to be riproaring inside him generally. The mist was full of
flickering lights, which presently seemed to be street lamps down the
Bowery. The front windows of Reilly’s saloon were glaring, and opposite
was Gottstein’s jewelry store, where he had happened to hit one Halligan
in the eye for saying that Babby Reilly was his girl and not Dinkey’s;
and he bought Babby a 90-cent gold ring of Gottstein, which proved
Halligan to be a liar. The cop saw him hit Halligan, too, and said
nothing, being his friend. And Halligan enlisted in Company G with the
rest of the boys, and was keeled over in the dark one night on picket
duty, somewhere up country. All the gang went into Company G. The
captain was one of the boys, and so was Pete Murphy, the big lieutenant.
He was a sort of ward sub-boss, was Pete.

“Reilly, he’s soured on me, Pete. I dun-no wot’s got the ol’ man.”

The lights seemed to grow thick, till everything was ablaze.

“Aw, come off! Dis ain’t de Bowery,” he muttered, and started and rubbed
his eyes.

The mist was cold and white all around him, ghostly and still, except
that there was a low, continual mutter of voices above, and now and then
a soft moan rose up from somewhere. And it seemed natural enough that a
ghost should come creeping out of the ghostly mist, even that it should
creep near to him and peer into his face, a ghost with a gray chin beard
and haggard eyes.

“I’m going down,” it whispered. “Come on. Don’t make any noise.”

“Hully gee!” thought Dinkey. “It’s the Pope!”

A number of things occurred to him in confusion. The deacon did not see
he was hit. He said to himself:

“I ain’t no call to spoil ‘is luck, if he is country.”

He blinked a moment, then nodded and whispered hoarsely: “Go on.”

The deacon crept away into the mist. Dinkey leaned back feebly and
closed his eyes.

“Wished I’d die quick. It’s rotten luck. Wished I could see Pete.”

The deacon crept down about two hundred yards, then stopped and waited
for the young man Cott. The night was closing in fast A cry in the
darkness made him shiver. He had never imagined anything could be so
desolate and sad. He thought he had better see what was the matter with
Dinkey. He never could make out afterward why it had seemed necessary
to look after Dinkey. There were hundreds of better men on the slopes.
Dinkey might have passed him. It did not seem very sensible business
to go back after that worthless little limb of Satan. The deacon never
thought the adventure a credit to his judgment.

But he went back, guiding himself by the darker gloom of the trees
against the sky, and groped his way down the hollow, and heard Dinkey
muttering and babbling things without sense. It made the deacon mad
to have to do with irresponsible people, such as go to sleep under the
enemy’s rifles and talk aloud in dreams. He pulled him roughly by the
boots, and he fell over, babbling and muttering. Then it came upon the
deacon that it was not sleep, but fever. He guessed the young man was
hit somewhere. They had better be going, anyway. The Johnnies must have
out a picket line somewhere. He slipped his hands under Dinkey and got
up. He tried to climb out quietly, but fell against the bank. Some one
took a shot at the noise, spattering the dirt under his nose. He lifted
Dinkey higher and went on. Dinkey’s mutterings ceased. He made no sound
at all for a while, and at last said huskily:

“Wot’s up?”

“It’s me.”

“Hully gee! Wot yer doin’?”

His voice was weak and thin now. He felt as if he were being pulled in
two in the middle.

“Say, ol’ man, I won’t jolly yer. Les’ find Pete. There’s a minie ball
messed up in me stomick awful.”

“‘Tain’t far, Dinkey,” said the deacon, gently.

And he thought of Pete Murphy’s red, fleshy face and black, oily
mustache. It occurred to him that he had noticed most men in Company
G, if they fell into trouble, wanted to find Pete. He thought he should
want to himself, though he could not tell why. If he happened to be
killed anywhere he thought he should like Pete Murphy to tell his wife
about it.

Dinkey lay limp and heavy in his arms. The wet blackness seemed like
something pressed against his face. He could not realize that he was
walking, though in the night, down the same slope to a river called the
Rappahannock and a town called Fredericksburg. It was strange business
for him, Deacon Terrell of Brewster, to be in, stumbling down the
battlefield in the pit darkness, with a godless little brat like Dinkey
Cott in his arms.

And why godless, if the same darkness were around us all, and the same
light, while we lived, would come to all in the morning? It was borne
upon the deacon that no man was elected to the salvation of the sun or
condemned to the night apart from other men.

The deacon never could recall the details of his night’s journey, except
that he fell down more than once, and ran against stone walls in the
dark. It seemed to him that he had gone through an unknown, supernatural
country. Dinkey lay so quiet that he thought he might be dead, but he
could not make up his mind to leave him. He wished he could find Pete
Murphy. Pete would tell him if Dinkey was dead.

He walked not one mile, but several, in the blind night Dinkey had long
been a limp weight. The last thing he said was, “Les’ find Pete,” and
that was long before.

At last the deacon saw a little glow in the darkness, and, coming near,
found a dying campfire with a few flames only flickering, and beside it
two men asleep. He might have heard the ripple of the Rappahannock, but,
being so worn and dull in his mind, he laid Dinkey down by the fire and
fell heavily to sleep himself before he knew it.

When he woke Pete Murphy stood near him with a corporal and a guard.
They were looking for the pieces of Company G. “Dead, ain’t he?” said
Pete.

The deacon got up and brushed his clothes. The two men who were sleeping
woke up also, and they all stood around looking at Dinkey in awkward
silence.

“Who’s his folks?”

“Him!” said the big lieutenant. “He ain’t got any folks. Tell you what,
ol’ man, I see a regiment drummer somewhere a minute ago. He’ll do a
roll over Dinkey, for luck, sure!”

They put Dinkey’s coat over his face and buried him on the bank of the
Rappahannock, and the drummer beat a roll over him.

Then they sat down on the bank and waited for the next thing.

The troops were moving back now across the bridge hurriedly. Company G
had to take its turn. The deacon felt in his pockets and found the cough
drops and Mrs. Terrell’s scissors. He took a cough drop and fell to
trimming his beard.



THE GREEN GRASSHOPPER


ANY one would have called Bobby Bell a comfortable boy--that is, any
one who did not mind bugs; and I am sure I do not see why any one should
mind bugs, except the kind that taste badly in raspberries and some
other kinds. It was among the things that are entertaining to see Bobby
Bell bobbing around among the buttercups looking for grasshoppers.
Grasshoppers are interesting when you consider that they have heads
like door knobs or green cheeses and legs with crooks to them. “Bobbing”
 means to go like Bobby Bell--that is, to go up and down, to talk to
one’s self, and not to hear any one shout, unless it is some one whom
not to hear is to get into difficulties.

Across the Salem Road from Mr. Atherton Bell’s house there were many
level meadows of a pleasant greenness, as far as Cum-ming’s alder swamp;
and these meadows were called the Bow Meadows. If you take the alder
swamp and the Bow Meadows together, they were like this: the swamp was
mysterious and unvisited, except by those who went to fish in the Muck
Hole for turtles and eels. Frogs with solemn voices lived in the swamp.
Herons flew over it slowly, and herons also are uncanny affairs. We
believed that the people of the swamp knew things it was not good to
know, like witchcraft and the insides of the earth. In the meadows, on
the other hand, there were any number of cheerful and busy creatures,
some along the level of the buttercups, but most of them about the roots
of the grasses. The people in the swamp were wet, cold, sluggish, and
not a great many of them. The people of the meadows were dry, warm,
continually doing something, and in number not to be calculated by any
rule in Wentworth’s Arithmetic.

So you see how different were the two, and how it comes about that the
meadows were nearly the best places in the world to be in, both
because of the society there, and because of the swamp near at hand and
interesting to think about. So, too, you see why it was that Bobby Bell
could be found almost any summer day “bobbing” for grasshoppers in the
Bow Meadows--“bobbing” meaning to go up and down like Bobby Bell, to
talk to one’s self and not to hear any one shout; and “grasshoppers”
 being interesting because of their heads resembling door knobs or green
cheeses, because of the crooks in their legs, and because of their
extraordinary habit of jumping.

There were in Hagar at this time four ladies who lived at a little
distance from the Salem Road and Mr. Atherton Bell’s house, on a road
which goes over a hill and off to a district called Scrabble Up and
Down, where huckleberries and sweet fern mostly grow. They were known as
the Tuttle Four Women, being old Mrs. Tuttle and the three Miss Tuttles,
of whom Miss Rachel was the eldest.

It is easy to understand why Miss Rachel and the children of the village
of Hagar did not get along well together, when you consider how clean
she was, how she walked so as never to fall over anything, nor took
any interest in squat tag, nor resembled the children of the village of
Hagar in any respect. And so you can understand how it was that, when
she came down the hill that Saturday afternoon and saw Bobby Bell
through the bars in the Bow Meadows, she did not understand his actions,
and disapproved of them, whatever they were.

The facts were these: In the first place a green grasshopper, who was
reckless or had not been brought up rightly, had gone down Bobby’s back
next the skin, where he had no business to be; and naturally Bobby stood
on his head to induce him to come out. That seems plain enough, for, if
you are a grasshopper and down a boy’s back, and the boy stands on his
head, you almost always come out to see what he is about; because it
makes you curious, if not ill, to be down a boy’s back and have him
stand on his head. Any one can see that. And this is the reason I had
to explain about Miss Rachel, in order to show you why she did not
understand it, nor understand what followed after.

In the next place, Bobby knew that when you go where you have no
business to, you are sometimes spanked, but usually you are talked to
unpleasantly, and tied up to something by the leg, and said to be in
disgrace. Usually you are tied to the sewing machine, and “disgrace”
 means the corner of the sewing-room between the machine and the sofa. It
never occurred to him but that this was the right and natural order of
things. Very likely it is. It seemed so to Bobby.

Now it is difficult to spank a grasshopper properly. And so there was
nothing to do but to tie him up and talk to him unpleasantly. That seems
quite simple and plain. But the trouble was that it was a long time
since Miss Rachel had stood on her head, or been spanked, or tied up to
anything. This was unfortunate, of course. And when she saw Bobby
stand violently on his head and then tie a string to a grasshopper, she
thought it was extraordinary business, and probably bad, and she came up
to the bars in haste.

“Bobby!” she said, “you naughty boy, are you pulling off that
grasshopper’s leg?”

Bobby thought this absurd. “Gasshoppers,” he said calmly, “ithn’t any
good ‘ith their legth off.”

This was plain enough, too, because grasshoppers are intended to jump,
and cannot jump without their legs; consequently it would be quite
absurd to pull them off. Miss Rachel thought one could not know this
without trying it, and especially know it in such a calm, matter-of-fact
way as Bobby seemed to do, without trying it a vast number of times;
therefore she became very much excited. “You wicked, wicked boy!” she
cried. “I shall tell your father!” Then she went off.

Bobby wondered awhile what his father would say when Miss Rachel told
him that grasshoppers were no good with their legs off. When Bobby told
him that kind of thing, he generally chuckled to himself and called
Bobby “a queer little chicken.” If his father called Miss Rachel “a
queer little chicken,” Bobby felt that it would seem strange. But he had
to look after the discipline of the grasshopper, and it is no use trying
to think of two things at once. He tied the grasshopper to a mullein
stalk and talked to him unpleasantly, and the grasshopper behaved very
badly all the time; so that Bobby was disgusted and went away to leave
him for a time--went down to the western end of the meadows, which is a
drowsy place. And there it came about that he fell asleep, because his
legs were tired, because the bees hummed continually, and because the
sun was warm and the grass deep around him.

Miss Rachel went into the village and saw Mr. Atherton Bell on the steps
of the post-office. He was much astonished at being attacked in such
a disorderly manner by such an orderly person as Miss Rachel; but
he admitted, when it was put to him, that pulling off the legs of
grasshoppers was interfering with the rights of grasshoppers. Then Miss
Rachel went on her way, thinking that a good seed had been sown and the
morality of the community distinctly advanced.

The parents of other boys stood on the post-office steps in great
number, for it was near mail-time; and here you might have seen what
varieties of human nature there are. For some were taken with the
conviction that the attraction of the Bow Meadows to their children was
all connected with the legs of grasshoppers; some suspected it only, and
were uneasy; some refused to imagine such a thing, and were indignant.
But they nearly all started for the Bow Meadows with a vague idea of
doing something, Mr. Atherton Bell and Father Durfey leading. It was not
a well-planned expedition, nor did any one know what was intended to be
done. They halted at the bars, but no Bobby Bell was in sight, nor
did the Bow Meadows seem to have anything to say about the matter. The
grasshoppers in sight had all the legs that rightly belonged to them.
Mr. Atherton Bell got up on the wall and shouted for Bobby. Father
Durfey climbed over the bars.

It happened that there was no one in the Bow Meadows at this time,
except Bobby, Moses Durfey, Chub Leroy, and one other. Bobby was asleep,
on account of the bumblebees humming in the sunlight; and the other
three were far up the farther side, on account of an expedition through
the alder swamp, supposing it to be Africa. There was a desperate battle
somewhere; but the expedition turned out badly in the end, and in this
place is neither here nor there. They heard Mr. Atherton Bell shouting,
but they did not care about it. It is more to the point that Father
Durfey, walking around in the grass, did not see the grasshopper who was
tied to the mullein stalk and as mad as he could be. For when tied up
in disgrace, one is always exceedingly mad at this point; but repentance
comes afterwards. The grasshopper never got that far, for Father Durfey
stepped on him with a boot as big as--big enough for Father Durfey to be
comfortable in--so that the grasshopper was quite dead. It was to him as
if a precipice were to fall on you, when you were thinking of something
else. Then they all went away.

Bobby Bell woke up with a start, and was filled with remorse,
remembering his grasshopper. The sun had slipped behind the shoulder of
Windless Mountain. There was a faint light across the Bow Meadows, that
made them sweet to look on, but a little ghostly. Also it was dark in
the roots of the grasses, and difficult to find a green grasshopper
who was dead; at least it would have been if he had not been tied to a
mullein stalk. Bobby found him at last sunk deep in the turf, with his
poor legs limp and crookless, and his head, which had been like a
green cheese or a door knob, no longer looking even like the head of a
grasshopper.

Then Bobby Bell sat down and wept. Miss Rachel, who had turned the corner
and was half way up to the house of the Tuttle Four Women, heard him,
and turned back to the bars. She wondered if Mr. Atherton Bell had not
been too harsh. The Bow Meadows looked dim and mournful in the twilight.
Miss Rachel was feeling a trifle sad about herself, too, as she
sometimes did; and the round-cheeked cherub weeping in the wide
shadowy meadows seemed to her something like her own life in the great
world--not very well understood.

“He wath geen!” wailed Bobby, looking up at her, but not allowing his
grief to be interrupted. “He wath my geen bug!”

Miss Rachel melted still further, without knowing why.

“What was green?”

She pulled down a bar and crawled through. She hoped Mr. Atherton Bell
was not looking from a window, for it was difficult to avoid making
one’s self amusing to Mr. Atherton Bell. But Bobby was certainly in some
kind of trouble.

“He’th dead!” wailed Bobby again. “He’th thtepped on!”

Miss Rachel bent over him stiffly. It was hard for one so austerely
ladylike as Miss Rachel to seem gracious and compassionate, but she did
pretty well.

“Oh, it’s a grasshopper!” Then more severely: “Why did you tie him up?”

Bobby’s sobs subsided into hiccoughs.

“It’th a disgace. I put him in disgace, and I forgotted him. He went
down my back.”

“Did you step on him?”

“N-O-O-O!” The hiccoughs rose into sobs again. “He wath the geenest
gasshopper!”

This was not strictly true; there were others just as green; but it was
a generous tribute to the dead and a credit to Bobby Bell that he felt
that way.

Now there was much in all this that Miss Rachel did not understand; but
she understood enough to feel sharp twinges for the wrong that she had
done Bobby Bell, and whatever else may be said of Miss Rachel, up to her
light she was square. In fact, I should say that she had an acute-angled
conscience. It was more than square; it was one of those consciences
that you are always spearing yourself on. She felt very humble, and went
with Bobby Bell to dig a grave for the green grasshopper under the lee
of the wall. She dug it herself with her parasol, thinking how she must
go up with Bobby Bell, what she must say to Mr. Atherton Bell, and how
painful it would be, because Mr. Atherton Bell was so easily amused.

Bobby patted the grave with his chubby palm and cooed contentedly. Then
they went up the hill in the twilight hand in hand.



THE ENEMIES


THE great fluted pillars in Ramoth church were taken away. They
interfered with the view and rental of the pews behind them. Albion Dee
was loud and persuasive for removing them, and Jay Dee secret, shy and
resistant against it. That was their habit and method of hostility.

Then in due season Jay Dee rented the first seat in the pew in front
of Albion’s pew. This was thought to be an act of hostility, subtle,
noiseless, far-reaching.

He was a tall man, Jay Dee, and wore a wide flapping coat, had flowing
white hair, and walked with a creeping step; a bachelor, a miser, he
had gathered a property slowly with persistent fingers; a furtive,
meditating, venerable man, with a gentle piping voice. He lived on the
hill in the old house of the Dees, built in the last century by one
“John Griswold Dee, who married Sarah Ballister and begat two sons,”
 who respectively begat Jay and Albion Dee; and Albion founded Ironville,
three or four houses in the hollow at the west of Diggory Gorge, and a
bolt and nail factory. He was a red-faced, burly man, with short legs
and thick neck, who sought determined means to ends, stood squarely and
stated opinions.

The beginnings of the feud lay backward in time, little underground
resentments that trickled and collected. In Albion they foamed up and
disappeared. He called himself modern and progressive, and the bolt and
nail factory was thought to be near bankruptcy. He liked to look men in
the eyes. If one could not see the minister, one could not tell if he
meant what he said, or preached shoddy doctrine. As regards all view and
rental behind him, Jay Dee was as bad as one of the old fluted pillars.
Albion could not see the minister. He felt the act to be an act of
hostility.

But he was progressive, and interested at the time in a question of the
service, as respected the choir which sang from the rear gallery. It
seemed to him more determined and effective to hymnal devotion that the
congregation should rise and turn around during the singing, to the end
that congregation and choir might each see that all things were done
decently. He fixed on the idea and found it written as an interlinear to
his gospels, an imperative codicil to the duty of man.

But the congregation was satiated with change. They had still to make
peace between their eyes and the new slender pillars, to convince
themselves by contemplation that the church was still not unstable, not
doctrinally weaker.

So it came about that Albion Dee stood up sternly and faced the choir
alone, with the old red, fearless, Protestant face one knows of Luther
and Cromwell. The congregation thought him within his rights there
to bear witness to his conviction. Sabbaths came and went in Ramoth
peacefully, milestones of the passing time, and all seemed well.

Pseudo-classic architecture is a pale, inhuman allegory of forgotten
meaning. If buildings like Ramoth church could in some plastic way
assimilate their communicants, what gargoyles would be about the
cornices, what wall paintings of patient saints, mystical and realistic.
On one of the roof cornices of an old church in France is the carved
stone face of a demon with horns and a forked tongue, and around its
eyes a wrinkled smile of immense kindness. And within the church is the
mural painting of a saint, some Beata Ursula or Catherine, with upturned
eyes; a likeable girl, capable of her saintship, of turning up her eyes
with sincerity because it fell to her to see a celestial vision;
as capable of a blush and twittering laugh, and the better for her
capabilities.

It is not stated what Albion symbolized. He stood overtopping the
bonnets and the gray heads of deacons, respected by the pews, popular
with the choir, protesting his conviction.

And all the while secretly, with haunch and elbow, he nudged, bumped
and rubbed the shoulders and silvery head of Jay Dee. It is here
claimed that he stood there in the conviction that it was his duty so
to testify. It is not denied that he so bumped and squatted against Jay
Dee, cautiously, but with relish and pleasure.

In the bowed silver head, behind the shy, persistent eyes of Jay Dee,
what were his thoughts, his purposes, coiling and constricting? None
but the two were aware of the locked throat grip of the spirit. In the
droning Sabbath peace the congregation pursued the minister through
the subdivisions of his text, and dragged the hymn behind the dragging
choir.

It was a June day and the orioles gurgled their warm nesting notes in
the maples. The boys in the gallery searched the surface of the quiet
assembly for points of interest; only here and there nodding heads,
wavering fans, glazed, abstracted eyes. They twisted and yawned. What to
them were brethren in unity, or the exegesis of a text, as if one were
to count and classify, prickle by prickle, to no purpose the irritating
points of a chestnut burr? The sermon drowsed to its close. The choir
and Albion rose. It was an outworn sight now, little more curious than
Monday morning. The sunlight shone through the side windows, slanting
down over the young, worldly and impatient, and one selected ray fell on
Jay Dee’s hair with spiritual radiance, and on Albion’s red face, turned
choirward for a testimony.

Suddenly Albion gave a guttural shout. He turned, he grasped Jay Dee’s
collar, dragged him headlong into the aisle, and shook him to and fro,
protesting, “You stuck me! I’ll teach you!”

His red face worked with passion; Jay Dee’s venerable head bobbed,
helpless, mild, piteous. The choir broke down. The minister rose with
lifted hands and open mouth, the gallery in revelry, the body of
the church in exclamatory confusion. Albion saw outstretched hands
approaching, left his enemy, and hat in hand strode down the aisle with
red, glowering face, testifying, “He stuck me.”

Jay Dee sat on the floor, his meek head swaying dizzily.

On Monday morning Albion set out for Hamilton down the narrow valley
of the Pilgrim River. The sudden hills hid him and his purposes from
Ramoth. He came in time to sit in the office of Simeon Ballister, and
Simeon’s eyes gleamed. He took notes and snuffed the battle afar.

“Ha! Witnesses to pin protruding from coat in region adjoining haunch.
Hum! Affidavits to actual puncture of inflamed character, arguing
possibly venom of pin. Ha! Hum! Motive of concurrent animosity. A very
respectable case. I will come up and see your witnesses--Ha!--in a day
or two. Good morning.”

Ballister was a shining light in the county courts in those days,
but few speak of him now. Yet he wrote a Life of Byron, a History of
Hamilton County, and talked a half century with unflagging charm. Those
who remember will have in mind his long white beard and inflamed and
swollen nose, his voice of varied melody. Alien whiskey and natural
indolence kept his fame local. His voice is silent forever that once
rose in the court-rooms like a fountain shot with rainbow fancies, in
musical enchantment, in liquid cadence. “I have laid open, gentlemen,
the secret of a human heart, shadowed and mourning, to the illumination
of your justice. You are the repository and temple of that sacred light.
Not merely as a plaintiff, a petitioner, my client comes; but as a
worshipper, in reverence of your function, he approaches the balm and
radiance of that steadfast torch and vestal fire of civilization, an
intelligent jury.” Such was Ballister’s inspired manner, such his habit
of rhythm and climax, whenever he found twenty-four eyes fixed on his
swollen nose, the fiery mesmeric core of his oratory beaconing juries to
follow it and discover truth.

But the Case of Dee v. Dee came only before a justice of the peace, in
the Town Hall of Ramoth, and Justice Kernegan was but a stout man with
hairy ears and round, spectacled, benevolent eyes. Jay Dee brought no
advocate. His silvery hair floated about his head. His pale eyes gazed
in mild terror at Ballister. He said it must have been a wasp stung
Albion.

“A wasp, sir! Your Honor, does a wasp carry for penetration, for
puncture, for malignant attack or justifiable defence, for any purpose
whatsoever, a brass pin of palpable human manufacture, drawn, headed and
pointed by machinery, such as was inserted in my client’s person? Does
the defendant wish your Honor to infer that wasps carry papers of brass
pins in their anatomies? I will ask the defendant, whose venerable
though dishonored head bears witness to his age, if, in his long
experience, he has ever met a wasp of such military outfit and arsenal?
Not a wasp, your Honor, but a serpent; a serpent in human form.”

Jay Dee had no answer to all this. He murmured--

“Sat on me.”

“I didn’t catch your remark, sir.”

“Why, you see,” explained the Justice, “Jay says Albion’s been squatting
on him, Mr. Ballister, every Sunday for six months. You see, Albion gets
up when the choir sings, and watches ‘em sharp to see they sing correct,
because his ear ain’t well tuned, but his eye’s all right.”

The Justice’s round eyes blinked pleasantly. The court-room murmured
with approval, and Albion started to his feet.

“Now don’t interrupt the Court,” continued the Justice. “You see, Mr.
Ballister, sometimes Jay says it was a wasp and sometimes he says it
was because Albion squatted on him, don’t you see, bumped him on the
ear with his elbow. You see, Jay sets just in front of Albion. Now, you
see--”

“Then, does it not appear to your Honor that a witness who voluntarily
offers to swear to two contradictory explanations; first, that the
operation in question, the puncture or insertion, was performed by a
wasp; secondly, that, though he did it himself with a pin and in his
haste allowed that pin in damnatory evidence to remain, it was because,
he alleges, of my client’s posture toward, and intermittent contact
with him--does it not seem to your Honor that such a witness is to be
discredited in any statement he may make?”

“Well, really, Mr. Ballister, but you see Albion oughtn’t to’ve squatted
on him.”

“I find myself in a singular position. It has not been usual in my
experience to find the Court a pleader in opposition. I came hoping to
inform and persuade your Honor regarding this case. I find myself in
the position of being informed and persuaded. I hope the Court sees
no discourtesy in the remark, but if the Court is prepared already to
discuss the case there seems little for me to do.”

The Justice looked alarmed. He felt his popularity trembling. It would
not do to balk the public interest in Ballister’s oratory. Doubtless Jay
Dee had stuck a pin into Albion, but maybe Albion had mussed Jay’s hair
and jabbed his ear, had dragged and shaken him in the aisle at least.
The rights of it did not seem difficult. They ought not to have acted
that way. No man has the right to sit on another man’s head from the
standpoint or advantage of his own religious conviction. Nor has a man
a right to use another man for a pincushion whenever, as it may be,
he finds something about him in a way that’s like a pincushion. But
Ballister’s oratory was critical and important.

“Why,” said Kemegan hastily, “this Court is in a mighty uncertain state
of mind. It couldn’t make it up without hearing what you were going to
say.”

Again the Court murmured with approval. Ballister rose.

“This case presents singular features. The secret and sunless caverns,
where human motives lie concealed, it is the function of justice to lay
open to vivifying light. Not only evil or good intentions are moving
forces of apparent action, but mistakes and misjudgments.
I conclude that your Honor puts down the defendant’s fanciful and
predatory wasp to the defendant’s neglect of legal advice, to his feeble
and guilty inepitude. I am willing to leave it there. I assume that he
confesses the assault on my client’s person with a pin, an insidious and
lawless pin, pointed with cruelty and propelled with spite; I infer
and understand that he offers in defence a certain alleged provocation,
certain insertions of my client’s elbow into the defendant’s ear,
certain trespasses and disturbance of the defendant’s hair, finally,
certain approximations and contacts between my client’s adjacent quarter
and the defendant’s shoulders, denominated by him--and here we demur or
object--as an act of sitting or squatting, whereby the defendant alleges
himself to have been touched, grieved and annoyed. In the defendant’s
parsimonious neglect of counsel we generously supply him with a fair
statement of his case. I return to my client.

“Your Honor, what nobler quality is there in our defective nature than
that which enables the earnest man, whether as a citizen or in divine
worship, whether in civil matters or religious, to abide steadfastly by
his conscience and convictions. He stands a pillar of principle, a rock
in the midst of uncertain waters. The feeble look up to him and are
encouraged, the false and shifty are ashamed. His eye is fixed on the
future. Posterity shall judge him. Small matters of his environment
escape his notice. His mind is on higher things.

“I am not prepared to forecast the judgment of posterity on that point
of ritualistic devotion to which my client is so devoted an advocate.
Neither am I anxious or troubled to seek opinion whether my client
inserted his elbow into the defendant’s ear, or the defendant,
maliciously or inadvertently, by some rotatory motion, applied, bumped
or banged his ear against my client’s elbow; whether the defendant
rubbed or impinged with his head on the appendant coat tails of
my client, or the reverse. I am uninterested in the alternative,
indifferent to the whole matter. It seems to me an academic question. If
the defendant so acted, it is not the action of which we complain. If
my client once, twice, or even at sundry times, in his stern absorption,
did not observe what may in casual accident have taken place behind,
what then? I ask your Honor, what then? Did the defendant by a slight
removal, by suggestion, by courteous remonstrance, attempt to obviate
the difficulty? No! Did he remember those considerate virtues enjoined
in Scripture, or the sacred place and ceremony in which he shared? No!
Like a serpent, he coiled and waited. He hid his hypocrisy in white
hairs, his venomous purpose in attitudes of reverence. He darkened his
morbid malice till it festered, corroded, corrupted. He brooded over his
fancied injury and developed his base design. Resolved and prepared,
he watched his opportunity. With brazen and gangrened pin of malicious
point and incensed propulsion, with averted eye and perfidious hand,
with sudden, secret, backward thrust, with all the force of accumulated,
diseased, despicable spite, he darted like a serpent’s fang this
misapplied instrument into the unprotected posterior, a sensitive
portion, most outlying and exposed, of my client’s person.

“This action, your Honor, I conceive to be in intent and performance a
felonious, injurious and sufficient assault. For this injury, for
pain, indignity and insult, for the vindication of justice in state and
community, for the protection of the citizen from bold or treacherous
attack, anterior or posterior, vanguard or rear, I ask your Honor that
damages be given my client adequate to that injury, adequate to that
vindication and protection.”

So much and more Ballister spoke. Mr. Kernegan took off his spectacles
and rubbed his forehead.

“Well,” he said, “I guess Mr. Ballister’ll charge Albion about forty
dollars--”

Ballister started up.

“Don’t interrupt the Court. It’s worth all that. Albion and Jay haven’t
been acting right and they ought to pay for it between ‘em. The Court
decides Jay Dee shall pay twenty dollars damages and costs.”

The court-room murmured with approval.

* * * * *

The twilight was gathering as Albion drove across the old covered bridge
and turned into the road that leads to Ironville through a gloomy gorge
of hemlock trees and low-browed rocks. The road keeps to the left above
Diggory Brook, which murmurs in recesses below and waves little ghostly
white garments over its waterfalls. Such is this murmur and the soft
noise of the wind in the hemlocks, that the gorge is ever filled with
a sound of low complaint. Twilight in the open sky is night below the
hemlocks. At either end of the avenue you note where the light still
glows fadingly. There lie the hopes and possibilities of a worldly day,
skies, fields and market-places, to-days, to-morrows and yesterdays,
and men walking about with confidence in their footing. But here the
hemlocks stand beside in black order of pillars and whisper together
distrustfully. The man who passes you is a nameless shadow with an
intrusive, heavy footfall. Low voices float up from the pit of the
gorge, intimations, regrets, discouragements, temptations.

A house and mill once stood at the lower end of it, and there, a century
ago, was a wild crime done on a certain night; the dead bodies of the
miller and his children lay on the floor, except one child, who hid and
crept out in the grass; little trickles of blood stole along the cracks;
house and mill blazed and fell down into darkness; a maniac cast his
dripping axe into Diggory Brook and fled away yelling among the hills.
Not that this had made the gorge any darker, or that its whispers are
supposed to relate to any such memories. The brook comes from swamps
and meadows like other brooks, and runs into the Pilgrim River. It is
shallow and rapid, though several have contrived to fall and be drowned
in it. One wonders how it could have happened. The old highway leading
from Ramoth village to the valley has been grass-grown for generations,
but that is because the other road is more direct to the Valley
settlement and the station. The water of the brook is clear and pleasant
enough. Much trillium, with its leaves like dark red splashes, a plant
of sullen color and solitary station, used to grow there, but does so no
more. Slender birches now creep down almost to the mouth of the gorge,
and stand with white stems and shrinking, trembling leaves. But birches
grow nearly everywhere.

Albion drove steadily up the darkened road, till his horse dropped
into a walk behind an indistinguishable object that crept in front with
creaking wheels. He shouted for passage and turned into the ditch on the
side away from the gorge. The shadowy vehicle drifted slantingly aside.
Albion started his horse; the front wheels of the two clicked, grated,
slid inside each other and locked. Albion spoke impatiently. He was ever
for quick decisions. He backed his horse, and the lock became hopeless.
The unknown made no comment, no noise. The hemlocks whispered, the
brook muttered in its pit and shook the little white garments of its
waterfalls.

“Crank your wheel a trifle now.”

The other did not move.

“Who are you? Can’t ye speak?”

No answer.

Albion leaned over his wheel, felt the seat rail of the other vehicle,
and brought his face close to something white--white hair about the
approximate outline of a face. By the hair crossed by the falling hat
brim, by the shoulders seen vaguely to be bent forward, by the loose
creaking wheels of the buck-board he knew Jay Dee. The two stood
close and breathless, face to face, but featureless and apart by the
unmeasured distance of obscurity.

Albion felt a sudden uneasy thrill and drew back. He dreaded to hear
Jay Dee’s spiritless complaining voice, too much in the nature of that
dusky, uncanny place. He felt as if something cold, damp and impalpable
were drawing closer to him, whispering, calling his attention to the
gorge, how black and steep! to the presence of Jay Dee, how near! to
the close secret hemlocks covering the sky. This was not agreeable to a
positive man, a man without fancies. Jay Dee sighed at last, softly, and
spoke, piping, thin, half-moaning:

“You’re following me. Let me alone!”

“I’m not following you,” said Albion hoarsely. “Crank your wheel!”

“You’re following me. I’m an old man. You’re only fifty.”

Albion breathed hard in the darkness. He did not understand either Jay
Dee or himself. After a silence Jay Dee went on:

“I haven’t any kin but you, Albion, except Stephen Ballister and the
Winslows. They’re only fourth cousins.”

Albion growled.

“What do you mean?”

“Without my making a will it’d come to you, wouldn’t it? Seems to me as
if you oughtn’t to pester me, being my nearest kin, and me, I ain’t made
any will. I got a little property, though it ain’t much. ‘Twould clear
your mortgage and make you easy.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Twenty dollars and costs,” moaned Jay Dee. “And me an old man, getting
ready for his latter end soon. I ain’t made my will, either. I ought
to’ve done it.”

What could Jay Dee mean? If he made no will his property would come to
Albion. No will made yet. A hinted intention to make one in favor of
Stephen Ballister or the Winslows. The foundry was mortgaged.--Jay
was worth sixty thousand. Diggory Gorge was a dark whispering place
of ancient crime, of more than one unexplained accident. The hemlocks
whispered, the brook gurgled and glimmered. Such darkness might well
cloak and cover the sunny instincts that look upwards, scruples of the
social daylight. Would Jay Dee trap him to his ruin? Jay Dee would not
expect to enjoy it if he were dead himself. But accidents befall, and
men not seldom meet sudden deaths, and an open, free-speaking neighbor
is not suspected. Success lies before him in the broad road.

It rushed through Albion’s mind, a flood, sudden, stupefying--thoughts
that he could not master, push back, or stamp down.

He started and roused himself; his hands were cold and shaking. He
sprang from his buggy and cried angrily:

“What d’ye mean by all that? Tempt me, a God-fearing man? Throw ye off’n
the gorge! Break your old neck! I’ve good notion to it, if I wasn’t a
God-fearing man. Crank your wheel there!”

He jerked his buggy free, sprang in, and lashed his horse. The horse
leaped, the wheels locked again. Jay Dee’s buckboard, thrust slanting
aside, went over the edge, slid and stopped with a thud, caught by the
hemlock trunks. A ghostly glimmer of white hair one instant, and Jay Dee
was gone down the black pit of the gorge. A wheezing moan, and nothing
more was heard in the confusion. Then only the complaining murmur of the
brook, the hemlocks at their secrets.

“Jay! Jay!” called Albion, and then leaped out, ran and whispered,
“Jay!”

Only the mutter of the brook and the shimmer of foam could be made out
as he stared and listened, leaning over, clinging to a tree, feeling
about for the buckboard. He fumbled, lit a match and lifted it. The
seat was empty, the left wheels still in the road. The two horses, with
twisted necks and glimmering eyes, were looking back quietly at him,
Albion Dee, a man of ideas and determination, now muttering things
unintelligible in the same tone with the muttering water, with wet
forehead and nerveless hands, heir of Jay Dee’s thousands, staring down
the gorge of Diggory Brook, the scene of old crime. He gripped with
difficulty as he let himself slide past the first row of trees, and felt
for some footing below. He noticed dully that it was a steep slope, not
a precipice at that point. He lit more matches as he crept down, and
peered around to find something crushed and huddled against some tree, a
lifeless, fearful thing. The slope grew more moderate. There were thick
ferns. And closely above the brook, that gurgled and laughed quietly,
now near at hand, sat Jay Dee. He looked up and blinked dizzily,
whispered and piped:

“Twenty dollars and costs! You oughtn’t to pester me. I ain’t made my
will.”

Albion sat down. They sat close together in the darkness some moments
and were silent.

“You ain’t hurt?” Albion asked at last. “We’ll get out.”

They went up the steep, groping and stumbling.

Albion half lifted his enemy into the buckboard, and led the horse, his
own following. They were out into the now almost faded daylight. Jay sat
holding his lines, bowed over, meek and venerable. The front of his coat
was torn. Albion came to his wheel.

“Will twenty dollars make peace between you and me, Jay Dee?”

“The costs was ten,” piping sadly.

“Thirty dollars, Jay Dee? Here it is.”

He jumped into his buggy and drove rapidly. In sight of the foundry he
drew a huge breath.

“I been a sinner and a fool,” and slapped his knee. “It’s sixty thousand
dollars, maybe seventy. A self-righteous sinner and a cocksure fool. God
forgive me!”

Between eight and nine Jay Dee sat down before his meagre fire and rusty
stove, drank his weak tea and toasted his bread. The windows clicked
with the night wind. The furniture was old, worn, unstable, except the
large desk behind him full of pigeonholes and drawers. Now and then
he turned and wrote on scraps of paper. Tea finished, he collected the
scraps and copied:

Mr. Stephen Ballister: I feel, as growing somewhat old, I ought to make
my will, and sometime, leaving this world for a better, would ask you
to make my will for me, for which reasonable charge, putting this so
it cannot be broken by lawyers, who will talk too much and are vain
of themselves, that is, leaving all my property of all kinds to my
relative, James Winslow of Wimberton, and not anything to Albion Dee;
for he has not much sense but is hasty; for to look after the choir is
not his business, and to sit on an old man and throw him from his own
wagon and pay him thirty dollars is hasty, for it is not good sense, and
not anything to Stephen Ballister, for he must be rich with talking so
much in courts of this world. Put this all in my will, but if unable or
unwilling on account of remorse for speaking so in the court, please to
inform that I may get another lawyer. Yours,

Jay Dee.

He sealed and addressed the letter, put it in his pocket, and noticed
the ruinous rent in his coat. He sighed, murmured over it complainingly,
and turned up the lapel of the coat. Pins in great variety and number
were there in careful order, some new, some small, some long and old and
yellow. He selected four and pinned the rent together, sighing. Then he
took three folded bills from his vest pocket, unfolded, counted and put
them back, felt of the letter in his coat gently, murmured, “I had the
best of Albion there; I had him there,” took his candle and went up
peacefully and venerably to bed.



A NIGHT’S LODGING


FATHER WILISTON was a retired clergyman, so distinguished from his
son Timothy, whose house stood on the ridge north of the old village
of Win-throp, and whose daily path lay between his house and the new
growing settlement around the valley station. It occurred at odd times
to Father Wiliston that Timothy’s path was somewhat undeviating. The
clergyman had walked widely since Win-throp was first left behind
fifty-five years back, at a time when the town was smaller and cows
cropped the Green but never a lawn mower.

After college and seminary had come the frontier, which lay this side
of the Great Lakes until Clinton stretched his ribbon of waterway to
the sea; then a mission in Wisconsin, intended to modify the restless
profanity of lumbermen who broke legs under logs and drank disastrous
whiskey. A city and twenty mills were on the spot now, though the same
muddy river ran into the same blue lake. Some skidders and saw-tenders
of old days were come to live in stone mansions and drive in
nickel-plated carriages; some were dead; some drifting like the refuse
on the lake front; some skidding and saw-tending still. Distinction
of social position was an idea that Father Wiliston never was able to
grasp.

In the memories of that raw city on the lake he had his place among its
choicest incongruities; and when his threescore and ten years were full,
the practical tenderness of his nickel-plated and mansioned parishioners
packed him one day into an upholstered sleeping car, drew an astonishing
check to his credit, and mailed it for safety to Timothy Wiliston of
Winthrop. So Father Wiliston returned to Winthrop, where Timothy, his
son, had been sent to take root thirty years before.

One advantage of single-mindedness is that life keeps on presenting us
with surprises. Father Wiliston occupied his own Arcadia, and Wisconsin
or Winthrop merely sent in to him a succession of persons and events
of curious interest. “The parson”--Wisconsin so spoke of him, leaning
sociably over its bar, or pausing among scented slabs and sawdust--“the
parson resembles an egg as respects that it’s innocent and some
lopsided, but when you think he must be getting addled, he ain’t. He
says to me, ‘You’ll make the Lord a deal of trouble, bless my soul!’
he says. I don’t see how the Lord’s going to arrange for you.
But’--thinking he might hurt my feelings--‘I guess he’ll undertake it by
and by.’ Then he goes wabbling down-street, picks up Mike Riley, who’s
considerable drunk, and takes him to see his chickens. And Mike gets so
interested in those chickens you’d like to die. Then parson goes off,
absent-minded and forgets him, and Mike sleeps the balmy night in the
barnyard, and steals a chicken in the morning, and parson says, ‘Bless
my soul! How singular!’ Well,” concluded Wisconsin, “he’s getting pretty
young for his years. I hear they’re going to send him East before he
learns bad habits.”

The steadiness and repetition of Timothy’s worldly career and semi-daily
walk to and from his business therefore seemed to Father Wiliston
phenomenal, a problem not to be solved by algebra, for if _a_ equalled
Timothy, _b_ his house, _c_ his business, _a + b + c_ was still not
a far-reaching formula, and there seemed no advantage in squaring it.
Geometrically it was evident that by walking back and forth over the
same straight line you never so much as obtained an angle. Now,
by arithmetic, “Four times thirty, multiplied by--leaving out
Sundays--Bless me! How singular! Thirty-seven thousand five hundred and
sixty times!”

He wondered if it had ever occurred to Timothy to walk it backward, or,
perhaps, to hop, partly on one foot, and then, of course, partly on
the other. Sixty years ago there was a method of progress known as
“hop-skip-and-jump,” which had variety and interest. Drawn in the train
of this memory came other memories floating down the afternoon’s slant
sunbeams, rising from every meadow and clump of woods; from the elder
swamp where the brown rabbits used to run zigzag, possibly still ran
in the same interesting way; from the great sand bank beyond the Indian
graves. The old Wiliston house, with roof that sloped like a well-sweep,
lay yonder, a mile or two. He seemed to remember some one said it was
empty, but he could not associate it with emptiness. The bough apples
there, if he remembered rightly, were an efficacious balm for regret.

He sighed and took up his book. It was another cure for regret, a
Scott novel, “The Pirate.” It had points of superiority over Cruden’s
Concordance. The surf began to beat on the Shetland Islands, and trouble
was imminent between Cleveland and Mor-daunt Mertoun.

Timothy and his wife drove away visiting that afternoon, not to
return till late at night, and Bettina, the Scandinavian, laid Father
Wiliston’s supper by the open window, where he could look out across the
porch and see the chickens clucking in the road.

“You mus’ eat, fater,” she commanded.

“Yes, yes, Bettina. Thank you, my dear. Quite right.”

He came with his book and sat down at the table, but Bettina was
experienced and not satisfied.

“You mus’ eat firs’.”

He sighed and laid down “The Pirate.” Bettina captured and carried it to
the other end of the room, lit the lamp though it was still light, and
departed after the mail. It was a rare opportunity for her to linger in
the company of one of her Scandinavian admirers. “Fater” would not know
the difference between seven and nine or ten.

He leaned in the window and watched her safely out of sight, then went
across the room, recaptured “The Pirate,” and chuckled in the tickling
pleasure of a forbidden thing, “asked the blessing,” drank his tea
shrewdly, knowing it would deteriorate, and settled to his book. The
brown soft dusk settled, shade by shade; moths fluttered around the
lamp; sleepy birds twittered in the maples. But the beat of the surf
on the Shetland Islands was closer than these. Cleveland and Mordaunt
Mertoun were busy, and Norna--“really, Norna was a remarkable
woman”--and an hour slipped past.

Some one hemmed! close by and scraped his feet. It was a large man
who stood there, dusty and ragged, one boot on the porch, with a red
handkerchief knotted under his thick tangled beard and jovial red face.
He had solid limbs and shoulders, and a stomach of sloth and heavy
feeding.

The stranger did not resemble the comely pirate, Cleveland; his linen
was not “seventeen hun’red;” it seemed doubtful if there were any linen.
And yet, in a way there was something not inappropriate about him, a
certain chaotic ease; not piratical, perhaps, although he looked like
an adventurous person. Father Wiliston took time to pass from one
conception of things to another. He gazed mildly through his glasses.

“I ain’t had no supper,” began the stranger in a deep moaning bass; and
Father Wiliston started.

“Bless my soul! Neither have I.” He shook out his napkin. “Bettina, you
see “--

“Looks like there’s enough for two,” moaned and grumbled the other.
He mounted the porch and approached the window, so that the lamplight
glimmered against his big, red, oily face.

“Why, so there is!” cried Father Wiliston, looking about the table in
surprise. “I never could eat all that. Come in.” And the stranger rolled
muttering and wheezing around through the door.

“Will you not bring a chair? And you might use the bread knife. These
are fried eggs. And a little cold chicken? Really, I’m very glad you
dropped in, Mr.”--

“Del Toboso.” By this time the stranger’s mouth was full and his
enunciation confused.

“Why”--Father Wiliston helped himself to an egg--“I don’t think I caught
the name.”

“Del Toboso. Boozy’s what they calls me in the push.”

“I’m afraid your tea is quite cold. Boozy? How singular! I hope it
doesn’t imply alcoholic habits.”

“No,” shaking his head gravely, so that his beard wagged to the judicial
negation. “Takes so much to tank me up I can’t afford it, let alone it
ain’t moral.”

The two ate with haste, the stranger from habit and experience, Father
Wiliston for fear of Bettina’s sudden return. When the last egg and
slice of bread had disappeared, the stranger sat back with a wheezing
sigh.

“I wonder,” began Father Wiliston mildly, “Mr. Toboso--Toboso is the
last name, isn’t it, and Del the first?”

“Ah,” the other wheezed mysteriously, “I don’t know about that, Elder.
That’s always a question.”

“You don’t know! You don’t know!”

“Got it off’n another man,” went on Toboso sociably. “He said he
wouldn’t take fifty dollars for it. I didn’t have no money nor him
either, and he rolled off’n the top of the train that night or maybe the
next I don’t know. I didn’t roll him. It was in Dakota, over a canyon
with no special bottom. He scattered himself on the way down. But I
says, if that name’s worth fifty dollars, it’s mine. Del Toboso. That’s
mine. Sounds valuable, don’t it?”

Father Wiliston fell into a reverie. “To-boso? Why, yes. Dulcinea del
Toboso. I remember, now.”

“What’s that? Dulcinea, was it? And you knowed him?”

“A long while ago when I was younger. It was in a green cover. ‘Don
Quixote’--he was in a cage, ‘The Knight of the Rueful Countenance.’ He
had his face between the bars.”

“Well,” said Toboso, “you must have knowed him. He always looked glum,
and I’ve seen him in quad myself.”

“Yes. Sancho Panza. Dulcinea del Toboso.”

“I never knowed that part of it. Dulcinea del Toboso! Well, that’s me.
You know a ruck of fine names, Elder. It sounds like thirteen trumps,
now, don’t it?”

Father Wiliston roused himself, and discriminated. “But you look more
like Sancho Panza.”

“Do? Well, I never knowed that one. Must’ve been a Greaser. Dulcinea’s
good enough.”

Father Wiliston began to feel singularly happy and alive. The regular
and even paced Timothy, his fidgeting wife, and the imperious Bettina
were to some extent shadows and troubles in the evening of his life.
They were careful people, who were hemmed in and restricted, who somehow
hemmed in and restricted him. They lived up to precedents. Toboso did
not seem to depend on precedents. He had the free speech, the casual
inconsequence, the primitive mystery, desired of the boy’s will and the
wind’s will, and travelled after by the long thoughts of youth. He was
wind-beaten, burned red by the sun, ragged of coat and beard, huge, fat,
wallowing in the ease of his flesh. One looked at him and remembered the
wide world full of crossed trails and slumbering swamps.

Father Wiliston had long, straight white hair, falling beside his
pale-veined and spiritual forehead and thin cheeks. He propped
his forehead on one bony hand, and looked at Toboso with eyes of
speculation. If both men were what some would call eccentric, to each
other they seemed only companionable, which, after all, is the main
thing.

“I have thought of late,” continued Father Wiliston after a pause, “that
I should like to travel, to examine human life, say, on the highway. I
should think, now, your manner of living most interesting. You go from
house to house, do you not?--from city to city? Like Ulysses, you see
men and their labors, and you pass on. Like the apostles--who surely
were wise men, besides that were especially maintained of God--like
them, and the pilgrims to shrines, you go with wallet and staff or
merely with Faith for your baggage.”

“There don’t nothing bother you in warm weather, that’s right,” said
Toboso, “except your grub. And that ain’t any more than’s interesting.
If it wasn’t for looking after meals, a man on the road might get right
down lazy.”

“Why, just so! How wonderful! Now, do you suppose, Mr. Toboso, do you
suppose it feasible? I should very much like, if it could be equably
arranged, I should very much like to have this experience.”

Toboso reflected. “There ain’t many of your age on the road.” An
idea struck him suddenly. “But supposing you were going sort of
experimenting, like that--and there’s some folks that do--supposing you
could lay your hands on a little bunch of money for luck, I don’t see
nothing to stop.”

“Why, I think there is some in my desk.” Toboso leaned forward and
pulled his beard. The table creaked under his elbow. “How much?”

“I will see. Of course you are quite right.”

“At your age, Elder.”

“It is not as if I were younger.”

Father Wiliston rose and hurried out.

Toboso sat still and blinked at the lamp. “My Gord!” he murmured and
moaned confidentially, “here’s a game!”

After some time Father Wiliston returned. “Do you think we could start
now?” he asked eagerly.

“Why sure, Elder. What’s hindering?”

“I am fortunate to find sixty dollars. Really, I didn’t remember. And
here’s a note I have written to my son to explain. I wonder what Bettina
did with my hat.”

He hurried back into the hall. Toboso took the note from the table and
pocketed it. “Ain’t no use taking risks.”

They went out into the warm night, under pleasant stars, and along the
road together arm in arm.

“I feel pretty gay, Elder.” He broke into bellowing song, “Hey, Jinny!
Ho, Jinny! Listen, love, to me.”

“Really, I feel cheerful, too, Mr. Toboso, wonderfully cheerful.”

“Dulcinea, Elder. Dulcinea’s me name. Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny!”

“How singular it is! I feel very cheerful. I think--really, I think I
should like to learn that song about Jinny. It seems such a cheerful
song.”

“Hit her up, Elder,” wheezed Toboso jovially. “Now then”--

“Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny! Listen, love, to me.”

So they went arm in arm with a roaring and a tremulous piping.

The lamp flickered by the open window as the night breeze rose. Bettina
came home betimes and cleared the table. The memory of a Scandinavian
caress was too recent to leave room for her to remark that there were
signs of devastating appetite, that dishes had been used unaccountably,
and that “Fater” had gone somewhat early to bed. Timothy and his wife
returned late. All windows and doors in the house of Timothy were
closed, and the last lamp was extinguished.

Father Wiliston and Toboso went down the hill, silently, with furtive,
lawless steps through the cluster of houses in the hollow, called
Ironville, and followed then the road up the chattering hidden brook.
The road came from the shadows of this gorge at last to meadows and wide
glimmering skies, and joined the highway to Redfield. Presently they
came to where a grassy side road slipped into the highway from the
right, out of a land of bush and swamp and small forest trees of twenty
or thirty years’ growth. A large chestnut stood at the corner.

“Hey, Jinny!” wheezed Toboso. “Let’s look at that tree, Elder.”

“Look at it? Yes, yes. What for?” Toboso examined the bark by the dim
starlight; Father Wiliston peered anxiously through his glasses to where
Toboso’s finger pointed.

“See those marks?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. Really, I’m sorry.”

“Feel ‘em, then.”

And Father Wiliston felt, with eager, excited finger.

“Them there mean there’s lodging out here; empty house, likely.”

“Do they, indeed. Very singular! Most interesting!” And they turned into
the grassy road. The brushwood in places had grown close to it, though
it seemed to be still used as a cart path. They came to a swamp, rank
with mouldering vegetation, then to rising ground where once had been
meadows, pastures, and plough lands.

Father Wiliston was aware of vaguely stirring memories. Four vast and
aged maple trees stood close by the road, and their leaves whispered to
the night; behind them, darkly, was a house with a far sloping roof in
the rear. The windows were all glassless, all dark and dead-looking,
except two in a front room, in which a wavering light from somewhere
within trembled and cowered. They crept up, and looking through saw
tattered wall paper and cracked plaster, and two men sitting on the
floor, playing cards in the ghostly light of a fire of boards in the
huge fireplace.

“Hey, Jinny!” roared Toboso, and the two jumped up with startled oaths.
“Why, it’s Boston Alley and the Newark Kid!” cried Toboso. “Come on,
Elder.”

The younger man cast forth zigzag flashes of blasphemy. “You big fat
fool! Don’t know no mor’ ‘n to jump like that on _me!_ Holy Jims! I
ain’t made of copper.”

Toboso led Father Wiliston round by the open door. “Hold your face, Kid.
Gents, this here’s a friend of mine we’ll call the Elder, and let
that go. I’m backing him, and I hold that goes. The Kid,” he went on
descriptively, addressing Father Wiliston, “is what you see afore you,
Elder. His mouth is hot, his hands is cold, his nerves is shaky, he’s
always feeling the cops gripping his shirt-collar. He didn’t see no
clergy around. He begs your pardon. Don’t he? I says, don’t he?”

He laid a heavy red hand on the Newark Kid’s shoulder, who wiped his
pallid mouth with the back of his hand, smiled, and nodded.

Boston Alley seemed in his way an agreeable man. He was tall and slender
limbed, with a long, thin black mustache, sinewy neck and hollow chest,
and spoke gently with a sweet, resonant voice, saying, “Glad to see you,
Elder.”

These two wore better clothes than Toboso, but he seemed to dominate
them with his red health and windy voice, his stomach and feet, and
solidity of standing on the earth.

Father Wiliston stood the while gazing vaguely through his spectacles.
The sense of happy freedom and congenial companionship that had been
with him during the starlit walk had given way gradually to a stream of
confused memories, and now these memories stood ranged about, looking at
him with sad, faded eyes, asking him to explain the scene. The language
of the Newark Kid had gone by him like a white hot blast. The past and
present seemed to have about the same proportions of vision and reality.
He could not explain them to each other. He looked up to Toboso,
pathetically, trusting in his help.

“It was my house.”

Toboso stared surprised. “I ain’t on to you, Elder.”

“I was born here.”

Indeed Toboso was a tower of strength even against the ghosts of other
days, reproachful for their long durance in oblivion.

“Oh! Well, by Jinny! I reckon you’ll give us lodging, Elder,” he puffed
cheerfully. He took the coincidence so pleasantly and naturally that
Father Wiliston was comforted, and thought that after all it was
pleasant and natural enough.

The only furniture in the room was a high-backed settle and an
overturned kitchen table, with one leg gone, and the other three
helplessly in the air--so it had lain possibly many years. Boston Alley
drew forward the settle and threw more broken clapboards on the fire,
which blazed up and filled the room with flickering cheer. Soon the
three outcasts were smoking their pipes and the conversation became
animated.

“When I was a boy,” said Father Wiliston--“I remember so
distinctly--there were remarkable early bough apples growing in the
orchard.”

“The pot’s yours, Elder,” thundered To-boso. They went out groping under
the old apple trees, and returned laden with plump pale green fruit.
Boston Alley and the Newark Kid stretched themselves on the floor on
heaps of pulled grass. Toboso and Father Wiliston sat on the settle. The
juice of the bough apples ran with a sweet tang. The palate rejoiced and
the soul responded. The Newark Kid did swift, cunning card tricks that
filled Father Wiliston with wonder and pleasure.

“My dear young man, I don’t see how you do it!”

The Kid was lately out of prison from a two years’ sentence, “only for
getting into a house by the window instead of the door,” as Boston Alley
delicately explained, and the “flies,” meaning officers of the law, “are
after him again for reasons he ain’t quite sure of.” The pallor of slum
birth and breeding, and the additional prison pallor, made his skin
look curious where the grime had not darkened it. He had a short-jawed,
smooth-shaven face, a flat mouth and light hair, and was short and
stocky, but lithe and noiseless in movement, and inclined to say little.
Boston Alley was a man of some slight education, who now sometimes sung
in winter variety shows, such songs as he picked up here and there in
summer wanderings, for in warm weather he liked footing the road better,
partly because the green country sights were pleasant to him, and partly
because he was irresolute and keeping engagements was a distress. He
seemed agreeable and sympathetic.

“He ain’t got no more real feelings ‘n a fish,” said Toboso, gazing
candidly at Boston, but speaking to Father Wiliston, “and yet he looks
like he had ‘em, and a man’s glad to see him. Ain’t seen you since
fall, Boston, but I see the Kid last week at a hang-out in Albany. Well,
gents, this ain’t a bad lay.”

Toboso himself had been many years on the road. He was in a way a man
of much force and decision, and probably it was another element in
him, craving sloth and easy feeding, which kept him in this submerged
society; although here, too, there seemed room for the exercise of his
dominance. He leaned back in the settle, and had his hand on Father
Wiliston’s shoulder. His face gleamed redly over his bison beard.

“It’s a good lay. And we’re gay, Elder. Ain’t we gay? Hey, Jinny!”

“Yes, yes, Toboso. But this young man--I’m sure he must have great
talents, great talents, quite remarkable. Ah--yes, Jinny!”

“Hey, Jinny,” they sang together, “Ho, Jinny! Listen, love, to me. I’ll
sing to you, and play to you, a dulcet melode-e-e”--while Boston danced
a shuffle and the Kid snapped the cards in time. Then, at Toboso’s
invitation and command, Boston sang a song, called “The Cheerful Man,”
 resembling a ballad, to a somewhat monotonous tune, and perhaps known
in the music halls of the time--all with a sweet, resonant voice and a
certain pathos of intonation:--

                   “I knew a man across this land

                   Came waving of a cheerful hand,

                   Who drew a gun and gave some one

                   A violent contus-i-on,

                        This cheerful man.


                   “They sent him up, he fled from ‘quad’

                   By a window and the grace of God,

                   Picked up a wife and children six,

                   And wandered into politics,

                        This cheerful man.


                   “‘In politics he was, I hear,

                   A secret, subtle financier--

                   So the jury says, ‘But we agree

                   He quits this sad community,

                        This cheerful man.’


                   “His wife and six went on the town,

                   And he went off; without a frown

                   Reproaching Providence, went he

                   And got another wife and three,

                        This cheerful man.


                   “He runs a cross-town car to-day

                   From Bleecker Street to Avenue A.

                   He swipes the fares with skilful ease,

                   Keeps up his hope, and tries to please,

                        This cheerful man.


                   “Our life is mingled woe and bliss,

                   Man that is born of woman is

                   Short-lived and goes to his long home.

                   Take heart, and learn a lesson from

                        This cheerful man.”


“But,” said Father Wiliston, “don’t you think really, Mr. Alley, that
the moral is a little confused? I don’t mean intentionally,” he
added, with anxious precaution, “but don’t you think he should have
reflected”--

“You’re right, Elder,” said Toboso, with decision. “It’s like that.
It ain’t moral. When a thing ain’t moral that settles it.” And Boston
nodded and looked sympathetic with every one.

“I was sure you would agree with me,” said Father Wiliston. He felt
himself growing weary now and heavy-eyed. Presently somehow he was
leaning on Toboso with his head on his shoulder. Toboso’s arm was around
him, and Toboso began to hum in a kind of wheezing lullaby, “Hey, Jinny!
Ho, Jinny!”

“I am very grateful, my dear friends,” murmured Father Wiliston. “I have
lived a long time. I fear I have not always been careful in my course,
and am often forgetful. I think”--drowsily--“I think that happiness must
in itself be pleasing to God. I was often happy before in this room. I
remember--my dear mother sat here--who is now dead. We have been quite,
really quite cheerful to-night. My mother--was very judicious--an
excellent wise woman--she died long ago.” So he was asleep before any
one was aware, while Toboso crooned huskily, “Hey, Jinny!” and Boston
Alley and the Newark Kid sat upright and stared curiously.

“Holy Jims!” said the Kid.

Toboso motioned them to bring the pulled grass. They piled it on the
settle, let Father Wiliston down softly, brought the broken table, and
placed it so that he could not roll off.

“Well,” said Toboso, after a moment’s silence, “I guess we’d better pick
him and be off. He’s got sixty in his pocket.”

“Oh,” said Boston, “that’s it, is it?”

“It’s my find, but seeing you’s here I takes half and give you fifteen
apiece.”

“Well, that’s right.”

“And I guess the Kid can take it out.”

The Kid found the pocketbook with sensitive gliding fingers, and pulled
it out. Toboso counted and divided the bills.

“Well,” whispered Toboso thoughtfully, “if the Elder now was forty years
younger, I wouldn’t want a better pardner.” They tiptoed out into the
night. “But,” he continued, “looking at it that way, o’ course he ain’t
got no great use for his wad and won’t remember it till next week.
Heeled all right, anyhow. Only, I says now, I says, there ain’t no vice
in him.”

“Mammy tuck me up, no licks to-night,” said the Kid, plodding in front.
“I ain’t got nothing against him.”

Boston Alley only fingered the bills in his pocket.

It grew quite dark in the room they had left as the fire sunk to a few
flames, then to dull embers and an occasional darting spark. The only
sound was Father Wiliston’s light breathing.

When he awoke the morning was dim in the windows. He lay a moment
confused in mind, then sat up and looked around.

“Dear me! Well, well, I dare say Toboso thought I was too old. I dare
say”--getting on his feet--“I dare say they thought it would be unkind
to tell me so.”

He wandered through the dusky old rooms and up and down the creaking
stairs, picking up bits of recollection, some vivid, some more dim than
the dawn, some full of laughter, some that were leaden and sad; then
out into the orchard to find a bough apple in the dewy grasses; and,
kneeling under the gnarled old tree to make his morning prayer, which
included in petition the three overnight revellers, he went in fluent
phrase and broken tones among eldest memories.

He pushed cheerfully into the grassy road now, munching his apple and
humming, “Hey, Jinny! Ho, Jinny!” He examined the tree at the highway
with fresh interest. “How singular! It means an empty house. Very
intelligent man, Toboso.”

Bits of grass were stuck on his back and a bramble dragged from his coat
tail. He plodded along in the dust and wabbled absent-mindedly from one
side of the road to the other. The dawn towered behind him in purple and
crimson, lifted its robe and canopy, and flung some kind of glittering
gauze far beyond him. He did not notice it till he reached the top
of the hill above Ironville with Timothy’s house in sight. Then he
stopped, turned, and was startled a moment; then smiled companionably
on the state and glory of the morning, much as on Toboso and the card
tricks of the Newark Kid.

“Really,” he murmured, “I have had a very good time.”

He met Timothy in the hall.

“Been out to walk early, father? Wait--there’s grass and sticks on your
coat.”

It suddenly seemed difficult to explain the entire circumstances to
Timothy, a settled man and girt with precedent.

“Did you enjoy it?--Letter you dropped? No, I haven’t seen it. Breakfast
is ready.”

Neither Bettina nor Mrs. Timothy had seen the letter.

“No matter, my dear, no matter. I--really, I’ve had a very good time.”

Afterward he came out on the porch with his Bible and Concordance,
sat down and heard Bettina brushing his hat and ejaculating, “Fater!”
 Presently he began to nod drowsily and his head dropped low over the
Concordance. The chickens clucked drowsily in the road.



ON EDOM HILL


I.


CHARLIE SEBASTIAN was a turfman, meaning that he had something to do
with race-horses, and knew property as rolls of bank bills, of which one
now and then suddenly has none at all; or as pacers and trotters that
are given to breaking and unaccountably to falling off in their nervous
systems; or as “Association Shares” and partnership investments in a
training stable; all capable of melting and going down in one vortex. So
it happened at the October races. And from this it arose that in going
between two heated cities and low by the sea he stopped among the high
hills that were cold.

He was a tall man with a pointed beard, strong of shoulder and foot, and
without fear in his eyes. After two hours’ riding he woke from a doze
and argued once more that he was a “phenomenally busted man.” It made
no difference, after all, which city he was in. Looking out at the white
hills that showed faintly in the storm, it occurred to him that this was
not the railway line one usually travelled to the end in view. It was
singular, the little difference between choices. You back the wrong
horse; then you drink beer instead of fizz, and the results of either
are tolerable. Let a man live lustily and there’s little to regret. He
had found ruin digestible before, and never yet gone to the dogs that
wait to devour human remnants, but had gotten up and fallen again, and
on the whole rejoiced. Stomach and lungs of iron, a torrent of red
blood in vein and artery maintain their consolations; hopes rise again,
blunders and evil doings seem to be practically outlived. So without
theory ran Sebastian’s experience. The theory used to be that his sin
would find a man out. There were enough of Sebastian’s that had gone
out, and never returned to look for him. So too with mistakes and
failures. A little while, a year or more, and you are busy with other
matters. It is a stirring world, and offers no occupation for ghosts.
The dragging sense of depression that he felt seemed natural enough; not
to be argued down, but thrown aside in due time. Yet it was a feeling of
pallid and cold futility, like the spectral hills and wavering snow.

“I might as well go back!”

He tossed a coin to see whether it was fated he should drop off at the
next station, and it was.

“Ramoth!” cried the brakeman.

Sebastian held in his surprise as a matter of habit.

But on the platform in the drift and float of the snow-storm he stared
around at the white January valley, at the disappearing train, at the
sign above the station door, “Ramoth.”

“That’s the place,” he remarked. “There wasn’t any railroad then.”

There were hidden virtues in a flipped coin. Sebastian had his
superstitions.

The road to Ramoth village from the station curves about to the south
of the great bare dome that is called Edom Hill, but Sebastian, without
inquiry, took the fork to the left which climbed up the hill without
compromise, and seemed to be little used.

Yet in past times Edom Hill was noted in a small way as a hill that
upheld the house of a stern abolitionist, and in a more secret way as a
station in the “underground railroad,” or system by which runaway slaves
were passed on to Canada. But when Charlie Sebastian remembered his
father and Edom Hill, the days of those activities were passed. The
abolitionist had nothing to exercise resistance and aggression on but
his wind-blown farm and a boy, who was aggressive to seek out mainly the
joys of this world, and had faculties of resistance. There were bitter
clashes; young Sebastian fled, and came upon a stable on a stud farm,
and from there in due time went far and wide, and found tolerance in
time and wrote, offering to “trade grudges and come to see how he was.”

The answer, in a small, faint, cramped, unskilful hand, stated the
abolitionist’s death. “Won’t you come back, Mr. Sebastian. It is lonely.
Harriet Sebastian.” And therefore Sebastian remarked:

“You bet it is! Who’s she? The old man must have married again.”

In his new-found worldly tolerance he had admired such aggressive
enterprise, but seeing no interest in the subject, had gone his way and
forgotten it.

Beating up Edom Hill through the snow was no easier than twenty years
before. David Sebastian had built his house in a high place, and looking
widely over the top of the land, saw that it was evil.

The drifts were unbroken and lay in long barrows and windy ridges over
the roadway. The half-buried fences went parallel up the white breast
and barren heave of the hill, and disappeared in the storm. Sebastian
passed a house with closed blinds, then at a long interval a barn and
a stiff red chimney with a snow-covered heap of ruins at its foot. The
station was now some miles behind and the dusk was coming on. The broad
top of the hill was smooth and rounded gradually. Brambles, bushes,
reeds, and the tops of fences broke the surface of the snow, and beside
these only a house by the road, looking dingy and gray, with a blackish
bam attached, four old maples in front, an orchard behind. Far down the
hill to the right lay the road to Ramoth, too far for its line of naked
trees to be seen in the storm. The house on Edom Hill had its white
throne to itself, and whatever dignity there might be in solitude.

He did not pause to examine the house, only noticed the faint smoke in
one chimney, opened the gate, and pushed through untrodden snow to
the side door and knocked. The woman who came and stood in the door
surprised him even more than “Ramoth!” called by the brakeman. Without
great reason for seeming remarkable, it seemed remarkable. He stepped
back and stared, and the two, looking at each other, said nothing.
Sebastian recovered.

“My feet are cold,” he said slowly. “I shouldn’t like to freeze them.”

She drew back and let him in, left him to find a chair and put his feet
against the stove. She sat down near the window and went on knitting.
The knitting needles glittered and clicked. Her face was outlined
against the gray window, the flakes too glittered and clicked. It
looked silent, secret, repressed, as seen against the gray window; like
something chilled and snowed under, cold and sweet, smooth pale hair and
forehead, deep bosom and slender waist. She looked young enough to be
called in the early June of her years.

“There’s good proportion and feature, but not enough nerves for a
thoroughbred. But,” he thought, “she looks as if she needed, as you
might say, revelry,” and he spoke aloud.

“Once I was in this section and there was a man named Sebastian lived
here, or maybe it was farther on.”

She said, “It was here” in a low voice.

“David Sebastian now, that was it, or something that way. Stiff, sort
of grim old--oh, but you might be a relative, you see. Likely enough. So
you might.”

“I might be.”

“Just so. You might be.”

He rubbed his hands and leaned back, staring at the window. The wind was
rising outside and blew the snow in whirls and sheets.

“Going to be a bad night I came up from the station. If a man’s going
anywhere tonight, he’ll be apt not to get there.”

“You ought to have taken the right hand at the fork.”

“Well, I don’t know.”

She rose and took a cloak from the table. Sebastian watched her.

“I must feed the pony and shut up the chickens.”

She hesitated. A refusal seemed to have been hinted to the hinted
request for hospitality. But Sebastian saw another point.

“Now, that’s what I’m going to do for you.”

She looked on silently, as he passed her with assured step, not
hesitating at doors, but through the kitchen to the woodshed, and there
in the darkness of a pitch-black corner took down a jingling lantern and
lit it. She followed him silently into the yard, that was full of drifts
and wild storm, to the barn, where she listened to him shake down hay
and bedding, measure oats, slap the pony’s flank and chirp cheerfully.
Then he plunged through a low door and she heard the bolt in the chicken
shed rattle. It had grown dark outside. He came out and held the barn
door, waiting for her to step out, and they stood side by side on the
edge of the storm.

“How did you know the lantern was there?”

“Lantern! Oh, farmhouses always keep the lantern in the nearest corner
of the woodshed, if it isn’t behind the kitchen door.”

But she did not move to let him close the bam. He looked down at her a
moment and then out at the white raging night.

“Can’t see forty feet, can you? But, of course, if you don’t want to
give me a roof I’ll have to take my chances. Look poor, don’t they?
Going to let me shut this door?”

“I am quite alone here.”

“So am I. That’s the trouble.”

“I don’t think you understand,” she said quietly, speaking in a manner
low, cool, and self-contained.

“I’ve got more understanding now than I’ll have in an hour, maybe.”

“I will lend you the lantern.”

“Oh, you mightn’t get it back.” He drew the barn door to, which
forced her to step forward. A gust of wind about the corner of the bam
staggered and threw her back. He caught her about her shoulders and held
her steadily, and shot the bolt with the hand that held the lantern.

“That’s all right. A man has to take his chances. I dare say a woman had
better not.”

If Sebastian exaggerated the dangers of the night, if there were any
for him, looked at from her standpoint they might seem large and full of
dread. The wind howled with wild hunting sound, and shrieked against the
eaves of the house. The snow drove thick and blinding. The chimneys
were invisible. A woman easily transfers her own feelings to a man and
interprets them there. In the interest of that interpretation it might
no longer seem possible that man’s ingratitude, or his failings and
passions, could be as unkind as winter wind and bitter sky.

She caught her breath in a moment.

“You will stay to supper,” she said, and stepped aside.

“No. As I’m going, I’d better go.”

She went before him across the yard, opened the woodshed door and stood
in it. He held out the lantern, but she did not take it. He lifted it to
look at her face, and she smiled faintly.

“Please come in.”

“Better go on, if I’m going. Am I?”

“I’m very cold. Please come in.”

They went in and closed the doors against the storm. The house was
wrapped round, and shut away from the sight of Edom Hill, and Edom Hill
was wrapped round and shut away from the rest of the world.


II.


Revelry has need of a certain co-operation. Sebastian drew heavily on
his memory for entertainment, told of the combination that had “cleaned
him out,” and how he might get in again in the Spring, only he felt
a bit tired in mind now, and things seemed dead. He explained the
mysteries of “short prices, selling allowances, past choices, hurdles
and handicaps,” and told of the great October races, where Decatur won
from Clifford and Lady Mary, and Lady Mary ran through the fence and
destroyed the features of the jockey. But the quiet, smooth-haired woman
maintained her calm, and offered neither question nor comment, only
smiled and flushed faintly now and then. She seemed as little stirred by
new tumultuous things as the white curtains at the windows, that moved
slightly when the storm, which danced and shouted on Edom Hill, managed
to force a whistling breath through a chink.

Sebastian decided she was frozen up with loneliness and the like. “She’s
got no conversation, let alone revelry.” He thought he knew what her
life was like. “She’s sort of empty. Nothing doing any time. It’s the
off season all the year. No troubles. Sort of like a fish, as being
chilly and calm, that lives in cold water till you have to put pepper on
to taste it. I know how it goes on this old hill.”

She left him soon. He heard her moving about in the kitchen, and
sometimes the clink of a dish. He sat by the stove and mused and
muttered. She came and told him his room was on the left of the stair;
it had a stove; would he not carry up wood and have his fire there?
She seemed to imply a preference that he should. But the burden
and oppression of his musings kept him from wondering when she had
compromised her scruples and fears, or why she kept any of them. He
mounted the stair with his wood. She followed with a lamp and left him.
He stared at the closed door and rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then went
to work with his fire. The house became silent, except for the outer
tumult. She did not mount the stair again; it followed that she slept
below.

Sebastian took a daguerreotype from the mantel and stared at it. It
was the likeness of a shaven, grim-faced man in early middle life. He
examined it long with a quizzical frown; finally went to the washstand,
opened the drawer and took out a razor with a handle of yellow bone,
carried the washstand to the stove, balanced the mirror against the
pitcher, stropped the razor on his hand, heated water in a cup, slowly
dismantled his face of beard and mustache, cast them in the stove, put
the daguerreotype beside the mirror, and compared critically. Except
that the face in the daguerreotype had a straight, set mouth, and the
face in the mirror was one full-lipped and humorous and differently
lined, they were nearly the same.

“I wouldn’t have believed it”

He put it aside and looked around, whistling in meditation. Then he went
back again to wondering who the pale-haired woman was. Probably the
farm had changed hands. A man whose father had been dead going on
twenty years couldn’t have that kind of widowed stepmother. He was
disqualified.

A cold, unchanging place, Edom Hill, lifted out of the warm, sapping
currents of life. It might be a woman could keep indefinitely there,
looking much the same. If her pulse beat once to an ordinary twice, she
ought to last twice as long. The house seemed unchanged. The old things
were in their old familiar places, David Sebastian’s books on their
shelves in the room below, on the side table there his great Bible, in
which he used to write all family records, with those of his reforming
activity. Sebastian wondered what record stood of his own flight.

He sat a few moments longer, then took his lamp and crept softly out of
the room and down the stairs. The sitting-room was icily cold now; the
white curtains stirred noiselessly. He sat down before the little side
table and opened the great book.

There were some thirty leaves between the Old and New Testaments, most
of them stitched in. A few at the end were blank. Some of the records
were obscure.

“March 5th, 1840. Saw light on this subject.”

Others ran:

“Sept. 1 st, 1843. Rec. Peter Cavendish, fugitive.”

“Dec. 3d, ditto. Rec. Robert Henry.”

“April 15th, ditto. Rec. one, Æsop,” and so on.

“Dec. 14th, 1848. Have had consolation from prayer for public evil.”

“April 20th, 1858. My son, Charles Sebastian, born.”

“April 7th, 1862. My wife, Jane Sebastian, died.”

“July 5th, 1862. Rec. Keziah Andrews to keep my house.”

The dates of the entries from that point grew further apart, random and
obscure; here and there a fact.

“Nov. 4th, 1876. Charles Sebastian departed.”

“June 9th, 1877. Rec. Harriet.”

“Jan. 19th, 1880. Have wrestled in prayer without consolation for
Charles Sebastian.”

This was the last entry. A faint line ran down across the page
connecting the end of “Harriet” with the beginning of “Charles.”
 Between the two blank leaves at the end was a photograph of himself
at seventeen. He remembered suddenly how it was taken by a travelling
photographer, who had stirred his soul with curiosity and given him the
picture; and David Sebastian had taken it and silently put it away among
blank leaves of the Bible.

Sebastian shivered. The written leaves, the look of himself of twenty
years before, the cold, the wail of the wind, the clicking flakes on the
window panes, these seemed now to be the dominant facts of life. Narrow
was it, poor and meagre, to live and labor with a barren farm? The old
abolitionist had cut deeper into existence than he had. If to deal with
the fate of races, and wrestle alone with God on Edom Hill, were not
knowledge and experience, what was knowledge or experience, or what
should a man call worth the trial of his brain and nerve?

“He passed me. He won hands down,” he muttered, bending over the page
again. “‘Rec. Harriet.’ That’s too much for me.” And he heard a quick
noise behind him and turned.

She stood in the door, wide-eyed, smooth, pale hair falling over one
shoulder, long cloak half slipped from the other, holding a shotgun,
threatening and stem.

“What are you doing here?”

“Out gunning for me?” asked Sebastian gravely.

She stared wildly, put the gun down, cried:

“You’re Charlie Sebastian!” and fell on her knees beside the stove,
choking, sobbing and shaking, crouching against the cold sheet iron in a
kind of blind memory of its warmth and protection.

“You still have the drop on me,” said Sebastian.

She shivered and crouched still and whispered:

“I’m cold.”

“How long have you been here freezing?”

Sebastian thrust anything inflammable at hand into the stove, lit it and
piled in the wood.

“Not long. Only--only a few moments.”

“You still have the advantage of me. Who are you?”

“Why, I’m Harriet,” she said simply, and looked up.

“Just so. ‘Received, 1877.’ How old were you then?”

“Why, I was eight.”

“Just so. Don’t tell lies, Harriet. You’ve been freezing a long while.”

She drew her cloak closer over the thin white linen of her gown with
shaking hand.

“I don’t understand. I’m very cold. Why didn’t you come before? It has
been so long waiting.”


III.


The draft began to roar and the dampers to glow. She crept in front of
the glow. He drew a chair and sat down close behind her.

“Why didn’t you come before?”

The question was startling, for Sebastian was only conscious of a lack
of reason for coming. If David Sebastian had left him the farm he would
have heard from it, and being prosperous, he had not cared. But the
question seemed to imply some strong assumption and further knowledge.

“You’d better tell me about it.”

“About what? At the beginning?”

“Aren’t you anything except ‘Received, Harriet’?”

“Oh, I hadn’t any father or mother when Mr. Sebastian brought me here.
Is that what you mean? But he taught me to say ‘Harriet Sebastian,’ and
a great many things he taught me. Didn’t you know? And about his life
and what he wanted you to do? Because, of course, we talked about you
nearly always in the time just before he died. He said you would be sure
to come, but he died, don’t you see? only a few years after, and that
disappointed him. He gave me the picture and said, ‘He’ll come, and
you’ll know him by this,’ and he said, ‘He will come poor and miserable.
My only son, so I leave him to you; and so, as I did, you will pray for
him twice each day.’ It was just like that, ‘Tell Charles there is no
happiness but in duty. Tell him I found it so.’ It was a night like this
when he died, and Kezzy was asleep in her chair out here, and I sat by
the bed. Then he told me I would pay him all in that way by doing what
he meant to do for you. I was so little, but I seemed to understand that
I was to live for it, as he had lived to help free the slaves. Don’t you
see? Then he began calling, ‘Charles! Charles!’ as if you were somewhere
near, and I fell asleep, and woke and lay still and listened to the
wind; and when I tried to get up I couldn’t, because he held my hair,
and he was dead. But why didn’t you come?”

“It looks odd enough now,” Sebastian admitted, and wondered at the
change from still impassiveness, pale and cool silence, to eager speech,
swift question, lifted and flushed face.

“Then you remember the letters? But you didn’t come then. But I began
to fancy how it would be when you came, and then somehow it seemed as
if you were here. Out in the orchard sometimes, don’t you see? And more
often when Kezzy was cross. And when she went to sleep by the fire
at night--she was so old--we were quite alone and talked. Don’t you
remember?--I mean--But Kezzy didn’t like to hear me talking to myself.
‘Mutter, mutter!’ like that. ‘Never was such a child!’ And then she
died, too, seven--seven years ago, and it was quite different. I--I grew
older. You seemed to be here quite and quite close to me always. There
was no one else, except--But, I don’t know why, I had an aching from
having to wait, and it has been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Rather long. Go on. There was no one else?”

“No. We lived here--I mean--it grew that way, and you changed from the
picture, too, and became like Mr. Sebastian, only younger, and just as
you are now, only--not quite.”

She looked at him with sudden fear, then dropped her eyes, drew her long
hair around under her cloak and leaned closer to the fire.

“But there is so much to tell you it comes out all mixed.”

Sebastian sat silently looking down at her, and felt the burden of his
thinking grow heavier; the pondering how David Sebastian had left him an
inheritance of advice, declaring his own life full and brimming, and to
Harriet the inheritance of a curious duty that had grown to people her
nights and days with intense sheltered dreams, and made her life,
too, seem to her full and brimming, multitudinous with events and
interchanges, himself so close and cherished an actor in it that his own
parallel unconsciousness of it had almost dropped out of conception.
And the burden grew heavier still with the weight of memories, and
the record between the Old and New Testaments; with the sense of the
isolation and covert of the midnight, and the storm; with the sight of
Harriet crouching by the fire, her story, how David Sebastian left this
world and went out into the wild night crying, “Charles! Charles!” It
was something not logical, but compelling. It forced him to remark that
his own cup appeared partially empty from this point of view. Harriet
seemed to feel that her hour had come and he was given to her hands..
Success even in methods of living is a convincing thing over unsuccess.
Ah, well! too late to remodel to David Sebastian’s notion. It was
singular, though, a woman silent, restrained, scrupulous, moving
probably to the dictates of village opinion--suddenly the key was
turned, and she threw back the gates of her prison; threw open doors,
windows, intimate curtains; asked him to look in and explore everywhere
and know all the history and the forecasts; became simple, primitive,
unrestrained, willing to sit there at his feet and as innocent as her
white linen gown. How smooth and pale her hair was and gentle cheek, and
there were little sleepy smiles in the corners of the lips. He thought
he would like most of all to put out his hand and touch her cheek and
sleepy smiles, and draw her hair, long and soft and pale, from under the
cloak. On the whole, it seemed probable that he might.

“Harriet,” he said slowly, “I’m going to play this hand.”

“Why, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Take it, I’m not over and above a choice selection. I don’t mention
details, but take it as a general fact. Would you want to marry that
kind of a selection, meaning me?”

“Oh, yes! Didn’t you come for that? I thought you would.”

“And I thought you needed revelry! You must have had a lot of it.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Listen! It keeps knocking at the door!”

“Oh, that’s all right. Let it knock. Do you expect any more vagrants?”

“Vagrants?”

“Like me.”

“Like you? You only came home. Listen! It was like this when he died.
But he wouldn’t come to-night and stand outside and knock, would he? Not
to-night, when you’ve come at last. But he used to. Of course, I fancied
things. It’s the storm. There’s no one else now.”

A thousand spectres go whirling across Edom Hill such winter nights and
come with importunate messages, but if the door is close and the fire
courageous, it matters little. They are but wind and drift and out in
the dark, and if one is in the light, it is a great point to keep the
door fast against them and all forebodings, and let the coming days be
what they will.

Men are not born in a night, or a year.

But if David Sebastian were a spectre there at the door, and thought
differently on any question, or had more to say, he was not articulate.
There is no occupation for ghosts in a stirring world, nor efficiency in
their repentance.

Has any one more than a measure of hope, and a door against the storm?
There was that much, at least, on Edom Hill.



SONS OF R. RAND


SOME years ago, of a summer afternoon, a perspiring organ-grinder and
a leathery ape plodded along the road that goes between thin-soiled
hillsides and the lake which is known as Elbow Lake and lies to the
northeast of the village of Salem. In those days it was a well-travelled
highway, as could be seen from its breadth and’ dustiness. At about half
the length of its bordering on the lake there was a spring set in the
hillside, and a little pool continually rippled by its inflow. Some
settler or later owner of the thin-soiled hillsides had left a clump of
trees about it, making as sightly and refreshing an Institute of
Charity as could be found. Another philanthropist had added half a
cocoanut-shell to the foundation.

The organ-grinder turned in under the trees with a smile, in which his
front teeth played a large part, and suddenly drew back with a guttural
exclamation; the leathery ape bumped against his legs, and both assumed
attitudes expressing respectively, in an Italian and tropical manner,
great surprise and abandonment of ideas. A tall man lay stretched on
his back beside the spring, with a felt hat over his face. Pietro, the
grinder, hesitated. The American, if disturbed and irascible, takes by
the collar and kicks with the foot: it has sometimes so happened. The
tall man pushed back his hat and sat up, showing a large-boned and
sun-browned face, shaven except for a black mustache, clipped close. He
looked not irascible, though grave perhaps, at least unsmiling. He said:
“It’s free quarters, Dago. Come in. Entrez. Have a drink.”

Pietro bowed and gesticulated with amiable violence. “Dry!” he said.
“Oh, hot!”

“Just so. That a friend of yours?”--pointing to the ape. “He ain’t got a
withering sorrow, has he? Take a seat.”

Elbow Lake is shaped as its name implies. If one were to imagine the arm
to which the elbow belonged, it would be the arm of a muscular person in
the act of smiting a peaceable-looking farmhouse a quarter of a mile to
the east. Considering the bouldered front of the hill behind the house,
the imaginary blow would be bad for the imaginary knuckles. It is
a large house, with brown, unlikely looking hillsides around it,
huckleberry knobs and ice-grooved boulders here and there. The land
between it and the lake is low, and was swampy forty years ago, before
the Rand boys began to drain it, about the time when R. Rand entered the
third quarter century of his unpleasant existence.

R. Rand was, I suppose, a miser, if the term does not imply too definite
a type. The New England miser is seldom grotesque. He seems more like
congealed than distorted humanity. He does not pinch a penny so hard as
some of other races are said to do, but he pinches a dollar harder, and
is quite as unlovely as any. R. Rand’s methods of obtaining dollars
to pinch were not altogether known, or not, at least, recorded--which
accounts perhaps for the tradition that they were of doubtful
uprightness. He held various mortgages about the county, and his
farm represented little to him except a means of keeping his two sons
inexpensively employed in rooting out stones.

At the respective ages of sixteen and seventeen the two sons, Bob and
Tom Rand, discovered the rooting out of stones to be unproductive labor,
if nothing grew, or was expected to grow, in their place, except more
stones; and the nature of the counsels they took may be accurately
imagined. In the autumn of ‘56 they began ditching the swamp in the
direction of the lake, and in the summer of ‘57 raised a crop of tobacco
in the northeast corner, R. Rand, the father, making no comment the
while. At the proper time he sold the tobacco to Packard & Co., cigar
makers, of the city of Hamilton, still making no comment, probably
enjoying some mental titillation. Tom Rand then flung a rock of the size
of his fist through one of the front windows, and ran away, also
making no comment further than that. The broken window remained broken
twenty-five years, Tom returning neither to mend it nor to break
another. Bob Rand, by some bargain with his father, continued the
ditching and planting of the swamp with some profit to himself.

He evidently classed at least a portion of his father’s manner of life
among the things that are to be avoided. He acquired a family, and was
in the way to bring it up in a reputable way. He further cultivated and
bulwarked his reputation. Society, manifesting itself politically, made
him sheriff; society, manifesting itself ecclesiastically, made him
deacon. Society seldom fails to smile on systematic courtship.

The old man continued to go his way here and there, giving account of
himself to no one, contented enough no doubt to have one reputable son
who looked after his own children and paid steady rent for, or bought
piece by piece, the land he used; and another floating between the
Rockies and the Mississippi, whose doings were of no importance in the
village of Salem. But I doubt, on the whole, whether he was softened
in heart by the deacon’s manner or the ordering of the deacon’s life to
reflect unfilially on his own. Without claiming any great knowledge of
the proprieties, he may have thought the conduct of his younger son the
more filial of the two. Such was the history of the farmhouse between
the years ‘56 and ‘82.

One wet April day, the sixth of the month, in the year ‘82, R. Rand went
grimly elsewhere--where, his neighbors had little doubt. With true New
England caution we will say that he went to the cemetery, the little
grass-grown cemetery of Salem, with its meagre memorials and absurd,
pathetic epitaphs. The minister preached a funeral sermon, out of
deference to his deacon, in which he said nothing whatever about R.
Rand, deceased; and R. Rand, sheriff and deacon, reigned in his stead.

Follow certain documents and one statement of fact:

_Document 1._

_Codicil to the Will of R. Rand._

The Will shall stand as above, to wit, my son, Robert Rand, sole
legatee, failing the following condition: namely, I bequeath all my
property as above mentioned, with the exception of this house and
farm, to my son, Thomas Rand, provided, that within three months of the
present date he returns and mends with his own hands the front window,
third from the north, previously broken by him.

(Signed) R. Rand.

_Statement of fact._ On the morning of the day following the funeral
the “condition” appeared in singularly problematical shape, the broken
window, third from the north, having been in fact promptly replaced _by
the hands of Deacon Rand himself_. The new pane stared defiantly across
the lake, westward.

_Document 2_.

Leadville, Cal., May 15.

Dear Bob: I hear the old man is gone. Saw it in a paper. I reckon maybe
I didn’t treat him any squarer than he did me. I’ll go halves on a
bang-up good monument, anyhow. Can we settle affairs without my coming
East? How are you, Bob?

Tom.

_Document 3._

Salem, May 29.

Dear Brother: The conditions of our father’s will are such, I am
compelled to inform you, as to result in leaving the property wholly
to me. My duty to a large and growing family gives me no choice but
to accept it as it stands, and I trust and have no doubt that you will
regard that result with fortitude. I remain yours,

Robert Rand.

_Document 4._

Leadville, June 9.

A. L. Moore.

Dear Sir: I have your name as a lawyer in Wimberton. Think likely there
isn’t any other. If you did not draw up the will of R. Rand, Salem, can
you forward this letter to the man who did? If you did, will you tell me
what in thunder it was?

Yours, Thomas Rand.

_Document 5._

Wimberton, June 18.

Thomas Rand.

Dear Sir: I did draw your father’s will and enclose copy of the same,
with its codicil, which may truly be called remarkable. I think it right
to add, that the window in question has been mended by your brother,
with evident purpose. Your letter comes opportunely, my efforts to find
you having been heretofore unsuccessful. I will add further, that I
think the case actionable, to say the least. In case you should see fit
to contest, your immediate return is of course necessary. Very truly
yours,

A. L. Moore,

Attorney-at-Law.

_Document 6. Despatch._

New York, July 5.

To Robert Rand, Salem.

Will be at Valley Station to-morrow. Meet me or not.

T. Rand.

The deacon was a tall meagre man with a goatee that seemed to accentuate
him, to hint by its mere straightness at sharp decision, an unwavering
line of rectitude.

He drove westward in his buckboard that hot summer afternoon, the 6th of
July. The yellow road was empty before him all the length of the lake,
except for the butterflies bobbing around in the sunshine. His lips
looked even more secretive than usual: a discouraging man to see, if one
were to come to him in a companionable mood desiring comments.

Opposite the spring he drew up, hearing the sound of a hand-organ under
the trees. The tall man with a clipped mustache sat up deliberately
and looked at him. The leathery ape ceased his funereal capers and also
looked at him; then retreated behind the spring. Pietro gazed back and
forth between the deacon and the ape, dismissed his professional smile,
and followed the ape. The tall man pulled his legs under him and got up.

“I reckon it’s Bob,” he said. “It’s free quarters, Bob. Entrez. Come in.
Have a drink.”

The deacon’s embarrassment, if he had any, only showed itself in an
extra stiffening of the back.

“The train--I did not suppose--I was going to meet you.”

“Just so. I came by way of Wimberton.”

The younger brother stretched himself again beside the spring and drew
his hat over his eyes. The elder stood up straight and not altogether
unimpressive in front of it. Pietro in the rear of the spring reflected
at this point that he and the ape could conduct a livelier conversation
if it were left to them. Pietro could not imagine a conversation in
which it was not desirable to be lively. The silence was long and,
Pietro thought, not pleasant.

“Bob,” said the apparent sleeper at last, “ever hear of the prodigal
son?”

The deacon frowned sharply, but said nothing. The other lifted the edge
of his hat brim.

“Never heard of him? Oh--have I Then I won’t tell about him. Too long.
That elder brother, now, he had good points;--no doubt of it, eh?”

“I confess I don’t see your object--”

“Don’t? Well, I was just saying he had good points. I suppose he and the
prodigal had an average good time together, knockin’ around, stubbin’
their toes, fishin’ maybe, gettin’ licked at inconvenient times, hookin’
apples most anytime. That sort of thing. Just so. He had something of
an argument. Now, the prodigal had no end of fun, and the elder brother
stayed at home and chopped wood; understood himself to be cultivating
the old man. I take it he didn’t have a very soft job of it?”--lifting
his hat brim once more.

The deacon said nothing, but observed the hat brim.

“Now I think of it, maybe strenuous sobriety wasn’t a thing he naturally
liked any more than the prodigal did. I’ve a notion there was more
family likeness between ‘em than other folks thought. What might be your
idea?”

The deacon still stood rigidly with his hands clasped behind him.

“I would rather,” he said, “you would explain yourself without parable.
You received my letter. It referred to our father’s will. I have
received a telegram which I take to be threatening.”

The other sat up and pulled a large satchel around from behind him.

“You’re a man of business, Bob,” he said cheerfully. “I like you, Bob.
That’s so. That will--I’ve got it in my pocket. Now, Bob, I take it
you’ve got some cards, else you’re putting up a creditable bluff. I play
this here Will, Codicil attached. You play,--window already mended; time
expired at twelve o’clock to-night. Good cards, Bob--first-rate. I play
here”--opening the satchel--“two panes of glass--allowin’ for
accidents--putty, et cetera, proposing to bust that window again. Good
cards, Bob. How are you coming on?”

The deacon’s sallow cheeks flushed and his eyes glittered. Something
came into his face which suggested the family likeness. He drew a paper
from his inner coat pocket, bent forward stiffly and laid it on the
grass.

“Sheriff’s warrant,” he said, “for--hem--covering possible trespassing
on my premises; good for twenty-four hours’ detention--hem.”

“Good,” said his brother briskly. “I admire you, Bob. I’ll be blessed if
I don’t. I play again.” He drew a revolver and placed it on top of the
glass. “Six-shooter. Good for two hours’ stand-off.”

“Hem,” said the deacon. “Warrant will be enlarged to cover the carrying
of concealed weapons. Being myself the sheriff of this town, it
is--hem--permissible for me.” He placed a revolver on top of the
warrant.

“Bob,” said his brother, in huge delight, “I’m proud of you. But--I
judge you ain’t on to the practical drop. _Stand back there!_” The
deacon looked into the muzzle of the steady revolver covering him, and
retreated a step, breathing hard. Tom Rand sprang to his feet, and
the two faced each other, the deacon looking as dangerous a man as the
Westerner.

Suddenly, the wheezy hand-organ beyond the spring began, seemingly
trying to play two tunes at once, with Pietro turning the crank as
desperately as if the muzzle of the revolver were pointed at him.

“Hi, you monk! Dance!” cried Pietro; and the leathery ape footed it
solemnly. The perspiration poured down Pietro’s face. Over the faces of
the two stern men fronting each other a smile came and broadened slowly,
first over the younger’s, then over the deacon’s.

The deacon’s smile died out first. He sat down on a rock, hid his face
and groaned.

“I’m an evil-minded man,” he said; “I’m beaten.”

The other cocked his head on one side and listened. “Know what that tune
is, Bob? I don’t.”

He sat down in the old place again, took up the panes of glass and the
copy of the will, hesitated, and put them down.

“I don’t reckon you’re beaten, Bob. You ain’t got to the end of your
hand yet. Got any children, Bob? Yes; said you had.”

“Five.”

“Call it a draw, Bob; I’ll go you halves, counting in the monument.”

But the deacon only muttered to himself: “I’m an evil-minded man.”

Tom Rand meditatively wrapped the two documents around the revolvers.

“Here, Dago, you drop ‘em in the spring!” which Pietro did, perspiring
freely. “Shake all that. Come along.”

The two walked slowly toward the yellow road. Pietro raised his voice
despairingly. “No cent! Not a nicka!”

“That’s so,” said Tom, pausing. “Five, by thunder! Come along, Dago.
It’s free quarters. Entrez. Take a seat.”

The breeze was blowing up over Elbow Lake, and the butterflies bobbed
about in the sunshine, as they drove along the yellow road. Pietro sat
at the back of the buck-board, the leathery ape on his knee and a smile
on his face, broad, non-professional, and consisting largely of front
teeth.



CONLON


CONLON, the strong, lay sick unto death with fever. The Water
Commissioners sent champagne to express their sympathy. It was an
unforced impulse of feeling.

But Conlon knew nothing of it. His lips were white, his cheeks sunken;
his eyes glared and wandered; he muttered, and clutched with his big
fingers at nothing visible.

The doctor worked all day to force a perspiration. At six o’clock he
said: “I’m done. Send for the priest.”

When Kelly and Simon Harding came, Father Ryan and the doctor were going
down the steps.

“‘Tis a solemn duty ye have, Kelly,” said the priest, “to watch the last
moments of a dying man, now made ready for his end.”

“Ah, not Conlon! He’ll not give up, not him,” cried Kelly, “the shtrong
man wid the will in him!”

“An’ what’s the sthrength of man in the hands of his Creathor?” said the
priest, turning to Harding, oratorically.

“I don’ know,” said Harding, calmly. “Do you?”

“‘Tis naught!”

Kelly murmured submissively.

“Kind of monarchical institution, ain’t it, what Conlon’s run up
against?” Harding remarked. “Give him a fair show in a caucus, an’ he’d
win, sure.”

“He’ll die if he don’t sweat,” said the doctor, wiping his forehead.
“It’s hot enough.” Conlon lay muttering and glaring at the ceiling. The
big knuckles of his hands stood out like rope-knots. His wife nodded to
Kelly and Harding, and went out. She was a good-looking woman, large,
massive, muscular. Kelly looked after her, rubbing his short nose
and blinking his watery eyes. He was small, with stooping shoulders,
affectionate eyes, wavering knees. He had followed Conlon, the strong,
and served him many years. Admiration of Conlon was a strenuous business
in which to be engaged.

“Ah!” he said, “his wife ten year, an’ me his inchimate friend.”

It was ten by the clock. The subsiding noise of the city came up over
housetops and vacant lots. The windows of the sickroom looked off the
verge of a bluff; one saw the lights of the little city below, the
lights of the stars above, and the hot black night between.

Kelly and Harding sat down by a window, facing each other. The lamplight
was dim. A screen shaded it from the bed, where Conlon muttered and
cried out faintly, intermittently, as though in conversation with some
one who was present only to himself. His voice was like the ghost or
shadow of a voice, not a whisper, but strained of all resonance. One
might fancy him standing on the bank of the deadly river and talking
across to some one beyond the fog, and fancy that the voices would so
creep through the fog stealthily, not leaping distances like earthly
sounds, but struggling slowly through nameless obstruction.

Kelly rubbed his hands before the fire.

“I was his inchimate friend.”

Harding said: “Are you going to talk like a blanked idiot all night, or
leave off maybe about twelve?”

“I know ye for a hard man, too, Simmy,” said Kelly, pathetically; “an’
‘tis the nathur of men, for an Irishman is betther for blow-in’ off his
shteam, be it the wrath or the sorrow of him, an’ the Yankee is betther
for bottlin’ it up.”

“Uses it for driving his engine mostly.”

“So. But Conlon--”

“Conlon,” said Harding slowly, “that’s so. He had steam to drive with,
and steam to blow with, and plenty left over to toot his whistle and
scald his fingers and ache in his belly. Expanding that there figure, he
carried suction after him like the 1:40 express, he did.”

“‘Tis thrue.” Kelly leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I mind me
when I first saw him I hadn’t seen him before, unless so be when he was
puttin’ the wather-main through the sand-hills up the river an’ bossin’
a gang o’ men with a fog-horn voice till they didn’t own their souls,
an’ they didn’t have any, what’s more, the dirty Polocks. But he
come into me shop one day, an’ did I want the job o’ plumbin’ the
court-house?

“‘Have ye the court-house in your pocket?’ says I, jokin’.

“‘I have,’ says he, onexpected, ‘an’ any plumbin’ that’s done for the
court-house is done in the prisint risidence of the same.’

“An’ I looks up, an’ ‘O me God!’ I says to meself, ‘’tis a man!’ wid
the black eyebrows of him, an’ the shoulders an’ the legs of him. An’ he
took me into the shwale of his wake from that day to this. But I niver
thought to see him die.”

“That’s so. You been his heeler straight through. I don’t know but I
like your saying so. But I don’t see the how. Why, look here; when I bid
for the old water contract he comes and offers to sell it to me, sort
of personal asset. I don’t know how. By the unbroke faces of the other
Water Commissioners he didn’t use his pile-driving fist to persuade
‘em, and what I paid him was no more’n comfortable for himself. How’d
he fetch it? How’d he do those things? Why, look here, Kelly, ain’t he
bullied you? Ain’t you done dirty jobs for him, and small thanks?”

“I have that.”

Kelly’s hands trembled. He was bowed down and thoughtful, but not angry.
“Suppose I ask you what for?”

“Suppose ye do. Suppose I don’ know. Maybe he was born to be king over
me. Maybe he wasn’t. But I know he was a mastherful man, an’ he’s dyin’
here, an’ me blood’s sour an’ me bones sad wid thinkin’ of it. Don’
throuble me, Simmy.”

Harding leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, where the
lamp made a nebulous circle of light.

“Why, that’s so,” he said at last, in conclusion of some unmentioned
train of thought. “Why, I got a pup at home, and his affection ain’t
measured by the bones he’s had, nor the licks he’s had, not either of
‘em.”

Kelly was deep in a reverie.

“Nor it ain’t measured by my virtues. Look here, now; I don’ see what
his measure is.”

“Hey?” Kelly roused himself.

“Oh, I was just thinking.”

Harding thought he had known other men who had had in some degree
a magnetic power that seemed to consist in mere stormy energy of
initiative. They were like strong drink to weaker men. It was more
physical than mental. Conlon was to Kelly a stimulant, then an appetite.
And Conlon was a bad lot. Fellows that had heeled for him were mostly
either wrecked or dead now. Why, there was a chap named Patterson that
used to be decent till he struck Conlon, when he went pretty low; and
Nora Reimer drowned herself on account of Patterson, when he got himself
shot in a row at some shanty up the railroad. The last had seemed a
good enough riddance. But Nora went off her head and jumped in the new
reservoir. Harding remembered it the more from being one of the Water
Company. They had had to empty the reservoir, which was expensive. And
there were others. A black, blustering sort of beast, Conlon. He had
more steam than was natural. Harding wondered vaguely at Kelly, who was
spelling out the doctor’s directions from a piece of paper.

“A powdher an’ five dhrops from the short bottle. ‘Tis no tin-course
dinner wid the champagne an’ entries he’s givin’ Conlon the night. Hey?
A powdher an’ five dhrops from the short bottle.”

Harding’s mind wandered on among memories of the little city below, an
intricate, irregular history, full of incidents, stories that were never
finished or dribbled off anywhere, black spots that he knew of in white
lives, white spots in dark lives. He did not happen to know any white
spots on Conlon.

“Course if a man ain’t in politics for his health he ain’t in it for the
health of the community, either, and that’s all right. And if he opens
the morning by clumping Mrs. Conlon on the head, why, she clumps him
back more or less, and that’s all right.” Then, if he went down-town and
lied here and there ingeniously in the way of business, and came home at
night pretty drunk, but no more than was popular with his constituency,
why, Conlon’s life was some cluttered, but never dull. Still, Harding’s
own ways being quieter and less cluttered, he felt that if Conlon were
going off naturally now, it was not, on the whole, a bad idea. It would
conduce to quietness. It would perhaps be a pity if anything interfered.

The clock in a distant steeple struck twelve, a dull, unechoing sound.

“Simmy,” said Kelly, pointing with his thumb, “what do he be sayin’,
talkin’--talkin’ like one end of a tiliphone?”

They both turned toward the bed and listened.

“Telephone! Likely there’s a party at the other end, then. Where’s the
other end?”

“I don’ know,” whispered Kelly. “But I have this in me head, for ye
know, when the priest has done his last, ‘tis sure he’s dhropped his
man at the front door of wherever he’s goin’, wid a letther of
inthroduction in his hatband. An’ while the man was waitin’ for the
same to be read an’ him certified a thrue corpse, if he had a kettleful
of boilin’ impatience in himself like Tom Conlon, wouldn’t he be passin’
the time o’ day through the keyhole wid his friends be-yant?”

“‘Tain’t a telephone, then? It’s a keyhole, hey?”

“Tiliphone or keyhole, he’d be talkin’ through it, Conlon would, do ye
mind?”

Harding looked with some interest. Conlon muttered, and stopped, and
muttered again. Harding rose and walked to the bed. Kelly followed
tremulously.

“Listen, will ye?” said Kelly, suddenly leaning down.

“I don’ know,” said Harding, with an instinct of hesitation. “I don’
know as it’s a square game. Maybe he’s talkin’ of things that ain’t
healthy to mention. Maybe he’s plugged somebody some time, or broke a
bank--ain’t any more’n likely. What of it?”

“Listen, will ye?”

“Don’ squat on a man when he’s down, Kelly.”

“‘Sh!”

“_Hold Tom’s hand. Wait for Tom_,” babbled the ghostly voice, a thin,
distant sound.

“What’d he say? What’d he say?” Kelly was white and trembling.

Harding stood up and rubbed his chin reflectively. He did not seem to
himself to make it out. He brought a chair, sat down, and leaned close
to Conlon to study the matter.

“_What’s the heart-scald, mother?_” babbled Conlon. “_Where’d ye get it
from? Me! Wirra!_”

“‘Tis spheakin’ to ghosteses he is, Simmy, ye take me worrd.”

“Come off! He’s harking back when he was a kid.”

Kelly shook his head solemnly.

“He’s spheakin’ to ghosteses.”

“_What’s that, mother? Arra! I’m sick, mother. What for? I don’ see.
Where’m I goin’?_’

“You got me,” muttered Harding. “I don’ know.”

“_Tom’ll be good. It’s main dark. Hold Tom’s hand_.”

Kelly was on his knees, saying prayers at terrific speed.

“Hear to him!” he stopped to whisper. “Ghosteses! Ora pro nobis--”

“_Tom ain’t afraid. Naw, he ain’t afraid._”

Harding went back to his window. The air was heavy and motionless, the
stars a little dim. He could see the dark line of the river with an
occasional glint upon it, and the outline of the hills beyond.

The little city had drawn a robe of innocent obscurity over it. Only a
malicious sparkle gleamed here and there. He thought he knew that city
inside and out, from end to end. He had lived in it, dealt with it,
loved it, cheated it, helped to build it, shared its fortunes. Who knew
it better than he? But every now and then it surprised with some hidden
detail or some impulse of civic emotion. And Kelly and Conlon, surely he
knew them, as men may know men. But he never had thought to see
Conlon as to-night. It was odd. But there was some fact in the social
constitution, in human nature, at the basis of all the outward oddities
of each.

“Maybe when a man’s gettin’ down to his reckonin’ it’s needful to show
up what he’s got at the bottom. Then he begins to peel off layers of
himself like an onion, and ‘less there ain’t anything to him but layers,
by and by he comes to something that resembles a sort of aboriginal boy,
which is mostly askin’ questions and bein’ surprised.”

Maybe there was more boyishness in Conlon than in most men. Come
to think of it, there was. Conlon’s leadership was ever of the
maybe-you-think-I-can’t-lick-you order; and men followed him, admitting
that he could, in admiration and simplicity. You might see the same
thing in the public-school yard. Maybe that was the reason. The sins of
Conlon were not sophisticated.

The low, irregular murmur from the bed, the heavy heat of the night,
made Harding drowsy. Kelly repeating the formula of his prayers, a kind
of incantation against ghosts, Conlon with his gaunt face in the shadow
and his big hands on the sheet clutching at nothing visible, both faded
away, and Harding fell asleep.

He woke with a start. Kelly was dancing about the bed idiotically.

“He’s shweatin’!” he gabbled. “He’s shweatin’! He’ll be well--Conlon.”

It made Harding think of the “pup,” and how he would dance about him,
when he went home, in the crude expression of joy. Conlon’s face was
damp. He muttered no more. They piled the blankets on him till the
perspiration stood out in drops. Conlon breathed softly and slept. Kelly
babbled gently, “Conlon! Conlon!”

Harding went back to the window and rubbed his eyes sleepily.

“Kind of too bad, after all that trouble to get him peeled.”

The morning was breaking, solemn, noiseless, with lifted banners and
wide pageantries, over river and city.

Harding yawned.

“It’s one on Father Ryan, anyway. That’s a good thing. Blamed old
windbag!”

Kelly murmured ecstatically, “Conlon will get well--Conlon!”



ST CATHERINE’S


ST. CATHERINE’S was the life work of an old priest, who is remembered
now and presently will be forgotten. There are gargoyles over the
entrance aside, with their mouths open to express astonishment. They
spout rain water at times, but you need not get under them; and there
are towers, and buttresses, a great clock, a gilded cross, and roofs
that go dimly heavenward.

St. Catherine’s is new. The neighborhood squats around it in different
pathetic attitudes. Opposite is the saloon of the wooden-legged man; then
the three groceries whose cabbages all look unpleasant; the parochial
school with the green lattice; and all those little wooden houses--where
lives, for instance, the dressmaker who funnily calls herself “Modiste.”
 Beyond the street the land drops down to the freight yards.

But Father Connell died about the time they finished the east oriel, and
Father Harra reigned over the house of the old man’s dreams--a red-faced
man, a high feeder, who looked as new as the church and said the virtues
of Father Connell were reducing his flesh. That would seem to be no
harm; but Father Harra meant it humorously. Father Connell had stumped
about too much among the workmen in the cold and wet, else there had
been no need of his dying at eighty-eight. His tall black hat became a
relic that hung in the tiring room, and he cackled no more in his thin
voice the noble Latin of the service. Peace to his soul! The last
order he wrote related to the position of the Christ figure and the
inscription, “Come unto me, weary and heavy-laden: I will give you
rest.” But the figure was not in place till the mid-December following.

And it was the day before Christmas that Father Harra had a fine
service, with his boy choir and all; and Chubby Locke sang a solo,
“Angels ever bright and fair,” that was all dripping with tears, so to
speak. Chubby Locke was an imp too. All around the altar the candles
were lighted, and there hung a cluster of gas jets over the head of the
Christ figure on the edge of the south transept. So fine it was that
Father Harra came out of his room into the aisle (when the people were
gone, saying how fine it was, and the sexton was putting out the gas
here and there), to walk up and down and think about it, especially
how he should keep up with the virtues of Father Connell. Duskier and
duskier it grew, as the candles went out cluster by cluster till only
those in the south transept were left; and Dennis, coming there, stopped
and grunted.

“What!” said Father Harra.

“It’s asleep he is,” said the sexton. “It’s a b’y, yer riverence.”

“Why, so it is! He went to sleep during the service. H’m--well--they
often do that, Dennis.”

“Anyways he don’t belong here,” said Dennis.

“Think so? I don’t know about that. Wait a bit. I don’t know about that
Dennis.”

The boy lay curled up on the seat--a newsboy, by the papers that had
slipped from his arms. But he did not look businesslike, and he did not
suggest the advantages of being poor in America. One does not become a
capitalist or president by going to church and to sleep in the best of
business hours, from four to six, when the streets are stirring with
men on their way to dinners, cigars and evening papers. The steps of St.
Catherine’s are not a bad place to sell papers after Vespers, and one
might as well go in, to be sure, and be warm while the service lasts;
only, as I said, if one falls asleep, one does not become a capitalist
or president immediately. Father Harra considered, and Dennis waited
respectfully.

“It’s making plans I am against your natural rest, Dennis. I’m that
inconsiderate of your feelings to think of keeping St. Catherine’s open
this night. And why? Look ye, Dennis. St. Catherine’s is getting itself
consecrated these days, being new, and of course--But I tell ye, Dennis,
it’s a straight church doctrine that the blessings of the poor are a
good assistance to the holy wather.”

“An’ me wid children of me own to be missin’ their father this Christmas
Eve!” began Dennis indignantly.

“Who wouldn’t mind, the little villains, if their father had another
dollar of Christmas morning to buy ‘em presents.”

“Ah, well,” said the sexton, “yer riverence is that persuadin’.”

“It’s plain enough for ye to see yourself, Dennis, though thick-headed
somewhat. There you are: ‘Come unto me, weary and heavy-laden;’ and
here he is. Plain enough. And who are the weary and heavy-laden in this
city?”

“Yer riverence will be meanin’ everybody,” chuckled Dennis.

“Think so? Rich and poor and all? Stuff! I don’t believe it. Not
to-night. It’ll be the outcasts, I’m thinking, Dennis. Come on.”

“An’ the b’y, yer riverence?”

“The what? Oh, why, yes, yes. He’s all right. I don’t see anything the
matter with him. He’s come.”

It was better weather to go with the wind than against it, for the
snow drove in gritty particles, and the sidewalks made themselves
disagreeable and apt to slip out from under a person. Little spurts
of snow danced up St. Catherine’s roofs and went off the ridgepoles in
puffs. It ought to snow on Christmas Eve; but it rightly should snow
with better manners and not be so cold. The groceries closed early.
Freiburger, the saloon man, looked over the curtains of his window.

“I don’t know vat for Fater Harra tack up dings dis time by his kirch
door, ‘Come--come in here.’ Himmel! der Irishman!”

Father Harra turned in to his supper, and thought how he would trouble
Father Conner’s reputation for enterprise and what a fine bit of
constructive ability himself was possessed of.

The great central door of St. Catherine’s stood open, so that the drift
blew in and piled in windrows on the cold floor of the vestibule. The
tall front of the church went up into the darkness, pointing to no
visible stars; but over the doors two gas jets flickered across the big
sign they use for fairs at the parochial school. “Come in here.” The
vestibule was dark, barring another gas jet over a side door, with
another sign, “Come in here,” and within the great church was dark as
well, except for a cluster over the Christ figure. That was all; but
Father Harra thought it a neat symbol, looking toward those who go from
meagre light to light through the darkness.

Little noises were in the church all night far up in the pitch darkness
of rafter and buttress, as if people were whispering and crying softly
to one another. Now and again, too, the swing door would open and remain
so for a moment, suspicious, hesitating. But what they did, or who they
were that opened it, could hardly be told in the dusk and distance.
Dennis went to sleep in a chair by the chancel rail, and did not care
what they did or who they were, granted they kept away from the chancel.

How the wind blew!--and the snow tapped impatiently at stained windows
with a multitude of little fingers. But if the noises among the rafters
were not merely echoes of the crying and calling wind without, if any
presences moved and whispered there, and looked down on flat floor and
straight lines of pews, they must have seen the Christ figure, with
welcoming hands, dominant by reason of the light about it; and, just on
the edge of the circle of light, shapeless things stretched on cushions
of pews, and motionless or stirring uneasily. Something now came dimly
up the aisle from the swing door, stopped at a pew, and hesitated.

“Git out!” growled a hoarse voice. “Dis my bunk.”

The intruder gave a nervous giggle. “Begawd!” muttered the hoarse voice.
“It’s a lady!”

Another voice said something angrily. “Well,” said the first, “it ain’t
behavin’ nice to come into me boodwer.”

The owner of the giggle had slipped away and disappeared in a distant
pew. In another pew to the right of the aisle a smaller shadow whispered
to another:

“Jimmy, that’s a statoo up there.”

“Who?”

“That. I bet ‘e’s a king.”

“Aw, no ‘e ain’t. Kings has crowns an’ wallups folks.”

“Gorry! What for?”

“I don’ know.”

The other sighed plaintively. “I thought ‘e might be a king.”

The rest were mainly silent. Some one had a bad cough. Once a sleeper
rolled from the seat and fell heavily to the floor. There was an oath
or two, a smothered laugh, and the distant owner of the giggle used it
nervously. The last was an uncanny sound. The wakened sleeper objected
to it. He said he would “like to get hold of her,” and then lay down
cautiously on his cushion.

Architects have found that their art is cunning to play tricks with
them; whence come whispering galleries, comers of echoes, roofs that
crush the voice of the speaker, and roofs that enlarge it. Father
Connell gave no orders to shape the roofs of St. Catherine’s, that on
stormy nights so many odd noises might congregate there, whispering,
calling, murmuring, now over the chancel, now the organ, now far up in
the secret high places of the roof, now seeming to gather in confidence
above the Christ figure and the circle of sleepers; or, if one vaguely
imagined some inquisitively errant beings moving overhead, it would seem
that newcomers constantly entered, to whom it had all to be explained.

But against that eager motion in the darkness above the Christ figure
below was bright in his long garment, and quiet and secure. The cluster
of gas jets over his head made light but a little distance around, then
softened the dusk for another distance, and beyond seemed not to touch
the darkness at all. The dusk was a debatable space. The sleepers all
lay in the debatable space. They may have sought it by instinct; but
the more one looked at them the more they seemed like dull, half-animate
things, over whom the light and the darkness made their own compromises
and the people up in the roof their own comments.

The clock in the steeple struck the hours; in the church the tremble was
felt more than the sound was heard. The chimes each hour started their
message, “Good will and peace;” but the wind went after it and howled it
down, and the snow did not cease its petulance at the windows.

*****

The clock in the steeple struck five. The man with the hoarse voice sat
up, leaned over the back of the seat and touched his neighbor, who rose
noiselessly, a huge fat man and unkempt.

“Time to slope,” whispered the first, motioning toward the chancel.

The other followed his motion.

“What’s up there?”

“You’re ignorance, you are. That’s where they gives the show. There’s
pickin’s there.”

The two slipped out and stole up the aisle with a peculiar noiseless
tread. Even Fat Bill’s step could not be heard a rod away. The aisle
entered the circle of light before the Christ figure; but the two
thieves glided through without haste and without looking up. The
smaller, in front, drew up at the end of the aisle, and Fat Bill ran
into him. Dennis sat in his chair against the chancel rail, asleep.

“Get onto his whiskers, Bill. Mebbe you’ll have to stuff them whiskers
down his throat.”

There was a nervous giggle behind them. Fat Bill shot into a pew,
dragging his comrade after him, and crouched down. “It ain’t no use,”
 he whispered, shaking the other angrily. “Church business is bad luck. I
alius said so. What’s for them blemed noises all night? How’d come they
stick that thing up there with the gas over it? What for’d they leave
the doors open, an’ tell ye to come in, an’ keep their damn devils
gigglin’ around? ‘Taint straight I won’t stand it.”

“It’s only a woman, Bill,” said the other patiently.

He rose on his knees and looked over the back of the seat. “’Tain’t
straight. I won’t stand it.”

“We won’t fight, Bill. We’ll get out, if you say so.”

The owner of the giggle was sitting up, as they glided back, Fat Bill
leading.

“I’ll smash yer face,” the smaller man said to her.

Bill turned and grabbed his collar.

“You come along.”

The woman stared stupidly after, till the swing door closed behind them.
Then she put on her hat, decorated with too many disorderly flowers.
Most of the sleepers were wakened. The wind outside had died in the
night, and the church was quite still. A man in a dress suit and
overcoat sat up in a pew beneath a window, and stared about him. His
silk hat lay on the floor. He leaned over the back of the seat and spoke
to his neighbor, a tramp in checked trousers.

“How’d I g-get here?” he asked thickly.

“Don’ know, pardner,” said the tramp cheerfully. “Floated in, same as
me?” He caught sight of the white tie and shirt front. “Maybe you’d
give a cove a shiner to steady ye out They don’t give breakfasts with
lodgin’s here.”

The woman with the giggle and the broken-down flowers on her hat went
out next; then a tall, thin man with a beard and a cough; the newsboy
with his papers shuffled after, his shoes being too large; then a lame
man--something seemed the matter with his hip; and a decent-looking
woman, who wore a faded shawl over her head and kept it drawn across her
face--she seemed ashamed to be there, as if it did not appear to her a
respectable place; last, two boys, one of them small, but rather stunted
than very young. He said:

“‘E ain’t a king, is ‘e, Jimmy? You don’ know who ‘e is, do you, Jimmy?”

“Naw.”

“Say, Jimmy, it was warm, warn’t it?”

*****

Dennis came down the aisle, put out the gas, and began to brush the
cushions. The clock struck a quarter of six, and Father Harra came in.

“Christmas, Dennis, Christmas! H’m--anybody been here? What did they
think of it?”

Dennis rubbed his nose sheepishly.

“They wint to shleep, sor, an’--an’ thin they wint out.”

Father Harra looked up at the Christ figure and stroked his red chin.

“I fancied they might see the point,” he said slowly. “Well, well, I
hope they were warm.”

The colored lights from the east oriel fell over the Christ figure and
gave it a cheerful look; and from other windows blue and yellow and
magical deep-sea tints floated in the air, as if those who had whispered
unseen in the darkness were now wandering about, silent but curiously
visible.

“Yer riverince,” said Dennis, “will not be forgettin’ me dollar.”



THE SPIRAL STONE


THE graveyard on the brow of the hill was white with snow. The marbles
were white, the evergreens black. One tall spiral stone stood painfully
near the centre. The little brown church outside the gates turned its
face in the more comfortable direction of the village.

Only three were out among the graves: “Ambrose Chillingworth, ætat 30,
1675;”

“Margaret Vane, ætat 19, 1839;” and “Thy Little One, O God, ætat 2,”
 from the Mercer Lot. It is called the “Mercer Lot,” but the Mercers are
all dead or gone from the village.

The Little One trotted around busily, putting his tiny finger in the
letterings and patting the faces of the cherubs. The other two sat on
the base of the spiral, which twisted in the moonlight over them.

“I wonder why it is?” Margaret said. “Most of them never come out at
all. We and the Little One come out so often. You were wise and learned.
I knew so little. Will you tell me?”

“Learning is not wisdom,” Ambrose answered. “But of this matter it was
said that our containment in the grave depended on the spirit in which
we departed. I made certain researches. It appeared by common report
that only those came out whom desperate sin tormented, or labors
incomplete and great desire at the point of death made restless. I
had doubts the matter were more subtle, the reasons of it reaching out
distantly.” He sighed faintly, following with his eyes, tomb by tomb,
the broad white path that dropped down the hillside to the church. “I
desired greatly to live.”

“I, too. Is it because we desired it so much, then? But the Little
One”---

“I do not know,” he said.

The Little One trotted gravely here and there, seeming to know very well
what he was about, and presently came to the spiral stone. The lettering
on it was new, and there was no cherub. He dropped down suddenly on the
snow, with a faint whimper. His small feet came out from under his gown,
as he sat upright, gazing at the letters with round troubled eyes, and
up to the top of the monument for the solution of some unstated problem.

“The stone is but newly placed,” said Ambrose, “and the newcomer would
seem to be of those who rest in peace.”

They went and sat down on either side of him, on the snow. The peculiar
cutting of the stone, with spirally ascending lines, together with the
moon’s illusion, gave it a semblance of motion. Something twisted and
climbed continually, and vanished continually from the point. But the
base was broad, square, and heavily lettered: “John Mareschelli Vane.”

“Vane? That was thy name,” said Ambrose.

1890. Ætat 72.

An Eminent Citizen, a Public Benefactor, and Widely Esteemed.

For the Love of his Native Place returned to lay his Dust therein.

The Just Made Perfect.

“It would seem he did well, and rounded his labors to a goodly end,
lying down among his kindred as a sheaf that is garnered in the autumn.
He was fortunate.”

And Margaret spoke, in the thin, emotionless voice which those who are
long in the graveyard use: “He was my brother.”

“Thy brother?” said Ambrose.

The Little One looked up and down the spiral with wide eyes. The other
two looked past it into the deep white valley, where the river, covered
with ice and snow, was marked only by the lines of skeleton willows and
poplars. A night wind, listless but continual, stirred the evergreens.
The moon swung low over the opposite hills, and for a moment slipped
behind a cloud.

“Says it not so, ‘For the Love of his Native Place’?” murmured Ambrose.

And as the moon came out, there leaned against the pedestal, pointing
with a finger at the epitaph, one that seemed an old man, with bowed
shoulders and keen, restless face, but in his manner cowed and weary.

“It is a lie,” he said slowly. “I hated it, Margaret. I came because
Ellen Mercer called me.”

“Ellen isn’t buried here.”

“Not here!”

“Not here.”

“Was it you, then, Margaret? Why?”

“I didn’t call you.”

“Who then?” he shrieked. “Who called me?”

The night wind moved on monotonously, and the moonlight was undisturbed,
like glassy water.

“When I came away,” she said, “I thought you would marry her. You
didn’t, then? But why should she call you?”

“I left the village suddenly!” he cried. “I grew to dread, and then to
hate it. I buried myself from the knowledge of it, and the memory of it
was my enemy. I wished for a distant death, and these fifty years have
heard the summons to come and lay my bones in this graveyard. I thought
it was Ellen. You, sir, wear an antique dress; you have been long in
this strange existence. Can you tell who called me? If not Ellen, where
is Ellen?” He wrung his hands, and rocked to and fro.

“The mystery is with the dead as with the living,” said Ambrose. “The
shadows of the future and the past come among us. We look in their eyes,
and understand them not. Now and again there is a call even here, and
the grave is henceforth untenanted of its spirit. Here, too, we know a
necessity which binds us, which speaks not with audible voice and will
not be questioned.”

“But tell me,” moaned the other, “does the weight of sin depend upon its
consequences? Then what weight do I bear? I do not know whether it was
ruin or death, or a thing gone by and forgotten. Is there no answer here
to this?”

“Death is but a step in the process of life,” answered Ambrose. “I know
not if any are ruined or anything forgotten. Look up, to the order of
the stars, an handwriting on the wall of the firmament. But who hath
read it? Mark this night wind, a still small voice. But what speaketh
it? The earth is clothed in white garments as a bride. What mean the
ceremonials of the seasons? The will from without is only known as it is
manifested. Nor does it manifest where the consequences of the deed end
or its causes began. Have they any end or a beginning? I cannot answer
you.”

“Who called me, Margaret?”

And she said again monotonously, “I didn’t call you.”

The Little One sat between Ambrose and Margaret, chuckling to himself
and gazing up at the newcomer, who suddenly bent forward and looked into
his eyes, with a gasp.

“What is this?” he whispered. “‘Thy Little One, O God, ætat 2,’ from
the Mercer Lot,” returned Ambrose gently. “He is very quiet. Art not
neglecting thy business, Little One? The lower walks are unvisited
to-night.”

“They are Ellen’s eyes!” cried the other, moaning and rocking. “Did you
call me? Were you mine?”

“It is, written, ‘Thy Little One, O God,’” murmured Ambrose.

But the Little One only curled his feet up under his gown, and now
chuckled contentedly.



THE MUSIDORA SONNET


THE clock in some invisible steeple struck one. The great snowflakes
fell thickly, wavering and shrinking, delicate, barren seeds, conscious
of their unfruitfulness. The sputter of the arc lights seemed explosive
to the muffled silence of the street. With a bright corner at either end,
the block was a canon, a passage in a nether world of lurking ghosts,
where a frightened gaslight trembled, hesitated midway. And Noel
Endicott conceived suddenly, between curb and curb, a sonnet, to be
entitled “Dante in Tenth Street,” the appearance of it occupying,
in black letter, a half page in the _Monthly Illustrated_, a gloomy
pencilling above, and below it “Noel Endicott.” The noiselessness of his
steps enlarged his imagination.

               I walked in 19th Street, not the Florentine,

               With ghosts more sad, and one like Beatrice

               Laid on my lips the sanction of her kiss.

               ‘Twas----

It should be in a purgatorial key, in effect something cold, white and
spiritual, portraying “her” with Dantesque symbolism, a definite being,
a vision with a name. “‘Twas--” In fact, who was she?

He stopped. Tenth Street was worth more than a sonnet’s confined
austerity. It should be a story. Noel was one who beat tragic
conceptions into manuscript, suffering rejection for improbability.
Great actions thrilled him, great desires and despairs. The massive
villainies of Borgia had fallen in days when art was strenuous. Of old,
men threw a world away for a passion, an ambition. Intense and abundant
life--one was compelled now to spin their symbols out of thin air, be
rejected for improbability, and in the midst of a bold conception, in a
snowstorm on canoned Tenth Street, be hungry and smitten with doubts of
one’s landlady.

Mrs. Tibbett had been sharp that morning relative to a bill, and he
had remonstrated but too rashly: “Why discuss it, Mrs. Tibbett? It’s
a negative, an unfruitful subject.” And she had, in effect, raved, and
without doubt now had locked the outer door. Her temper, roused at one
o’clock, would be hasty in action, final in result.

He stood still and looked about him. Counting two half blocks as one, it
was now one block to Mrs. Tibbett and that ambushed tragedy.

In his last novel, “The Sunless Treasure” (to his own mind his
greatest), young Humphrey stands but a moment hesitating before the
oaken door, believing his enemies to be behind it with ready daggers. He
hesitates but a moment. The die is cast. He enters. His enemies are not
there. But Mrs. Tibbett seemed different. For instance, she would be
there.

The house frontage of this, like the house frontage of the fatal next
block, was various, of brick, brownstone or dingy white surface,
with doorways at the top of high steps, doorways on the ground level,
doorways flush with the front, or sunken in pits. Not a light in any
window, not a battlement that on its restless front bore a star, but
each house stood grim as Child Roland’s squat tower. The incessant
snowflakes fell past, no motion or method of any Byzantine palace
intrigue so silken, so noiseless, so mysterious in beginnings and
results. All these locked caskets wedged together contained problems
and solutions, to which Bassanio’s was a simple chance of three with a
pointed hint. Noel decided that Tenth Street was too large for a story.
It was a literature. One must select.

Meanwhile the snow fell and lay thickly, and there was no doubt that by
persistent standing in the snow one’s feet became wet. He stepped into
the nearest doorway, which was on the level of the street, one of three
doorways alike, all low, arched and deep.

They would be less noticeable in the daytime than in the night, when
their cavernous gaping and exact repetition seemed either ominous or
grotesque, according to the observer. The outer door was open. He felt
his way in beyond the drift to the hard footing of the vestibule, kicked
his shoes free of snow and brushed his beard.

The heroes of novels were sometimes hungry and houseless, but it seemed
to Noel that they seldom or never faced a problem such as Mrs. Tibbett
presented. Desperate fortunes should be carried on the point of one’s
sword, but with Mrs. Tibbett the point was not to provoke her. She was
incongruous. She must be thrust aside, put out of the plot. He made a
gesture dismissing Mrs. Tibbett. His hand in the darkness struck the
jamb of the inner door, which swung back with a click of the half-caught
latch. His heart thumped, and he peered into the darkness, where a thin
yellow pencil of light stretched level from a keyhole at the farther end
of a long hall.

Dismissing Mrs. Tibbett, it was a position of dramatic advantage to
stand in so dark and deep an arched entrance, between the silence and
incessant motion of the snow on the one hand, and the yellow pencil
of light, pointing significantly to something unknown, some crisis
of fortune. He felt himself in a tale that had both force and form,
responsible for its progress.

He stepped in, closed the half door behind him softly, and crept through
the hall. The thin line of light barred the way, and seemed to say,
“Here is the place. Be bold, ready-minded, full of subtlety and
resource.” There was no sound within that he could hear, and no sound
without, except his own oppressed breathing and pulses throbbing in his
ears.

Faint heart never won anything, and as for luck, it belonged to those
who adventured with various chances, and of the blind paths that led
away from their feet into the future, chose one, and another, and so
kept on good terms with possibility. If one but cried saucily, “Open
this odd little box, you three gray women!” And this, and this the
gray Fates smiled indulgently, showing a latent motherliness. How many
destinies had been decided by the opening and shutting of a door, which
to better or worse, never opened again for retreat? A touch on this door
and Mrs. Tibbett might vanish from the story forever, to the benefit of
the story.

He lifted his hand, having in mind to tap lightly, with tact and
insinuation, but struck the door, in fact, nervously, with a bang that
echoed in the hall. Some one spoke within. He opened and made entry in a
prepared manner, which gave way to merely blinking wonder.

It was a large dining-room, brightly lit by a chandelier, warm from
a glowing grate, sumptuous with pictures and hangings, on the table a
glitter of glass and silver, with meat, cakes and wine.

On the farther side of the table stood a woman in a black evening dress,
with jewels on her hair and bosom. She seemed to have just risen, and
grasped the back of her chair with one hand, while the other held open a
book on the table. The length of her white arm was in relief against her
black dress.

Noel’s artistic slouch hat, now taken off with uncertain hand, showed
wavy brown hair over eyes not at all threatening, a beard pointed,
somewhat profuse, a face interestingly featured and astonished. No
mental preparation to meet whatever came, of Arabic or mediaeval
incident, availed him. He felt dumb, futile, blinking. The lady’s
surprise, the startled fear on her face, was hardly seen before it
changed to relief, as if the apparition of Noel, compared with some
foreboding of her own, were a mild event. She half smiled when he
began:--

“I am an intruder, madam,” and stopped with that embarrassed platitude.
“I passed your first door by accident, and your second by impulse.”

“That doesn’t explain why you stay.”

“May I stay to explain?”

When two have exchanged remarks that touch the borders of wit, they
have passed a mental introduction. To each the mind of the other is a
possible shade and bubbling spring by the dusty road of conversation.
Noel felt the occasion. He bowed with a side sweep of his hat.

“Madam, I am a writer of poems, essays, stories. If you ask, What do I
write in poems, essays, stories, I answer, My perception of things. If
you ask, In what form would I cast my present perceptions of things, I
say, Without doubt a poem.”

“You are able to carry both sides of a conversation. I have not asked
any of these.”

“You have asked why I stay. I am explaining.”

The lady’s attitude relaxed its stiffness by a shade, her half smile
became a degree more balmy.

“I think you must be a successful writer.”

“You touch the point,” he said slowly. “I am not. I am hungry and
probably houseless. And worse than that, I find hunger and houselessness
are sordid, tame. The taste of them in the mouth is flat, like stale
beer. It is not like the bitter tang of a new experience, but like
something the world shows its weariness of in me.”

The amused smile vanished in large-eyed surprise, and something
more than surprise, as if his words gave her some intimate, personal
information.

“You say strange things in a very strange way. And you came in by an
accident?”

“And an impulse?”

“I don’t understand. But you must sit down, and I can find you more to
eat, if this isn’t enough.”

Noel could not have explained the strangeness of his language, if it was
strange, further than that he felt the need of saying something in
order to find an opportunity of saying something to the point, and so
digplayed whatever came to his mind as likely to arrest attention. It
was a critical lesson in vagabondage, as familiar there as hunger and
houselessness. He attacked the cold meat, cakes and fruit with fervor,
and the claret in the decanter. But what should be the next step in the
pursuit of fortune? At this point should there not come some revelation?

The lady did not seem to think so, but sat looking now at Noel and now
at her own white hands in her lap. That she should have youth and beauty
seemed to Noel as native to the issue as her jewels, the heavy curtains,
the silver and glass. As for youth, she might be twenty, twenty-one,
two. All such ages, he observed to himself with a mental flourish,
were one in beauty. It was not a rosy loveliness like the claret in the
decanter, nor plump like the fruit in the silver basket, but dark-eyed,
white and slender, with black hair drawn across the temples; of a
fragile delicacy like the snowflakes, the frost flower of the century’s
culture, the symbol of its ultimate luxury. The rich room was her
setting. She was the center and reason for it, and the yellow point of
a diamond over her heart, glittering, but with a certain mellowness, was
still more central, intimate, interpretative, symbolic of all desirable
things. He began to see the story in it, to glow with the idea.

“Madam,” he said, “I am a writer of whose importance I have not as yet
been able to persuade the public. The way I should naturally have gone
to-night seemed to me something to avoid. I took another, which brought
me here. The charm of existence--” She seemed curiously attentive. “The
charm of existence is the unforeseen, and of all things our moods are
the most unforeseen. One’s plans are not always and altogether futile.
If you propose to have salad for lunch, and see your way to it, it
is not so improbable that you will have salad for lunch. But if you
prefigure how it will all seem to you at lunch, you are never quite
right. Man proposes and God disposes. I add that there is a third and
final disposal, namely, what man is to think of the disposition after it
is made. I hope, since you proposed or prefigured to-night, perhaps as
I did, something different from this--this disposition”--he lifted his
glass of claret between him and the light--“that your disposition what
to think of it is, perhaps, something like mine.”

The lady was leaning forward with parted lips, listening intently,
absorbed in his words. For the life of him Noel could not see why she
should be absorbed in his words, but the fact filled him with happy
pride.

“Tell me,” she said quickly. “You speak so well--”

Noel filled in her pause of hesitation.

“That means that my wisdom may be all in my mouth.”

“No, indeed! I mean you must have experience. Will you tell me, is it so
dreadful not to have money? People say different things.”

“They do.” He felt elevated, borne along on a wave of ornamental
expression. “It is their salvation. Their common proverbs contradict
each other. A man looks after his pence and trusts one proverb that the
pounds will look after themselves, till presently he is called penny
wise and pound foolish, and brought up by another. And consider how less
noticeable life would be without its jostle of opinion, its conflicting
lines of wisdom, its following of one truth to meet with another going
a different way. Give me for finest companionship some half truth, some
ironic veracity.”

She shook her head. It came to him with a shock that it was not his
ornamental expression which interested her, but only as it might bear on
something in her own mind more simple, direct and serious, something
not yet disclosed. “In fact,” he thought, “she is right. One must get on
with the plot” It was a grievous literary fault to break continuity, to
be led away from the issue by niceties of expression. The proper issue
of a plot was simple, direct, serious, drawn from the motive which began
it. Why did she sit here with her jewels, her white arms and black dress
these weird, still hours of the night? Propriety hinted his withdrawal,
but one must resist the commonplace.

“The answer to the question does not satisfy you. But do you not see
that I only enlarged on your own answer? People say different things
because they are different. The answer depends on temperaments, more
narrowly on moods; on tenses, too, whether it is present poverty
and houselessness or past or future. And so it has to be answered
particularly, and you haven’t made me able to answer it particularly to
you. And then one wouldn’t imagine it could be a question particular to
you.”

“You are very clever,” she murmured, half smiling again. “Are you not
too clever for the purpose? You say so many things.”

“That is true,” said Noel plaintively. “The story has come to a
standstill. It has all run out into diction.”

At that moment there was a loud noise in the hall.

The smile, which began hopefully, grew old while he watched it, and
withered away. The noise that echoed in the hall was of a banging door,
then of laden, dragging steps. The hall door was thrown open, and two
snowy hackmen entered, holding up between them a man wearing a tall hat.

“He’s some loaded, ma’am,” said one of them cheerfully. “I ain’t seen
him so chucked in six months.”

They dropped him in a chair, from which, after looking about him with
half-open, glassy eyes, and closing them again, he slid limply to the
floor. The hackman regarded that choice of position with sympathy.

“Wants to rest his load, he does,” and backed out of the door with his
companion.

“It goes on the bill. Ain’t seen him so chucked in six months.”

The lady had not moved from her chair, but had sat white and still,
looking down into her lap. She gave a hard little laugh.

“Isn’t it nice he’s so ‘chucked’? He would have acted dreadfully.” She
was leaning on the table now, her dark eyes reading him intently. The
man on the floor snorted and gurgled in his sleep.

“I couldn’t kill anybody,” she said. “Could you?”

Noel shook his head.

“It’s so funny,” she went on in a soft, speculative way, “one can’t do
it. I’m afraid to go away and be alone and poor. I wish he would die.”

“It wouldn’t work out that way,” said Noel, struggling with his wits.
“He’s too healthy.”

It seemed to him immediately that the comment was not the right one. It
was not even an impersonal fact to himself, an advantage merely to the
plot, that the sleeper was unable to object to him and discard him from
it, as he had resolved to discard Mrs. Tibbett, but with such brutal
energy as the sleeper’s face indicated. For it repelled not so much by
its present relaxed degradation as by its power, its solidity of flesh,
its intolerant self-assertion, the physical vigor of the short bull
neck, bulky shoulders, heavy mustache, heavy cheeks and jaw, bluish
with the shaving of a thick growth. He was dressed, barring his damp
dishevelment, like a well-groomed clubman.

But the lady was looking Noel in the eyes, and her own seemed strangely
large, but as if covering a spiritual rather than a physical space,
settled in melancholy, full of clouds, moving lights and dusky
distances.

“I was waiting for him because he ordered me. I’m so afraid of him,” she
said, shrinking with the words. “He likes me to be here and afraid of
him.”

“Tell me what I am to do?” he said eagerly.

“I suppose you are not to do anything.”

Noel caught the thread of his fluency. He drew a ten-cent piece from
his pocket, tossed it on the table, gestured toward it with one hand
and swung the other over the back of his chair with an air of polished
recklessness.

“But your case seems desperate to you. Is it more than mine? You have
followed this thing about to ‘the end of the passage,’ and there is my
last coin. My luck might change to-morrow. Who knows? Perhaps tonight.
I would take it without question and full of hope. Will you experiment
with fortune and--and me?”

The dark eyes neither consented nor refused. They looked at him gravely.

“It is a black, cold night. The snow is thick in the air and deep on the
street Put it so at the worst, but fortune and wit will go far.”

“Your wit goes farther than your fortune, doesn’t it?” she said,
smiling.

“I don’t conceal.”

“You don’t conceal either of them, do you? You spread them both out,”
 and she laughed a pleasant little ripple of sound.

Noel rose with distinction and bent toward her across the table.

“My fortune is this ten-cent piece. As you see, on the front of it is
stamped a throned woman.”

“Oh, how clever.” She laughed, and Noel flushed with the applause.

“Shall we trust fortune and spin the coin? Heads, the throned woman, I
shall presently worship you, an earthly divinity. Tails, a barren wreath
and the denomination of a money value, meaning I take my fortunes away,
and you,” pointing in turn to the sleeper and the jewels, “put up with
yours as you can.”

She seemed to shiver as he pointed. “No,” she said, “I couldn’t do that.
A woman never likes to spin a coin seriously.”

“Will you go, then?”

The sleeper grunted and turned over. She turned pale, put her hand to
her throat, said hurriedly, “Wait here,” and left the room, lifting and
drawing her skirt aside as she passed the sleeper.

She opened the door at last and came again, wrapped in a fur mantle,
carrying a travelling case, and stood looking down at the sleeper as if
with some struggle of the soul, some reluctant surrender.

They went out, shutting the door behind them.

The snow was falling still on Tenth Street, out of the crowding
night. He held her hand on his arm close to him. She glided beside him
noiselessly.

The express office was at the corner, a little dingy, gas-lit room.

“Carriage? Get it in a minute,” said the sleepy clerk. “It’s just round
the corner.”

They stood together by a window, half opaque with dust. Her face was
turned away, and he watched the slant of her white cheek.

“You will have so much to tell me,” he whispered at last.

“I am really very grateful. You helped me to resolve.”

“Your carriage, sir.”

The electric light sputtered over them standing on the curb.

“But,” she said, smiling up at him, “I have nothing to tell you. There
is nothing more. It ends here. Forgive me. It is my plot and it wouldn’t
work out your way. There are too many conflicting lines of wisdom in
your way. My life lately has been what you would call, perhaps, a study
in realism, and you want me to be, perhaps, a symbolic romance. I am
sure you would express it very cleverly. But I think one lives by
taking resolutions rather than by spinning coins, which promise either
a throned woman, or a wreath and the denomination of a money value. One
turns up so much that is none of these things. Men don’t treat women
that way. I married to be rich, and was very wretched, and perhaps your
fame, when it comes, will be as sad to you. Perhaps the trouble lies in
what you called ‘the third disposal.’ But I did not like being a study
in realism. I should not mind being something symbolic, if I might prove
my gratitude”--she took her hand from his arm, put one foot on the step
and laughed, a pleasant little ripple of sound--“by becoming literary
material.” The door shut to, and the carriage moved away into the storm
with a muffled roll of wheels.

Noel stared after it blankly, and then looked around him. It was half
a block now to Mrs. Tibbett. He walked on mechanically, and mounted the
steps by habit. The outer door was not locked. A touch of compunction
had visited Mrs. Tibbett.

He crept into his bed, and lay noting the growing warmth and sense of
sleep, and wondering whether that arched doorway was the third of the
three or the second. Strictly speaking he seemed to have gone in at the
middle one and come out at the third, or was it not the first rather
than the middle entrance that he had sheltered in? The three arched
entrances capered and contorted before him in the dark, piled themselves
into the portal of a Moorish palace, twisted themselves in a kind of
mystical trinity and seal of Solomon, floated apart and became thin,
filmy, crescent moons over a frozen sea. He sat up in bed and smote the
coverlet.

“I don’t know her name! She never told me!” He clutched his hair, and
then released it cautiously. “It’s Musidora! I forgot that sonnet!”

               ‘Twas Musidora, whom the mystic nine

               Gave to my soul to be forever mine,

               And, as through shadows manifold of Dis,

               Showed in her eyes, through dusky distances

               And clouds, the moving lights about their shrine;

               Now ever on my soul her touch shall be

               As on the cheek are touches of the snow,

               Incessant, cool, and gone; so guiding me

               From sorrow’s house and triple portico.

               And prone recumbrance of brute tyranny,

               In a strict path shall teach my feet to go.


The clock in the invisible steeple struck three.





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