© H. H. Half-tone plate, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

BRONZE GROUP OF THE UNDEFEATED AMERICAN POLO TEAM

HERBERT HAZELTINE’S SCULPTURE OF THE AMERICAN TEAM WHICH WON THE WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP IN ENGLAND, IN 1909, AND DEFENDED IT SUCCESSFULLY AGAINST ALL ENGLAND IN 1911 AND 1913

(The leading figure: Mr. Milburn. Second figure: Mr. Whitney, captain. Figure in background: Mr. Lawrence Waterbury. Figure on the right: Mr. J. M. Waterbury.)

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 641]

VERSE

LOVE is the début of a woman’s soul from the darkness under Adam’s left ribs into the sunshine of the Garden of Eden and his presence. It is heavenly, but very much like a major operation attended by convulsions, and I am going to write you the whole truth about it, my dear Evelyn, and not present to you an unadorned feminine version. It is going to be hard, for I’ve only been practising concise veracity for a little over a month, and if I am crude in places, you must forgive me.

What did it?

Aunt Grace, my unfilial virago of a disposition, and the will of God.

Please don’t let it make you uncomfortable to have me speak of Him in this friendly fashion, for He is in the story, and I can’t help it. Besides, that is part of what I want to tell you about.

The first of May, mother came home from a visit to Aunt Grace in Louisville with the most peculiar little man led by a halter for me. He has a title, genuine brand. Elizabeth Gentry is going to marry him now, and she’ll write you all about it. Aunt Grace had selected him in Rome at Easter, and told him the round numbers of the fortune Grandmother Wickliffe left me. She had instructed mother minutely as to my joyous and appreciative course of action toward him, and you know how my maternal parent is about Aunt Grace. I want to record it of father that he received the duke with a recoil, and went to New Orleans the next morning for an indefinite stay.

Of course the little man is a human being, but I consider the United States as fortunate that it is not now in complications with Italy over the murder of one of her scions by an enraged Tennessee woman. Two days after his arrival, and only several hours after the first time he tried to possess his funny little paws of my very garden-burned hand, I packed a few of my belongings in three trunks and a steamer-bag and departed to find Dudley. He is such a perfectly satisfactory brother that, since my earliest youth, I have always felt it best to flee to him when I feel a tantrum coming on. They don’t dis[Pg 642]turb the even tenor of his life in the least.

“Oh, Nell!” was all mother had the courage to say, when so far away from Aunt Grace, at the announcement of my intention.

“My brother is ill up in the Harpeth Hills, and I must go to him,” was all I said to the duke.

That was the feminine version of a line in Dudley’s last letter, saying he had caught a heavy cold sleeping out without his blanket while with one of his gangs marking lumber on Old Harpeth. But I did take his grace to call on Elizabeth before I departed. I will say that much for myself.

With it all I had left home in such a whirl of hurry and rage that I hadn’t had time really to realize myself until I sat in my seat and watched the train begin to wind around and around the foot-hills that lead up from the valley. And I must say that realization of myself was not much in the way of amusement. Why should I have left mother in a huff just because she is Aunt Grace’s obedient sister? Isn’t she also my browbeaten parent? And why rudely abandon the little nobleman, who was my guest, for trying to kiss my hand, which has been used for any old purpose, from digging worms for Dudley to fish with to supplying a surface to be pressed by Bobby Gentry’s adolescent bristles, even unto the mustache he at present flourishes? And others, too! No, I couldn’t honestly approve of myself, as hard as I tried.

And, to make it worse, the very day itself was a balmy, pliant, feminine thing, with not a bluster in its disposition to harmonize with mine. There was a soft bridal veil of spring mist all over the Harpeth Valley, behind which the orchards were blushing pink and white, while by noon, as we began to go up the hills, I caught a whiff of that indescribable, lilting honeysuckle note that comes in the June rhapsody in the Alleghanies. You remember it, don’t you, deary, even if you do live in an enchanted Breton garden with a husband who sings? I’m going to remember it in heaven.

No, I wasn’t very well pleased with myself, and I got more and more serious on the subject the higher the train crawled up toward the crown of Old Harpeth. If a naturally conscientious person has such a bad disposition that she finds it impossible to accept any form of criticism from other people, then she is ethically obliged to chastise her own self, which is the refinement of psychical cruelty.

By three o’clock the only way I could drag myself out of the depths was by remembering how Aunt Grace’s nostrils distend while she insinuates to mother in my presence what an unsatisfactory daughter I am. I can always get up a rage with that mental picture. That is, I could; now it is different, because—but that is what I am going to tell you about.

Of course I knew that Dudley’s letters all went to Crow Point, and the ticket-man had told me that we got there at five-fifty. That hour was not dark—quite, I knew, and I decided that I would have plenty of time to drive across the ridge to his camp at Pigeon Creek.

Isn’t it a good thing for women that they can’t take peeps into what is going to happen to them next? Men could digest their disclosed futures complacently, but on account of pure excitement, women never in the world could even sufficiently masticate theirs to swallow them.

“Is it far from Crow Point to Pigeon Creek?” I asked the conductor, by way of amusing myself.

“About one horse-pull,” he answered lucidly, as he went to help a woman and eleven children off at Hitch It.

I’m glad now he was no more explicit.

Crow Point was just a little farther along the road than Hitch It, and we got there before I had time to ask him any more questions. Purple dusk was just hovering over the mountain-top, as if uncertain about settling down upon it for the night, when the train stopped. He called Crow Point, and I jumped off—the universe.

I stood for a few minutes, with my mind tottering.

“Looking for anybody, little gal?” came a drawl from out the twilight just in time to keep me from running after the train to try and tell them that I didn’t want to be left alone in the mountains at dark. A man sat all hunched up on the tree-trunk that supported one end of the huge log which represented the station platform of Crow Point, whittling a small stick.

“Is this Crow Point?” I gasped from[Pg 643] the depths of both consternation and amazement as I looked from him to the three trunks stacked on the ground by the rustic platform.

“Sure am,” was the answer, as the small red slivers of wood flew.

“Is this—this all of it?” I asked, this time less from consternation than astonishment.

“Well, they is a few more of us,” he answered. “Was you a-looking for any of us in particular?”

“Mr. Dudley Gaines,” I answered in a manner that bordered on the lofty, as if I felt that the status of my family must be much the same commanding one at Crow Point that it was down in Hillsboro.

“I reckon you’ll have to holler that loud enough to reach about twenty-five miles acrost to Pigeon Creek, gal, if you want to git him,” was the unimpressed answer.

“Twenty-five miles!” I spoke less haughtily this time. “Can’t I get there to-night?”

“You could ef you had started this time last night,” was the practical reply.

Suddenly the fact that I was planted down in the wilderness of gigantic mountains, alone except for one aborigine of the masculine gender, overpowered me so that I sank down on the log and became much meeker in manner and spirit.

“What’ll I do?” I asked, and this time my words were nothing more than a subdued and respectful peep.

“Wall, I reckon Stivers and missus will have to take you in for the night,” answered the native, with a condescending drawl. “They might not, but you mentioned young Gaines’s name. We ’most shot him for a revenue when he first came, but he’s brought a sight of good work amongst us, and lives like he was fellow-man with all. Be you his sister or his woman?”

“Sister,” I answered, taking a grain of courage at thus hearing Dudley’s name mentioned as that of a prominent citizen of the fastnesses.

“Yes, Stivers had a cross on his gun for Dud, and he mighty nigh got a bloodstain to smear on it ’fore he found out that he were just a logger. But Stivers’ll take you in, I reckon, now he knows you belong to his tribe, though his cabin is so small you couldn’t cuss a cat without getting hair in your teeth.”

“Where do Mr. and Mrs. Stivers live?” I ventured, with a shudder at the taste of cat-hair in my mouth.

“Round behind that crag and woodland there,” he answered as he turned the stick and looked at it critically in the fading light. “You can go on by yourself, or, if you want to wait until I whittle this little end slimmer, I can take you along with me. They is going to be a ruckus kind of a meetin’ of the gang there to-night, but they won’t nothing but dark draw the boys outen the bushes.”

“I’ll wait,” I answered trustfully, preferring to appear at the hostelry under the care of a strange man than risk the woods alone. Necessity is the stepmother of many conventions.

And there I sat on a companionable log beside a perfectly strange outlaw who had been talking about notches on guns and blood-splotches, waiting for him to whittle down the end of a stick exactly to satisfy his artistic tastes before accompanying me through a dark strip of woodland to the hospitable roof of a moonshiner, in hopes I would be taken in to spend the night thereunder.

And I must proudly and truthfully record it of myself that I bore the situation in dignified and complacent terror, sitting humbly still while the moonshiner slowly peeled tiny pink shavings off the end of the stick for what seemed like centuries to me. My interior was a small Vesuvius of disposition, frozen over temporarily, and I even had the strength to marvel at my own control of it.

Finally he held his work of art close to his eyes to see the point in the dusk, which had deepened by the moment, tested it on his finger carefully several times, peered at it again, and then nonchalantly threw it away in the grass.

“Come on and follow,” he said in commanding and indifferent mien as I rose to accompany him.

And follow him I did, in true squaw fashion, about ten paces behind. I was surprised he didn’t ask me to carry his gun, a long, heavy ante-bellum weapon that rested carelessly in the hollow of his arm. I’d have done it with the greatest graciousness if he had handed it to me. A frightened woman easily lapses into sav[Pg 644]agery, and is willing to accept impedimenta in the rear of man in times of danger.

And, as we walked, the shadows got blacker and blacker, and the tree-tops lowered lower and lower in their thick gloom. Every few minutes something furry, like the hallucination of a gigantic mouse, would scurry across our path, or a great creaky croak would be hurled at our heads from the groaning branches above. And, with every fresh horror, I got closer to the heels of the human animal in front of me, until I was in danger of having my nose skinned by the barrel of the gun, or stepping on the protruding heels of his heavy boots, into which his faded overalls were stuffed. My knees may have trembled, but I assure you I kept pace with grim determination through what seemed endless miles of that haunted woodland.

And as we tramped along in silence, my mood of self-depreciation, which had seized me on the train, again asserted itself, and my alarmed mentality was saying sternly that it had warned my proud spirit that such catastrophes would be the result of my headlong course of wilfulness, when we came out of the darkness into a clearing where a cabin stood, from which a dim light shone.

“Stivers’,” remarked my guide, fluently. “So long,” he added tersely, and disappeared again into the woods by another path. At the time I wondered if he could be troubled by the conventions. I did him an injustice; I know now it was a horse hitched on the other side of the clearing.

For more than a few long minutes I stood and pondered with panicky indecision over just what to do, the wood with its nightmares on the one hand, and the unknown on the other. I chose the unknown, and plunged in as I faltered up to the open door of the small two-room hut.

Suddenly two doors were shut hurriedly in the darkness, and I heard the scuffling of heavy feet as a man appeared in the flare of the dim candle in the front room and peered at me cautiously.

“What do you want?” was the hospitable greeting that issued from the cavern of his huge chest.

“Mr. Dudley Gaines,” I answered, using instinctively the name of introduction that I had seen succeed a few minutes earlier.

“He ain’t here; but if you are his woman, come in,” was the answer, and as Dudley’s property I entered the Stivers’s abode.

Even in my tragic situation for an instant my temper rose. Why should man’s possession justify the existence of a woman in the eyes of the primitive? However, masculine justification of life is a delicious feeling to a woman in a dark and fearful wood and—But I’ll tell you about that later.

With becoming gravity and timidity I entered the living-room of the moonshiner’s hut, and weakly seated myself in a chair he pointed out to me in a corner by an open window.

“Brat’s got fits, and the woman is out there tending it,” was my host’s ample excuse for the non-appearance of my hostess.

At his words my heart jumped and then stood still. I had never been in the house with a fit before, and the feeling was gruesome, coming so close on the heels of the woolly, furry things in the woods.

Then as I poised myself on the edge of the chair, holding on tight to keep myself from running out into the night, an eery wail came from the back of the house, and I collapsed on the seat, with a queer, suffocating pain in the place of that jump. I had never noticed a child’s cry before, and something moved in the region of my solar plexus.

“Can’t—can’t something be done?” I ventured in desperation.

“Naw,” came the answer in a drawl. “I reckon it is bound fer kingdom come this trip sure. Leader will take a look at it when he comes in fer a round-up of the gang. They’ll all be late to-night, on ’count of some dirty business over at Hitch It. If you want to go to bed, that’s the best bed in the lean-to out there we keep for over-nights. Better git settled and outen the way ’fore the gang gits here. They’re ’most too rough fer calico like you to stay around, and there’ll be a big fight on ’fore it’s over. Leader is snorting rough over that knifing at Hitch It, and somebody’ll be cut down with power by him ’fore he’s done with it. The woman is too upsot with the kid to see to you; but bedding is all you need, now dark has come. Better git to cover right away.”

Drawn by F. R. Gruger. Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

“THEN, AS I FALTERED AND FELT THAT I MUST STOP AND SINK ON THE FLOOR, A WHILE A SHOULDER BRACED ITSELF AGAINST STRONG, WARM, BARE ARM CAME AROUND ME, AND UNDER MY ARM AROUND THE BABY, MINE, AS GABRIEL SWUNG INTO STEP WITH ME”

❏
LARGER IMAGE

As he was speaking, he took the candle[Pg 645] and led the way into a little shed-room, while I followed with trembling knees, and the jelly of fear quivering all over my body. Every moonshine murder about which I had ever read in the papers trod in martial array before my mental eyes, and my breath was just a flutter between my chattering teeth. It really is a triumph of the survival of the life force in the human body that I am alive to tell the tale to you to-day.

“They’s light enough from the window for you to roll in,” the man said as he pointed to a low bed, built of logs and boughs along the wall next to the front room. “Better git to cover and stay there, a calico like you, with the boys as rough as they be; you mightn’t like ’em. I reckon they better not know you’re here, on ’count of the row that’s coming over that knifing; so lay close.”

And even before he had time to depart with his candle, I made a dive beneath the patched quilt, only grasping my hat in my hand instead of keeping it on my head. Then, as still as my trembling limbs would let me, I lay close to the rough, thin, pine planks that separated me from what seemed the only other human being in the world. And for hours it seemed I lay there and panted and groveled in spirit with terror and helplessness, waiting, waiting, for something dreadful to happen, and almost wishing it would come and be over.

Across the mountain-tops there began to be distant mutterings of thunder, and in the flashes of lightning I could see restless, dark birds wing by the small window. And save for the thunderings, there was a stillness that must have been on the waters before the first dawn reigned. I could hear my heart beat like a muffled motor, and only the uncanny wail broke the silence now and again, while once I thought I heard a woman’s stifled moan that sent a shudder to the very core of my body.

And as I lay and cowered in that darkness, the mood of self-realization came back upon me, and alone in that terror of blackness I turned at bay and faced myself. Was that coward thing I that lay helpless while a woman alone moaned away the life of her tortured child, and a plan for murder was plotted with my full knowledge? Why didn’t I run out into that dreadful night and warn the victim, stop him from stepping into the dreadful trap laid for him? And right then I impeached myself. I had been guarded and fended and had all humanity nurtured out of me, so that, rather than risk my own pitiful little life, I was willing to “lie close” and let my brother human be murdered in cold blood.

“But women are weak,” I argued in my own defense, “and terrible, wolfish things like these they cannot control or prevent. They must let them take their course.”

“Weak women have steeled themselves to the saving of their brothers and sisters centuries long,” came the still, small voice that seemed to be hovering over my breast.

“I can’t risk my own life for that of a rough moonshiner who probably spends his time whittling a stick to throw away,” I sobbed in answer to myself.

“What more important thing than whittling a stick do you do with your life?” came the question, relentlessly.

“Nothing,” I sobbed under my breath, as a vision of all the nothings I had done in my life came before me with a flash of the lightning that seemed to illumine the inside of the very inner me.

“And that other woman suffering in there, why don’t I go to her?” I demanded of myself, and failed to find an answer.

“Afraid of the roughness of some mountain man who would scarcely dare harm your brother’s ‘woman’?” I asked contemptuously from above my own breast. “You a ‘woman,’ if you let another woman watch her child die alone!”

Desperate at this goad, I sat up, and was pushing back the quilt, when the muffled sound of heavy boots came from across the clearing, and in another flash I saw a file of men, each one of whom looked ten feet tall, each with a gun on his arm, come out of the black woods and turn to the front of the house. I melted back to cover, and lay drawing breath like a drowning man.

Quietly they came into the room next to that in which I was hiding, and their drawly voices had a subdued and terrible sound as they exchanged a few remarks in guarded tones.

“Leader come?” one man asked from so near the pine board against which I trembled that he couldn’t have been a foot away from me.

[Pg 646]

“Naw; and Bill is waiting in the woods to ketch him ’fore he gits here, if he kin,” came the mumble of my host’s big voice.

“It’ll be nip and tuck ’twixt ’em, and lay out the worst man feet due west,” another voice took up the gruesome chorus.

“That’s Bill now, coming outen the woods,” exclaimed Stivers, ominously. “I reckon he thinks he missed Leader. Don’t nobody say nothing when he comes in, but let him set and wait for his knock-out. Nobody’s business but Leader’s.”

Listening frantically, I heard the doomed man’s hesitating feet shuffle into the room and the chair groan as he took his seat amid the glum silence.

And there I lay, and with Bill I waited I didn’t know for what, some nameless horror that would kill the life in me and make me a dishonored thing all my life—a human too cowardly to cry out the word of warning to another of God’s creatures. And through it all the little child wailed and the woman moaned.

Then in the midst of another thick muttering from the head of Old Harpeth, which was followed by a vivid flash, I heard another pair of feet step on the threshold of the cabin. I cowered under the quilt, held my breath, and took the bullet into my own heart—or thought I did.

Then high and clear through the flash of the lightning, over the mutterings of the thunder and the scuffle of the men’s feet, accompanied by a glad cry from the moaning woman, there came a voice of an archangel singing in tones of command that thrilled that whole mountain until it seemed to shake with its reverberations:

I lay still, and something poured into my heart that was a peace made from the glory of the storm, the moan of the woman, and the song of a dawn-bird. Out of the darkness my soul came like—I think I partly expressed it in the first sentence of this confession, if you will turn back and see, Evelyn dear.

After the men had sung the wonderful old hymn through to its very last lines,

Bill and I kept very still and took our “knock-out.”

Bill had stuck a knife into a gallant over at Hitch It for offering to exchange snuff-sticks with Malinda Budd, and I could easily detect a decided vein of sympathy in the voice of Leader while he administered a rousing reproof to the knife, but extolled the use of fists in such cases, much to the approval of the rest of the gang.

In fact, that was the greatest sermon ever spoken in the English language on the theme of justice, courage, feminine protection, manly dignity, and brotherly love, and it was done in about five minutes, I should say. Every word of it hit Bill fair and square, and me also, to say nothing of all the rest of the world. During the last minute and a half of the discourse the men were indulging in muttered “Ahmens” and “Glory be’s,” and I could hardly restrain myself from throwing off the quilt and—well, you know, Evelyn, that Grandmother Wickliffe was a pillar in the Methodist Church of Hillsboro, and at times of great emotion, during the visit of the presiding elder, she did—shout. Aunt Grace never likes to hear it mentioned.

Now, let me see, this is just about the beginning of the real story, and I am so anxious to tell it all, though I really feel a hesitancy. However, when I am through with the letter, I can leave out any part of it that doesn’t sound seemly for me to tell about him—and me, can’t I?

To begin with, I hardly know how to make you understand about that baby’s stomach, and how near a tragedy it was. Don’t laugh! I tremble when I think about it, and I don’t ever believe I’ll learn to do it to them. I hope I won’t have to practise on one of my own first; but, then, it would be awful to kill another woman’s baby experimenting on it, wouldn’t it? I’d better not think about that now, or I can’t tell the rest of the story.

Well, after the doxology had been sung by the strange Gabriel in the next room, accompanied by some really lovely rough[Pg 647] men’s voices, and he had sent them away so he could see to the sick baby in the other room, I lay still and had a racking, glorious experience. For the first time in my life I really prayed to Something that answered in the dark. I didn’t have much to say for myself, but a great Gentleness reached down and laid hold of me for always, and I can never be lost from Him any more, and I knew it. Now, I have been taught that it is called the witness of the spirit, and it’s what Grandmother Wickliffe had. But I didn’t inherit it; I had to find it myself, and I got it through tribulation, by the way of Gabriel’s song in the terror of the night, followed by the sermon to Bill.

And while I was lying there under the quilt, just shouting in my soul with ancestral ardor, I was called to come forth and attest my new convictions. And I did. If I hadn’t got that faith in God just a few minutes before on the wings of a great emotion, I never could have steeled myself to taking that awful purple, twitching baby and helping Gabriel do the dreadful things to it he did. I would have taken to the woods at the first look at it. But I know now that I had got the real religion that darts right through the emotions, and prods you up to do things. And I did them.

“It’ll die, and I can’t hold it,” whimpered the poor exhausted mother when Gabriel told her to hold the baby’s mouth open while he poured in the hot water. At that time I was still safe and rejoicing over myself under the quilt.

“You must hold him while I wash him out, or he will die. Come, brace up and help me!” I heard Gabriel plead to the poor creature, with positive agony in his voice, while the baby moaned.

“No use, Leader; I’ve done give’ up,” and I heard her fling herself on the floor and begin to moan in chorus with the baby.

It took me just half a minute to get to my feet, into that other room, and that baby in my arms, as awful to look at as it was. Of course it seemed as if God was honoring me by crowding works on my new faith pretty closely, and how I got through with such credit I don’t see; but I did.

“You’ll have to show me just what to do; I never touched a baby before, but I will try to help,” I said to Gabriel, who was looking at me in an absolute astonishment and devout thankfulness that encouraged my new-found capableness.

“A woman, thank God!” I heard him mutter before he spoke.

“Tip him on your arm, hold his head close against your breast, with your finger down his throat, while I pour in this hot water; then turn him over on your knee quick when it is about to come up. He is full of fried potatoes, and that is what is making the spasms. I’ll hold his legs with my left hand, so he can’t kick away from you. We must get down enough of this water to bring up all of the potatoes.”

Gabriel’s voice was quick and respectful, as if he were speaking to somebody that had as much intellect and manual training as himself. I suppose that is what helped me through with those dreadful hours of time that it took to work up that awful potato—that and the positive way I said:

“Now, God, help me, please, and quick!”

At last it all came forth, and I don’t suppose it really was hours; but the baby was apparently done for.

“No use, Leader; his time have come. She’s buried five out thar in the clearing at jest about his age. Let the little critter go in peace,” said Stivers, who had come in through the back door. His rough voice had a note of suffering in it, though he lit his pipe by a coal from the fire calmly enough.

But at the mention of the five little graves out in that awful night, the poor woman on the floor groveled up on to her knees and caught at my skirts.

“God help you!” said Gabriel, gently, to her. “He’s rid of the poison, but so collapsed that there seems nothing more to do.”

“Yes, and I’m going to help God help her,” I said suddenly, and I rose from the chair to walk the floor with the limp, white thing that had been the purple horror in my arms. “I didn’t know how to unpoison him, but if it’s strength and heat he needs, I can give him that,” and I held the tiny mountaineer close against my bare breast, from which his poor little convulsed fingers had torn all the foolish lace and embroidered linen.

[Pg 648]

“If a physician were here, he would try transfusion; the child is anemic, anyway,” said Gabriel, thoughtfully.

“We don’t need any physician but God to get my heat and strength into him. I only wish I had on a real flannel petticoat, as a decent woman ought to have for cases of emergency like this, to wrap him in. This old piece of blanket isn’t real wool.”

“Poor folks can’t buy much but shoddy these days,” said Stivers, with glum resentfulness.

“Here, my shirt’s the thing,” said Leader, and as quick as one of the flashes that came in the window with the thunder mutterings, he had peeled off his own gray flannel blouse, and was wrapping it around the baby, and tucking it close over my breast.

“Now fight, and I’m with you,” he said as he looked straight into my eyes in the dim light.

“He isn’t going to die; he’s got a right to live, and he’s going to do it, God helping,” I answered, as I got a firm grasp of the mite on my left arm, and put my warm right hand over the poor little collapsed stomach.

And then for what seemed hours of eternity I walked and rubbed and hugged that limp baby, while I prayed inside my own vitals to the tune of “Stand up.” Stivers stood smoking sullenly by the fire, the mother lay on the floor, moaning, and Gabriel stood over by the window, with his bare shoulders gleaming comfortingly with every flash of lightning. And the knowledge that all three of those strong, useful real people were depending upon ignorant, foolish me to lead the fight for that poor little life made the new wings of my spirit raise themselves and soar out into some wonderful space I had never been in before, but through which I knew the way and could take the baby with me.

How long I plodded across and across that rickety floor of the cabin I don’t know, but once I staggered as I came near Gabriel at the window, and my right shoulder sagged under its burden. Then, as I faltered and felt that I must stop and sink on the floor, a strong, warm, bare arm came around me, and under my arm around the baby, while a shoulder braced itself against mine, as Gabriel swung into step with me.

“Keep fighting,” he said deep in his throat.

And again I soared away with the baby up to where God was there to help us.

Then suddenly we both were brought back to earth by my feeling him stir, and huddle closer to my breast, while the limp little knees found strength to press themselves in against the ribs over my heart.

“Oh!” I sobbed with a quick breath.

The mother moaned, and Gabriel steadied us both closer. He thought the baby was dead, I knew.

“Want to give him to me?” he asked gently.

“No, I don’t,” I answered jerkily enough to sound like a snap; “but wipe the perspiration out of my eyes. He’s getting hot now, and I’m melting, but I don’t dare stop hugging and patting. Make his mother understand he’s getting all right.”

But nobody has to make a mother understand when her baby is saved. The poor creature just gave one pitiful gasp, and went to nice, comfortable crying instead of moaning. It was lovely to hear hearty boohoos, though she never said a word except to ask Stivers for her snuff-stick, which he attentively swabbed in the can before he handed it to her.

“You can’t go on walking and joggling forever; sit down and rock and rest with him,” suggested Gabriel, timidly and respectfully, after he had passed a nice, cool, linen handkerchief all over my hot face for me, even with intelligence enough to wipe in the hollow under my chin.

“Not now; he’s squirming deliciously, and I don’t dare. Suppose he should go limp again,” I answered fearfully.

“He’s due to drop off to sleep now,” announced Leader in such a positive, though kind, voice that almost immediately young Stivers obediently turned himself a bit, settled in a nice, soggy way, and I could feel the little lungs so near mine begin to draw breath in a regular, good sound sleep.

I waited a minute to be sure, then sank with him into a chair beside the fire.

“Yes, he’s all right now,” Leader said in a lovely, quiet voice, with just a husky note of happiness in it as he gently raised into his own strong hand one tiny paddie that had stolen up on my breast from out the warm, gray shirt. For a wonderful[Pg 649] second we were all soul-becalmed together, and then he went over into the corner and slipped on his khaki hunting-coat, which he had hung on a peg in the wall, and decorously tied his silk handkerchief around his neck, in true mountaineer fashion. He never did get that shirt again, for I originated some remarkable bandages for young Stivers out of it next day.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

“‘ARE YOU REAL?’ HE WHISPERED, WITH MY CHEEK PRESSED HARD AGAINST HIS, AND HIS ARMS TERRIFIC WITH TENDERNESS”

DRAWN BY F. R. GRUGER

❏
LARGER IMAGE

Then he came back to the fire, and while I hovered the kiddie, the mother came close on her knees and settled beside us, so that together we took a worse ministerial drubbing than even Bill got for the knifing episode, delivered in a voice of such heavenly sympathy that Grandmother Wickliffe’s spirit again rose in me, and if it hadn’t been for the baby, I believe she would have broken out this time in one good shout. She hasn’t up to date, but I feel sure she will some day, and I don’t always intend to restrain her manifestations.

The sermon this time had for its text the sacredness of the use of the maternal fount for the young instead of promiscuous food, but it embraced all the advanced feminist questions of the day, and was an awful glorification and arraignment of human females all in one breath. Why don’t women begin to know what dreadful and wonderful creatures they really are earlier in life? The knowledge comes with an awful shock when it does come, and ought to be experienced while young. I had taken Bill’s sermon to heart, but that one to Mrs. Stivers I got right in the center of my soul. It is still there.

And when it was over, the poor mother was kneeling by the fire, with the baby at her breast, sobbing and crooning softly as she rocked it to and fro in its deep sleep.

“It’s suffocating in here, now that it is all over. Don’t you want to come out and watch the storm?” Gabriel asked me in a low voice as he stood beside me looking down on the comfortable pair on the hearth. “Don’t be afraid. It is a great one, mostly electrical, and will likely go on all night this way. It makes the atmosphere almost unendurably heavy. Do you want to watch it from the bluff there at the end of the clearing? You can look down and see it at play in the valley.”

“Please,” I answered, catching the word in the middle with a breath that was a sob in retreat.

Then before I knew it, or how, we were seated together on a big rock that jutted out from the edge of the world. The cabin, with its one or two dim lights, loomed with shadowy outlines behind us, and tall trees hugged us close on both sides; but before us and beneath us was a wild, black, turbulent night.

“Now look down into the valley when the next flash comes,” Gabriel said with a note of excitement sounding in his deep voice that matched the wind through the trees.

Then just as he finished speaking, a slow, steady sheet of light came and lit up the world below us. The fields in their spring garments, embroidered by the threads of silver creeks, lay lush and green, dotted by farm-houses in which dim lights twinkled, bouqueted by glowing pink orchards, and outlined by blooming hedges. Tall trees were massed along the edges of the meadows and the river-banks, and among them the white lines of the old sycamores gleamed in masses of high lights. And in the wild, soft wind that rushed up the mountain-sides and flung itself upon us there was mingled the tang of the honeysuckle and rhododendron with the sweetness of the orchards and pungence of newly plowed earth.

Then as suddenly as the picture had risen before our eyes it sank back into the purple blackness, and I caught my breath with the glory of it.

“And God made it!” I exclaimed softly, with the last sob that had been left in my heart caught from my mouth by the wind.

“‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein,’” he answered, and the wind took his words as if it had been waiting for them to carry across the mountains.

After that for several long minutes, I don’t know how many, I sat silent in the windy blackness, with the tree-branches sighing and crashing over our heads, and wild things rustling in the leaves and bushes beside us, and wondered what was happening to me.

Of course I have been deadly afraid of a minister all my life, and the times we have had the bishops and presiding elders and pastors to dinner with us in honor[Pg 650] of the memory of Grandmother Wickliffe have been times of torture to me. I always thought, of course, they were not real men, though the way they looked and their hearty appetites for both viands and jokes kept them from seeming conventional angels; but this Gabriel materialization that sat close to me on that rock, which was the end of the universe, was a strong, heart-beating man, who alone stood between me and the real wilderness of the woods and the awful wilderness of my ignorant and convicted spirit. It was terrific, but heavenly sweet.

“I know He made me,—I found that out to-night,—but I don’t see what for, and I wish I knew why,” I said in the smallest voice I had ever heard myself use; and this time there was just the echo of that last sob left to sigh out on the wind.

“He saw I needed you pretty badly a few hours ago,” Gabriel said in that delicious warm voice he had used to me to encourage me through the worst baby chokings.

“I’ve always been a dreadful woman, and wanted to be more and more so until I heard you sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ when I was dead and gone from fear of your gun, and talk to Bill about loving the girl with the snuff-stick in the right way, and the man, too, just because we are all God’s children. I was lost, but Something found me in the dark just before you and the baby did. I never belonged to anything or anybody before, and even now how do I know that God wants me after the awful way I have lived?” My words trailed in positive anguish.

“He does want you, woman dear. Take my word for that, or would you like me to quote you about five hundred passages from His Book to prove it to you?” He laughed as he said it in a wooing, comforting way that was both manly and ministerial.

“You don’t know me. I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I answered with agonizing honesty, because the regard of that man, whom I had never seen a few hard, long hours before, was becoming very valuable to me, and I felt afraid that if I didn’t warn him about myself before he took me for a friend, I might not ever do it, but dishonestly make him like me, as I have done to so many other men.

“We couldn’t be perfect strangers after the battle with those potatoes—and after seeing what that flash revealed of the valley together, could we?” he asked, with the amusement sounding still more plainly in his voice. “And you know you heard me preach twice. Isn’t that a kind of left-handed introduction?”

“People that are introduced to me don’t ever know me,” I answered forlornly; for I felt that the time had come for me to confess my sins before men, and this was the hardest man to do it to I had ever met, and also the easiest.

“Then tell me about yourself. I’ve been wondering a bit since I have had time. You answered a hurry-call I had to send above pretty quickly,” he said in a beguiling and encouraging tone of voice that sounded just as other agreeable men’s voices have sounded to me before, only more so.

Just then a furry thing rustled in the bushes, and I moved an inch nearer him. I felt him stir, but he sat comfortingly still. I didn’t want him to move to me.

“The worst thing about me is that I am utterly and entirely worthless,” I began, dropping the words out slowly in the dark. “If God made me, He can’t help but be dreadfully disappointed in me, and wishing He hadn’t. I’m just a wicked white kitten, with a blue ribbon around my neck, kept in a basket, and fed the warm milk of other people’s work and attentions.”

“That is not always the kitten’s fault,” said Gabriel, gently.

“It’s this kitten’s. My family would have liked for me to be strong-minded and go to college and do things in the world. They’ve tried to persuade me. Dudley, my brother, says I have got so much brains held in solution that he is afraid some day something will happen to precipitate them before the world is ready for them; but I ignore them strenuously. My mother is the president of the Home Mission Society that Grandmother Wickliffe founded, and Aunt Grace is state president of the Colonial Daughters, and makes remarkable speeches. I am just a large, white-skinned, well-fed, red-headed bunch of nothing, and I don’t know how to get over it.”

“At least you are of the blessed company of the meek,” answered Gabriel, this[Pg 651] time with a real human chuckle that he might have used if he had found three of a kind in a poker-hand.

“Oh, no, I’m not meek,” I hastened to assure him. “I’m the most conceited woman on the earth, the vain kind of conceit that looks in the glass and admires its black lashes and white teeth, and long curves in good frocks, not the intellectual-attainment kind, that has some excuse for existence. I know I’m beautiful, and I hugely enjoy it.”

“You sound beautiful by description, and a few flashes of lightning, added to candle-light, bear you witness. Still, why shouldn’t you appreciate the gifts God has made you? Beauty can have the most wonderful influence in the world in the way of enjoyment for us people at large. Use yours that way when no misguided potatoes call you.” His voice was enthusiastic and delightful, and what he said about the flashes of lightning made me blush so there in the dark that I was sorry one didn’t come that minute and let him see it—the blush. That thought, coming into my mind, cast me into the depths of humiliation that I had had it about him.

“That’s the trouble,” I faltered in unhappy mortification at my instability of character. “I use it to make other people miserable, and know when I do it—men people and things like that.”

“Sometimes that isn’t fair, is it?” he asked after a minute’s pause. “And yet women will do it. What makes them?”

“I don’t know,” I almost sobbed, but controlled it. “I never knew how wrong it was until you talked to Bill about that snuff-stick girl, and how he ought to feel about her, and influence her not to do other men that way. I’m like her, only I do worse than snuff-sticks; and I enjoy it. No, I know God doesn’t want a woman like that.”

“But perhaps you won’t be like that any more. I don’t believe you could, after tasting to-night’s adventure. You lapped up that situation pretty enthusiastically,” he said gently. But somehow there was a hint of amusement in his voice that set my dreadful temper off for a second, and made me wild to convince him of the depths of my sinfulness. I felt that the occasion demanded his serious attention and not levity.

All my life my temper has been a whirlwind that rose and carried me to the limit of things, and then beyond, without any warning. I thought I was making a confession in a state of religious zeal, but I am afraid it was just the same old rage. Religious zeal often takes these peculiar forms of exaggerated temper, and often never finds itself out. From this you’ll see I’m trying very hard to differentiate myself; but it is difficult.

Then for minutes and minutes, and perhaps hours, I sat there in the dark beside that strange man, and told him things that I had never told anybody living, and some I had never admitted to myself. It came out in a wailing, sobbing volume, and I trembled so that he had to take my cold hand in his, I suppose to keep me from sliding off the rock down into the valley.

I wonder if any woman before ever talked out her whole wild self into a man’s ears? And I wonder if it shook him as it did this one out under the lowering clouds and dark trees? When women habitually reveal themselves to men, it is going to bring social revolution, and they must go slow.

And I did go slow. I tried to be truly considerate of him. I began on a few ridiculous misdemeanors that I am surprised I remembered of myself, such as inconsiderate extraction of money from father by means of unwarranted tantrums, impositions on my dear mother’s loving credulity about some of my hunting forays with Bobby, when I left home riding Lady Gray, side-style, only to fling a leg over Dudley’s Grit two squares down the street, where Bobby was waiting with him for me.

It surprised me that he only chuckled delightedly, and wanted to know just exactly who and what Bobby was or is.

But I couldn’t be diverted, and was determined to tell the whole tale. I felt as if I must get one or two things off my conscience and on to his. I went the whole length, and succeeded.

When I told him of that mad escapade at Louisville, while I was visiting Aunt Grace, with Stanley Hughes and the supper party he gave to that French dancing-girl in “The Bird-Flight,” when I got out of the taxi and walked home in my satin slippers in the snow for ten blocks rather than stay and have Stanley take me[Pg 652] another block in the state he was in, though I had done nothing to stop his drinking and laughed at him, I heard him catch his breath and shudder.

I never told anybody before that it was a paper-knife in my hands that ripped open Henry Hedrick’s cheek for an inch, down in his library while Mamie was up-stairs putting their six-months’ old baby to bed, and I was a guest in their house. In this case I had suspected how he felt about me before I came, but had contemptuously ignored it because I liked to be with Mamie. I told the last few minutes of that tale with dry sobs breaking my words, and while I shook, he folded my cold hand in both his warm ones, and I heard him mutter between his teeth:

“God love her and keep her!”

Then, after a long stillness, I crept closer to him, so that my head bowed against his arm, and opened the very depths to him.

“I don’t think any woman ought to say this to any man,” I began from very far down in my throat, “but you are a preacher, and that makes a difference, and you won’t mind. I am disrespectful and ungrateful to Aunt Grace about it when she is trying her level best to do it to me, but—but I ought to get married. There are lots of wonderful women all over the world who are doing gloriously without husbands, and living happily forever after; but I’m not one. Some women have such frivolous spirits that nothing but a good, firm husband and an enormous family of children can ever chasten them. I’m one. I’ve always thought that he’d find me some day long before I was ready for him—or them; but now I’m afraid he’ll never come. I know he won’t.” I clung to his strong fingers desperately.

“I think he will,” he answered as he kindly, but firmly, possessed himself of his own hand and coat-sleeve, but in such a way as not to hurt my feelings. “I seem to feel that he is well on the road, though fighting hard,” he added in what sounded like mild exasperation or desperation, I couldn’t tell which.

“No,” I answered, with pitiful sadness and real conviction—“no; I am not worthy of him, and he won’t come. It is too late. God and you have just taught me this dreadful night what a good woman really is, and now I will have to be so busy trying all the rest of my life to be one that I won’t have time to look for—that is, he won’t find me. I don’t want anything but a good one, and if I’m being so good as all that, how’ll I let him know I want him?”

“Maybe he’ll get a revelation,” answered Gabriel in a low and controlled voice that seemed to come from the very fastnesses of something within him.

And as he spoke I felt something warm and sweet and terrible stealing over me; but I plunged forward in my confession, past the episode of the duke, my traitorous flight from home, and up to the arrival at Stivers’s, and the cowardly taking of refuge under the patchwork quilt.

“I misunderstood, and thought from the way the men talked that you were going to kill Bill, and I was too much of a coward to run out and find him in the dark and warn him. You see, I lay still and let Bill be killed, whether you did it or not; and so I murdered him, even if he is alive,” I deduced miserably.

“Dudley was wise to fear the precipitation of the logical part of the solution,” Gabriel remarked so quietly that it seemed as if he preferred that I shouldn’t hear him.

“Yes; and, you see, I am a common murderer as well as all the other dreadful things. And I let that baby die, too, rather than go and help the woman wash it outside and in, as you made me do. That is two murders; and I’m another one for not knowing how to fill it up with hot water and poke my finger down its throat and press the potatoes and water up at the same time. I’m a woman, or I ought to be. It’s my life business to know and perform ably such terrible and simple operations on babies. That makes me three murderers. And how did I know that Bill wouldn’t kill you at the same time you killed him, and Mr. Stivers and—”

“Stop!” Gabriel exclaimed suddenly, and he was shaking so hard with unseemly mirth that he shook me, too; for without being able to help myself, I had been crowding closer and closer to him, until I was burrowing right under his arm in the agonies of confession.[Pg 653] “The damages will be endless if you go on at this rate. How many of these murders did you realize you were doing at the time you did ’em?”

“Only Bill,” I answered, after a few minutes of intense mental suffering. “I knew I ought to go and sympathize with the mother of the baby, but I didn’t know about that squeezing a baby’s stomach in the right place; but, as I say, I ought to have known, and—I did throw the quilt back to start to Mrs. Stivers when you came in. Please don’t laugh!”

“Then you stand acquitted of all responsibility of faulty impulse except about the murder of Bill, which didn’t come off,” Gabriel answered in a gentle, serious, and respectful voice that soothed me into a cheerful frame of mind over my crimes even before he had more than half uttered the words. I felt hope for myself rise in my heart.

“And then—then you came to the door and began to sing ‘Stand up for Jesus!’ so that eyes in my soul opened suddenly, and I saw Him standing and looking pitifully down into my awful black heart, and I felt Him reach out His hand to me in the darkness. I’ve always avoided and been afraid of God before, but now do you think He feels about me as He did the man on the other cross who had done awful things, I forget just what, and as long as Bill and the baby are both alive, and I worked so hard, He will forgive me and love me? And give me more awful work to do? Tell me, and what you say I will believe.” I crouched at his knee as I asked the question breathlessly.

“Oh, you wonderful, foolish woman, you! Don’t you know that the good God knows and claims His own?” Gabriel answered, as he bent forward and put his hand on the head that had bowed on his knee. For a heart-still instant we trembled together, then he said quietly and humbly: “I give up. All my life I have prayed that my ‘woman’ would be one who had seen her Master face to face. Stumbling in the darkness, groping, both of us, we found each other and—clung. Are you mine? God, dare I claim a miracle such as You sent to Your servants of old? Have we together met You in the bush, and is it burning? Can we believe that You mean to”—

Then suddenly, in the very midst of his prayer, came a great, white, steady glare, which rent the black clouds above us and revealed us to each other, like the sun at high noon. The very mountains seemed to reel in it, and the forest behind us was stilled from the rack of the winds.

And clasping his knees, I looked and looked into his eyes, down, down until I found a light more blinding than that without, while I could feel his searching mine sternly, solemnly, and with a hope so great that I was tempted to cower, but was prevented by a fierce hunger that rose in me and demanded. I don’t know how long the light lasted, but when it went out, and had left us in the night, the ordeal was over, and I was welded into his arms, and his lips were pouring out love to me in broken words of blessing and demand.

“Are you real?” he whispered, with my cheek pressed hard against his, and his arms terrific with tenderness. “Can I believe it is true? Can I claim a miracle? Can I?”

“Yes,” I answered with triumphant certainty in my mind and voice—“yes. It’s that revelation you said you—that is, the—the man that was coming for me would have. I know it’s a miracle, because I am as afraid of a preacher as of—of that thing rustling out there in the bushes; but if God let me get into your arms this awful way He means for me to stay. And it’s my miracle, not yours. I needed one, and you didn’t. You are it! You don’t think He will take you away from me in the daylight, do you?”

“Never,” he laughed against my lips, with the coax and woo both in his throat, under my hand pressed against it. And that was the taming of the wild me.

A long time after, when I had settled myself comfortably against his shoulder, and gone permanently to housekeeping in the parsonage of his arms, softly the clouds above us drifted apart, and a glorious full moon shone down on us in the warmest congratulatory approval.

“Let me look good at you, love-woman, so I’ll not confuse you with the other flowers when morning comes,” Gabriel fluted from above my head as he attempted to turn me on his arm a fraction of an inch away from him.

“You can use the moon, if you need it for identification purposes, but that lightning was enough for me,” I answered, retiring from his eyes for a hot-cheeked second under the silk handkerchief around his neck.[Pg 654] “It may take time and moonlight to teach you me, but I knew you in a flash. I know it’s awful, but most women learn love by lightning, and it’s agony to have to wait while men slowly arrive at it by the light of the sun, moon, and stars. Will nothing ever teach them to hurry?”

“I should say,” answered Gabriel, with a delicious laugh, which I got double benefit of, for I both heard it and felt it, “that I had met you at least half-way.”

“And I’m a perfect stranger to you,” I was reiterating honestly, when an amazed answer arrived from the other side of the rock.

“Well, you don’t look it—perfect strangers!” came in Dudley’s astonished voice, as he rose from beneath the crag and stood beside us. “You old psalm-singer, you, where did you get that girl?” he demanded with a great, but, for the circumstances, very calm, interest.

“Just picked her up in the woods, where she has always been waiting for me, you old log-killer, you. Yes, I guessed the fact that she is your sister, but I dare you to try to take her away from me,” answered Gabriel, as he held me closer, when, with sisterly dignity, I tried to get into a position to squelch Dudley.

“I’ll never try,” answered Dudley, with devout thankfulness sounding in his voice up from his diaphragm. “Maybe you can hold her down, Gates; you seem to have got a good grip for a starter. The family never could.”

Yes, my dear Evelyn, Gabriel turned out to be that wonderful Gates Attwood to whom Chicago has given five million dollars to build his great Temple of Labor down on the South Side. He has been up here visiting Dudley at his camp at Pigeon Creek, hiding for a little rest for three months, and circuit-riding the mountaineers. If I had met him under the shelter of my own roof-tree, I in evening dress, with the lights on, I would have taken one insolent look at him, and then talked to Bobby the rest of the evening, while Aunt Grace raged in pantomime at mother about me. I realized this the instant Dudley called his name, and I turned and hid my eyes against his lips as I trembled at such an escape from losing him.

“I never belonged to anybody but you and—God. That’s what made me bad to the others before I was found and claimed,” I whispered across his cheek, while he nestled me still deeper into his breast, ignoring Dudley, as he deserved.

“God’s good woman, and mine,” was the low answer I felt and heard.

“Well, I’d better go scare Mr. and Mrs. Possum and the Coon Sisters off your trunks over at Crow Point,” remarked Dudley, with more than brotherly consideration. “Something familiar about that collection of baggage yanked me off the down train. I’ll fix you up at Stivers’s when you want to come in, Nell. Here’s to her permanent change of heart, Parson!” And he lighted his pipe as he strolled away through the woods.

And as he left, an awful shyness came pressing in between me and the great man who sat on an Old Harpeth crag and held me so mercifully in his arms.

“Isn’t there a mistake somewhere?” I asked in fear and trembling. “Or did I really get born again, with you to help me?”

“Yes, love,” he answered softly. “This is the right way of things. I needed you; you, me. We were ready, and He let us touch hands in the storm, to be new created. Don’t you feel—kind of weak and young?”

“No,” I whispered just as softly. “Dreadfully strong. I know now how Eve felt when she put her hand to Adam’s side, where there wasn’t even a scar, and didn’t have to ask where she really came from.”

THE LETTER THAT REALLY WAS SENT

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

LES DEUX AVOCATS (THE TWO LAWYERS)

FROM THE HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED PAINTING BY HONORÉ DAUMIER

NOW IN THE COLLECTION OF ALEXANDER W. DRAKE

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 655]

LIFE AFTER DEATH[1]

BY MAURICE MAETERLINCK

Author of “The Life of the Bee,” “Pelléas and Mélisande,” etc.

THE THEOSOPHICAL HYPOTHESIS

I  HAVE recently been studying two interesting solutions of the problem of personal survival—solutions which, although not new, have at least been lately renewed. I refer to the neotheosophical and neospiritualistic theories, which are, I think, the only ones that can be seriously discussed. The first is almost as old as man himself; but a popular movement of some magnitude in certain countries has rejuvenated the doctrine of reincarnation, or the transmigration of souls, and brought it once more into prominence.

The great argument of its adherents—the chief and, when all is said, the only argument—is only a sentimental one. Their doctrine that the soul in its successive existences is purified and exalted with more or less rapidity according to its efforts and deserts is, they maintain, the only one that satisfies the irresistible instinct of justice which we bear within us. They are right, and, from this point of view, their posthumous justice is immeasurably superior to that of the barbaric heaven and the monstrous hell of the Christians, where rewards and punishments are forever meted out to virtues and vices which are for the most part puerile, unavoidable, or accidental. But this, I repeat, is only a sentimental argument, which has only an infinitesimal value in the scale of evidence.

We may admit that certain of their theories are rather ingenious; and what they say of the part played by the “shells,” for instance, or the “elementals,” in the spiritualistic phenomena, is worth about as much as our clumsy explanations of fluidic and supersensible bodies. Perhaps, or even no doubt, they are right when they insist that everything around us is full of living, sentient forms, of diverse and innumerous types, “as different from one another as a blade of grass and a tiger, or a tiger and a man,” which are incessantly brushing against us and through which we pass unawares. If all the religions have overpopulated the world with invisible beings, we have perhaps depopulated it too completely; and it is extremely possible[Pg 656] that we shall find one day that the mistake was not on the side which one imagined. As Sir William Crookes well puts it in a remarkable passage:

All this, with so many other things which they assert, would be, if not admissible, at least worthy of attention, if those suppositions were offered for what they are, very ancient hypotheses that go back to the early ages of human theology and metaphysics; but when they are transformed into categorical and dogmatic assertions, they at once become untenable. Their exponents promise us, on the other hand, that by exercising our minds, by refining our senses, by etherealizing our bodies, we shall be able to live with those whom we call dead and with the higher beings that surround us. It all seems to lead to nothing very much and rests on very frail bases, on very vague proofs derived from hypnotic sleep, presentiments, mediumism, phantasms, and so forth. We want something more than arbitrary theories about the “immortal triad,” the “three worlds,” the “astral body,” the “permanent atom,” or the “Karma-Loka.” As their sensibility is keener, their perception subtler, their spiritual intuition more penetrating, than ours, why do they not choose as a field for investigation the phenomena of prenatal memory, for instance, to take one subject at random from a multitude of others—phenomena which, although sporadic and open to question, are still admissible?

THE NEOSPIRITUALISTIC HYPOTHESIS

OUTSIDE theosophy, investigations of a purely scientific nature have been made in the baffling regions of survival and reincarnation. Neospiritualism, or psychicism, or experimental spiritualism, had its origin in America in 1870. In the following year the first strictly scientific experiments were organized by Sir William Crookes, the man of genius who opened up most of the roads at the end of which men were astounded to discover unknown properties and conditions of matter; and as early as 1873 or 1874 he obtained, with the aid of the medium Florence Cook, phenomena of materialization that have hardly been surpassed. But the real beginning of the new science dates from the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research, familiarly known as the S. P. R. This society was formed in London twenty-eight years ago, under the auspices of the most distinguished men of science in England, and, as we all know, has made a methodical and strict study of every case of supernormal psychology and sensibility. This study or investigation, originally conducted by Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore, and continued by their successors, is a masterpiece of scientific patience and conscientiousness. Not an incident is admitted that is not supported by unimpeachable testimony, by definite written records and convincing corroboration. Among the many supernormal manifestations, telepathy, previsions, and so forth, we will take cognizance only of those which relate to life beyond the grave. They can be divided into two categories: first, real, objective, and spontaneous apparitions, or direct manifestations; second, manifestations obtained by the agency of mediums, whether induced apparitions, which we will put aside for the moment because of their frequently questionable character, or communications with the dead by word of mouth or automatic writing. Those extraordinary communications have been studied at length by such men as F. W. H. Myers, Richard Hodgson, Sir Oliver Lodge, and the philosopher William James, the father of the new pragmatism. They profoundly impressed and almost[Pg 657] convinced these men, and they therefore deserve to arrest our attention.

It appears, therefore, to be as well established as a fact can be that a spiritual or nervous shape, an image, a belated reflection of life, is capable of subsisting for some time, of releasing itself from the body, or surviving it, of traversing enormous distances in the twinkling of an eye, of manifesting itself to the living and, sometimes, of communicating with them.

For the rest, we have to recognize that these apparitions are very brief. They take place only at the precise moment of death, or follow very shortly after. They do not seem to have the least consciousness of a new or superterrestrial life, differing from that of the body whence they issue. On the contrary, their spiritual energy, at a time when it ought to be absolutely pure, because it is rid of matter, seems greatly inferior to what it was when matter surrounded it. These more or less uneasy phantasms, often tormented with trivial cares, although they come from another world, have never brought us one single revelation of topical interest concerning that world whose prodigious threshold they have crossed. Soon they fade away and disappear forever. Are they the first glimmers of a new existence or the final glimmers of the old? Do the dead thus use, for want of a better, the last link that binds them and makes them perceptible to our senses? Do they afterward go on living around us, without again succeeding, despite their endeavors, to make themselves known or to give us an idea of their presence, because we have not the organ that is necessary to perceive them, even as all our endeavors would not succeed in giving a man who was blind from birth the least notion of light and color? We do not know at all; nor can we tell whether it is permissible to draw any conclusion from all these incontestable phenomena. Meanwhile, it is interesting to observe that there really are ghosts, specters, and phantoms. Once again, science steps in to confirm a general belief of mankind, and to teach us that a belief of this sort, however absurd it may at first seem, still deserves careful examination.

THE DILEMMA OF THE TRUTH-SEEKER

NOW, what are we to think of it all? Must we, with Myers, Newbold, Hyslop, Hodgson, and many others who have studied this problem at length, conclude in favor of the incontestable agency of forces and intelligences returning from the farther bank of the great river which it was deemed that none might cross? Must we acknowledge with them that there are cases ever more numerous which make it impossible for us to hesitate any longer between the telepathic hypothesis and the spiritualistic hypothesis? I do not think so. I have no prejudices,—what were the use of having any in these mysteries?—no reluctance to admit the survival and the intervention of the dead; but, before leaving the terrestrial plane, it is wise and necessary to exhaust all the suppositions, all the explanations, there to be discovered. We have to make our choice between two manifestations of the unknown, two miracles, if you prefer, whereof one is situated in the world which we inhabit and the other in a region which, rightly or wrongly, we believe to be separated from us by nameless spaces which no human being, alive or dead, has crossed to this day. It is natural, therefore, that we should stay in our own world as long as it gives us a foothold, as long as we are not pitilessly expelled from it by a series of irresistible and irrefutable facts issuing from the adjoining abyss. The survival of a spirit is no more improbable than the prodigious faculties which we are obliged to attribute to the mediums if we deny them to the dead: but the existence of the medium, contrary to that of the spirit, is unquestionable; and therefore it is for the spirit, or for those who make use of its name, first to prove that it exists.

Do the extraordinary phenomena of which we have spoken—transmission of thought from one subconscious mind to another, perception of events at a distance, subliminal clairvoyance—occur when the dead are not in evidence, when the experiments are being made exclusively between living persons? This cannot be honestly contested. Certainly no one has ever obtained among living people series of communications or revelations similar to those of the great spiritualistic mediums Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Thompson, and Stainton Moses, nor anything that can be compared with these so far as continuity or lucidity is concerned. But though the quality of the phenomena will not bear[Pg 658] comparison, it cannot be denied that their inner nature is identical. It is logical to infer from this that the real cause lies not in the source of inspiration, but in the personal value, the sensitiveness, the power of the medium. These mediums are pleased, in all good faith and probably unconsciously, to give to their subliminal faculties, to their secondary personalities, or to accept, on their behalf, names which were borne by beings who have crossed to the further side of the mystery: this is a matter of vocabulary or nomenclature which neither lessens nor increases the intrinsic significance of the facts.

THE BORDER-LAND OF LIFE AND DEATH

WELL, in examining these facts, however strange and really unparalleled some of them may be, I never find one which proceeds frankly from this world or which comes indisputably from the other. They are, if you wish, phenomenal border incidents; but it cannot be said that the border has been violated. It is simply a matter of distant perception, subliminal clairvoyance, and telepathy raised to the highest power; and these three manifestations of the unexplored depths of man are to-day recognized and classified by science, which is not saying that they are explained. That is another question. When, in connection with electricity, we use such terms as positive, negative, induction, potential, and resistance, we are also applying conventional words to facts and phenomena of the inward essence of which we are utterly ignorant; and we must needs be content with these, pending better. Between these extraordinary manifestations and those given to us by a medium who is not speaking in the name of the dead, there is, I insist, only a difference of the greater and the lesser, a difference of extent or degree, and in no wise a difference in kind.

For the proof to be more decisive, it would be necessary that neither the medium nor the witnesses should ever have known of the existence of him whose past is revealed by the dead man; in other words, that every living link should be eliminated. I do not believe that this has ever actually occurred, nor even that it is possible; in any case, it would be a very difficult experiment to control. Be this as it may, Dr. Hodgson, who devoted part of his life to the quest of specific phenomena wherein the boundaries of mediumistic power should be plainly overstepped, believes that he found them in certain cases, of which, as the others were of very much the same nature, I will merely mention one of the most striking. In a course of excellent sittings with Mrs. Piper, the medium, he communicated with various dead friends who reminded him of a large number of common memories. The medium, the spirits, and he himself seemed in a wonderfully accommodating mood; and the revelations were plentiful, exact, and easy. In this extremely favorable atmosphere, he was placed in communication with the soul of one of his best friends, who had died a year before, and whom he simply called “A.” This A, whom he had known more intimately than most of the spirits with whom he had communicated previously, behaved quite differently and, while establishing his identity beyond dispute, vouchsafed only incoherent replies. Now, A “had been troubled much, for years before his death, by headaches and occasionally mental exhaustion, though not amounting to positive mental disturbance.”

The same phenomenon appears to recur whenever similar troubles have come before death, as in cases of suicide.

“If the telepathic explanation is held to be the only one,” says Dr. Hodgson (I give the gist of his observations), “if it is claimed that all the communications of these discarnate minds are only suggestions from my subconscious self, it is unintelligible that, after having obtained satisfactory results from others whom I had known far less intimately than A and with whom I had consequently far fewer recollections in common, I should get from him, in the same sittings, nothing but incoherencies. I am thus driven to believe that my subliminal self is not the only thing in evidence, that it is in the presence of a real, living personality, whose mental state is the same as it was at the hour of death, a personality which remains independent of my subliminal consciousness and absolutely unaffected by it, which is deaf to its suggestions, and draws from its own resources the revelations which it makes.”

The argument is not without value, but its full force would be obtained only if it were certain that none of those present[Pg 659] knew of A’s madness; otherwise it can be contended that, the notion of madness having penetrated the subconscious intelligence of one of them, it worked upon it and gave to the replies induced a form in keeping with the state of mind presupposed in the dead man.

IS THE FUTURE LIFE DIM AND SHADOWY?

OF a truth, by extending the possibilities of the medium to these extremes, we furnish ourselves with explanations which forestall nearly everything, bar every road, and all but deny to the spirits any power of manifesting themselves in the manner which they appear to have chosen. But why do they choose that manner? Why do they thus restrict themselves? Why do they jealously hug the narrow strip of territory which memory occupies on the confines of both worlds and from which none but indecisive or questionable evidence can reach us? Are there, then, no other outlets, no other horizons? Why do they tarry about us, stagnant in their little pasts, when, in their freedom from the flesh, they ought to be able to wander at ease over the virgin stretches of space and time? Do they not yet know that the sign which will prove to us that they survive is to be found not with us, but with them, on the other side of the grave? Why do they come back with empty hands and empty words? Is that what one finds when one is steeped in infinity? Beyond our last hour is it all bare and shapeless and dim? If it be so, let them tell us; and the evidence of the darkness will at least possess a grandeur that is all too absent from these cross-examining methods. Of what use is it to die, if all life’s trivialities continue? Is it really worth while to have passed through the terrifying gorges which open on the eternal fields in order to remember that we had a great-uncle called Peter and that our Cousin Paul was afflicted with varicose veins and a gastric complaint? At that rate, I should choose for those whom I love the august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing. Though it be difficult for them, as they complain, to make themselves understood through a strange and sleep-bound organism, they tell us enough categorical details about the past to show that they could disclose similar details, if not about the future, which they perhaps do not yet know, at least about the lesser mysteries which surround us on every side and which our body alone prevents us from approaching. There are a thousand things, large or small, alike unknown to us, which we must perceive when feeble eyes no longer arrest our vision. It is in those regions from which a shadow separates us, and not in foolish tittle-tattle of the past, that they would at last find the clear and genuine proof which they seem to seek with such enthusiasm. Without demanding a great miracle, one would nevertheless think that we had the right to expect from a mind which nothing now enthralls some other discourse than that which it avoided when it was still subject to matter.

This is where things stood when, of late years, the mediums, the spiritualists, or, rather, it appears, the spirits themselves, for one cannot tell exactly with whom we have to do, perhaps dissatisfied at not being more definitely recognized and understood, invented, for a more effectual proof of their existence, what has been called “cross-correspondence.” Here the position is reversed: it is no longer a question of various and more or less numerous spirits revealing themselves through the agency of one and the same medium, but of a single spirit manifesting itself almost simultaneously through several mediums often at great distances from one another and without any preliminary understanding among themselves. Each of these messages, taken alone, is usually unintelligible, and yields a meaning only when laboriously combined with all the others.

As Sir Oliver Lodge says:

The experiments are still in their early stages, and the most recent volumes of the “Proceedings” are devoted to them. Although the accumulated mass of evidence is already considerable, no conclusion can yet be drawn from it. In any case, whatever the spiritualists may say, the suspicion of telepathy seems to me to be in no way removed. The experiments form a rather fantastic literary exercise, one intellectually much superior to the ordinary manifestations of the mediums; but up to the present there is no reason for placing their mystery in the other world rather than in this. Men have tried to see in them a proof that somewhere in time or space, or else beyond both, there is a sort of immense cosmic reserve of knowledge upon which the spirits go and draw freely. But if the reserve exist, which is very possible, nothing tells us that it is not the living rather than the dead who repair to it. It is very strange that the dead, if they really have access to the immeasurable treasure, should bring back nothing from it but a kind of ingenious child’s puzzle, although it ought to contain myriads of lost or forgotten notions and acquirements, heaped up during thousands and thousands of years in abysses which our mind, weighed down by the body, can no longer penetrate, but which nothing seems to close against the investigations of freer and more subtle activities. They are evidently surrounded by innumerable mysteries, by unsuspected and formidable truths that loom large on every side. The smallest astronomical or biological revelation, the least secret of olden time, such as that of the temper of copper, an archæological detail, a poem, a statue, a recovered remedy, a shred of one of those unknown sciences which flourished in Egypt or Atlantis—any of these would form a much more decisive argument than hundreds of more or less literary reminiscences. Why do they speak to us so seldom of the future? And for what reason, when they do venture upon it, are they mistaken with such disheartening regularity? One would think that, in the sight of a being delivered from the trammels of the body and of time, the years, whether past or future, ought all to lie outspread on one and the same plane.[3] We may therefore say that the ingenuity of the proof turns against it. All things considered, as in other attempts, and notably in those of the famous medium Stainton Moses, there is the same characteristic inability to bring us the veriest particle of truth or knowledge of which no vestige can be found in a living brain or in a book written on this earth. And yet it is inconceivable that there should not somewhere exist a knowledge that is not as ours and truths other than those which we possess here below.

A LACK OF VITAL COMMUNICATIONS

THE case of Stainton Moses, whose name we have just mentioned, is a very striking one in this respect. This Stainton Moses was a dogmatic, hard-working clergyman, whose learning, Myers tells us, in the normal state did not exceed that of an ordinary schoolmaster. But he was no sooner “entranced” before certain spirits of antiquity or of the Middle Ages who are hardly known save to profound scholars—among others, St. Hippolytus; Plotinus; Athenodorus, the tutor of Augustus; and more particularly Grocyn, the friend of Erasmus—took possession of his person and manifested themselves through his agency. Now, Grocyn, for instance, furnished certain information about Erasmus which was at first thought to have been gathered in the other world, but which was subsequently discovered in forgotten, but nevertheless accessible, books. On the other hand, Stainton Moses’s integrity was never questioned for an instant by those who knew him, and we may therefore take his word for it when he declares that he had not read the books in question. Here again the mystery, inexplicable though it be, seems really to lie hidden in the midst of ourselves. It is unconscious reminis[Pg 661]cence, if you will, suggestion at a distance, subliminal reading; but no more than in cross-correspondence is it indispensable to have recourse to the dead and to drag them by main force into the riddle, which, seen from our side of the grave, is dark and impassioned enough as it is. Furthermore, we must not insist unduly on this cross-correspondence. We must remember that the whole thing is in its earliest stages, and that the dead appear to have no small difficulty in grasping the requirements of the living.

In regard to this subject, as to the others, the spiritualists are fond of saying:

“If you refuse to admit the agency of spirits, the majority of these phenomena are absolutely inexplicable.”

Agreed; nor do we pretend to explain them, for hardly anything is to be explained upon this earth. We are content simply to ascribe them to the incomprehensible power of the mediums, which is no more improbable than the survival of the dead, and has the advantage of not going outside the sphere which we occupy and of bearing relation to a large number of similar facts that occur among living people. Those singular faculties are baffling only because they are still sporadic, and because only a very short time has elapsed since they received scientific recognition. Properly speaking, they are no more marvelous than those which we use daily without marveling at them; as our memory, for instance, our understanding, our imagination, and so forth. They form part of the great miracle that we are; and, having once admitted the miracle, we should be surprised not so much at its extent as at its limits.

Nevertheless, I am not at all of opinion that we must definitely reject the spiritualistic theory; that would be both unjust and premature. Hitherto everything remains in suspense. We may say that things are still very little removed from the point marked by Sir William Crookes, in 1874, in an article which he contributed to the “Quarterly Journal of Science.” He there wrote:

HAS THE SPIRIT ONLY AN INCOHERENT MEMORY OF LIFE?

MEANWHILE, it is saying a good deal that rigorous scientific investigations have not utterly shattered a theory which radically confounds the idea which we were wont to form of death. We shall see presently why, in considering our destinies beyond the grave, we need have no reason to linger too long over these apparitions or these revelations, even though they should really be incontestable and to the point. They would seem, all told, to be only the incoherent and precarious manifestations of a transitory state. They would at best prove, if we were bound to admit them, that a reflection of ourselves, an after-vibration of the nerves, a bundle of emotions, a spiritual silhouette, a grotesque and forlorn image, or, more correctly, a sort of truncated and uprooted memory, can, after our death, linger and float in a space where nothing remains to feed it, where it gradually becomes wan and lifeless, but where a special fluid, emanating from an exceptional medium, succeeds at moments in galvanizing it. Perhaps it exists objectively, perhaps it subsists and revives only in the recollection of certain sympathies. After all, it would be not unlikely that the memory which represents us during our life should continue to do so for a few weeks or even a few years after our decease. This would explain the evasive and deceptive character of those spirits which, possessing only a mnemonic existence, are naturally able to interest themselves only in matters within their reach. Hence their irritating and maniacal energy in clinging to the slightest facts, their sleepy dullness, their incomprehensible indifference and ignorance, and all the wretched absurdities which we have noticed more than once.

[Pg 662]

But, I repeat, it is much simpler to attribute these absurdities to the special character and the as yet imperfectly recognized difficulties of telepathic communication. The unconscious suggestions of the most intelligent among those who take part in the experiment are impaired, disjointed, and stripped of their main virtues in passing through the obscure intermediary of the medium. It may be that they go astray and make their way into certain forgotten corners which the intelligence no longer visits, and thence bring back more or less surprising discoveries; but the intellectual quality of the aggregate will always be inferior to that which a conscious mind would yield. Besides, once more, it is not yet time to draw conclusions. We must not lose sight of the fact that we have to do with a science which was born but yesterday, and which is groping for its implements, its paths, its methods, and its aim in a darkness denser than the earth’s. The boldest bridge that men have yet undertaken to throw across the river of death is not to be built in thirty years. Most sciences have centuries of thankless efforts and barren uncertainties behind them; and there are, I imagine, few among the younger of them that can show from the earliest hour, as this one does, promises of a harvest which may not be the harvest of their conscious sowing, but which already bids fair to yield such unknown and wondrous fruit.[4]

TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS

SO much for survival proper. But certain spiritualists go further, and attempt the scientific proof of palingenesis and the transmigration of souls. I pass over their merely moral or scientific arguments, as well as those which they discover in the prenatal reminiscences of illustrious men and others. These reminiscences, though often disturbing, are still too rare, too sporadic, so to speak; and the supervision has not always been sufficiently close for us to be able to rely upon them with safety. Nor do I purpose to pay attention to the proofs based upon the inborn aptitudes of genius or of certain infant prodigies—aptitudes which are difficult to explain, but which, nevertheless, may be attributed to unknown laws of heredity. I shall be content to recall briefly the results of some of Colonel de Rochas’s experiments, which leave one at a loss for an explanation.

First of all, it is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth, and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into an hypnotic sleep, and by means of downward passes makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence, and down to the extreme limits of their childhood. At each of these hypnotic stages the subject reassumes the consciousness, the character, and the state of mind which he possessed at the corresponding stage in his life. He goes over the same events, with their joys and sorrows. If he has been ill, he once more passes through his illness, his convalescence, and his recovery. If, for instance, the subject is a woman who has been a mother, she again becomes pregnant and again suffers the pains of childbirth. Carried back to an age when she was learning to write, she writes like a child, and her writings can be placed side by side with the copy-books which she filled at school.

This in itself is very extraordinary, but, as Colonel de Rochas says:

[Pg 663]

We now enter a region where still more surprising enigmas await us. Let us, to come to details, take one of the simplest cases. The subject is a girl of eighteen, called Joséphine. She lives at Voiron, in the department of the Isère. By means of downward passes, she is brought back to the condition of a baby at her mother’s breast. The passes continue, and the wonder-tale runs its course. Joséphine can no longer speak; and we have the great silence of infancy, which seems to be followed by a silence more mysterious still. Joséphine no longer answers except by signs; she is not yet born, “she is floating in darkness.” They persist; the sleep becomes heavier; and suddenly, from the depths of that sleep, rises the voice of another being—a voice unexpected and unknown, the voice of a churlish, distrustful, and discontented old man. They question him. At first he refuses to answer, saying that “of course he’s there, as he’s speaking”; that “he sees nothing”; and that “he’s in the dark.” They increase the number of passes, and gradually gain his confidence. His name is Jean-Claude Bourdon; he is an old man; he has long been ailing and bedridden. He tells the story of his life. He was born at Champvent, in the parish of Polliat, in 1812. He went to school until he was eighteen, and served his time in the army with the Seventh Artillery at Besançon; and he describes his gay time there, while the sleeping girl makes the gesture of twirling an imaginary mustache. When he goes back to his native place, he does not marry, but he has a mistress. He leads a solitary life (I omit all but the essential facts), and dies at the age of seventy, after a long illness.

We now hear the dead man speak, and his posthumous revelations are not sensational, which, however, is not an adequate reason for doubting their genuineness. He “feels himself growing out of his body,” but he remains attached to it for a fairly long time. His fluidic body, which is at first diffused, takes a more concentrated form. He lives in darkness, which he finds disagreeable; but he does not suffer. At last the night in which he is plunged is streaked with a few flashes of light. The idea comes to him to reincarnate himself, and he draws near to her who is to be his mother (that is to say, the mother of Joséphine). He encircles her until the child is born, whereupon he gradually enters the child’s body. Until about the seventh year this body was surrounded by a sort of floating mist in which he used to see many things which he has not seen since.

The next thing to be done is to go back beyond Jean-Claude. A mesmerization lasting nearly three quarters of an hour, without lingering at any intermediate stage, brings the old man back to babyhood, to a fresh silence, a new limbo; and then suddenly another voice and an unexpected person. This time it is an old woman who has been very wicked; and so she is in great torment. She is dead at the actual instant; for, in this inverted world, lives go backward and of course begin at the end. She is in deep darkness, surrounded by evil spirits. She speaks in a faint voice, but always gives definite replies to the questions put to her, instead of caviling at every moment, as Jean-Claude did. Her name is Philomène Carteron.

I will now quote Colonel de Rochas:

I thought it well to give the report of one of these experiments almost in extenso, because those who maintain the palingenesic theory find in these the only appreciable argument which they possess. Colonel de Rochas renewed them more than once with different subjects. Among these, I will mention only one, a girl called Marie Mayo, whose history is more complicated than Joséphine’s, and whose successive reincarnations take us back to the seventeenth century and carry us suddenly to Versailles, among the historical personages moving about Louis XIV.

Let us add that Colonel de Rochas is not the only mesmerizer who has obtained revelations of this kind, which may henceforth be classed among the incontestable facts of hypnotism. I have mentioned his alone because they offer the most substantial guaranties from every point of view.

WHAT HAS BEEN PROVED?

WHAT do they prove? We must begin, as in all questions of this kind, by entertaining a certain distrust of the medium. It goes without saying that all mediums, by the very nature of their faculties, are inclined to imposture, to trickery. I know that Colonel de Rochas, like Dr. Richet and like Professor Lombroso, was occasionally hoaxed. That is the inherent defect of the machinery which we must perforce employ; and experiments of this sort will never possess the scientific value of those made in a physical or chemical laboratory. But this is not an a priori reason for denying them any sort of interest. As a question of fact, are imposture and trickery possible here? Obviously, even though the experiments be conducted under the strictest supervision. However complicated it may be, the subject can have learned his lesson, and can cleverly avoid the traps laid for him. The best guaranty, when all is said, lies in his good faith and his moral sense, which the experimenters alone are in a position to test and to know; and for that we must trust to them. Besides, they neglect no precaution necessary to make imposture extremely difficult. After taking the subject, by means of transverse passes, up the stream of his life, they make him come down the same stream; and the same events pass in the reverse order. Repeated tests and countertests always yield identical results; and the medium never hesitates or goes astray in the labyrinth of names, dates, and incidents.[5]

Moreover, it would be requisite for these mediums, who are generally people of merely average intelligence, suddenly to become great poets in order thus to create, down to every detail, a series of characters differing entirely one from the other, in which everything—gestures, voice, temper, mind, thoughts, feeling—is in keeping, and ever ready to reply, in harmony with their inmost nature, to the most unexpected questions. It has been said that every man is a Shakspere in his dreams; but have we not here to do with dreams which, in their uniformity, bear a singular resemblance to fact?

I think, therefore, that, until we receive evidence to the contrary, we may be allowed to leave fraud out of the question. Another objection that might be raised, as was done with respect to the Myers phantom, is the insignificance of their revelations from beyond the grave. I would rather look on this as an argument in behalf of their good faith. Those whose imagination is rich enough to create the wonderful persons whom we see living in their sleep would doubtless find no great[Pg 665] difficulty in inventing a few fantastic but plausible details on the subject of the next world. Not one of them thinks of it. They are Christians, and therefore carry deep down in themselves the traditional terror of hell, the fear of purgatory, and the vision of a paradise full of angels and palms. They never refer to any of it. Although they are most often ignorant of all the theories of reincarnation, they conform strictly to the theosophical or neospiritualistic hypothesis, and are unconsciously faithful to it in their very indefiniteness: they speak vaguely of “the dark” in which they find themselves. They tell nothing because they know nothing. It is apparently impossible for them to give any account of a state that is still illumined. In fact, it is very likely, if we admit the hypothesis of reincarnation and of evolution after death, that nature, here as elsewhere, does not proceed by bounds. There is no special reason why she should take a prodigious and inconceivable leap between life and death.

We do not find the dramatic change which at first thought we are rather inclined to expect. The spirit is first of all confused at losing its body and every one of its familiar ways; it recovers itself only by degrees. It resumes consciousness slowly. This consciousness is subsequently purified, exalted, and extended, gradually and indefinitely, until, reaching other spheres, the principle of life that animates it ceases to reincarnate itself, and loses all contact with us. This would explain why we never have any but minor and elementary revelations.

All that concerns this first phase of the survival is fairly probable, even to those who do not admit the theory of reincarnation. For the rest, we shall see presently that the solutions which man’s imagination finds there merely change the question and are inadequate and provisional.

THE DANGER OF UNCONSCIOUS SUGGESTION IN MESMERIC TESTS

WE now come to the most serious objection, that of suggestion. Colonel de Rochas declares that he and all the other experimenters who have given themselves up to this study “have not only avoided everything that could put the subject on a definite tack, but have often tried in vain to lead him astray by different suggestions.” I am convinced of it: there can be no question of voluntary suggestion.

But do we not know that in these regions unconscious and involuntary suggestion is often more powerful and effective than the other? In the hackneyed and rather childish experiment of table-turning, for instance, which, after all, is only a crude and elementary form of telepathy, the replies are nearly always dictated by the unconscious suggestion of a participant or a mere onlooker.[6] We should therefore first of all have to make sure that neither the hypnotizer nor an onlooker, nor yet the subject himself, has ever heard of the reincarnated persons. It will be enough, I shall be told, to employ for the countertests another operator and different onlookers who are ignorant of the previous revelations. Yes, but the subject is not ignorant of them; and it is possible that the first suggestion has been so profound that it will remain forever stamped upon the unconsciousness, and that it will reproduce the same incarnations indefinitely in the same order.

All this does not mean that the phenomena of suggestion are not themselves laden[Pg 666] with mysteries; but that is another question. For the moment, as we see, the problem is almost insoluble, and control is impracticable. Meanwhile, since we have to choose between reincarnation and suggestion, it is right that we should confine ourselves in the first instance to the latter, in accordance with the principles which we have observed in the case of automatic speech and writing. Between two unknowns, common sense and prudence decree that we should turn first to the one on whose frontiers lie certain facts more frequently recorded, the one which shows a few familiar glimmers. Let us exhaust the mystery of our life before forsaking it for the mystery of our death. Throughout this vast expanse of treacherous ground, it is important that, until fresh evidence arrives, we should keep to one inflexible rule, namely, that thought transference exists as long as it is not absolutely and physically impossible for the subject or some person in the room to have cognizance of the incident in question, whether the cognizance be conscious or not, forgotten or actual. Even this guaranty is not sufficient, for it is still possible for some one taking no part in the sitting, and even very far away from it, to be placed in communication with the medium by some unknown means, and to influence the medium at a distance and unwittingly. Lastly, to provide for every contingency before letting death come upon the boards, it would be necessary to make certain that atavistic memory does not play an unforeseen part. Cannot a man, for instance, carry hidden in the depths of his being the recollection of events connected with the childhood of an ancestor whom he has never seen, and communicate it to the medium by unconscious suggestion? It is not impossible. We carry in ourselves all the past, all the experience, of our ancestors. If by some magic we could illumine the prodigious treasures of the subconscious memory, why should we not there discover the events and facts that form the sources of that experience? Before turning toward yonder unknown, we must utterly exhaust the possibilities of this terrestrial unknown. It is moreover remarkable, but undeniable, that, despite the strictness of a law which seems to shut out every other explanation, despite the almost unlimited and probably excessive scope allotted to the domain of suggestion, there nevertheless remain some facts which perhaps call for another interpretation.

THE LACK OF COMPELLING PROOF IN THE THEORY

BUT let us return to reincarnation, and recognize, in passing, that it is very regrettable that the arguments of the theosophists and neospiritualists are not compelling; for there never was a more beautiful, a juster, a purer, a more moral, fruitful, and consoling, or, to a certain point, a more probable creed than theirs. But the quality of a creed is no evidence of its truth. Even though it is the religion of six hundred millions of mankind, the nearest to the mysterious origins, the only one that is not odious, and the least absurd of all, it will have to do what the others have not done—bring unimpeachable testimony; and what it has given us hitherto is only the first shadow of a proof begun.

Indeed, even that would not put an end to the riddle. In principle, reincarnation sooner or later is inevitable, since nothing can be lost or remain stationary. What has not been demonstrated in any way, and will perhaps remain indemonstrable, is the reincarnation of the whole, identical person, notwithstanding the abolition of memory. But what matters that reincarnation to him, if he be unaware that he is still himself? All the problems of the conscious survival of man start up anew, and we have to begin all over again. Even if scientifically established, the doctrine of reincarnation, just like that of a survival, would not set a term to our questions. It replies to neither the first nor the last, those of the beginning and the end, the only ones that are essential. It simply shifts them, pushes them a few hundreds, a few thousands, of years back, in the hope, perhaps, of losing or forgetting them in silence and space. But they have come from the depths of the most prodigious infinities, and are not content with a tardy solution. I am most certainly interested in learning what is in store for me, what will happen to me immediately after my death. You tell me:

[Pg 667]

“Man, in his successive incarnations, will make atonement by suffering, will be purified, in order that he may ascend from sphere to sphere until he returns to the divine essence whence he sprang.”

I am willing to believe it, notwithstanding that all this still bears the somewhat questionable stamp of our little earth and its old religions; I am willing to believe it; but even then? What matters to me is not what will be for some time, but for always; and your divine principle appears to me not at all infinite nor definite. It even seems to me greatly inferior to that which I conceive without your help. Now, even if it were based on thousands of facts, a religion that belittles the God conceived by my loftiest thought could never dominate my conscience. Your infinity or our God, without being even more unintelligible than mine, is nevertheless smaller. If I be again immerged in Him, it means that I emerged from Him; if it be possible for me to have emerged from Him, then He is not infinite; and, if He be not infinite, what is He? We must accept one thing or the other: either He purifies me because I am outside Him and He is not infinite; or, being infinite, if He purify me, then there was something impure in Him, because it is a part of Himself which He is purifying in me. Moreover, how can we admit that this God who has existed for all time, who has the same infinity of millenaries behind Him as in front of Him, should not yet have found time to purify Himself and put a period to His trials? What He was not able to do in the eternity previous to the moment of my existence He will not be able to do in the subsequent eternity, for the two are equal. And the same question presents itself where I am concerned. My principle of life, like His, exists from all eternity, for my emergence out of nothing would be more difficult of explanation than my existence without a beginning. I have necessarily had innumerable opportunities of incarnating myself; and I have probably done so, seeing that it is hardly likely that the idea came to me only yesterday. All the chances of reaching my goal have therefore been offered to me in the past; and all those which I shall find in the future will add nothing to the number, which was already infinite. There is not much to say in answer to these interrogations, which spring up everywhence the moment our thought glances upon them. Meanwhile, I had rather know that I know nothing than feed myself on illusory and irreconcilable assertions. I had rather keep to an infinity the incomprehensibility of which has no bounds than restrict myself to a God whose incomprehensibility is limited on every side. Nothing compels you to speak of your God; but, if you take upon yourself to do so, it is necessary that your explanations should be superior to the silence which they break.

It is true that the scientific spiritualists do not venture as far as this God; but, then, tight-pressed between the two riddles of the beginning and the end, they have almost nothing to tell us. They follow the tracks of our dead for a few seconds in a world where seconds no longer count, and then they abandon them in the darkness. I do not reproach them, because we have here to do with things which, in all probability, we shall not know in the day when we shall think that we know everything. I do not ask that they shall reveal to me the secret of the universe, for I do not believe, like a child, that this secret can be expressed in three words or that it can enter my brain without bursting it. I am even persuaded that beings who might be millions of times more intelligent than the most intelligent among us would not yet possess it, for this secret must be as infinite, as unfathomable, as inexhaustible as the universe itself. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this inability to go even a few years beyond the life after death detracts greatly from the interest of their experiments and revelations. At best, it is only a short space gained, and it is not by this juggling on the threshold that our fate is decided. I am ready to go through what may befall me in the short interval filled by those revelations, as I am even now going through what befalls me in my life here. My destiny does not lie there, nor my home. I do not doubt that the facts reported are genuine and proved; but what is even much more certain is that the dead, if they survive, have not a great deal to teach us, whether because at the moment when they can speak to us they have nothing to tell us, or because at the moment when they might have something to reveal to us they are no longer able to do so, but withdraw forever, and lose sight of us in the immensity which they are exploring.

[Pg 668]

❏
LARGER IMAGE

Country Roads of New England

Four Drawings by Walter King Stone

[Pg 669]

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 670]

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 671]

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 672]

THE WHITE LINEN NURSE

HOW RAE MALGREGOR UNDERTOOK GENERAL HEARTWORK FOR A FAMILY OF TWO

BY ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

Author of “Molly Make-Believe,” etc.

IN THREE PARTS: PART TWO

WITH PICTURES BY HERMAN PFEIFER

SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING INSTALMENT

WHEN the White Linen Nurse found anything again, she found herself lying perfectly flat on her back in a reasonably comfortable nest of grass and leaves. Staring inquisitively up into the sky she thought she noticed a slight black-and-blue discoloration toward the west, but more than that, much to her relief, the firmament did not seem to be seriously injured. The earth, she feared, had not escaped so easily. Even away off somewhere near the tip of her fingers the ground was as sore, as sore as could be, under her touch. Impulsively to her dizzy eyes the hot tears started, to think that now, tired as she was, she would have to jump right up in another minute or two and attend to the poor earth. Fortunately for any really strenuous emergency that might arise, there seemed to be nothing about her own body that hurt at all except a queer, persistent little pain in her cheek.

Not until the Little Crippled Girl’s dirt-smouched face intervened between her own staring eyes and the sky did she realize that the pain in her cheek was a pinch.

“Wake up! wake up!” scolded the Little Crippled Girl, shrilly. “Naughty—pink-and-white Nursie! I wanted to hear the bump! You screamed so loud I couldn’t hear the bump.”

With excessive caution the White Linen Nurse struggled up at last to a sitting posture, and gazed perplexedly about her.

It seemed to be a perfectly pleasant field—acres and acres of mild old grass totter[Pg 673]ing palsiedly down to watch some skittish young violets and bluets frolic in and out of a giggling brook. Up the field? Up the field? Hazily the White Linen Nurse ground her knuckles into her incredulous eyes. Up the field, just beyond them, the great empty automobile stood amiably at rest. From the general appearance of the stone wall at the top of the little grassy slope it was palpably evident that the car had attempted certain vain acrobatic feats before its failing momentum had forced it into the humiliating ranks of the backsliders.

Still grinding her knuckles into her eyes, the White Linen Nurse turned back to the Little Girl. Under the torn, twisted sable cap one little eye was hidden completely, but the other eye loomed up as rakish and bruised as a prize-fighter’s. One sable sleeve was wrenched disastrously from its armhole, and along the edge of the vivid, purple little skirt the ill-favored white ruffles seemed to have raveled out into hopeless yards and yards and yards of Hamburg embroidery.

The Little Girl began to gather herself together a trifle self-consciously.

“We—we seem to have fallen out of something,” she confided with the air of one who halves a most precious secret.

“Yes, I know,” said the White Linen Nurse; “but what has become of—your father?”

Worriedly for an instant, the Little Girl sat scanning the remotest corners of the field, then abruptly, with a gasp of real relief, she began to explore with cautious fingers the geographical outline of her black eye.

“Oh, never mind about Father,” she asserted cheerfully. “I guess—I guess he got mad and went home.”

“Yes, I know,” mused the White Linen Nurse; “but it doesn’t seem—probable.”

“Probable?” mocked the Little Girl, most disagreeably; then suddenly her little hand went shooting out toward the stranded automobile.

“Why, there he is,” she screamed—“under the car! Oh, look—look—looky!”

Laboriously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her knees. Desperately she tried to ram her fingers like a clog into the whirling dizziness round her temples.

“Oh, my God! oh, my God! what’s the dose for anybody under a car?” she babbled idiotically.

Then with a really Herculean effort, both mental and physical, she staggered to her feet, and started for the automobile.

But her knees gave out, and wilting down to the grass, she tried to crawl along on all fours till straining wrists sent her back to her feet again.

Whenever she tried to walk, the Little Girl walked; whenever she tried to crawl, the Little Girl crawled.

“Isn’t it fun!” the shrill childish voice piped persistently. “Isn’t it just like playing shipwreck!”

When they reached the car, both woman and child were too utterly exhausted with breathlessness to do anything except just sit down on the ground and stare.

Sure enough, under that monstrous, immovable-looking machine the Senior Surgeon’s body lay rammed, face down, deep, deep into the grass.

It was the Little Girl who recovered her breath first.

“I think he’s dead,” she volunteered sagely. “His legs look—awfully dead to me.” Only excitement was in the statement. It took a second or two for her little mind to make any particularly personal application of such excitement. “I hadn’t—exactly—planned—on having him dead,” she began with imperious resentment. A threat of complete emotional collapse zigzagged suddenly across her face. “I won’t have him dead! I won’t! I won’t!” she screamed out stormily.

In the amazing silence that ensued the White Linen Nurse gathered her trembling knees up into the circle of her arms and sat there staring at the Senior Surgeon’s prostrate body, and rocking herself feebly to and fro in a futile effort to collect her scattered senses.

“Oh, if some one would only tell me what to do, I know I could do it! Oh, I know I could do it! If some one would only tell me what to do!” she kept repeating helplessly.

Cautiously the Little Girl crept forward on her hands and knees to the edge of the car, and peered speculatively through the great yellow wheel-spokes. “Father!” she faltered in almost inaudible gentleness. “Father!” she pleaded in perfectly impotent whisper.

[Pg 674]

Impetuously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her own hands and knees and jostled the Little Girl aside.

“Fat Father!” screamed the White Linen Nurse. “Fat Father! Fat Father! Fat Father!” she gibed and taunted with the one call she knew that had never yet failed to rouse him.

Perceptibly across the Senior Surgeon’s horridly quiet shoulders a little twitch wrinkled and was gone again.

“Oh, his heart!” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “I must find his heart!”

Throwing herself prone upon the cool, meadowy ground and frantically reaching under the running-board of the car to her full arm’s-length, she began to rummage awkwardly hither and yon beneath the heavy weight of the man in the desperate hope of feeling a heart-beat.

“Ouch! you tickle me!” spluttered the Senior Surgeon, weakly.

Rolling back quickly with fright and relief, the White Linen Nurse burst forth into one maddening cackle of hysterical laughter. “Ha! ha! ha!” she giggled. “Hi! hi!”

Perplexedly at first, but with increasing abandon, the Little Girl’s voice took up the same idiotic refrain. “Ha! ha! ha!” she choked. “Hi! hi! hi!”

With an agonizing jerk of his neck, the Senior Surgeon rooted his mud-gagged mouth half an inch farther toward free and spontaneous speech. Very laboriously, very painstakingly, he spat out one by one two stones and a wisp of ground-pine and a brackish, prickly tickle of stale goldenrod.

“Blankety-blank-blank-blank!” he announced in due time—“blankety-blank-blank-blank-blank! Maybe when you two blankety-blank imbeciles have got through your blankety-blank cackling, you’ll have the blankety-blank decency to save my—my blankety-blank-blank-blank-blank-blank life!”

“Ha! ha! ha!” persisted the poor White Linen Nurse, with the tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Hi! hi! hi!” snickered the poor Little Girl through her hiccoughs.

Feeling hopelessly imprisoned under the monstrous car, the Senior Surgeon closed his eyes for death. No man of his weight, he felt sure, could reasonably expect to survive many minutes longer the apoplectic, blood-red rage that pounded in his ear-drums. Through his tight-closed eyelids very, very slowly a red glow seemed to permeate. He thought it was the fires of hell. Opening his eyes to meet his fate like a man, he found himself staring impudently close, instead, into the White Linen Nurse’s furiously flushed face, which lay cuddled on one plump cheek, staring impudently close at him.

“Why—why—get out!” gasped the Senior Surgeon.

Very modestly the White Linen Nurse’s face retreated a little further into its blushes.

“Yes, I know,” she protested; “but I’m all through giggling now. I’m sorry—I’m—”

In sheer apprehensiveness the Senior Surgeon’s features crinkled wincingly from brow to chin as though struggling vainly to retreat from the appalling proximity of the girl’s face.

“Your—eyelashes—are too long,” he complained querulously.

“Eh?” jerked the White Linen Nurse’s face. “Is it your brain that’s hurt? Oh, sir, do you think it’s your brain that’s hurt?”

“It’s my stomach,” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “I tell you I’m not hurt; I’m just—squashed. I’m paralyzed. If I can’t get this car off me—”

“Yes, that’s just it,” beamed the White Linen Nurse’s face—“that’s just what I crawled in here to find out—how to get the car off you. That’s just what I want to find out. I could run for help, of course; only I couldn’t run, ’cause my knees are so wobbly. It would take hours, and the car might start or burn up or something while I was gone. But you don’t seem to be caught anywhere on the machinery,” she added more brightly; “it only seems to be sitting on you. So if I could only get the car off you! But it’s so heavy. I had no idea it would be so heavy. Could I take it apart, do you think? Is there any one place where I could begin at the beginning and take it all apart?”

“Take it apart—hell!” groaned the Senior Surgeon.

A little twitch of defiance flickered across the White Linen Nurse’s face.

“All the same,” she asserted stubbornly,[Pg 675] “if some one would only tell me what to do, I know I could do it.”

Horridly from some unlocatable quarter of the engine an alarming little tremor quickened suddenly, and was hushed again.

“Get out of here—quick!” stormed the Senior Surgeon.

“I won’t,” said the White Linen Nurse, “until you tell me what to do.”

Brutally for an instant the ingenuous blue eyes and the cynical gray eyes battled each other.

“Can you do what you’re told?” faltered the Senior Surgeon.

“Oh, yes,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“I mean, can you do exactly what you’re told?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. “Can you follow directions, I mean? Can you follow them explicitly? Or are you one of those people who listens only to her own judgment?”

“Oh, but I haven’t got any judgment,” protested the White Linen Nurse.

Palpably in the Senior Surgeon’s bloodshot eyes the leisurely seeming diagnosis leaped to precipitous conclusions.

“Then get out of here quick, for God’s sake, and get to work!” he ordered.

Cautiously the White Linen Nurse jerked herself back into freedom and crawled around and stared at the Senior Surgeon through the wheel-spokes again. Like one worrying out some intricate mathematical problem, his mental strain was pulsing visibly through his closed eyelids.

“Yes, sir?” prodded the White Linen Nurse.

“Keep still!” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “I’ve got to think,” he said. “I’ve got to work it out. All in a moment you’ve got to learn to run the car. All in a moment! It’s awful!”

“Oh, I don’t mind, sir,” affirmed the White Linen Nurse, serenely.

Frenziedly the Senior Surgeon rooted one cheek into the mud again.

“You don’t mind?” he groaned. “You don’t mind? Why, you’ve got to learn—everything—everything from the very beginning!”

“Oh, that’s all right, sir,” crooned the White Linen Nurse.

Ominously from somewhere a horrid sound creaked again. The Senior Surgeon did not stop to argue any further.

“Now come here,” he ordered. “I’m going to—I’m going to—” Startlingly his voice weakened, trailed off into nothingness, and rallied suddenly with exaggerated bruskness. “Look here, now, for Heaven’s sake, use your brains! I’m going to dictate to you very slowly, one thing at a time, just what to do.”

Quite astonishingly the White Linen Nurse sank down on her knees and began to grin at him.

“Oh, no, sir,” she said; “I couldn’t do it that way—not one thing at a time. Oh, no, indeed, sir—No.” Absolute finality was in her voice, the inviolable stubbornness of the perfectly good-natured person.

“You’ll do it the way I tell you to,” roared the Senior Surgeon, struggling vainly to ease one shoulder or stretch one knee-joint.

“Oh, no, sir,” beamed the White Linen Nurse; “not one thing at a time. Oh, no; I couldn’t do it that way. Oh, no, sir; I won’t do it that way—one thing at a time,” she persisted hurriedly. “Why, you might faint away or something might happen right in the middle of it—right between one direction and another, and I wouldn’t know at all what to turn on or off next; and it might take off one of your legs, you know, or an arm. Oh, no; not one thing at a time.”

“Good-by, then,” croaked the Senior Surgeon. “I’m as good as dead now.” A single shudder went through him, a last futile effort to stretch himself.

“Good-by,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Good-by. I’d heaps rather have you die perfectly whole, like that, of your own accord, than have me run the risk of starting the car full-tilt and chopping you up so, or dragging you off so, that you didn’t find it convenient to tell me how to stop the car.”

“You’re a—a—a—” spluttered the Senior Surgeon, incoherently.

“Crinkle-crackle!” went that mysterious, horrid sound from somewhere in the machinery.

“Oh, my God!” surrendered the Senior Surgeon, “do it your own—damned way! Only—only—” His voice cracked raspingly.

“Steady! Steady there!” said the White Linen Nurse. Except for a sudden odd pucker at the end of her nose her expression was still perfectly serene. “Now begin at the beginning,” she[Pg 676] begged. “Quick! Tell me everything just the way I must do it! Quick! quick! quick!”

Twice the Senior Surgeon’s lips opened and shut with a vain effort to comply with her request.

“But you can’t do it,” he began all over again; “it isn’t possible. You haven’t got the mind.”

“Maybe I haven’t,” said the White Linen Nurse; “but I’ve got the memory. Hurry!”

“Creak!” said the funny little something in the machinery.

“Oh, get in there quick!” surrendered the Senior Surgeon. “Sit down behind the wheel!” he shouted after her flying footsteps. “Are you there? For God’s sake, are you there? Do you see those two little levers where your right hand comes? For God’s sake, don’t you know what a lever is? Quick now! Do just what I tell you!”

A little jerkily then, but very clearly, very concisely, the Senior Surgeon called out to the White Linen Nurse just how every lever, every pedal, should be manipulated to start the car.

Absolutely accurately, absolutely indelibly, the White Linen Nurse visualized each separate detail in her abnormally retentive mind.

“But you can’t possibly remember it,” groaned the Senior Surgeon. “You can’t possibly. And probably the damned car’s bust and won’t start, anyway, and—” Abruptly the speech ended in a guttural snarl of despair.

“Don’t be a—blight!” screamed the White Linen Nurse. “I’ve never forgotten anything yet, sir!”

Very tensely she straightened up suddenly in her seat. Her expression was no longer even remotely pleasant. Along her sensitive, fluctuant nostrils the casual crinkle of distaste and suspicion had deepened suddenly into sheer dilating terror.

“Left foot—press down—hard—left pedal,” she began to singsong to herself.

“No, right foot—right foot!” corrected the Little Girl, blunderingly from somewhere close in the grass.

“Inside lever—pull—’way—back!” persisted the White Linen Nurse, resolutely, as she switched on the current.

“No, outside lever! Outside! Outside!” contradicted the Little Girl.

“Shut your damned mouth!” screeched the White Linen Nurse, her hand on the throttle as she tried the self-starter.

Bruised as he was, wretched, desperately endangered there under the car, the Senior Surgeon could almost have grinned at the girl’s terse, unconscious mimicry of his own most venomous tones.

Then with all the forty-eight lusty, ebullient years of his life snatched from his lips like an untasted cup, and one single noxious, death-flavored second urged, forced, crammed down his choking throat, he felt the great car quicken and start.

“God!” said the Senior Surgeon, just “God!” The God of mud, he meant; the God of brackish grass; the God of a man lying still hopeful under more than two and a half ton’s weight of unaccountable mechanism, with a novice in full command.

Up in her crimson leather cushions, free-lunged, free-limbed, the White Linen Nurse heard the smothered cry. Clear above the whir of wheels, the whizz of clogs, the one word sizzled like a red-hot poker across her chattering consciousness. Tingling through the grasp of her fingers on the vibrating wheel, stinging through the sole of her foot that hovered over the throbbing clutch, she sensed the agonized appeal. “Short lever, spark; long lever, gas,” she persisted resolutely. “It must be right; it must!”

Jerkily then, and blatantly unskilfully, with riotous puffs, and spinning of wheels, the great car started, faltered, balked a bit, then dragged crushingly across the Senior Surgeon’s flattened body, and with a great wanton burst of speed tore down the sloping meadow into the brook rods away. Clamping down the brakes with a wrench and a racket like the smash of a machine-shop, the White Linen Nurse jumped out into the brook, and with one wild, terrified glance behind her, staggered back up the long, grassy slope to the Senior Surgeon.

Mechanically through her wooden-feeling lips she forced the greeting that sounded most cheerful to her.

“It’s not much fun, sir, running an auto,” she gasped. “I don’t believe I’d like it.”

Half propped up on one elbow, still dizzy with mental chaos, still paralyzed with physical inertia, the Senior Surgeon lay staring blankly about him. Indiffer[Pg 677]ently for an instant his stare included the White Linen Nurse. Then glowering suddenly at something beyond her, his face went perfectly livid.

“Good God! the—the car’s on fire!” he mumbled.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Why, didn’t you know it, sir?”

Headlong the Senior Surgeon pitched over on the grass, his last vestige of self-control stripped from him, horror unspeakable racking him sobbingly from head to toe.

Whimperingly the Little Girl came crawling to him, and, settling down close at his feet, began with her tiny lace handkerchief to make futile dabs at the mud-stains on his gray silk stockings.

“Never mind, Father,” she coaxed; “we’ll get you clean sometime.”

Nervously the White Linen Nurse bethought her of the brook. “Oh, wait a minute, sir, and I’ll get you a drink of water,” she pleaded.

Bruskly the Senior Surgeon’s hand jerked out and grabbed at her skirt.

“Don’t leave me!” he begged. “For God’s sake, don’t leave me!”

Weakly he struggled up again and sat staring piteously at the blazing car. His unrelinquished clutch on the White Linen Nurse’s skirt brought her sinking softly down beside him like a collapsed balloon. Together they sat and watched the gaseous yellow flames shoot up into the sky.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” piped the Little Girl.

“Eh?” groaned the Senior Surgeon.

“Father,” persisted the shrill little voice—“Father, do people ever burn up?”

“Eh?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. Brutally the harsh, shuddering sobs began to rack and tear again through his great chest.

“There! there!” crooned the White Linen Nurse, struggling desperately to her knees. “Let me get—everybody a drink of water.”

Again the Senior Surgeon’s unrelinquished clutch on her skirt jerked her back to the place beside him.

“I said not to leave me!” he snapped out as roughly as he jerked.

Before the affrighted look in the White Linen Nurse’s face a sheepish, mirthless grin flickered across one corner of his mouth.

“Lord! but I’m shaken!” he apologized. “Me, of all people!” Painfully the red blood mounted to his cheeks. “Me, of all people!” Bluntly he forced the White Linen Nurse’s reluctant gaze to meet his own. “Only yesterday,” he persisted, “I did a laparotomy on a man who had only one chance in a hundred of pulling through, and I—I laughed at him for fighting off his ether cone—laughed at him, I tell you!”

“Yes, I know,” soothed the White Linen Nurse; “but—”

“But nothing!” growled the Senior Surgeon. “The fear of death? Bah! All my life I’ve scoffed at it. Die? Yes, of course, when you have to, but with no kick coming. Why, I’ve been wrecked in a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and I didn’t care; and I’ve lain for nine days more dead than alive in an Asiatic cholera camp, and I didn’t care; and I’ve been locked into my office three hours with a raving maniac and a dynamite bomb, and I didn’t care; and twice in a Pennsylvania mine disaster I’ve been the first man down the shaft, and I didn’t care; and I’ve been shot, I tell you, and I’ve been horse-trampled, and I’ve been wolf-bitten, and I’ve never cared. But to-day—to-day—” Piteously all the pride and vigor wilted from his great shoulders, leaving him all huddled up, like a woman, with his head on his knees—“but to-day I’ve got mine,” he acknowledged brokenly.

Once again the White Linen Nurse tried to rise.

“Oh, please, sir, let me get you a—drink of water,” she suggested helplessly.

“I said not to leave me!” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

Perplexedly, with big staring eyes, the Little Crippled Girl glanced up at this strange fatherish person who sounded so suddenly small and scared like herself. Jealous instantly of her own prerogatives, she dropped her futile labors on the mud-stained silk stockings and scrambled precipitously for the White Linen Nurse’s lap, where she nestled down finally after many gyrations, and sat glowering forth at all possible interlopers.

“Don’t leave any of us!” she ordered with a peremptoriness not unmixed with supplication.

[Pg 678]

“Surely some one will see the fire and come and get us,” conceded the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, surely,” mused the White Linen Nurse. Just at that moment she was mostly concerned with adjusting the curve of her shoulder to the curve of the Little Girl’s head. “I could sit more comfortably,” she suggested to the Senior Surgeon, “if you’d let go my skirt.”

“Let go of your skirt? Who’s touching your skirt?” gasped the Senior Surgeon, incredulously. Once again the blood mounted darkly to his face. “I think I’ll get up—and walk around a bit,” he confided coldly.

“Do, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

With a tweak of pain through his sprained back, the Senior Surgeon suddenly sat down again. “I sha’n’t get up till I’m good and ready,” he declared.

“I wouldn’t, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse. Very slowly, very complacently, all the while she kept right on renovating the Little Girl’s personal appearance, smoothing a wrinkled stocking, tucking up obstreperous white ruffles, tugging down parsimonious purple hems, loosening a pinchy hook, tightening a wobbly button. Very slowly, very complacently, the Little Girl drowsed off to sleep, with her weazen, iron-cased little legs stretched stiffly out before her. “Poor little legs! Poor little legs! Poor little legs!” crooned the White Linen Nurse.

“I don’t know that you need to make a song about it,” winced the Senior Surgeon. “It’s just about the cruellest case of complete muscular atrophy that I’ve ever seen.”

Blandly the White Linen Nurse lifted her big blue eyes to his.

“It wasn’t her ‘complete muscular atrophy’ that I was thinking about,” she said. “It’s her panties that are so unbecoming.”

“Eh?” exclaimed the Senior Surgeon.

“Poor little legs! Poor little legs! Poor little legs!” resumed the White Linen Nurse, droningly.

Very slowly, very complacently, all around them April kept right on being April. Very slowly, very complacently, all around them the grass kept right on growing, and the trees kept right on budding. Very slowly, very complacently, all around them the blue sky kept right on fading into its early evening dove-colors.

Nothing brisk, nothing breathless, nothing even remotely hurried, was there in all the landscape except just the brook, and the flash of a bird, and the blaze of the crackling automobile.

The White Linen Nurse’s nostrils were smooth and calm with the lovely sappy scent of rabbit-nibbled maple-bark and mud-wet arbutus buds. The White Linen Nurse’s mind was full of sumptuous, succulent marsh-marigolds and fluffy-white shad-bush blossoms.

The Senior Surgeon’s nostrils were all puckered up with the stench of burning varnish. The Senior Surgeon’s mind was full of the horrid thought that he’d forgotten to renew his automobile fire-insurance, and that he had a sprained back, and that his rival colleague had told him he didn’t know how to run an auto, anyway, and that the cook had given notice that morning, and that he had a sprained back, and that the moths had gnawed the knees out of his new dress-suit, and that the Superintendent of Nurses had had the audacity to send him a bunch of pink roses for his birthday, and that the boiler in the kitchen leaked, and that he had to go to Philadelphia the next day to read a paper on “Surgical Methods at the Battle of Waterloo” and he hadn’t even begun the paper yet, and that he had a sprained back, and that the wall-paper on his library hung in shreds and tatters, waiting for him to decide between a French fresco effect and an early English paneling, and that his little daughter was growing up in wanton ugliness under the care of coarse, indifferent hirelings, and that the laundry robbed him weekly of at least five socks, and that it would cost him fully seven thousand dollars to replace this car, and that he had a sprained back.

“It’s restful, isn’t it?” cooed the White Linen Nurse.

“Isn’t what restful?” glowered the Senior Surgeon.

“Sitting down,” said the White Linen Nurse.

Contemptuously the Senior Surgeon’s mind ignored the interruption and reverted precipitously to its own immediate problem concerning the gloomy, black-walnut-shadowed entrance-hall of his great house, and how many yards of imported linoleum at $3.45 a yard it would take to recarpet the[Pg 679] “confounded hole”; and how it would have seemed, anyway, if—if he hadn’t gone home as usual to the horrid black-walnut shadows that night, but been carried home instead, feet first and quite dead—dead, mind you, with a red necktie on, and even the cook was out! And they wouldn’t even know where to lay him, but might put him by mistake in that—in that—in his dead wife’s dead bed!

Altogether unconsciously a little fluttering sigh of ineffable contentment escaped the White Linen Nurse.

“I don’t care how long we have to sit here and wait for help,” she announced cheerfully, “because to-morrow, of course, I’ll have to get up and begin all over again—and go to Nova Scotia.”

“Go where?” lurched the Senior Surgeon.

“I’d thank you kindly, sir, not to jerk my skirt quite so hard,” said the White Linen Nurse, just a trifle stiffly.

Incredulously once more the Senior Surgeon withdrew his detaining hand.

“I’m not even touching your skirt,” he denied desperately. Nothing but denial and reiterated denial seemed to ease his self-esteem for an instant. “Why, for Heaven’s sake, should I want to hold on to your skirt?” he demanded peremptorily. “What the deuce,” he began blusteringly—“why in—”

Then abruptly he stopped and shot an odd, puzzled glance at the White Linen Nurse, and right there before her startled eyes she saw every vestige of human expression fade out of his face as it faded out sometimes in the operating-room when, in the midst of some ghastly, unforeseen emergency that left all his assistants blinking helplessly about them, his whole wonderful, scientific mind seemed to break up like some chemical compound into all its meek component parts, only to reorganize itself suddenly with some amazing explosive action that fairly knocked the breath out of all on-lookers, but was pretty apt to knock the breath into the body of the person most concerned.

When the Senior Surgeon’s scientific mind had reorganized itself to meet this emergency, he found himself vastly more surprised at the particular type of explosion that had taken place than any other person could possibly have been.

“Miss Malgregor,” he gasped, “speaking of preferring ‘domestic service,’ as you call it—speaking of preferring domestic service to—nursing, how would you like to consider—to consider a position of—of—well, call it a—a position of general—heartwork—for a family of two? Myself and the Little Girl here being the two, as you understand,” he added briskly.

“Why, I think it would be grand!” beamed the White Linen Nurse.

A trifle mockingly the Senior Surgeon bowed his appreciation.

“Your frank and immediate—enthusiasm,” he murmured, “is more, perhaps, than I had dared to expect.”

“But it would be grand,” said the White Linen Nurse. Before the odd little smile in the Senior Surgeon’s eyes her white forehead puckered all up with perplexity. Then with her mind still thoroughly unawakened, her heart began suddenly to pitch and lurch like a frightened horse whose rider has not even remotely sensed as yet the approach of an unwonted footfall. “What did you say?” she repeated worriedly. “Just exactly what was it that you said? I guess, maybe, I didn’t understand just exactly what it was that you said.”

The smile in the Senior Surgeon’s eyes deepened a little.

“I asked you,” he said, “how you would like to consider a position of ‘general heartwork’ in a family of two, myself and the Little Girl here being the two. ‘Heartwork’ was what I said. Yes, ‘heartwork,’ not housework.”

“Heartwork?” faltered the White Linen Nurse. “Heartwork? I don’t know what you mean, sir.” Like two falling rose-petals her eyelids fluttered down across her affrighted eyes. “Oh, when I shut my eyes, sir, and just hear your voice, I know of course, sir, that it’s some sort of a joke; but when I look right at you, I—I—don’t know—what it is.”

“Open your eyes and keep them open, then, till you do find out,” suggested the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

Defiantly once again the blue eyes and the gray eyes challenged each other.

“‘Heartwork’ was what I said,” persisted the Senior Surgeon. Palpably his narrowing eyes shut out all meaning but one definite one.

[Pg 680]

The White Linen Nurse’s face became almost as blanched as her dress.

“You’re—you’re not asking me to—marry you, sir?” she stammered.

“I suppose I am,” acknowledged the Senior Surgeon.

“Not marry you!” cried the White Linen Nurse. Distress was in her voice, distaste, unmitigable shock, as though the high gods themselves had fallen at her feet and splintered off into mere candy fragments. “Oh, not marry you, sir?” she kept right on protesting. “Not be—engaged, you mean? Oh, not be engaged—and everything?”

“Well, why not?” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

Like a smitten flower the girl’s whole body seemed to wilt down into incalculable weariness.

“Oh, no, no! I couldn’t!” she protested. “Oh, no, really!” Appealingly she lifted her great blue eyes to his, and the blueness was all blurred with tears. “I’ve—I’ve been engaged once, you know,” she explained falteringly. “Why—I was engaged, sir—almost as soon as I was born, and I stayed engaged till two years ago. That’s almost twenty years. That’s a long time, sir. You don’t get over it—easy.” Very, very gravely she began to shake her head. “Oh, no, sir! No! Thank you—very much, but I—I just simply couldn’t begin at the beginning and go all through it again. I haven’t got the heart for it. I haven’t got the spirit. Carving your initials on trees and—and gadding round to all the Sunday-school picnics—”

Brutally, like a boy, the Senior Surgeon threw back his head in one wild hoot of joy. Much more cautiously, as the agonizing pang in his shoulder lulled down again, he proceeded to argue the matter, but the grin in his face was even yet faintly traceable.

“Frankly, Miss Malgregor,” he affirmed, “I’m much more addicted to carving people than to carving trees; and as to Sunday-school picnics—well, really now, I hardly believe that you’d find my demands in that direction excessive.”

Perplexedly the White Linen Nurse tried to stare her way through his bantering smile to his real meaning. Furiously, as she stared, the red blood came flushing back into her face.

“You don’t mean for a second that you—that you love me?” she asked incredulously.

“No, I don’t suppose I do,” acknowledged the Senior Surgeon with equal bluntness; “but my little kiddie here loves you,” he hastened somewhat nervously to affirm. “Oh, I’m almost sure that my little kiddie here—loves you. She needs you, anyway. Let it go at that. Call it that we both—need you.”

“What you mean is,” corrected the White Linen Nurse, “that needing somebody very badly, you’ve just suddenly decided that that somebody might as well be me?”

“Well, if you choose to put it like that,” said the Senior Surgeon, a bit sulkily.

“And if there hadn’t been an auto accident,” argued the White Linen Nurse just out of sheer inquisitiveness, “if there hadn’t been just this particular kind of an auto accident at this particular hour of this particular day of this particular month, with marigolds and—everything, you probably never would have realized that you did need anybody?”

“Maybe not,” admitted the Senior Surgeon.

“U-m-m,” said the White Linen Nurse. “And if you’d happened to take one of the other girls to-day instead of me, why, then I suppose you’d have felt that she was the one you really needed? And if you’d taken the Superintendent of Nurses instead of any of us girls, you might even have felt that she was the one you most needed?”

“Oh, hell!” said the Senior Surgeon.

With surprising agility for a man with a sprained back he wrenched himself around until he faced her quite squarely.

“Now see here, Miss Malgregor,” he growled, “for Heaven’s sake, listen to sense, even if you can’t talk it! Here am I, a plain professional man, making you a plain professional offer. Why in thunder should you try and fuss me all up because my offer isn’t couched in all the foolish, romantic, lace-paper sort of flub-dubbery that you think such an offer ought to be couched in, eh?”

“Fuss you all up, sir?” protested the White Linen Nurse, with real anxiety.

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

“‘THE CAR’S ON FIRE!’ HE MUMBLED. ‘YES, SIR,’ SAID THE WHITE LINEN NURSE. ‘WHY, DIDN’T YOU KNOW IT, SIR?’”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER

❏
LARGER IMAGE

“Yes, fuss me all up,” snarled the Senior Surgeon, with increasing venom.[Pg 681] “I’m no story-writer; I’m not trying to make up what might have happened a year from next February in a Chinese junk off the coast of—Nova Zembla to a Methodist preacher and a—and a militant suffragette. What I’m trying to size up is just what’s happened to you and me to-day. For the fact remains that it is to-day. And it is you and I. And there has been an accident, and out of that accident—and everything that’s gone with it—I have come out thinking of something that I never thought of before. And there were marigolds,” he added with unexpected whimsicality. “You see, I don’t deny even the marigolds.”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“Yes, what?” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

Softly the White Linen Nurse’s chin burrowed down a little closer against the sleeping child’s tangled hair.

“Why—yes, thank you very much; but I never shall love again,” she said definitely.

“Love?” gasped the Senior Surgeon. “Why, I’m not asking you to love me!” His face was suddenly crimson. “Why, I’d hate it, if you—loved me! Why, I’d—”

“O-h-h,” mumbled the White Linen Nurse in new embarrassment. Then suddenly and surprisingly her chin came tilting bravely up again. “What do you want?” she asked.

Helplessly the Senior Surgeon threw out his hands.

“My God!” he said, “what do you suppose I want? I want some one to take care of us.”

Gently the White Linen Nurse shifted her shoulder to accommodate the shifting little sleepy-head on her breast.

“You can hire some one for that,” she suggested with real relief.

“I was trying to hire—you!” said the Senior Surgeon, tersely.

“Hire me?” gasped the White Linen Nurse. “Why! Why!”

Adroitly she slipped both hands under the sleeping child and delivered the little frail-fleshed, heavily ironed body into the Senior Surgeon’s astonished arms.

“I—I don’t want to hold her,” he protested.

“She—isn’t mine,” argued the White Linen Nurse.

“But I can’t talk while I’m holding her,” insisted the Senior Surgeon.

“I can’t listen while I’m holding her,” persisted the White Linen Nurse.

Freely now, though cross-legged like a Turk, she jerked herself forward on the grass and sat probing up into the Senior Surgeon’s face like an excited puppy trying to solve whether the gift in your upraised hand is a lump of sugar or a live coal.

“You’re trying to hire me?” she prompted him nudgingly with her voice. “Hire me for money?”

“Oh, my Lord, no!” said the Senior Surgeon. “There are plenty of people I can hire for money; but they won’t stay,” he explained ruefully. “Hang it all!—they won’t stay!” Above his little girl’s white, pinched face his own ruddy countenance furrowed suddenly with unspeakable anxiety. “Why, just this last year,” he complained, “we’ve had nine different housekeepers and thirteen nursery governesses.” Skilfully as a surgeon, but awkwardly as a father, he bent to readjust the weight of the little iron leg-braces. “But, I tell you, no one will stay with us,” he finished hotly. “There’s something the matter with us. I don’t seem to have money enough in the world to make anybody stay with us.” Very wryly, very reluctantly, at one corner of his mouth his sense of humor ignited in a feeble grin. “So, you see, what I’m trying to do to you, Miss Malgregor, is to—hire you with something that will just naturally compel you to stay.” If the grin round his mouth strengthened a trifle, so also did the anxiety in his eyes. “For Heaven’s sake, Miss Malgregor,” he pleaded, “here’s a man and a house and a child all going to—hell! If you’re really and truly tired of nursing, and are looking for a new job, what’s the matter with tackling us?”

“It would be a job,” admitted the White Linen Nurse, demurely.

“Why, it would be a horrible job,” confided the Senior Surgeon, with no demureness whatsoever.

Very soberly, very thoughtfully, then, across the tangled, snuggling head of his own and another woman’s child, he urged the torments and the comforts of his home upon this second woman.

[Pg 682]

“What is there about my offer that you don’t like?” he demanded earnestly. “Is it the whole idea that offends you? Or just the way I put it? ‘General heartwork for a family of two’—what is the matter with that? Seems a bit cold to you, does it, for a real marriage proposal? Or is it that it’s just a bit too ardent, perhaps, for a mere plain business proposition?”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“Yes, what?” insisted the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes—sir,” flushed the White Linen Nurse.

Very meditatively the Senior Surgeon reconsidered his phrasing. “‘General heartwork for a family of two’? U-m-m.” Quite abruptly even the tenseness of his manner faded from him, leaving his face astonishingly quiet, astonishingly gentle. “But how else, Miss Malgregor,” he queried—“how else should a widower with a child proffer marriage to a—to a young girl like yourself? Even under conditions directly antipodal to ours, such a proposition can never be a purely romantic one. Yet even under conditions as cold and businesslike as ours, there’s got to be some vestige of affection in it, some vestige at least of the intelligence of affection, else what gain is there for my little girl and me over the purely mercenary domestic service that has racked us up to this time with its garish faithlessness?”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“But even if I had loved you, Miss Malgregor,” explained the Senior Surgeon, gravely, “my offer of marriage to you would not, I fear, have been a very great oratorical success. Materialist as I am, cynic, scientist, any harsh thing you choose to call me, marriage in some freak, boyish corner of my mind still defines itself as being the mutual sharing of a—mutually original experience. Certainly, whether a first marriage be instigated in love or worldliness, whether it eventually proves itself bliss, tragedy, or mere sickening ennui, to two people coming mutually virgin to the consummation of that marriage, the thrill of establishing publicly a man-and-woman home together is an emotion that cannot be reduplicated while life lasts.”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

Bleakly across the Senior Surgeon’s face something gray that was not years shadowed suddenly, and was gone again.

“Even so, Miss Malgregor,” he argued—“even so, without any glittering romance whatsoever, no woman, I believe, is very grossly unhappy in any affectional place that she knows distinctly to be her own place. It’s pretty much up to a man, then, I think, though it tear him brain from heart, to explain to a second wife quite definitely just exactly what place it is that he is offering her in his love or his friendship or his mere desperate need. No woman can even hope to step successfully into a second-hand home who does not know from her man’s own lips the measure of her predecessor. The respect we owe the dead is a selfish thing compared with the mercy we owe the living. In my own case—”

Unconsciously the White Linen Nurse’s lax shoulders quickened, and the sudden upward tilt of her chin was as frankly interrogative as a French inflection. “Yes, sir,” she said.

“In my own case,” said the Senior Surgeon, bluntly—“in my own case, Miss Malgregor, it is no more than fair to tell you that I—did not love my wife. And my wife did not love me.” Only the muscular twitch in his throat betrayed the torture that the confession cost him. “The details of that marriage are unnecessary,” he continued with equal bluntness. “It is enough, perhaps, to say that she was the daughter of an eminent surgeon with whom I was exceedingly anxious at that time to be allied, and that our mating, urged along on both sides, as it was, by strong personal ambitions, was one of those so-called ‘marriages of convenience’ which almost invariably turn out to be marriages of such dire inconvenience to the two people most concerned. For one year we lived together in a chaos of experimental acquaintanceship; for two years we lived together in increasing uncongeniality and distaste; for three years we lived together in open and acknowledged enmity; at the last, I am thankful to remember, we had one year together again that was at least an—armed truce.”

Darkly the gray shadow and the red flush chased each other once more across the man’s haggard face.

[Pg 683]

“I had a theory,” he said, “that possibly a child might bridge the chasm between us. My wife refuted the theory, but submitted herself reluctantly to the fact. And when she died in giving birth to—my theory, the shock, the remorse, the regret, the merciless self-analysis that I underwent at that time almost convinced me that the whole miserable failure of our marriage lay entirely on my own shoulders.” Like the stress of mid-summer, the tears of sweat started suddenly on his forehead. “But I am a fair man, I hope, even to myself, and the cooler, less-tortured judgment of the subsequent years has virtually assured me that for types as diametrically opposed as ours such a thing as mutual happiness never could have existed.”

Mechanically he bent down and smoothed a tickly lock of hair away from the little girl’s eyelids.

“And the child is the living physical image of her,” he stammered—“the violent hair, the ghost-white skin, the facile mouth, the arrogant eyes, staring, staring, maddeningly reproachful, persistently accusing. My own stubborn will, my own hideous temper, all my own ill-favored mannerisms, mock back at me eternally in her mother’s unloved features.” As mirthless as the grin of a skull, the Senior Surgeon’s mouth twisted up a little at one corner. “Maybe I could have borne it better if she’d been a boy,” he acknowledged grimly; “but to see all your virile—masculine vices come back at you, so sissified, in skirts!”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

With an unmistakable gasp of relief, the Senior Surgeon expanded his great chest.

“There, that’s done,” he said tersely. “So much for the past; now for the present! Look at us pretty keenly and judge for yourself. A man and a very little girl, not guaranteed, not even recommended, offered merely ‘as is,’ in the honest trade-phrase of the day, offered frankly in an open package, accepted frankly, if at all, ‘at your own risk.’ Not for an instant would I try to deceive you about us. Look at us closely, I ask, and decide for yourself. I am forty-eight years old; I am inexcusably bad-tempered, very quick to anger, and not, I fear, of great mercy. I am moody, I am selfish, I am most distinctly unsocial; but I am not, I believe, stingy, or ever intentionally unfair. My child is a cripple, and equally bad-tempered as myself. No one but a mercenary has ever coped with her, and she shows it. We have lived alone for six years. All of our clothes, and most of our ways, need mending. I am not one to mince matters, Miss Malgregor, nor has your training, I trust, made you one from whom truths must be veiled. I am a man, with all a man’s needs, mental, moral, physical. My child is a child with all a child’s needs, mental, moral, physical. Our house of life is full of cobwebs. The rooms of affection have long been closed. There will be a great deal of work to do, and it is not my intention, you see, that you should misunderstand in any conceivable way either the exact nature or the exact amount of work and worry involved. I should not want you to come to me afterward with a whine, as other workers do, and say: ‘Oh, but I didn’t know you would expect me to do this! Oh, but I hadn’t any idea you would want me to do that! And I certainly don’t see why you should expect me to give up my Thursday afternoon just because you yourself happened to fall down-stairs in the morning and break your back!’”

Across the Senior Surgeon’s face a real smile lightened suddenly.

“Really, Miss Malgregor,” he affirmed,[Pg 684] “I’m afraid there isn’t much of anything that you won’t be expected to do. And as to your ‘Thursdays out’? Ha! if you have ever yet found a way to temper the wind of your obligations to the shorn lamb of your pleasures, you have discovered something that I myself have never yet succeeded in discovering. And as to ‘wages’? Yes, I want to talk everything quite frankly. In addition to my average yearly earnings, which are by no means small, I have a reasonably large private fortune. Within normal limits there is no luxury, I think, that you cannot hope to have. Also, exclusive of the independent income which I should like to settle upon you, I should be very glad to finance for you any reasonable dreams that you may cherish concerning your family in Nova Scotia. Also, though the offer looks small and unimportant to you now, it is liable to loom pretty large to you later; also, I will personally guarantee to you, at some time every year, an unfettered, perfectly independent two-months’ holiday. So the offer stands—my ‘name and fame,’ if those mean anything to you, financial independence, an assured ‘breathing spell’ for at least two months out of twelve, and at last, but not least, my eternal gratitude. ‘General heartwork for a family of two!’ There, have I made the task perfectly clear to you? Not everything to be done all at once, you know; but immediately where necessity urges it, gradually as confidence inspires it, ultimately if affection justifies it, every womanish thing that needs to be done in a man’s and a child’s neglected lives? Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“Oh, and there’s one thing more,” confided the Senior Surgeon. “It’s something, of course, that I ought to have told you the very first thing of all.” Nervously he glanced down at the sleeping child, and lowered his voice to a mumbling monotone. “As regards my actual morals, you have naturally a right to know that I’ve led a pretty decentish sort of life, though I probably don’t deserve any special credit for that. A man who knows enough to be a doctor isn’t particularly apt to lead any other kind. Frankly, as women rate vices, I believe I have only one. What—what—I’m trying to tell you now is about that one.” A little defiantly as to chin, a little appealingly as to eye, he emptied his heart of its last tragic secret. “Through all the male line of my family, Miss Malgregor, dipsomania runs rampant. Two of my brothers, my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather before him, have all gone down, as the temperance people would say, into ‘drunkards’ graves.’ In my own case, I have chosen to compromise with the evil. Such a choice, believe me, has not been made carelessly or impulsively, but out of the agony and humiliation of several less successful methods.” As hard as a rock, his face grooved into its granite-like furrows again. “Naturally, under these existing conditions,” he warned her almost threateningly, “I am not peculiarly susceptible to the mawkishly ignorant and sentimental protests of people whose strongest passions are an appetite for chocolate candy. For eleven months of the year,” he hurried on a bit huskily—“for eleven months of the year, eleven months, each day reeking from dawn to dark with the driving, nerve-wracking, heart-wringing work that falls to my profession, I lead an absolutely abstemious life, touching neither wine nor liquor nor even, indeed, tea or coffee. In the twelfth month—June always—I go ’way up into Canada,—’way, ’way off in the woods to a little log camp I own there,—with an Indian who has guided me thus for eighteen years, and live like a—wild man for four gorgeous, care-free, trail-tramping, salmon-fighting, whisky-guzzling weeks. It is what your temperance friends would call a ‘spree.’ To be quite frank, I suppose it is what anybody would call a ‘spree.’ Then the first of July,—three or four days past the first of July, perhaps,—I come out of the woods quite tame again, a little emotionally nervous, perhaps, a little temperishly irritable, a little unduly sensitive about being greeted as a returned jail-bird, but most miraculously purged of all morbid craving for liquor, and with every digital muscle as coolly steady as yours, and every conscious mental process clamoring cleanly for its own work again.”

Furtively under his glowering brows he stopped and searched the White Linen Nurse’s imperturbable face. “It’s an—established habit, you understand,” he re-warned her. “I’m not advocating it, you understand, I’m not defending it; I’m simply calling your attention to the fact that it is an established habit. If you decide to come to us, I—I couldn’t, you know, at forty-eight, begin all over again to—to have some one waiting for me on the top step the first of July to tell me what a low beast I am till I go down the steps again the following June.”

“No, of course not,” conceded the White Linen Nurse. Blandly she lifted her lovely eyes to his. “Father’s like that,” she confided amiably. “Once a year—just Easter Sunday only—he always buys him a brand-new suit of clothes and goes to church. And it does something to him, I don’t know exactly what, but Easter afternoon he always gets drunk,—oh, mad, fighting drunk is what I mean,—and goes out and tries to shoot up the whole county.” Worriedly, two black[Pg 685] thoughts puckered between her eyebrows. “And always,” she said, “he makes mother and me go up to Halifax beforehand to pick out the suit for him. It’s pretty hard sometimes,” she said, “to find anything dressy enough for the morning that’s serviceable enough for the afternoon.”

“Eh?” jerked the Senior Surgeon. Then suddenly he began to smile again like a stormy sky from which the last cloud has just been cleared. “Well, it’s all right, then, is it? You’ll take us?” he asked brightly.

“Oh, no!” said the White Linen Nurse. “Oh, no, sir! Oh, no, indeed, sir!” Quite perceptibly she jerked her way backward a little on the grass. “Thank you very much,” she persisted courteously. “It’s been very interesting. I thank you very much for telling me, but—”

“But what?” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

“But it’s too quick,” said the White Linen Nurse. “No man could tell like that, just between one eye-wink and another, what he wanted about anything, let alone marrying a perfect stranger.”

Instantly the Senior Surgeon bridled.

“I assure you, my dear young lady,” he retorted, “that I am entirely and completely accustomed to deciding between ‘one wink and another’ just exactly what it is that I want. Indeed, I assure you that there are a good many people living to-day who wouldn’t be living if it had taken me even as long as a wink and three quarters to make up my mind.”

“Yes, I know, sir,” acknowledged the White Linen Nurse. “Yes, of course, sir,” she acquiesced, with most commendable humility; “but all the same, sir, I couldn’t do it,” she persisted with inflexible positiveness. “Why, I haven’t enough education,” she confessed quite shamelessly.

“You had enough, I notice, to get into the hospital with,” drawled the Senior Surgeon, a bit grumpily, “and that’s quite as much as most people have, I assure you. ‘A high-school education or its equivalent,’—that is the hospital requirement, I believe?” he questioned tartly.

“‘A high-school education or its—equivocation’ is what we girls call it,” confessed the White Linen Nurse, demurely. “But even so, sir,” she pleaded, “it isn’t just my lack of education. It’s my brains. I tell you, sir, I haven’t got enough brains to do what you suggest.”

“I don’t mean at all to belittle your brains,” grinned the Senior Surgeon despite himself,—“oh, not at all, Miss Malgregor,—but, you see, it isn’t especially brains that I’m looking for. Really, what I need most,” he acknowledged frankly, “is an extra pair of hands to go with the—brains I already possess.”

“Yes, I know, sir,” persisted the White Linen Nurse. “Yes, of course, sir,” she conceded. “Yes, of course, sir, my hands work awfully well—with your face. But all the same,” she kindled suddenly—“all the same, sir, I can’t. I won’t! I tell you, sir, I won’t! Why, I’m not in your world, sir. Why, I’m not in your class. Why, my folks aren’t like your folks. Oh, we’re just as good as you, of course, but we aren’t as nice. Oh, we’re not nice at all. Really and truly we’re not.” Desperately through her mind she rummaged up and down for some one conclusive fact that would close this torturing argument for all time. “Why, my father eats with his knife!” she asserted triumphantly.

“Would he be apt to eat with mine?” asked the Senior Surgeon, with extravagant gravity.

Precipitously the White Linen Nurse jumped to the defense of her father’s intrinsic honor.

“Oh, no,” she denied with some vehemence; “Father’s never cheeky like that! Father’s simple sometimes—plain, I mean. Or he might be a bit sharp. But, oh, I’m sure he’d never be—cheeky. Oh, no, sir. No.”

“Oh, very well, then,” grinned the Senior Surgeon. “We can consider everything all comfortably settled, then, I suppose?”

“No, we can’t,” screamed the White Linen Nurse. A little awkwardly, with cramped limbs, she struggled partly upward from the grass and knelt there, defying the Senior Surgeon from her temporarily superior height. “No, we can’t,” she reiterated wildly. “I tell you I can’t, sir. I won’t! I won’t! I’ve been engaged once, and it’s enough. I tell you, sir, I’m all engaged out!”

[Pg 686]

“What’s become of the man you were engaged to?” quizzed the Senior Surgeon, sharply.

“Why, he’s married,” said the White Linen Nurse. “And they’ve got a kid!” she added tempestuously.

“Good! I’m glad of it,” smiled the Senior Surgeon, quite amazingly. “Now he surely won’t bother us any more.”

“But I was engaged so long,” protested the White Linen Nurse—“almost ever since I was born, I said. It’s too long. You don’t get over it.”

“He got over it,” remarked the Senior Surgeon, laconically.

“Y-e-s,” admitted the White Linen Nurse; “but, I tell you, it doesn’t seem decent, not after being engaged—twenty years.” With a little helpless gesture of appeal she threw out her hands. “Oh, can’t I make you understand, sir?”

“Why, of course I understand,” said the Senior Surgeon, briskly. “You mean that you and John—”

“His name was Joe,” corrected the White Linen Nurse.

With astonishing amiability the Senior Surgeon acknowledged the correction.

“You mean,” he said—“you mean that you and—Joe have been cradled together so familiarly all your babyhood that on your wedding-night you could most naturally have said: ‘Let me see, Joe, it’s two pillows that you always have, isn’t it? And a double-fold of blanket at the foot?’ You mean that you and Joe have been washed and scrubbed together so familiarly all your young childhood that you could identify Joe’s headless body twenty years hence by the kerosene-lamp scar across his back? You mean that you and Joe have played house together so familiarly all your young tin-dish days that even your rag dolls called Joe father? You mean that since your earliest memory, until a year or so ago, life has never once been just you and life, but always you and life and Joe? You and spring and Joe, you and summer and Joe, you and autumn and Joe, you and winter and Joe, till every conscious nerve in your body has been so everlastingly Joed with Joe’s Joeness that you don’t believe there’s any experience left in life powerful enough to eradicate that original impression? Eh?”

“Yes, sir,” flushed the White Linen Nurse.

“Good! I’m glad of it,” snapped the Senior Surgeon. “It doesn’t make you seem quite so alarmingly innocent and remote for a widower to offer marriage to. Good, I say! I’m glad of it.”

“Even so, I don’t want to,” said the White Linen Nurse. “Thank you very much, sir; but even so, I don’t want to.”

“Would you marry Joe now if he were suddenly free and wanted you?” asked the Senior Surgeon, bluntly.

“Oh, my Lord, no!” said the White Linen Nurse.

“Other men are pretty sure to want you,” admonished the Senior Surgeon. “Have you made up your mind definitely that you’ll never marry anybody?”

“N-o, not exactly,” confessed the White Linen Nurse.

An odd flicker twitched across the Senior Surgeon’s face like a sob in the brain.

“What’s your first name, Miss Malgregor?” he asked a bit huskily.

“Rae,” she told him, with some surprise.

The Senior Surgeon’s eyes narrowed suddenly again.

“Damn it all, Rae,” he said, “I—want you!”

Precipitously the White Linen Nurse scrambled to her feet.

“If you don’t mind, sir,” she cried, “I’ll run down to the brook and get myself a drink of water.”

Impishly like a child, muscularly like a man, the Senior Surgeon clutched out at the flapping corner of her coat.

“No, you don’t,” he laughed, “till you’ve given me my definite answer, yes or no.”

Breathlessly the White Linen Nurse spun round in her tracks. Her breast was heaving with ill-suppressed sobs, her eyes were blurred with tears.

“You’ve no business to hurry me so,” she protested passionately. “It isn’t fair; it isn’t kind.”

Sluggishly in the Senior Surgeon’s jolted arms the Little Girl woke from her feverish nap and peered up perplexedly through the gray dusk into her father’s face.

“Where’s my kitty?” she asked hazily.

“Eh?” jerked the Senior Surgeon.

Harshly the little iron leg-braces[Pg 687] clanked together. In an instant the White Linen Nurse was on her knees in the grass.

“You don’t hold her right, sir,” she expostulated. Deftly, with soft, darting little touches, interrupted only by rubbing her knuckles into her own tears, she reached out and eased successively the bruise of a buckle or the dragging weight on a cramped little hip.

Still drowsily, still hazily, with little smacking gasps and gulping swallows, the child worried her way back again into consciousness.

“All the birds were there, Father,” she droned forth feebly from her sweltering mink-fur nest.

Frenziedly she began to burrow the back of her head into her father’s shoulder. “And bumblebees—and bumblebees—”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake—‘buzzed in the trees!’” interpolated the Senior Surgeon.

Rigidly from head to foot the little body in his arms stiffened suddenly. As one who saw the supreme achievement of a life-time swept away by some one careless joggle of an infinitesimal part, the Little Girl stared up agonizingly into her father’s face.

“Oh, I don’t think ‘buzzed’ was the word!” she began convulsively. “Oh, I don’t think—”

Startlingly through the twilight the Senior Surgeon felt the White Linen Nurse’s rose-red lips come smack against his ear.

“Darn you! Can’t you say ‘crocheted in the trees’?” sobbed the White Linen Nurse.

Grotesquely for an instant the Senior Surgeon’s eyes and the White Linen Nurse’s eyes glared at each other in rank antagonism. Then suddenly the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing.

“Oh, very well,” he surrendered—“‘crocheted in the trees!’”

The White Linen Nurse sank back on her heels and began to clap her hands.

“Oh, now I will! Now I will!” she cried exultantly.

“Will what?” frowned the Senior Surgeon.

The White Linen Nurse stopped clapping her hands and began to wring them nervously in her lap instead.

“Why, will—will,” she confessed demurely.

“Oh!” exclaimed the Senior Surgeon. “Oh!” Then jerkily he began to pucker his eyebrows. “But, for Heaven’s sake, what’s the ‘crocheted in the trees’ got to do with it?” he asked perplexedly.

“Nothing much,” mused the White Linen Nurse, very softly. With sudden alertness she turned her curly blonde head toward the road. “There’s somebody coming,” she said. “I hear a team.”

Overcome by a bashfulness that tried to escape in jocosity, the Senior Surgeon gave an odd, choking little chuckle.

“Well, I never thought I should marry a—trained nurse!” he acknowledged with somewhat hectic blitheness.

Impulsively the White Linen Nurse reached for her watch and lifted it close to her twilight-blinded eyes. A sense of ineffable peace crept suddenly over her.

“You won’t, sir,” she said amiably. “It’s twenty minutes of nine now, and the graduation was at eight.”

FOR any real adventure except dying, June is certainly a most auspicious month.

Indeed, it was on the very first rain-green, rose-red morning of June that the White Linen Nurse sallied forth upon her extremely hazardous adventure of marrying the Senior Surgeon and his naughty little crippled daughter.

The wedding was at noon in some kind of gray-granite church. The Senior Surgeon was there, of course, and the necessary witnesses; but the Little Crippled Girl never turned up at all, owing, it proved later, to a more than usually violent wrangle with whomever dressed her, concerning the general advisability of sporting turquoise-colored stockings with her brightest little purple dress.

The Senior Surgeon’s stockings, if you really care to know, were gray, and the Senior Surgeon’s suit was gray, and he looked altogether very huge and distinguished, and no more strikingly unhappy than any bridegroom looks in a gray-granite church.

And the White Linen Nurse, no longer[Pg 688] now truly a White Linen Nurse, but just an ordinary, every-day silk-and-cloth lady of any color she chose, wore something rather coaty and grand and bluish, and was distractingly pretty, of course, but most essentially unfamiliar, and just a tiny bit awkward and bony-wristed-looking, as even an admiral is apt to be on his first day out of uniform.

Then as soon as the wedding ceremony was over, the bride and groom went to a wonderful green-and-gold café, all built of marble and lined with music, and had a little lunch. What I really mean, of course, is that they had a very large lunch, but didn’t eat any of it.

Then in a taxi-cab, just exactly like any other taxi-cab, the White Linen Nurse drove home alone to the Senior Surgeon’s great, gloomy house, to find her brand-new stepdaughter still screaming over the turquoise-colored stockings. And the Senior Surgeon, in a Canadian-bound train, just exactly like any other Canadian-bound train, started off alone, as usual, on his annual June “spree.”

Please don’t think for a moment that it was the Senior Surgeon who was responsible for the general eccentricities of this amazing wedding-day. No, indeed. The Senior Surgeon didn’t want to be married the first day of June. He said he didn’t, he growled he didn’t, he snarled he didn’t, he swore he didn’t; and when he finished saying and growling and snarling and swearing, and looked up at the White Linen Nurse for a confirmation of his opinion, the White Linen Nurse smiled perfectly amiably and said, “Yes, sir.” Then the Senior Surgeon gave a great gasp of relief and announced resonantly: “Well, it’s all settled, then? We’ll be married some time in July, after I get home from Canada?” And when the White Linen Nurse kept right on smiling perfectly amiably and said, “Oh, no, sir, oh, no, thank you, sir; it wouldn’t seem exactly legal to me to be married any other month but June,” the Senior Surgeon went absolutely dumb with rage that this mere chit of a girl, and a trained nurse, too, should dare to thwart his personal and professional convenience. But the White Linen Nurse just drooped her pretty blonde head and blushed and blushed and blushed and said: “I was only marrying you, sir, to—accommodate you, sir, and if June doesn’t accommodate you, I’d rather go to Japan with that monoideic somnambulism case. It’s very interesting, and it sails June 2.” Then, “Oh, hell with the ‘monoideic somnambulism case’!” the Senior Surgeon would protest.

Really it took the Senior Surgeon quite a long while to work out the three special arguments that would best protect him, he thought, from the horridly embarrassing idea of being married in June.

“But you can’t get ready so soon,” he suggested at last with real triumph. “You’ve no idea how long it takes a girl to get ready to be married. There are so many people she has to tell—and everything.”

“There’s never but two that she’s got to tell, or bust,” conceded the White Linen Nurse with perfect candor—“just the woman she loves the most and the woman she hates the worst. I’ll write my mother to-morrow, but I told the Superintendent of Nurses yesterday.”

“The deuce you did!” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

Almost caressingly the White Linen Nurse lifted her big blue eyes to his.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “And she looked as sick as a young undertaker. I can’t imagine what ailed her.”

“Eh?” choked the Senior Surgeon. “But the house, now,” he hastened to contend—“the house, now, needs a lot of fixing over; it’s all run down. It’s all—everything. We never in the world could get it into shape by the first of June. For Heaven’s sake, now that we’ve got money enough to make it right, let’s go slow and make it perfectly right.”

A little nervously the White Linen Nurse began to fumble through the pages of her memorandum-book.

“I’ve always had money enough to ‘go slow and make things perfectly right,’” she confided a bit wistfully. “Never in all my life have I had a pair of boots that weren’t guaranteed or a dress that wouldn’t wash or a hat that wasn’t worth at least three re-pressings. What I was hoping for now, sir, was that I was going to have enough money so that I could go fast and make things wrong if I wanted to—so that I could afford to take chances, I mean. Here’s this wall-paper, now,”—tragically she pointed to some figuring in her note-book,—[Pg 689]“it’s got peacocks on it, life-size, in a queen’s garden, and I wanted it for the dining-room. Maybe it would fade, maybe we’d get tired of it, maybe it would poison us: slam it on one week, and slash it off the next. I wanted it just because I wanted it, sir. I thought maybe, while you were ’way off in Canada—”

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

“‘YOU’VE NO BUSINESS TO HURRY ME SO,’ SHE PROTESTED. ‘IT ISN’T FAIR; IT ISN’T KIND’”

DRAWN BY HERMAN PFEIFER

❏
LARGER IMAGE

Eagerly the Senior Surgeon jerked his chair a little nearer to his fiancée’s.

“Now, my dear girl,” he said, “that’s just what I want to explain—that’s just what I want to explain—just what I want to explain—to—er—explain,” he continued a bit falteringly.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

Very deliberately the Senior Surgeon removed a fleck of dust from one of his cuffs.

“All this talk of yours about wanting to be married the same day I start off on my—Canadian trip,” he contended, “why, it’s all damned nonsense.”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

Very conscientiously the Senior Surgeon began to search for a fleck of dust on his other cuff.

“Why, my—my dear girl,” he persisted, “it’s absurd, it’s outrageous! Why, people would—would hoot at us! Why, they’d think—”

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

“Why, my dear girl,” sweated the Senior Surgeon, “even though you and I understand perfectly well the purely formal, businesslike conditions of our marriage, we must at least, for sheer decency’s sake, keep up a certain semblance of marital conventionality before the world. Why, if we were married at noon the first day of June as you suggest, and I should go right off alone as usual on my Canadian trip, and you should come back alone to the house, why, people would think—would think that I didn’t care anything about you.”

“But you don’t,” said the White Linen Nurse, serenely.

“Why, they’d think,” choked the Senior Surgeon—“they’d think you were trying your—darndest to get rid of me.”

“I am,” said the White Linen Nurse, complacently.

With a muttered ejaculation the Senior Surgeon jumped to his feet and stood glaring down at her.

Quite ingenuously the White Linen Nurse met and parried the glare.

“A gentleman, and a red-haired kiddie, and a great walloping house all at once, it’s too much,” she confided genially. “Thank you just the same, but I’d rather take them gradually. First of all, sir, you see, I’ve got to teach the little kiddie to like me. And then there’s a green-tiled paper with floppity sea-gulls on it that I want to try for the bath-room. And—and—” Ecstatically she clapped her hands together. “Oh, sir, there are such loads and loads of experiments I want to try while you are off on your spree!”

“’S-h-h!” cried the Senior Surgeon. His face was suddenly blanched, his mouth twitching like the mouth of one stricken with almost insupportable pain. “For God’s sake, Miss Malgregor,” he pleaded, “can’t you call it my Canadian trip?”

Wider and wider the White Linen Nurse opened her big blue eyes at him.

“But it is a spree, sir!” she protested resolutely. “And my father says—” Still resolutely her young mouth curved to its original assertion, but from under her heavy-shadowing eyelashes a little smile crept softly out—“when my father’s got a lame trotting-horse, sir, that he’s trying to shuck off his hands,” she faltered, “he doesn’t ever go round mournful-like, with his head hanging, telling folks about his wonderful trotter that’s just ‘the littlest, teeniest, tiniest bit lame.’ Oh, no. What father does is to call up every one he knows within twenty miles and tell ’em: ‘Say, Tom, Bill, Harry, or whatever your name is, what in the deuce do you suppose I’ve got over here in my barn? A lame horse that wants to trot! Lamer than the deuce, you know, but can do a mile in two forty.’” Faintly the little smile quickened again in the White Linen Nurse’s eyes. “And the barn will be full of men in half an hour,” she said. “Somehow nobody wants a trotter that’s lame, but almost anybody seems willing to risk a lame horse that’s plucky enough to trot.”

“What’s the ‘lame trotting-horse’ got to do with me?” snarled the Senior Surgeon, incisively.

Darkly the White Linen Nurse’s lashes fringed down across her cheeks.

“Nothing much,” she said; “only—”

“Only what?” demanded the Senior Surgeon. A little more roughly than he realized he stooped down and took the White Linen Nurse by her shoulders, and[Pg 690] jerked her sharply round to the light. “Only what?” he insisted peremptorily.

Almost plaintively she lifted her eyes to his.

“Only my father says,” she confided obediently—“my father says, ‘if you’ve got a worse foot, for Heaven’s sake, put it forward, and get it over with!’

“So I’ve got to call it a spree,” smiled the White Linen Nurse; “’cause when I think of marrying a surgeon that goes off and gets drunk every June, it—it scares me almost to death; but—” Abruptly the red smile faded from her lips, the blue smile from her eyes—“but when I think of marrying a—June drunk that’s got the grit to pull up absolutely straight as a die and be a surgeon all the other ’leven months in the year?” Dartingly she bent down and kissed the Senior Surgeon’s astonished wrist. “Oh, then I think you’re perfectly grand!” she sobbed.

Awkwardly the Senior Surgeon pulled away and began to pace the floor.

“You’re a good little girl, Rae Malgregor,” he mumbled huskily—“a good little girl. I truly believe you’re the kind that will see me through.” Poignantly in his eyes humiliation overwhelmed the mist. Perversely in its turn resentment overtook the humiliation. “But I won’t be married in June,” he reasserted bombastically. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. I tell you I positively refuse to have a lot of damned fools speculating about my private affairs, wondering why I didn’t take you, wondering why I didn’t stay home with you. I tell you I won’t. I surely won’t.”

“Yes, sir,” whimpered the White Linen Nurse.

With a real gasp of relief the Senior Surgeon stopped his eternal pacing of the floor.

“Bully for you!” he said. “You mean then we’ll be married some time in July after I get back from my—trip?”

“Oh, no, sir,” whimpered the White Linen Nurse.

“But, great Heavens!” shouted the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, sir,” the White Linen Nurse began all over again. Dreamily planning out her wedding-gown, her lips without the slightest conscious effort on her part were already curving into shape for her alternate “No, sir.”

“You’re an idiot!” snapped the Senior Surgeon.

A little reproachfully the White Linen Nurse came frowning out of her reverie.

“Would it do just as well for traveling, do you think?” she asked, with real concern.

“Eh? What?” said the Senior Surgeon.

“I mean, does Japan spot?” queried the White Linen Nurse. “Would it spot a serge, I mean?”

“Oh, hell with Japan!” jerked out the Senior Surgeon.

“Yes, sir,” said the White Linen Nurse.

Now, perhaps you will understand just exactly how it happened that the Senior Surgeon and the White Linen Nurse were married on the first day of June, and just exactly how it happened that the Senior Surgeon went off alone as usual on his Canadian trip, and just exactly how it happened that the White Linen Nurse came home alone to the Senior Surgeon’s great, gloomy house, to find her brand-new stepdaughter still screaming over the turquoise-colored stockings. Everything now is perfectly comfortably explained except the turquoise-colored stockings. Nobody could explain the turquoise-colored stockings.

But even a little child could explain the ensuing June. Oh, June was perfectly wonderful that year! Bud, blossom, birdsong, breeze, rioting headlong through the land; warm days as sweet and lush as a greenhouse vapor; crisp nights faintly metallic, like the scent of stars; hurdy-gurdies romping tunefully on every street corner; even the ash-man flushing frankly pink across his dusty cheek-bones.

Like two fairies who had sublet a giant’s cave, the White Linen Nurse and the Little Crippled Girl turned themselves loose upon the Senior Surgeon’s gloomy old house.

It certainly was a gloomy old house, but handsome withal, square and brown and substantial, and most generously gardened within high brick walls. Except for dusting the lilac-bushes with the hose, and weeding a few rusty leaves out of the privet hedge, and tacking up three or four scraggly sprays of English ivy, and re-greening one or two bay-tree boxes, there was really nothing much to do to the garden. But the house? O ye gods! All[Pg 691] day long from morning till night, but most particularly from the back door to the barn, sweating workmen scuttled back and forth till nary a guilty piece of black-walnut furniture had escaped. All day long from morning till night, but most particularly from ceilings to floors, sweltering workmen scurried up and down step-ladders, stripping dingy papers from dingier plasterings.

When the White Linen Nurse wasn’t busy renovating the big house or the little stepdaughter, she was writing to the Senior Surgeon. She wrote twice.

“Dear Dr. Faber,” the first letter said—

It was this letter that drew the only definite message from the itinerant bridegroom.

“Kindly refrain from rummaging in my ulster pockets,” wrote the Senior Surgeon, briefly. “The ‘thing’ you threw out happened to be the cerebellum and medulla of an extremely eminent English theologian.”

“Even so, it was sour,” telegraphed the White Linen Nurse in a perfect agony of remorse and humiliation.

The telegram took an Indian with a birch canoe two days to deliver, and cost the Senior Surgeon twelve dollars. Just impulsively the Senior Surgeon decided to make no further comments on domestic affairs at that particular range.

Very fortunately for this impulse, the White Linen Nurse’s second letter concerned itself almost entirely with matters quite extraneous to the home.

The second letter ran:

It was some indefinite, pleasant time on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June, that the Senior Surgeon received the second letter. It was Friday, the twenty-sixth of June, exactly at dawn, that the Senior Surgeon started homeward.

(To be concluded)

[Pg 693]

SUBMARINE MOUNTAINS

BY CALE YOUNG RICE

[Pg 694]

A VISIT TO WHISTLER

BY MARIA TORRILHON BUEL

IN May, 1899, we were two women in Paris for hats, gowns, and the season’s show of pictures. I was under the wing of a handsome matron who had a latent desire to see herself transferred to canvas should she chance upon a painter with an appealing portrait of some other woman. Through friends, several great studios were opened to us, and we grew more and more enterprising, until one day my guide and mentor, suddenly turning to me, said, “Let us visit Whistler!”

It fairly took my breath away, for I recalled much caustic wit of alleged Whistler origin that I had seen in the public prints, and, feeling the promptings of caution, I exclaimed, “How dare you?”

“Because he has invited me,” she replied.

It was true, for, a few years before, my friend’s husband, shrewd in the law, and equally daring in his connoisseurship, had paid a large price for a Whistler “Nocturne” of a beauty so characteristic that even amateurs could look at it and wonder what it was all about. This nocturne began its existence in my friend’s home by perpetrating a joke. It had been brought to the house by one of Whistler’s pupils, just from Europe. We two women entered the drawing-room to find it alone in its glory, which did not seem to be dimmed by the fact that it was on the carpet with a Louis Quinze chair for an easel. We gazed in wonderment, from all possible angles, and finally exclaimed that it was “quite Japanese” in style and coloring. Then the reverent pupil entered, kneeled before it, wiped it softly with his silk handkerchief, smiled, and reversed it—for we had been studying the chef-d’œuvre upside down. He withdrew without taking notice of our chagrin. Evidently the joke was too good to keep, for the incident has become one of the stock Whistler anecdotes. Within a year a friend has regaled me with it, without a suspicion of carrying coals to Newcastle.

That purchase had given the artist much satisfaction, aside from the lofty price, and he used to write charming letters, asking my friend to visit him in Paris.

That same day we went to his studio in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.

Arriving at a forbidding area, with a winding staircase, we looked at each other with feminine indecision. Before we could arrange a retreat, the concierge, who was somewhere near the top, caught sight of us and called down to learn whom we wanted. I made a megaphone of my hand and screamed aloft, “Monsieur Whist-lai-ai-re!”

“Là bas, on the fifth,” she answered.

After a slow ascent, we stood at last on the top steps of the winding staircase. I can still hear the prolonged jingle of the primitive bell my vigorous pull had roused. Before it was stilled, the door opened suddenly, and there stood Whistler, the great Whistler—in his shirt-sleeves!

The first impression was of a little, big personage who completely filled the doorway. He appeared much smaller than any idea of personality conveyed by the portraits of him that we had seen. On his left arm he held a large palette, with a bunch of brushes in his hand. All were moist, as were also to some extent his sleeves and clothing, for he was without a painting-apron. But the famous mono[Pg 695]cle was there, and the whisk of white hair was in the right place. The signalement was complete.

There he stood, silent, obviously waiting for us to explain the intrusion. In the dim light I imagined that I could see his monocle bristling, and I felt much like a conscience-stricken child about to be eaten by an ogre. As my friend remained dumb, in a weak voice I murmured the name that was to be our talisman, meekly adding my own; but that was lost in his “Ah!” of recognition.

“You are the bold woman who bought my picture! I have a sitter now; but come to-morrow at four, and we will have tea.”

We accepted in unison, the door was closed in our faces, and with a sense of deep satisfaction at having escaped an unknown peril we tripped lightly down the staircase. While we were standing at his door, Whistler had so managed that we could not have moved half an inch farther toward the forbidden sanctuary. It was probably a well-planned, habitual, and defensive position on his part.

On the following day, punctually at four o’clock, we again stood in constrained positions on the narrow steps, but without a sense of awkwardness; again the bell jingled wildly.

Again the great Whistler opened the door, but now dressed in a suit of black, with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his lapel. His welcome was graceful and cordial. With easy confidence we walked into the studio. A bright fire glowed at one end, in front of which was a round table covered with green rep, on which were tea-things, and dishes filled with dainty French cakes. A little maid, in neat cap and apron, was hovering about. All about us, turned to the wall and unframed, were seemingly hundreds of canvases. What has become of all those treasures since Whistler’s death?

As we entered, he said, with a wave of the hand toward the hidden canvases, “See how careful I am!”

As a whole, the studio, though spacious, was simple in its furnishings, except for the amazing decoration of masterpieces turned to the wall. He offered us chairs, and seated himself on the edge of a long table. Reaching out for a copy of “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” he began to read to us his most spicy letters.

He read on and on, until we began to wonder whether all the afternoon was to be spent in this novel and entertaining way. Meanwhile I glanced about and noticed a large phonograph, which seemed the only discordant note in an otherwise harmonious place. It soon became a discord, for suddenly tiring of his own wit, he turned lovingly to the instrument, and regaled us with a medley of “coon” songs, orchestral numbers, and other music. Had we dared, we should have glanced at each other in amazement.

At last Whistler reverted to art, and brought a canvas to the easel. He oiled it slightly, tenderly, and, lo! a handsome Italian boy shone forth, soul and all. It was magical. We had previously agreed to say but little, and never to gush over anything we might be shown. We did not speak, indeed hardly dared to, for he was watching us as a nurse watches a thermometer in an overheated room.

Again he made search, and brought before us another picture. This time the oiling and dusting disclosed the portrait of a beautiful American girl, wearing an evening cloak, the collar of which was very high. Such breeding and poise in the picture! It was more than a reproduction: something of the inner woman was there. Over this we allowed ourselves to exclaim in admiration, which moved the master to say:

“It took a long time to paint this portrait.”

There was a pause, of which my friend took advantage to say that she would much like to have him paint her portrait.

“How long shall you be in Paris?” he asked.

“Another week.”

“There you are! You Americans are all the same; here to-day, gone to-morrow; à Paris aujourd’hui, demain, à Hoboken. One might as well try to paint fish jumping out of the water,” he added with his captivating laugh.

With this laugh, all the ice that had been accumulating melted away. I found voice to say that I had recognized him immediately the day before from having seen and greatly admired his portrait by a fellow-artist. To my complete discomfiture, he shrugged his shoulders and said:

[Pg 696]

“He imagines that he has painted my portrait.”

At last we were having a glimpse of the real Whistler, or, rather, of the one we had heard of and read about.

He showed us two more canvases, one by a pupil. Then he drew up to the tea-table and began to discourse on the “Nocturne” which my friend had bought. This led to a recital of his hopes of the budding “Académie Whistler,” which had been formally opened in the autumn of 1898. However, the academy did not remain open long. Nothing in his training or natural gifts gave him the endurance and patience required of a teacher; besides, his health failed, and he went to a milder climate. We dared ask him how he liked being a teacher, to which he answered:

“You know what the French call une bête de somme—un cheval de fiacre—quoi!” Again he shrugged and sighed.

We had brought with us two copies of Nicholson’s caricature of Whistler, in which he is standing at full-length, monocled, against a nocturnal sky. We asked him to sign them, and he was exceedingly gracious about it.

“These caricatures were my idea,” he explained; “I told Nicholson how to do them. They are a great success.”

On each he sketched a butterfly in pencil, adding on one, “Tant pis” and on the other, “With all proper regrets.”

He told us that he often became very much attached to his work. Once he had an order from a man for a portrait; it was duly finished, and amply paid for. He still held it, although the man wrote periodically to have it sent to him. “I really feel that it is much too good for him,” he explained. “The worst of it is that the longer I keep it the more I like it, and”—after a pause he whispered—“the less likely he is to get it.”

As the afternoon had waned, we suggested driving him home. He assented, putting on his famous high hat and a pair of black gloves, and we clattered down the five flights together, the air seeming fairly saturated with his presence.

Entering the one-horse victoria which had brought us from the hotel, I had to sit on the strapontin, about which I festooned myself as best I could. To my astonishment, our appearance did not seem to create much commotion in the Quartier, though I knew how exotic we must look.

We drove through a round porte-cochère, which was the entrance to a sort of tunnel; at the end of it we emerged into a courtyard flanked by the little house Whistler occupied.

On reaching his home, the master insisted on our coming in to see it. We found it rather gloomy, with a garden in the rear, which was shown with great pride. There were a few pictures on the walls. The cloth was spread on the dining-table, and many dishes and plates were stacked in the middle.

The good-bys were said, with an invitation extended to visit his studio again on our next trip. We had had a memorable visit with him, and were taking away with us impressions of the real Whistler—the Whistler whom the world at large knew not, the kind, genial, courteous, humanly sorrowful, and sorrowing man of genius.

[Pg 697]

LOWER MANHATTAN, FROM THE HUDSON, OR NORTH, RIVER

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 698]

BROAD STREET, LOOKING NORTH TO WALL STREET

The portico of the Stock Exchange is at the left, a part of the portico of the Sub-Treasury is seen at Wall and Nassau Streets, and the crowd in the street, at the right, is the outdoor exchange known as “The Curb.”

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 699]

CORTLANDT STREET, LOOKING EAST FROM THE FERRY

The Hudson Terminal is seen at the left, and the Investment Building and Singer Tower at the right.

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 700]

LOWER BROADWAY, FROM THE POST-OFFICE

The portico of St. Paul’s is in the foreground, and the Singer Tower in the distance.

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 701]

THE BOOK OF HIS HEART

BY ALLAN UPDEGRAFF

Author of “The Siren of the Air,” etc.

WITH A PICTURE BY HERMAN PFEIFER

ON Monday, April 11, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

His reason for adding this selection was not very clear; but somehow a little touch of poetry seemed suitable after an entry of that sort. There was a good deal of poetry in the book, selections copied from various magazines and volumes that had helped to brighten his prosaic existence as a silk salesman in McDavitt’s department store.

One would have had to be a good observer to guess that behind the plain, neat, black-and-white exterior of Mr. Francis there was the soul of a poet. Judged by the frost-touched blackness of his hair, he might have been thirty-eight years old. His face, tending to delicacy of feature in the forehead and nose, and rendered a little wistful by the worry-lines about his eyes, had the pallor that comes from years of living in artificial light. He invariably looked as though he had been smooth-shaven five minutes before, and he invariably was ready to give his most earnest attention to the desires of a customer. He fitted in the high-classed old establishment that employed him, and paid him well for a silk salesman. The consideration shown him he repaid by immaculateness in dress, scrupulousness in his reports, and the air of an English butler in dealing with customers.

His inner self was revealed in only two of his daily activities—in the handling of the silks that had been his familiars from boyhood, and in the keeping of a large red-morocco diary that he carried in the breast-pocket of his black frock-coat.

The silks—how he caressed their shimmering textures and colors, how he made them display all their subtle beauties and allurements! It was quite without guile on his part: the idea of urging or inveigling any one into buying would have filled him with horror. He displayed his wares to their best advantage because he loved them. Therefore he did it so wonderfully well that many a fine lady, after watching his firm, white, well-kept hands play among the folds, bought stuffs for which she had no possible use. This gained him some dislike and trouble, for McDavitt’s does not exchange dress-goods.

But Mr. Francis’s real self-revelation was reserved for the diary. Every night he made an entry. During the several hours every day when the choiceness, and[Pg 702] therefore sparseness, of McDavitt’s clientele left him with nothing to do, he often took out the book, opened it among the shining silks on the mahogany counter, and made a note or two in it. It was a rather large book for a diary, and the India-paper leaves gave its thousand pages the bulk of a far smaller number in ordinary diaries. The words “Personal Journal” were printed in gold across the front cover, and there was a bunch of gold forget-me-nots, tied with a gold true-lover’s knot, in the upper left-hand corner. Beneath the forget-me-nots, in small, precise roman capitals, Mr. Francis had printed his name, ROLAND FARWELL FRANCIS.

To one prying into the secrets of Mr. Francis’s life through the medium of this diary, the number of entries like the one quoted above might have seemed somewhat appalling.

The pages were full of hints of romance, or, rather, of an almost indefinite number of romances. The vague beginnings were recorded in statements like “She was in again to-day.” Later there were conjectures about “her,” bits of personal description, faint suggestions of longing, of aspiration; then commiserations of his own unworthiness, bitter self-analysis leading up to relinquishment, final fits of despondency, during which he loaded pages with the most mortuary poetry he could find. But he was an invincible idealist; soon the process started all over again. From the time when he began work, aged seventeen years, as a stock clerk in McDavitt’s silk department, he must have approximated a round hundred of these catalectic romances.

His station in life, his work, his poetic temperament, made the result inevitable. His silks attracted beauty, he adored beauty, and beauty considered him in much the same class as the glass-and-ebony display-fixtures. Like a modern Tantalus, he watched the waters of life flow by so close that they fairly enveloped him, and yet he was powerless to lift one drop for the quenching of the thirst of his soul. A cheaper man might have solaced himself with cheaper beauty, a more practical man might have sought beauty as true in less inaccessible places, a luckier man might have stumbled upon it nearer home. Mr. Francis, lacking cheapness and practicality and luck, had remained a virtuous bachelor.

On Friday, April 15, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

On Monday, April 18, he wrote:

Drawn by Herman Pfeifer. Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

“‘SHE WAS THREE AISLES AWAY, LOOKING OVER THAT NEW IMPORTATION OF CHINESE MANDARINS’”

❏
LARGER IMAGE

During the considerable period that Mr. Francis had rented Mrs. Benson’s most expensive room, the second-floor front, his intimacy with her had consisted of one heart-to-heart talk in the week following Mr. Benson’s decease. Mr. Benson, who had been indefinitely “in the clothing business,” had caught a cold which developed into pneumonia, with fatal results. When, a few days after the funeral, Mrs. Benson wept on Mr. Francis’s shoulder, she had said that she wished never to speak to another man, never even to see one, except in the necessary course of business. She ran a boarding-house, and she would accept men as well as women for boarders; other relations with them she could not consider.

Mr. Francis had always respected her wishes. Even when she presided at the Sunday evening dinner-table, a wide, tight vision of black silk, and conversation was supposed to be more unrestricted than on week-days, Mr. Francis had been careful not to trespass on the sacred confines of her bereavement. Her conversation with the other men at the table, in which she attempted to include him, he passed off as her necessary sacrifice to the business that supported her widowhood. He was even more literal-minded than the average idealist.

On Thursday, April 21, he wrote in the book:

Under the entry of Friday, April 22, he copied entire Shelley’s “Indian Serenade,” beginning,

Nevertheless, it was a much chastened, even saddened, Mr. Francis who returned to work the following morning. He had lived in his dreams, his romances had been the deepest and sweetest part of his life, for so long that such a reality as his engagement to Mrs. Benson hurt him through and through.

Perhaps any reality in the matter of romance would have hurt him. He had become a confirmed dreamer, even as he had become a confirmed bachelor, and he was not fitted to cope with practical details. Even the preparations, the hundred and one rather sordid arrangements, he would have had to go through in order to marry his latest ideal would probably have saddened him a good deal. It was thrice in vain that he attempted to be practical in the matter of marriage with Mrs. Benson; he suffered by every necessary preparation that brushed the star-dust off the butterfly’s wings of his dream ideal of love—suffered agonies that gave him a feeling of weakness in the diaphragm and in the knees.

Until eleven o’clock he was busy with the morning instalment of traveling-salesmen who came to offer their wares. This duty disposed of, he strolled out into the department where he was supposed to oversee the stock and clerks. Wicked hopes that she, the lady of his dream romance, would return he suppressed so firmly that he had a continuous ache in his throat. Gone were his shimmering dreams, his vistas of poetic reverie. He threw himself desperately into the business of arranging displays, stationing clerks, verifying price-tags. He was thoroughly melancholy and businesslike and stern-faced and miserable.

His evenings at the boarding-house were even more uncomfortable than his days in the store. Mrs. Benson had lost no time in announcing her engagement, and Mr. Francis now occupied the place of honor at her right hand at meals; he had long refused this place through feelings of delicacy about trespassing on Mrs. Benson’s known reverence for her late husband, and the honor sat heavily upon him. The smiles and insinuations of the boarders, the sordid jocularity of it all, seared his soul. Idealist that he was, his sense of humor was not much developed; and remarks like, “Can’t you just see Mr. Francis walking the floor with a bundle of yell in his arms?” sent all the blood from his heart into his face, and back again, in two frantic leaps.

On one point he was trying to be firm: he would not let Mrs. Benson read in “The Book of his Heart.” She found it on the second evening of their prenuptial bliss in the front parlor, and triumphantly drew it forth. Desperately he reclaimed his property; frantically he argued that it[Pg 706] was sacred to him, that there were some things they wouldn’t have to share in common. No theory could have been more repugnant to Mrs. Benson, and none could have so solidified her determination to read that “Personal Journal” from cover to cover. The issues were pitched, the armies drawn up, the bugles blown; and struggle as he would, Mr. Francis realized that he was foredoomed to the woe of the vanquished. She would read the book, she would despise it, and she would burn it because of its wicked references to women other than herself. Realizing this certain outcome, Mr. Francis vacillated between the wisdom of burning the book himself and the wickedness of hiding it and telling her that he had burned it. In the meantime he kept his coat buttoned and his door locked.

On Thursday, April 28, he wrote at one o’clock in the morning:

On Friday, April 29, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

The entry of Thursday, May 5, ended:

The entries of May 6, 7, and 8 related that he had walked past “her” house. He avoided mentioning her name, as an ancient Hebrew would have avoided mentioning the name of Jehovah, or a modern Japanese the name of his emperor.

On Monday, May 9, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

The entries of the next few days dealt chiefly with his evening parades and with the struggles of his conscience as to whether he ought to write her again. By pressure of the longing in his soul he became bolder; one evening he even had the courage to go into the front hall of the apartment-house and search out her name in the long row of letter-boxes above the electric-bell buttons. The simple “Wright” printed there held him spellbound for so long that, when he recollected himself, he fled fearfully from the building, and trembled afterward at the thought of the risk he had run. But his timidity did not prevent him from continuing to haunt the vicinity of her home.

Such was his absorption in his romance, such interesting business filled his evenings, that he was never lonely, as he had often been even in the company of the other boarders at Mrs. Benson’s. Except for an occasional visit to his brother and sister-in-law in Brooklyn, he had no more human associations, and desired none. The place where he lived was a rooming-house; he took his solitary meals in restaurants, seeking out the cheapest places, so that he might save every possible cent toward discharging the financial burden his engagement and dereliction had put upon him.

But taking it all in all, he was happier than he had ever been in his life before. Never had one of his ideal romances developed so far; and never, thanks principally to the affectionate, if brief advances, of Mrs. Benson, had he had so true an idea of the meaning of love. He composed many notes to Miss Anna Wright,—I hope he will forgive me for setting forth her name in cold type,—and he knew that the time was approaching when he would send one to her.

On Friday, May 13, Mr. Francis wrote in the book:

Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

JOSEPH H. CHOATE

FROM A CHARCOAL PORTRAIT BY JOHN SARGENT

❏
LARGER IMAGE

WITH A SIDE-LIGHT ON WOMEN AS JURORS

BY HUGO MÜNSTERBERG

Author of “American Traits,” “Psychology and Life,” etc.

EVERY lawyer knows some good stories about some wild juries he has known, which made him shiver and doubt whether a dozen laymen ever can see a legal point. But every newspaper reader, too, remembers an abundance of cases in which the decision of the jury startled him by its absurdity. Who does not recall sensational acquittals in which sympathy for the defendant or prejudice against the plaintiff carried away the feelings of the twelve good men and true? For them are the unwritten laws, for them the mingling of justice with race hatreds or with gallantry. And even in the heart of New York a judge recently said to a chauffeur who had killed a child and had been acquitted, “Now go and get drunk again; then this jury will allow you to run over as many children as you like.”

Yet whatever the temperament of the jury and its legal insight, we may sharply separate its ideas of deserved punishment from that far more important aspect of its function, the weighing of evidence. The juries may be whimsical in their decisions, they may be lenient in their acquittals or over-rigid in their verdicts of guilty, but that is quite in keeping with the democratic spirit of the institution. The Teutonic nations do not want the abstract law of the scholarly judges; they want the pulse-beat of life throbbing in the court decisions, and what may seem a wilful ignoring of the law of the lawyers may be a heartfelt expression of the popular sentiment. Better to have some statutes riddled by illogical verdicts than legal decisions severed from the sense of justice which is living in the soul of the nation.

But while a rush into prejudice or a hasty overriding of law may draw attention to some exceptional verdicts, in the overwhelming mass of jury decisions nothing is aimed at but a real clearing up of the facts. The evidence is submitted, and while the lawyers may have wrangled as to what is evidence and what is not, and while they may have tried by their presentation of the witnesses on their own side and by their cross-examinations to throw light on some parts of the evidence and shadows on some others, the jurymen are simply to seek the truth when all the evidence has been submitted. And mostly they do not forget that they will live up to their duty best the more they suppress in their own hearts the question whether they like or dislike the truth that comes to light. Whoever weighs the social significance of the jury system ought not to be guided by the few stray cases in which the emotional response obscures the truth, but all praise and blame and every scrutiny of the institution ought to be confined essentially to the ability of the jurymen to live up to their chief responsibility, the sober finding of the true facts.

It cannot be denied that much criticism has been directed against the whole jury system in America and Europe by legal scholars, as well as by laymen, on account of the prevailing doubt whether the traditional form is really furthering the clearing-up of the hidden truth. Where the evidence is so perfectly clear that every one by himself alone feels from the start exactly like all the others, the coöperation of the twelve men cannot do any harm; but it cannot do any particular good, either. Such cases do not demand the special interest of the social reformer. His doubts and fears come up only when difference of opinion exists, and the discussion and the repeated votes overcome the divergence of opinion. The skeptics claim that the system as such may easily be instrumental for suppressing the truth and bringing the erroneous opinion to victory. In earlier times a frequent objection was that lack of higher education made men unfit to weigh correctly the facts in a complicated situation, but for a long while[Pg 712] this kind of arguing has been given up. The famous French lawyer who, whenever he had a weak case, made use of his right to challenge jurymen by systematically excluding all persons of higher education, certainly blundered in this respect, according to the views of to-day. Those best informed within and without the legal science agree that the verdicts of straightforward people with public-school education are in the long run neither better nor worse than those of men with college schooling or professional training. A jury of artisans and farmers understands and looks into a mass of neutral material as well as a jury of bankers and doctors, or at least their final verdict has an equal chance to hit the truth.

But the critics say that it is not the lack of general or logical training of the individual person which obstructs the path of justice. The trouble lies rather in the mutual influence of the twelve men. The more persons work together, the less, they say, every single man can reach his highest level. They become a mass, with mass consciousness, a kind of crowd in which each one becomes oversuggestible. Each one thinks less reliably, less intelligently, and less impartially than he would by himself alone. We know how men in a crowd do indeed lose some of the best features of their individuality. A crowd may be thrown into a panic, may rush into any foolish, violent action, may lynch and plunder, or a crowd may be stirred to a pitch of enthusiasm, may be roused to heroic deeds or to wonderful generosity; but whether the outcome be wretched or splendid, in any case it is the product of persons who have been entirely changed. In the midst of the panic or in the midst of the heroic enthusiasm, no one has kept his own characteristic mental features. The individual no longer judges for himself; he is carried away, his own heart reverberates, with the feelings of the whole crowd. The mass consciousness is not an adding-up, a mere summation, of the individual minds, but the creation of something entirely new. Such a crowd may be pushed into any roads; chance leaders may use or misuse its increased suggestibility for any ends. No one can foresee whether this heaping up of men will bring good or bad results. Certainly the individual level of the crowd will always be below the level of its best members. And is not a jury necessarily such a group with a mass consciousness of its own? Every individual member is melted into the total, has lost his independent power of judging, and has become influenced through his heightened suggestibility and social feeling by any chance pressure which may push toward error as often as toward truth.

But if such arguments are brought into play, it is evident that it is no longer a legal question, but a psychological one. The psychologist alone deals scientifically with the problem of mutual mental influence and with the reënforcing or awakening of mental energies by social coöperation. He should accordingly investigate the question with his own methods, and deal with it from the point of view of the scientist. This means he is not simply to form an opinion from general value impressions and to talk about it as about a question of politics, where any man may have his personal idea or fancy, but to discover the facts by definite experiments. The modern student of mental life is accustomed to the methods of the laboratory. He wants to see exact figures, by which the essential facts come into sharp relief. But let us understand clearly what such an experiment means. When the psychologist goes to work in his laboratory, his aim is to study those thoughts and emotions and feelings and deeds which move our social world. But his aim is not simply to imitate or to repeat the social scenes of the community. He must simplify them and bring them down to the most elementary situations, in which only the characteristic mental actions are left.

Is this not the way in which the experimenters proceed in every field? The physicist or the chemist does not study the great events as they occur in nature on a large scale and with bewildering complexity of conditions, but he brings down every special fact which interests him to a neat, miniature copy on his laboratory table. There he mixes a few chemical solutions in his retorts and his test-tubes, or produces the rays or sparks or currents with his subtle laboratory instruments, and he feels sure that whatever he finds there must hold true everywhere in the gigantic universe. If the waters move in a certain way in his little[Pg 713] tank on his table, he knows that they must move according to the same laws in the midst of the ocean. In this spirit the psychologist arranges his experiments, too. He does not carry them on in the turmoil of social life, but prepares artificial situations in which the persons will show the laws of mental behavior. An experiment on memory or attention or imagination or feeling may bring out in a few minutes mental facts which the ordinary observer would discover only if he were to watch the behavior and life attitudes of the man for years. Everything depends upon the degree with which the characteristic mental states are brought into play under experimental conditions. The great advantage of the experimental method here is, as everywhere, that everything can be varied and changed at will and that the conditions and the effects can be exactly measured.

If we apply these principles to the question of the jury, the task is clear. We want to find out whether the coöperation, the discussion, and the repeated voting of a number of persons is helping or hindering them in the effort to judge correctly upon a complex situation. We must therefore artificially create a situation which brings into action the judgment, the discussion, and the vote; but if we are loyal to the idea of experimenting, we must keep the experiment free from all those features of a real jury deliberation that have nothing to do with the mental action itself. Moreover, it is evident that the situations to be judged must allow a definite knowledge as to the objective truth. The experimenter must know which verdict of his voters corresponds to the real facts. Secondly, the situation must be difficult, in order that a real doubt may prevail. If all the voters were on one side from the start, no discussion would be needed. Thirdly, it must be a rather complex situation, in order that the judgment may be influenced by a number of motives. Only in this case will it be possible for the discussion to point out factors which the other party may have overlooked, thus giving a chance for changes of mind. All these demands must be fulfilled if the experiment is really to picture the jury function. But it would be utterly superfluous, and would make the exact measurement impossible, if the material on which the judgment is to be based were of the same kind of which the evidence in the court-room is composed. The trial by jury in an actual criminal case may involve many picturesque and interesting details, but the mental act of judging is no different when the most trivial objects are chosen.

I settled on the following simple device. I used sheets of dark-gray cardboard. On each were pasted white paper dots of different form and in an irregular order. Each card had between ninety-two and a hundred and eight such white dots of different sizes. The task was to compare the number of spots on one card with the number of spots on another. Perhaps I held up a card with a hundred and four dots, and below it one with ninety-eight. Then the subjects of the experiment had to decide whether the upper card had more dots or fewer dots than the lower one. I made the first set of experiments with eighteen Harvard students. I took more than the twelve men who form a jury in order to reinforce the possible effect, but did not wish to exceed the number greatly, so that the character of the discussion might be similar to that in a jury. A much larger number would have made the discussion too formal or too unruly. The eighteen men sat about a long table, and were first allowed to look for half a minute at the two big cards, each forming his judgment independently. Then at a signal every one had to write down whether the number of dots on the upper card was larger, equal, or smaller. Immediately after that they had to indicate by a show of hands how many had voted for each of the three possibilities. After that an excited discussion began, three or four men speaking at the same time.

After five minutes of talking, the vote was repeated, again at first being written and then being taken by a show of hands. A second five-minute exchange of opinion followed, with a new effort to convince the dissenters. After this period the third and last vote was taken. This experiment was carried out with a variety of cards with smaller or larger difference of numbers, but always with a difference enough to allow an uncertainty of judgment. Here, indeed, we had repeated all the essential conditions of the jury vote and discussion, and the mental state was char[Pg 714]acteristically similar to that of the jurymen.

The very full accounts which the participants in the experiment wrote down the following day indicated clearly that we had a true imitation of the mental process despite the striking simplicity of our conditions. One man, for instance, described his inner experience as follows:

Another man wrote:

Again, another wrote:

Another said:

To be sure, there were a few who were strongly impressed by the evident differences between the rich material of an actual trial and the meager content of our tests, there the actions of living men, here the space relations of little spots. But they evidently did not sufficiently realize that the forming of such number judgments was not at all a question of mere perception; that, on the contrary, many considerations were involved. Most men felt the similarity from the start.

What were the results of this first group of experiments? Our interest must evidently be centered on the question of how many judgments were correct at the first vote before any discussion and any show of hands were influencing the minds of the men, and how many were correct at the last vote, after the two periods of discussion and after taking cognizance of the two preceding votes. If I sum up all the results, the outcome is that fifty-two per cent. of the first votes were correct, and seventy-eight per cent. of the final votes were correct. The discussion of the successive votes had therefore led to an improvement of twenty-six per cent. of all votes. Or, as the correct votes were at first fifty-two per cent., their number is increased by one half. May we not say that this demonstration in exact figures proves that the confidence in the jury system is justified? And may it not be added that, in view of the wide-spread prejudices, the result is almost surprising?[Pg 715] Here we had men of high intelligence who were completely able to take account of every possible aspect of the situation. They had time to do so, they had training to do so, and every foregoing experiment ought to have stimulated them to do so in the following ones. Yet their judgment was right in only fifty-two per cent. of the cases until they heard the opinions of the others and saw how they voted. The mere seeing of the vote, however, cannot have been decisive, because forty-eight per cent.,—that is, virtually half of the votes,—were at first incorrect. The wrong votes might have had as much suggestive influence on those who voted rightly as the right votes on those on the wrong side. Nevertheless, if the change was so strongly in the right direction, the result must clearly have come from the discussion.

But I am not at the end of my story. I also made exactly the same experiments with a class of advanced female university students. When I started, my aim was not to examine the differences of men and women, but only to have ampler material, and I confined my work to students in psychological classes because I was anxious to get the best possible scientific analysis of the inner experiences. I had no prejudice in favor of or against women as members of the jury, any more than my experiments were guided by a desire to defend or to attack the jury system. I was anxious only to clear up the facts. The women students had exactly the same opportunities for seeing the cards and the votes and for exchanging opinions. The discussions, while carried on for the same length of time, were on the whole less animated. There was less desire to convince and more restraint; but the record which was taken in shorthand showed nearly the same variety of arguments that the men had brought forward. Everything agreed exactly with the experiments of the men, and the only difference was in the results. The first vote of all experiments with the women showed a slightly smaller number of right judgments. The women had forty-five per cent. correct judgments, as against the fifty-two per cent. of the men. I should not put any emphasis on this difference. It may be said that the men had more training in scientific observations, and the task was therefore slightly easier for them than for most of the women. I should say that, all taken together, men and women showed an equal ability in immediate judgment, as with both groups about half of the first judgments were correct. The fact that with the men two per cent. more, with the women five per cent. less, than half were right would not mean much. But the situation is entirely different with the second figure. We saw that for the men the discussion secured an increase from fifty-two per cent. to seventy-eight per cent.; with the women the increase is not a single per cent. The first votes were forty-five per cent. right, and the last votes were forty-five per cent. right. In other words, they had not learned anything from discussion.

It would not be quite correct, if we were to draw from that the conclusion that the women did not change their minds at all. If we examine the number of cases in which in the course of the first, second, and third votes some change occurred, we find changes in forty per cent. of all judgments of the men and nineteen per cent. of all judgments of the women. This does not mean that a change in a particular case necessarily made the last vote different from the first; we not seldom had a case where for instance the first vote was larger, the second equal, and the third again larger. And, as a matter of course, where a change between the first and the last occurred, it was not always a change in the right direction. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that the votes always covered three possibilities, and not only two. It was therefore possible for the first vote to be wrong, and then for a change to occur to another wrong vote. The nineteen per cent. changes in the decisions of the women accordingly contained as many cases in which right was turned into wrong as in which wrong was turned into right, while with the men the changes to the right had an overweight of twenty-six per cent. The self-analysis of the women indicated clearly the reason for their mental stubbornness. They heard the arguments, but they were so fully under the autosuggestion of their first decision that they fancied that they had known all that before and that they had discounted the arguments of their opponents in the first vote. The cobbler has to stick to his last: the psychologist has to be sat[Pg 716]isfied with analyzing the mental processes, but it is not his concern to mingle in politics. He must leave it to others to decide whether it will really be a gain if the jury-box is filled with persons whose minds are unable to profit from discussion and who return to their first idea, however much is argued from the other side. It is evident that this tendency of the female mind must be advantageous for many social purposes. The woman remains loyal to her instinctive opinion. Hence we have no right to say that one type of mind is better than another. We may say only they differ, and that this difference makes men fit and women unfit for the task which society requires from jurymen.

In order to make quite sure that the discussion, and not the seeing of the vote, is responsible for the marked improvement in the case of men, I carried on some further experiments in which the voting alone was involved. To bring this mental process to strongest expression, I went far beyond the small circle which was needed for the informal exchange of opinion, and operated, instead, with my large class of psychological students in Harvard. I have there four hundred and sixty students, and accordingly had to use much larger cards with large dots. I showed to them any two cards twice. There was an interval of twenty seconds between the first and the second exposure, and each time they looked at the cards for three seconds. In one half of the experiments that interval was not filled at all, in the other half a quick show of hands was arranged, so that every one could see how many on the first impression judged the upper card as having more or an equal number or fewer dots than the lower. After the second exposure every one had to write down his final result. The pairs of cards which were exposed when the show of hands was made were the same as those which were shown without any one knowing how the other men judged. We calculated the results on the basis of four hundred reports. They showed that the total number of right judgments in the cases without showing hands was sixty per cent. correct, in those with show of hands about sixty-five per cent. A hundred and twenty men had turned from the right to the wrong; that is, had more incorrect judgments when they saw how the other men voted than when they were left to themselves. It is true that those who turned from worse to better by seeing the vote of the others were in a slight majority, bringing the total vote five per cent. upward; but this difference is so small that it could just as well be explained by the mere fact that this act of public voting reinforced the attention and improved a little the total vote through this stimulation of the social consciousness. It is not surprising that the mere seeing of the votes in such cases has so small an effect, incomparable with that of a real discussion in which new vistas are opened, inasmuch as in forty per cent. of the cases the majority was evidently on the wrong side from the start. Those who are swept away by the majority would, therefore, in forty per cent. of the cases be carried to the wrong side. I went still further, and examined by psychological methods the degree of suggestibility of those four hundred participants in the experiment, and the results showed that the fifty most suggestible men profited from the seeing of the vote of the majority no more than the fifty least suggestible ones. In both cases there was an increase of about five per cent. correct judgments. I also drew from this the conclusion that the show of hands was ineffective as a direct influence toward correctness, and that it had only the slight indirect value of forcing the men to concentrate their attention better on those cards. All results, therefore, point in the same direction: it is really the argument which brings a coöperating group nearer to the truth, and not the seeing how the other men vote. Hence the psychologist has every reason to be satisfied with the jury system.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

THE LAST FAUN

“‘Since I slept, the boughs have pressed so near
The narrow path is lost. But I must run
And chase my fellows out into the sun.’”

DRAWN BY CHARLES A. WINTER

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 717]

THE LAST FAUN

BY HELEN MINTURN SEYMOUR

WITH PICTURE BY CHARLES A. WINTER

[Pg 720]

THE COUNTRY OF THE DORMER-WINDOW

MURRAY BAY, A CANADIAN SUMMER RESORT

BY HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK

WITH PICTURES BY W. T. BENDA

THE way to go to Murray Bay is down the St. Lawrence by boat from Quebec. There is, indeed, another way, which most people take, but it should be taken only by impatient travelers who prefer a speedy to a picturesque arrival.

The “bateau” is one of the three paddle-wheel boats that ply between Quebec and the Saguenay River. Each bateau has its own character, its own history, its own aliases. A bateau regards shipwreck as a baptism, and thereupon takes a new name and a new coat of paint. The dean of the fleet, at least according to the Murray Bay tradition, is a sort of Methuselah. The story goes that before our Civil War, in the days when the Mississippi ran unvexed to the gulf, when young Sam Clemens was crying out “Mark Twain,” a paddle-wheeler plied between New Orleans and Vicksburg—but this gossip is beneath the dignity of history. The bateau, whatever its dubious past may have been, leaves the wharf at Quebec at eight o’clock in the morning and arrives at Murray Bay at half-past one. This legend, which I take from the Richelieu and Ontario time-table, is less trustworthy than the other. Let us come to facts. At some time or other the bateau leaves Quebec; it passes the Ile d’Orleans, the Falls of Montmorency, and about sixty miles of beautiful shore; and after what, if the day be fine, is a most delightful sail, draws near to Bay St. Paul. This arrival is the prologue to Murray Bay. The bateau gyrates, heaves, trembles, and sidles toward the dock. Shouts from the bateau, answering shouts from the dock; the bateau hesitates, shivers, and like a tired cow comes diffidently up alongside. The passengers crowd to the landward rail; the population of Bay St. Paul crowds to the edge of the quay. A small coil of rope is hurled through the air from the bateau; it is caught by the population of Bay St. Paul; attached to the rope is the boat’s hawser, which is made fast to a pile. Friends exchange joyous greetings; the charretiers, whose carriages and carts in long sequence stretch the length of the causeway from the dock to the shore, wait politely for customers.

The bateau prefers to arrive at the moment when the tide either lifts it far above or leaves it far below the level of the quay; the gang-plank is always at a sharp angle, and in consequence the cargo, put on or off,—barrels, bales, bundles, trunks—slides down or is rushed[Pg 721] up with bumps, bangs, and loud shouts of “Prenez garde! Faites attention!” or less articulate expressions. For a time all is feverish excitement, joyous activity, perspiration, and hullabaloo. Then, as the gang-plank, at a whistle from the quarterdeck, is about to be lifted, shrieks from the quay indicate the belated arrival of a barrel, a pig, or some stout passenger waving breathlessly hand-bag and umbrella. At last the bateau glides on toward Murray Bay. The same bustle which characterized the arrival at Bay St. Paul, but tempered by a higher civilization, marks the arrival at Murray Bay. The custom-house is a mere amiable ceremony, and the traveler is at once confronted with his first exercise of choice: “Will monsieur have a calèche or a planche?”

MAP OF THE ST. LAWRENCE FROM QUEBEC TO MURRAY BAY

As soon as the traveler has climbed into the calèche (the luggage is left for the charrette), the charretier gives a warning cry and swings down the long causeway, and, turning to the right, goes up the hill that buttresses the Pic. Here you learn your first vehicular lesson. At a particular point going up the hill—it will not vary six feet on any hill, for the rule is de rigueur, and every native boy is born with the knowledge—the charretier leaps to the ground and drives on foot from alongside.

Once free of the dock and over the hill, the traveler drives down the long village street. Every French-Canadian village properly consists of one long street. This is partly in order to economize shoveling and plank-walk during the winter, and partly because Latin sociability and democracy hold that every house has a right to front on the main street. Here the traveler sees the most charming touch of art in Murray Bay architecture, the curve of the gable-roof. In old times all the native houses, or most of them, had this curving roof; but of late years desire for space and lack of taste betray themselves in repeating the ugly roofs familiar to the south of the Canadian border. Nothing in architecture is more soothing than this curve in the gabled roof; it contains all the picturesqueness, all the poetry, that the patron saint of roofs—is it, perchance, St. Rufinus?—allows to them.

Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by R. C. Collins

VIEW OF MURRAY BAY FROM POINTE-AU-PIC

The traveler who means to put up at a hotel has an ample range of choice. The Manoir Richelieu, a younger sister to the Château Frontenac of Quebec, gazes over a glorious expanse of river from the heights above the quay. It supplies its guests with confort moderne softened to the native simplicity of Murray Bay, but it can hardly count as a part of the village; it is too young, it is an interloper. There is also the Château Murray, on the main street, which looks over the bay, and presents a comfortable air of seeming to receive, as no doubt it does, the compliments of departing guests; and, though even younger than the Manoir Richelieu, it is much more in accord with Murray Bay habits and traditions. But beyond cavil the hotel of Murray Bay is the Lorne House, as it calls itself on its letter-paper, which is known to its familiars, and to all the world, as Chamard’s. Architects, builders, upholsterers, and tinsmiths can[Pg 722] create Manoirs Richelieu ad libitum; so, with the addition of a French sense of proportion, they can also create Château Murray; nobody except the late Monsieur Chamard could have created Chamard’s. It is a personality expressed in the form of a hotel; it is a spirit embodied in dining-room, parlors, office, veranda, and partitions. The partitions remind the guest of Shakspere’s lines, like “cloud-capp’d towers” and “gorgeous palaces”: he expects them to dissolve, melt into thin air, and “leave not a rack behind.” Chamard’s is the one hotel, I should suppose, in all the world that rises triumphantly above material things. The table, no doubt, is wholesome and exhilarating, but nobody cares; for at Chamard’s, quite unlike other human abodes, the table is not the center of gravity. The place is a club, gathered about Monsieur Chamard’s interesting and attractive personality, and, now that he is gone, prospering upon his memory and Mademoiselle Chamard’s disposition and character. The physical structure used to stand about where the Manoir Richelieu now is; but it flitted away, or, like the phenix, was reborn, on a bold eminence above the golf-links, where half a dozen cottages, seedlings from the parent plant, have grown up about it. But Chamard’s is not a hotel for chance comers; it demands, so one of the guests assures me, an introduction from some one known to a guest, at least.

The first thing for a new-comer to do is to take a drive; and the first drive should be up the rive droite of the Murray River as far as the red bridge and down the rive gauche, or, for custom is liberal in this matter, up the rive gauche and back by the rive droite. This drive uncovers all that is typical in the scenery of Murray Bay.

Besides introducing the traveler at once to the scenery, the Murray River drive has another advantage—it takes him past the principal sights. The road skirts the golf-links, turns sharp at the Village Mailloux, and then cuts the links in two just before the path that leads to the famous sixth tee, the pons dufforum. Here the charretier, if he is a good cicerone, points his whip to a house that stands in a little garden radiant with bright flowers: “Voilà, monsieur, la maison de Mademoiselle Anger.” One may draw aside the veil that has been very transparent ever since the French Academy crowned “L’Oublié,” and say that Mademoiselle Anger is Laure Conan, the novelist. A few minutes further, to the left, on the edge of the[Pg 723] bay, stands the manor-house of the seigniory.

Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by G. M. Lewis

VIEW OF MALBAIE (MURRAY BAY) FROM THE BRIDGE

From the manor-house the road runs along the edge of the bay, where picturesque schooners float or lie on their sides, according to the tide, and then on to the village of Malbaie, or Murray Bay. Americans call it the Far Village, but the native resident of Pointe-au-Pic, who wishes Monsieur Anger, le notaire, brother to Laure Conan, to draw up a legal document, or Monsieur Perron to cut him a suit of homespun, or Monsieur Shea to sell him a clock or a banjo-string, says, “Je vais au village” (“I am going to the village”), just as a suburban resident says, “I am going to town.” At the end of the bay stands the Far Village church in all her kindly, simple seriousness. Her bells ring out the angelus over the waters of the bay, along the shores, and back into the uplands, proclaiming that she is ready, like a hen gathering her chickens under her wings, to receive and comfort all the faithful. On the façade, if three doorways and a barn-like front can count as a façade, there is a statue of the Madonna that has drawn to itself some of the beauty of the place. Hard by is the residence of Monsieur le Curé and his assistants. The younger priests officiate in the church and also teach school. It is pleasant, when[Pg 724] driving by during recess, to see these serious-faced young men, dressed in their long black cassocks, playing with the children, or, when off duty, refreshing themselves with a pipe and animated conversation.

Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by G. M. Lewis

THE CHURCH OF ST. ETIENNE AT MURRAY BAY,
WITH TEACHING BROTHERS IN THE FOREGROUND

The Far Village has a little inn of its own, but it is undisturbed by foreigners; it is sufficient to itself, with its shops, its bank, its ecclesiastical edifices, its little houses, some of which back on the river, in fact, lean perilously over the brink, strongly reminding one of the old Florentine houses along the Arno. The court-house is on the rive gauche, and somewhat away from the village. To say the truth, its bald, rather brazen, aspect suggests the less amiable side of the law, and it seems singularly out of keeping with the general innocence of Malbaie. There is a story that Sir Charles Fitzpatrick, when at the bar, long before he became chief-justice of Canada, went there to argue a case, carrying only one book under his arm. A native remarked this penury of legal preparation: “C’est fort peu de chose; il ne réussira pas avec M’sieur le juge” (“That’s too little; he won’t win his case”). The next time Sir Charles carried several large volumes:[Pg 725] “A la bonne heure; cette fois-ci il est sérieux” (“Good; this time he means business”).

Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by R. C. Collins

A ROAD NEAR MURRAY BAY

Now and then, whether on your first drive up the Murray River, or on your second up Maltais’s Hill and on the way to St. Agnès to see mountains rise behind mountains in deepening hues of violet and blue, you pass a plain, black cross. These crosses stand in little inclosures, eight feet square, which are filled with monk’s-hood. At these places the people of the neighborhood gather in the month of May to say a prayer, and ask la Sainte Vierge to bless the sowing of the grain. Sometimes you pass one of the old baking-ovens, and, if you are in luck, a pretty girl examining the condition of the loaves.

The traveler who is used to the more gingerly driven horses of other places need not fear lest the wiry little horse, which ends his course downhill at a canter and starts uphill at a gallop, will tire himself out. The charretier always spares his horse by jumping out himself as soon as the first[Pg 726] uphill gallop is over. This is a comfort to the tender-hearted traveler, for as soon as he leaves the Far Village he is, or seems to be, going up or down hill all the time.

Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by C. W. Chadwick

VIEW ACROSS THE BAY FROM THE HILLSIDE

Chamard’s in the foreground; Cap-à-l’Aigle manor in the middle distance

Beyond the Murray River, on the high bluffs overlooking the St. Lawrence, lies the village of Cap-à-l’Aigle. The relations of Cap-à-l’Aigle to Pointe-au-Pic would require a chapter by themselves; they seem to present the difference between slap-everlasting and auction bridge; some like one game and some the other. Even the views are very different. Nothing can be finer in its way—one feels that here the player makes a most successful slap—than the view over the St. Lawrence; and there are notable objects of pilgrimage at Cap-à-l’Aigle. There is nothing north of the St. Lawrence—one may hazard the assertion—more charming in its way than the garden of Mount Murray manor, the seigniory that was allotted to Colonel Fraser at the time the seigniory on the west side of the Murray River was allotted to Colonel Nairne. It is hard to say what makes a garden charming, or what makes a garden old-fashioned, or why we praise old fashions when all the world is agog for new fashions; but whatever the causes, they are operative[Pg 727] here, and most successfully. There is a glorious prodigality of color and sweet odor, an inspiriting sense that the flowers are all animated by as reckless a purpose to enjoy life as is compatible with floral propriety; and all is hedged in by a gracious seclusion.

Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by R. Varley

BAKING BREAD IN MURRAY BAY

Of course there are other things to do at Murray Bay than to drive or to visit the sights. But do what you will, so long as you stay out of doors you cannot escape the view. There is golf, pursued with the regularity that characterizes all kinds of superior machinery, on a links of much variety and picturesqueness, which is associated with memories of President Taft and of the late Mr. Justice Harlan; there is tennis; there is the Sunday afternoon walk. There is canoeing for those who venture out on the bay or along the shore of the St. Lawrence. And canoeing, which is not without a spice of danger, might well be worth a greater risk, for only from the center of the bay can you see the mountains rise in sequent tiers beyond the Far Village church; only on the bay can you appreciate the angelus or see all the beauty of the Murray Bay[Pg 729] sunsets, gloriously reflected in the water and coloring the eastern sky. But the chief pastime is fishing. There are salmon to be had in the Murray River, and ambitious fishermen spend long, happy hours, casting, casting, casting. It is hard to say whether catching enters into this sport or not, stories differ so widely.

Drawn by W. T. Benda. Half-tone plate engraved by H. C. Merrill

A NATIVE FAMILY AND A TYPICAL HOUSE IN MURRAY BAY

❏
LARGER IMAGE

Trout-fishing is obligatory. A visitor is at liberty to play golf, canoe, walk, or not, as he pleases; but unless he is willing to pass for a misanthrope, or, what is worse, a misichthus (or whatever word will serve to designate some wretch of Doctor Johnson’s way of thinking), he must go trout-fishing. Let me hasten to say that what we in our slipshod American fashion call trout are not the true British-born trout, but char or I know not what else. This, very properly, is the A B C of a Canadian’s education. The way to go trout-fishing is to camp on the shore of one of the little lakes in the back country. There a club or a host provides a tent, and the guest brings his rod, blankets, and food. The gardien of the lake, and one or two of his friends, cook, make the fires, and paddle the boats. Some people—parsons, Englishmen, young ladies—are totally absorbed in weights and numbers and interminable fish-stories. Others, of soberer disposition or piscatorial incapacity, enjoy the woods, the birds, the shy hare, the amiable chipmunk, and all the denizens of the forest. But the great pleasure of it all is to sit about the fire after supper, with the stars overhead and a faint breeze just audible over the lake and in the trees, and listen to the men sing their Canadian songs.

There are no better-mannered people than the habitants who live on the borders of the woods. In earlier times all the natives used to have charming manners, but the coming of strangers who set no special store by manners—Americans who have more important things to think about, others from different places who hold themselves superior to the natives—has tended to bring in different standards and values. But even now the habitants on the borders of the woods have always good manners—a refinement, a self-effacement, a wealth of consideration for their guests—that must rank as one of the fine arts. Their manners are their chief possession; they are poor and not quick-witted. One gardien, to whom a letter had been sent bidding him be ready to expect a party of fishermen on Monday, was discovered sitting on his door-step.

Gardien: “Bonjour, messieurs.”

We: “Bonjour, mon ami, est-ce que tout est prêt?”

Gardien: “Que voulez-vous dire, messieurs?”

We: “N’avez-vous pas reçu notre lettre?”

Gardien: “Ah, oui, j’ai reçu votre lettre.”

We: “Eh bien, nous avons dit que nous arriverions aujourd’hui, lundi” (“We said that we should come to-day, Monday”).

Gardien (after a pause): “J’ai lu lundi, mais j’ai compris jeudi” (“I read Monday, but I understood Thursday”).

The great charm of Murray Bay lies even more in the character and disposition of its people than in its beautiful scenery. To every one who has been long familiar with Murray Bay its most delicate charm lies in the memories of the men whose dignity of character and fine friendliness of manner set a special seal upon the beautiful place. Among those who will not come again to brighten the summer days by their presence are Mr. Edward Blake and Mr. Justice Harlan. These men belong to the history of Canada and of the United States, but in matters that do not concern the muse of history they belong to Murray Bay. No golfer can tee his ball on the links without involuntarily expecting to see Judge Harlan’s noble figure striding joyously from hole to hole, and to hear his exultant, boyish glee over a good stroke or his humorous explanation of an unlucky one. No worshiper goes to the Protestant church, the pretty stone church on the village street, without a glance at the spot where the justice used to stand on Sunday mornings, a symbol of large-hearted, Christian hospitality, and greet the congregation as it straggled in. And if, for instance, in order to give a visual reality to one of Shakspere’s heroes, one seeks for an embodiment of dignity, grace, and high character, the image of Mr. Edward Blake comes instantly up, with his handsome bearing and courtly simplicity. Indeed, Murray Bay is rich in human memories that outdo nature in her prodigal attempts to make the place delightful.

[Pg 730]

CLOWN’S RUE

BY HUGH JOHNSON

Author of “A Man and his Dog,” etc.

WITH A PICTURE BY H. T. DUNN

THE “Incorrigibles” of the Sixteenth Cavalry was an unofficial gild of bachelors consisting of a major named Merton; of Gallipoli, who is named as the homeliest man in the army; of Fredericks, who is a born and joyful celibate; and of Swinnerton.

The round-faced good humor of fat, bandy-legged Swinnerton was proverbial. He was not a cavalry officer. He was a medico, and the best surgeon in the service; yet the only place where his mere passing did not provoke a smile was the operating-pavilion of his own hospital. His thin tow hair was of the unbrushable variety. Smooth and wet it as he would, it stuck out at divers angles in every conceivable form of horn and quirk and curl from a head that was of the contour of a peeled onion. His blue eyes were round, his lips seemed pursed in a perennial effort to form the letter o, and his torso was nearly spherical, with all of which grotesquery no one in the world seemed more pleased than Swinnerton himself. For with the advantage of having his laugh well launched before he had uttered a word, he had acquired an easy reputation as one of the army’s “funny men,” a thing in which he took no little pride, until between the dawn and the dark of a single day it became for him a shirt of fire which, strive as he would, he could not cast away, and which came as near as the breadth of a man’s hand from being the end of him.

Apart from these the Sixteenth is a “married” regiment, and when orders dropped from a seemingly placid sky, sending the command to the Mexican border, fifteen hundred miles away, with two hours’ notice, no one took thought of how this might affect the officers of the bachelors’ mess, and least of all Swinnerton.

At the railroad spur, where three long troop-trains lay puffing amid a debris of ammunition- and ration-cases, forage-bales, saddles, and equipment; where a regiment of soldiers swarmed, tugging and heaving supplies upon the train, leading, cajoling, and forcing frightened troop-horses up the heavy ramps to the crowded stock-cars; where sergeants swore and fretted, and orderlies ran about with belated orders for the officers who were devoting the between-times of all this to saying good-by to more or less numerous families, no one had eyes for Swinnerton. And eyes that might have seen him would not have been believed. For, fancying himself hidden behind a pile of canvas-bales of medical[Pg 731] supplies, he was holding the two hands of a gravely beautiful girl, gazing into her tear-dimmed eyes and telling her in a hoarse and earnest voice that there was no danger, anyway, that all this could not possibly mean war, and that if it did, he, as a non-combatant, would keep well to the rear and safely out of harm’s way; that partings made no difference, anyway, so long as he loved her and she loved him, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.

The shock to the Sixteenth’s credulity would not have been altogether that Swinnerton was trying to cut a serious figure; it would have sprung from the fact that the hands he was holding were those of Mary Smith—the Mary Smith, the regiment called her, because every youngster in the three-regiment post of Fort Robertson had vainly dreamed the dream that absurd little Swinnerton was here actually living, and which to him was no dream at all.

That night when the lights were on in the officers’ Pullman, the Incorrigibles were sitting in the smoking-compartment over a last pipe, and Fredericks said:

“No use talking, war or no war, these sudden trapesings to the antipodes are bad for family life—blamed bad, and I’m glad I’m not in it. Go to it, Swinney; but for Heaven’s sake don’t be irreverent. It’s no time for it.”

Swinnerton had puffed out his cheeks to abnormal rotundity. He did this near the point of a story or when he was excited. It served to heighten effects.

“I think I ought to tell you, fellows, first of all,” he began bluntly, “that I—I’m leaving my heart behind, too.”

Gallipoli burst into raucous laughter, and Fredericks chuckled expectantly. Swinnerton’s face contorted in puzzlement.

“Well,” he said aggressively, “what’s funny about that?”

“You are, Swinney,” said Merton; “that’s all.”

“In the first place,” began Gallipoli, didactically, “you haven’t any heart in the ordinary romantic acceptation. One of your infernal explorative incisions would disclose a two-foot layer of healthy fat, and then”—he patted Swinnerton affectionately on the pudgy shoulder—“a core of pure gold, perhaps, and you would have to conclude that it was all heart; but that, unfortunately, is not the sort of anatomical monstrosity to offer a lady.”

Swinnerton shook him off.

“Be serious, can’t you?” he said. “I am.”

“Manifestly absurd,” grinned Merton. “Get your banjo and sing that song about the chap they hired to get into the cage with the lion. You know—the one with the beller in the chorus.”

“That’s better than your fourth-dimension joke,” urged Fredericks. “Go on.”

Swinnerton was experiencing what was rare with him, anger.

“Do you people imagine,” he asked, “that because a man goes about six days in the seven making a silly ass of himself for the happiness of humanity that he pines to be placed beyond the pale of all that is beautiful and wholesome in life? I ask you.”

His round eyes snapped. His quirks of hair fairly trembled. Secretly the three were wary of Swinnerton. They feared some colossal hoax, some trap. The suspicion that he was serious did not come.

“Postulate one,” growled Merton, guardedly. “Grind out the logic. We do not think this thing.”

“If a good woman is blind enough to intrust her heart to me, is there any reason why I, of all men, shouldn’t accept it?”

“I should say not,” chuckled Fredericks, pleased with the possibilities of his own idea, “not when you can offer her an existence which is a breathing enactment of all for which the Sunday supplements are read. ‘My dear, allow me to present my esteemed confrère of the colored page, Dippy Dick, Mrs. Swinnerton. And this is Little Nemo.’”

The anger was leaving Swinnerton’s red face. These men did not believe him, and only because he was he. His twinkling eyes dulled, his round mouth straightened. He rose, and something in his drooping attitude arrested Fredericks.

“I was only going to say,” he began a little sadly, “that to you, of all the men I love to call my friends, I wished first to tell my great happiness. I am going to marry Mary Smith.” Indignation tinged his later words and indignation straightened his shoulders as he turned and walked with an unintended burlesque of dignity from the room. For Gallipoli had laughed again.

[Pg 732]

“What’s he trying to put over?” asked Fredericks, puzzled.

“Well, I don’t know,” confessed Merton, “but I think that even Swinney shouldn’t inject the names of ladies into his buffooneries.”

In his own berth, Swinnerton, fully dressed, sat rigidly staring at his hands, his face hard and expressionless. He was considering a new need that had come to him.

“Only for her,” he was saying, “I’d only ask it for her.” Then he added reflectively, “Only one person ever took me seriously; but she—” his face softened in a little smile—“will be my wife.”

THE regiment, its twelve troops strung along the line like beads on a string, took station at Agua Caliente, on the Arizona border, and strove to prevent filibustering. Across the border the old Mexican city of Angeles lay steeped in the strong desert sunlight, a cascade of whitewashed cubicles glistening against a yellow hill, with the bell-shaped domes of the twin-towered cathedral sharply outlined against the turquoise sky above. The Mexican town was garrisoned by a battalion of half-starved, shoddily uniformed infantry, who eyed the big American troopers with envious wonder.

There were bailes and fiestas in the American town, but Swinnerton did not attend them. Every one admitted the change in him. His room at headquarters contained a field cot, a table, and two chairs. On the table were a writing-pad and a framed photograph of the face of Mary Smith. Here he spent much of his time. He carried on conversations with the girl in the picture, and his half of them he wrote down in bulky letters that sometimes had to be rolled because no envelop would hold them—pleasant fancies of a future in which he built a dream palace and furnished it from keep to turret with imaginings. He received letters done in the same spirit, and thus he strove to find refuge from the self that was daily becoming more and more intolerable to him.

Swinnerton could sing. He had an unusually facile and sympathetic baritone voice, which he accompanied well on a guitar, and it was part of his panacea to sing in Spanish, some queer, immemorial folk-lilts, passionate with the throbbing tempo di bolero, that sometimes ended with a plaintive little wail at the inconstancy of a caballero lover, and sometimes with an impudent staccato note, like a Sevillan dancer’s final step in a whirling jota. It was perfectly possible to stand in the corridor and imagine the singer, who was inspired by a remembered face, to be the most gorgeous Escamillo that ever stepped gracefully toward an alluring Carmen—until the door opened. For there would stand Swinnerton, his fat face red and wet from exertion, his hair awry, his round rabbit’s eyes inquiring, and his pudgy little body partly covered by a Japanese crape kimono, and this would bring a smile.

It was this very sort of smile that Swinnerton had been pleased to see on the faces of people for thirty years, but that irked him sorely now. It meant that he was not taken seriously, and he shrank from offering to the pride of Mary Smith in him a thing so lightly held. He desired dignity; he yearned for it more passionately than he had ever longed for anything in his whole life before. It did not come, and nothing that he could do would bring it nearer. Swinnerton’s own smile became sad, and a little of this sadness seeped into his letters. Out of this grew something very like a misunderstanding, for it had been unconscious, and in far-away Fort Robertson Mary Smith sensed it and asked about it. It disappeared, but in its place came a strange, false little note of irrelevancy. There came to Swinnerton one day a vexed letter, and then for almost a week no letter at all.

The fire of insurrection was lapping up toward the border, and at Cananea, fifty miles away, Lopez was concentrating his ragamuffin battalions with ugly menace toward Angeles. Disquieting rumors were current on the American side, and one day the colonel, with his staff, was called to Huachuca, which left only Fredericks and Swinnerton to open the official mail. There were two bills and a wedding-invitation in Swinnerton’s sack, and only the daily bulletin of conditions along the border generally for the commanding officer. Fredericks opened this, and Swinnerton, the bills placed in his pocket, the wedding-invitation still in his hand, read it over Fredericks’s shoulder.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

“GAZING INTO HER TEAR-DIMMED EYES AND TELLING HER ... THAT THERE WAS NO DANGER”

DRAWN BY H. T. DUNN

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 733]

“Information from reports of secret agents of the State and Treasury departments indicate a movement of Lopez forces toward Quebrantos smelter, five miles west of Agua Caliente—”

“Phew!” whistled Fredericks. “Getting warm. We’ll see a scrap yet, eh? Who’s getting married now, Swinney?”

The telegraph orderly had entered the corridor and stood saluting. Fredericks motioned him in and took the official despatch he proffered, while Swinnerton, with a swift insertion of his dexterous fingers, tore open the creamy envelop.

“Darned if I know. This thing came sandwiched between bills for other presents. I wish people would stop it.”

Fredericks was reading the loose scrawl of his telegram, and he heard nothing Swinnerton said. He left his chair with a suddenness that overturned it, and began yelling orders.

“Orderly, sound to horse! Whoop! Hurroo! It’s come, Swinney. Old Lopez and his pack of thieves have crossed the border. Hurry up, orderly!”

The trumpeter at the door glued his brass bugle to his lips and sounded the jumble of staccato notes that is the oldest of alarm-calls. The men had been forewarned. They were already swarming from their tents to the lines and saddle-racks. Fredericks turned to Swinnerton.

Poor little Swinnerton, his chubby cheeks had suddenly become flabby, his mouth hung loosely open. The square envelop had fallen to the floor; its engraved contents drooped from his fingers. Fredericks gripped him by the shoulder.

“For Heaven’s sake, what is it, Swinney? Are you sick? What is it, boy?”

Swinnerton turned a pained face, drawn in some spasm of expression that was intended for a smile.

“Devil of a funny joke, Fredericks. Best one that’s been pulled off on old fat Swinney yet. Read that, will you?”

Fredericks read:

“Mr. and Mrs. Charles Smith
request the honor of
your presence
at the marriage of their daughter
Mary
to
Mr. Feldmar Brown.”

Outside, the troopers were leading into line, and a trumpeter was holding Fredericks’s impatient charger. Fredericks had only a moment. He seized his pistol and field-glasses, threw an affectionate arm across Swinnerton’s slouching shoulders, and hugged him fiercely. There was not a word that he could say.

LOPEZ’S raid across the border never occurred, but the false report of it accomplished its intended purpose. The town of Agua Caliente was stripped of its combatant garrison, and two hours after Fredericks had trotted away a lonely vaquero appeared at the crest of the hill back of Angeles, a Mexican picket fired, and was instantly answered by a sheet-like volley from the hidden rebel battle-line. It flashed through the wind-swept streets of Angeles, it knocked great sections from the adobe buildings, it ricochetted from the flagstones of the street, it shattered windows by the score; but most significant of all, it crossed the border-line, and every bullet found a resting-place in American soil. This was a contingency that no one had foreseen.

An American at the custom-house whirled, threw up his hands, and fell in an anguished heap. The halyards of the headquarters flag snapped, and the flag dropped loosely from its pulley to the ground. A bullet crashed through Swinnerton’s window and thudded in the wall behind him. He scarcely looked up. He was sitting before the photograph in his room, and talking to it, as was his custom.

“No, I don’t blame you. No one could, and least of all I. It was a fine thing I offered you. People may laugh at a fool, but to live with one! Tired—I’m tired of it myself.” After a full minute’s silence, he added, “Dog-tired—pitifully tired.”

He rose wearily and walked toward the open window, whence he could see the long, supple slope of the tawny hillside, with the Mexican federal trenches cutting it diagonally on one flank, and the white smoke-puffs of the attackers on the other.

The mayor of Caliente came storming into the outer office, roaring at the abashed headquarters orderly:

“Where’s the commanding officer? Where is he, I say? What are you soldiers good for, anyway?”

Swinnerton quietly opened the door, to the immense relief of the trooper.

[Pg 734]

“The colonel’s gone to Huachuca,” he said, “and Captain Fredericks has taken the troop to Quebrantos under competent orders. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Do? Do? Why, those damned Greasers are firing through this town.” The mayor’s fingers spread as though dropping from them something not to be entertained for a moment.

“I have no military function, you know,” drawled Swinnerton; “I’m just a surgeon. And if I had, the orders are plain. We must not cross that line, whatever happens.”

“Drat your orders!” bellowed his Excellency, the mayor. A bullet came and smashed the door-lintel. It covered the mayor with a shower of dust and plaster. He ducked incontinently, and came up furious at Swinnerton’s vapid smile.

“I know you, Doctor Swinnerton. You’re the regimental joker, the official fool. Gad! man, don’t you get sick of yourself? Doesn’t the sight of suffering humanity”—he waved his hand in an excited gesture that included a hurrying group of frightened non-combatants who were rushing a wounded man to shelter—“stir a spark of anger in you? Ain’t you weary of grinning and being grinned at? Ain’t you tired of it, I say?”

“Yes,” said Swinnerton, with unexpected decision, “I am tired. Get out of my way.” He walked deliberately through the door and out into the street, hatless and unarmed. The orderly at the door, a mere boy, followed him in his journey toward the plaza, to the custom-house door, and then to the line. Spiteful little dust-spots kicked up here and there in the open square, and a bullet whined close to the boy’s ear. Swinnerton turned and ordered him back.

“I ain’t goin’,” the soldier refused stolidly. “I’m a-goin’ to stay by you—an’ I know what orders is.”

Swinnerton seemed not disposed to argue the point. Perhaps he thought the hotter fire forward would drive the lad back. He walked unhesitatingly on. He did not stop at the federal trenches, though men and officers cheered him as he passed. But once he had clambered over the glacis, his and the boy’s were the only upright figures in a wide stretch of sloping, gravelly hillside. There was a sense of awful loneliness there for a moment; yet he did not hesitate.

His calm decision seemed, without qualification, good to Swinnerton. He expected to be killed. No one could look out across the bullet-spattered front and hope for less. The air was filled with gruesome sounds—the screams and whines and whistles of deflected rifle-balls. He did not yearn for the shot that would be the end, and yet he did not shrink from it. The very proximity of death caused nervous little shivers along his spine and in the pit of his stomach, but no regret. He was tired of disappointment, and glad to end it. There was an unavoidable trifle of revengeful school-boy thought, “They’ll be sorry when I’m gone,” and another that brought real pleasure, “There can never be any joke about this thing I am doing.”

A gentle breeze was sweeping down the hill with the fire; it ruffled in his hair and cooled his temples. Yes, it was all pleasant, all good, all desirable. He had forgotten the boy who had so faithfully followed him.

Swinnerton was just enough to see the terrible selfishness of what he had done. A cry came from behind. The lad was down, writhing and clawing at the gravelly soil, a bullet through his intestines. Calmness and self-satisfaction left Swinnerton between two pulse-throbs, and as he knelt beside the soldier and examined the wound, anger came to him—anger with himself at first, and then a bullet covered them with trash and another seared Swinnerton’s forehead like a red-hot iron. The rebels were firing at them both. His blood flowed down into his eyes. Blinded with this and rage, he rose and ran forward. He was no doubt absurd, but he was not unterrifying, as with lumbering gait he stumbled and ran straight on to the very muzzles of the firing-line. If he was grotesque, it was with the grotesquery of the bizarre and sinister figures of the first French Empire, and he was standing where vehemence commanded respect.

“Stop that infernal firing!” he yelled, purple with rage, his arms pumping in frantic gesture. And then he broke into a perfect tirade of English and Spanish.[Pg 735] “I’ll bring the American troops across and hunt every hound of you to his hole and shoot him like the dog he is,” he screamed.

Your Mexican is not at his best in the psychology of bluff. Half the rifles were already raised. Swinnerton directed his words at the evil-faced little firing-director, who had lived a replete life with the reformed bandits of the Rurales, but who had yet to hear or see a thing like this.

“Do you imagine that you may fire into American territory, kill American soldiers, and escape the troops?”

The self-commissioned officer blew his firing-whistle.

“Señor,” he said, “igscouse. We do no know our fire offend. We will make attack from other quarters.”

Swinnerton wasted neither words nor time. He hurried back, and knelt at the side of the wounded orderly. He threw one of the boy’s arms about his own neck and lifted him, his voice running on like a mother’s crooning.

“Never mind, Felker; it’s not a bad wound. If I’m a surgeon at all, I’ll mend it. There, is that easy, boy? Then here we go.”

A special train had hurried the general and the colonel and staff back from Huachuca. Fredericks, good soldier that he was, had marched to the sound of the guns. From the time he had trotted out at the head of his troop, an absurd suspicion had been troubling Fredericks, and the moment of his return he verified it. He found and examined the envelop in Swinnerton’s room, and he was even ahead of the general in greeting Swinnerton when the latter came staggering under his heavy burden toward the custom-house steps. Despite the gravity of the occasion, the general smiled, the colonel chuckled, and Fredericks laughed aloud.

Swinnerton’s hair was rumpled like the ruffled crest of a cockatoo. Dust had blackened the caking streaks on his face, which was red from exertion. He was wheezing and puffing like a donkey-engine, and at every expiration of breath his cheeks bulged prodigiously. And what is more than mere words of description can ever convey, he was simply Swinnerton, at whom and with whom people smiled. He did not smile this time. He set his burden down and glared murderously at Fredericks.

“Well, Fredericks,” he gasped, with no thought of the deference due to the general’s stars, “what is there about this so infernally funny?”

“This is, Swinney,” said Fredericks, waving the wedding-card. “It isn’t even postmarked Fort Robertson. The last census found twenty-three thousand four hundred and five Mary Smiths. This is just one of the others, my boy.”

Swinnerton made a full confession to Fredericks before the week was over. He had received three delayed love-letters and a congratulatory telegram from the President of the United States, though it was significant that every admiring newspaper sensed the humor of a single fat surgeon waddling up to a firing-line and bluffing it into submission.

“I reckon,” he smiled a little ruefully, “that it’s written in the books that I’m to be a silly ass of sorts for all my mortal days. But I’m cured of minding it, and I’m a most uncommonly happy one, Freddie.”

[Pg 736]

THE THAMES

AN UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELER IN LONDON

BY THEODORE DREISER

Author of “Sister Carrie,” “Jennie Gerhardt,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY W. J. GLACKENS

AFTER a few days I went to London for the first time,—I do not count the night of my arrival, for I saw nothing but the railway terminus,—and, I confess, I was not greatly impressed. I could not help thinking on this first morning, as we passed from Paddington, via Hyde Park, Grosvenor Square, Berkeley Square, Piccadilly, and other streets to Regent Street and the neighborhood of the Carlton Hotel, that it was beautiful, spacious, cleanly, dignified, and well ordered, but not astonishingly imposing. Fortunately, it was a bright and comfortable morning, and the air was soft. There was a faint, bluish haze over the city, which I took to be smoke; and certainly it smelled as though it were smoky. I had a sense of great life, but not of crowded life, if I manage to make myself clear by that. It seemed to me at first blush as if the city might be so vast that no part was important. At every turn, X. was my ever-present monitor. We must have passed through a long stretch of Piccadilly, for X. pointed out a line of clubs, naming them the St. James’s Club, the Savile Club, the Lyceum Club, and then St. James’s Palace.

I was duly impressed. I was seeing things which, after all, I thought, did not depend so much upon their exterior beauty or vast presence as upon the distinction of their lineage and connections. They were beautiful in a low, dark way, and certainly they were tinged with an atmosphere of age and respectability. After all, since life is a figment of the brain, such built-up notions of things are in many cases really far more impressive than the things them[Pg 737]selves. London is a fanfare of great names; it is a clatter of vast reputations; it is a swirl of memories and celebrated beauties and orders and distinctions. It is almost impossible any more to disassociate the real from the fictitious or, better, the spiritual. There is something here which is not of brick and stone at all, but which is purely a matter of thought. It is disembodied poetry, noble ideas, delicious memories of great things; and these, after all, are better than brick and stone. The city is low, generally not more than five stories high, often not more than two, but it is beautiful. And it alternates great spaces with narrow crevices in such a way as to give a splendid variety. You can have at once a sense of being very crowded and of being very free. I can understand now Browning’s desire to include “poor old Camberwell” with Italy in the confines of romance.

Drawn by W. J. Glackens

“X. WAS MY EVER-PRESENT MONITOR”

The thing that struck me most was that the buildings were largely a golden yellow in color, quite as if they had been white, and time had stained them. Many other buildings looked as though they had been black originally and had been daubed white in spots. The truth is that it was quite the other way about. They had been snow-white and had been sooted by the smoke until they were now nearly coal-black. Only here and there had the wind and rain whipped bare white places which looked like scars or the drippings of lime. At first I thought, “How wretched!” Later, “This effect is charming.”

We are so used to the new and shiny and tall in America, particularly in our larger cities, that it is very hard at first to estimate a city of equal or greater rank, which is old and low and, to a certain extent, smoky. In places there was more beauty, more surety, more dignity, more space than most of our cities have to offer. The police had an air of dignity and intelligence such as I have never seen anywhere in America, and it was obvious at a glance. The streets were beautifully swept and clean, and I saw soldiers here and there in fine uniforms, standing outside palaces and walking in the public ways. That alone was sufficient to differentiate London from any American city. We rarely see our soldiers. They are too few. I think what I felt most of all was that I could not feel anything very definite about so great a city, and that there was no use trying.

The first thing that took my attention in the stores was the clerks, but I may say the stores and shops themselves, after New York, seemed small and old. New York is new; the space given to the more important shops is considerable. In London it struck me that the space was not much and that the woodwork and walls were dingy. One can tell by the feel of a place whether it is exceptional and profitable, and all of these were that; but they were dingy. The English clerk, too, had an air of civility, I had almost said servility, which was different. They looked to me like[Pg 738] persons born to a condition and a point of view, and I think they are. In America any clerk may subsequently be anything he chooses, ability guaranteed, but I’m not so sure that this is true in England. Anyhow, the American clerk always looks his possibilities, his problematic future; the English clerk looks as though he were to be one indefinitely.

X. and I were through with our first impressive round of sight-seeing by one o’clock, and he explained that we would go to a popular, hotel grill. All my life, certainly all my literary life, I had been hearing of this hotel, its distinction, its air; and now I said to myself, “Here I am, and I shall be able to judge it for myself.” We stopped at a barber’s for a few minutes to be shaved, and, to my astonishment, I saw a barber-shop which anywhere in America would be considered ridiculous. It was not a dirty barber-shop; you could see plainly that it was clean, well-conditioned, and probably enjoyed a profitable patronage: but for smallness, meanness, the age of the woodwork and the chairs, commend me to America of, say, 1865. It was the poorest little threadbare thing I have yet seen in that line. X. spoke of it as “his barber’s.”

The hotel, after its fashion,—the grill,—was another blow. I had fancied that I was going to see something on the order of the new, luxurious hotels in New York; certainly as resplendent, let us say, as our hotels of the lower first class. Not so. It can be compared, and I think fairly so, only to our hotels of the second or third class. There is the same air of age here that there is about our old, but very excellent, hotels in New York. The woodwork is plain, simple (I am speaking of the grill); the coat-room commonplace; the carpets are red and a little worn in spots. Several of the stair-steps squeaked as we went down. “Just like our old and popular hotels,” I said to myself over and over in descending; and the cuisine and the general appearance of the dining-room reminded me of the same type of room in these hotels.

While we were sipping coffee X. told me of a Mrs. W., a friend of his, whom I was to meet. She was, he said, a lion-hunter. She tried to make her somewhat interesting personality felt in so large a sea as London by taking up with promising talent before it was already a commonplace. I believe it was arranged over the telephone then that I should lunch there the following day at one, and be introduced to a certain Lady B., who was known as a patron of the arts, and to a certain Miss N., an interesting English type. I was pleased with the idea of going. I had never seen an English lady lion-hunter. I had never met English ladies of the types of Miss N. and Lady B. There might be others present, I was told. I was also informed that Mrs. W. was really not English, but French, though she and her husband, who was also French and a wealthy merchant, had resided in London so long that they were to all intents and purposes English, and besides they were in rather interesting standing socially.

I recall the next day, Sunday, with as much interest as any date, for on that day I encountered my first London drawing-room. When I reached the house of Mrs. W., which was in one of those lovely squares that constitute a striking feature of the West End, I was ushered up-stairs to the drawing-room, where I found my host, a rather practical, shrewd-looking Frenchman, and his less obviously French wife.

“Oh, Mr. Derrizer,” exclaimed my hostess on sight, as she came forward to greet me, a decidedly engaging woman of something over forty, with bronze hair and ruddy complexion. Her gown of green silk, cut after the latest mode, stamped her in my mind as of a romantic, artistic, eager disposition.

“You must come and tell us at once what you think of the picture we are discussing. It is down-stairs. Lady B. is there, and Miss N. We are trying to see if we can get a better light on it. Mr. X. has told me of you. You are from America. You must tell us how you like London, after you see the Degas.”

I think I liked this lady thoroughly at a glance and felt at home with her, for I know the type. It is the mobile, artistic type, with not much practical judgment in great matters, but bubbling with enthusiasm, temperament, life.

[Pg 739]

“Certainly; delighted. I know too little of London to talk of it. I shall be interested in your picture.”

Drawn by W. J. Glackens

“‘I LIKE IT,’ HE PRONOUNCED. ‘THE NOTE IS SOMBER,
BUT IT IS EXCELLENT WORK’”

We had reached the main floor by this time.

“Mr. Derrizer, the Lady B.,” said Mrs. W., as she brought me forward to meet the ladies.

A modern suggestion of the fair Jehanne, tall, astonishingly lissome, done, as to clothes, after the best manner of the romanticists, such was the Lady B. A more fascinating type, from the point of view of stagecraft, I never saw. And the languor and lofty elevation of her gestures and eyebrows defy description. She could say, “Oh, I am so weary of all this!” with a slight elevation of her eyebrows a hundred times more definitely and forcefully than if it had been shouted for her in stentorian tones through a megaphone.

She gave me the fingers of an archly poised hand.

“It is a pleasure.”

“And Miss N., Mr. Derrizer.” Again it was Mrs. W. who spoke.

“I am very pleased.”

A pink, slim lily of a woman of twenty-eight or thirty, seemingly very fragile, very Dresden-china-like as to color, a dream of light and Tyrian blue with some white interwoven, very keen as to eye, the perfection of hauteur as to manner, so well-bred that her voice seemed subtly suggestive of it all—that was Miss N.

To say that I was interested in this company is putting it mildly. The three women were distinct, individual, characteristic each in a different way. The Lady B. was all peace and repose, statuesque, weary, dark. Miss N. was like a ray of sunshine, pure morning light, delicate, gay, mobile. Mrs. W. was of thicker texture, redder blood, more human fire. She had a vigor past the comprehension of either, if not their subtlety of intellect, which latter is often much better.

“Ah, yes, Degas. You like Degas, no doubt,” interpolated Mrs. W., recalling[Pg 740] us. “A lovely pigture, don’t you think? Such color, such depth, such sympathy of treatment! Oh!”

Mrs. W.’s hands were up in a pretty artistic gesture of delight.

“LADY B. WAS EXTENDING HER HAND IN AN ALMOST PATHETIC FAREWELL”

“Oh, yes,” continued the Lady B., taking up the rapture, “it is saw human—saw perfect in its harmony! The hair it is divine! And the poor man! He lives alone now in Paris, quite dreary, not seeing any one. Aw, the tragedy of it! The tragedy of it!” Her delicately carved vanity-box of some odd workmanship—blue-and-white enamel, with points of coral in it—was lifted in one hand as expressing her great distress. I confess I was not much moved, and I looked quickly at Miss N. Her eyes, it seemed to me, held a subtle, apprehending twinkle.

“And you?” It was Mrs. W. addressing me.

“It is impressive, I think. I do not know as much of his work as I might, I am sorry to say.”

“Aw, he is marvelous, wonderful! I am transported by the beauty and the depth of it all.” It was Mrs. W. talking, and I could not help rejoicing in the quality of her accent. Nothing is so pleasing to me in a woman of culture and refinement as that additional tang of remoteness which a foreign accent lends. If only all the lovely, cultivated women of the world would speak with a foreign accent in their native tongue I should like it better. It lends a touch of piquancy not otherwise obtainable.

Our luncheon party was complete now, and we would probably have gone immediately into the dining-room except for another picture—by Picasso. Let me repeat here that before X. called my atten[Pg 741]tion to Picasso’s cubical uncertainty in the London exhibition, I had never heard of him. Here in a dark corner of the room was the nude torso of a consumptive girl, her ribs showing, her cheeks colorless and sunken, her nose a wasted point, her eyes as hungry and sharp and lustrous as those of a bird. Her hair was really no hair—strings; and her thin, bony arms and shoulders were pathetic, decidedly morbid in their quality. To add to the morgue-like aspect of the composition, the picture was painted in a pale bluish-green key.

I wish to state here that now, after a little lapse of time, this conception, the thought and execution of it, is growing upon me. I am not sure that this work, which has rather haunted me, is not much more than a protest, the expression and realization of a great temperament; but at the moment it struck me as dreary, gruesome, decadent, and I said as much when asked for my impression.

“Gloomy, morbid,” Mrs. W. fired in her lovely accent, “what have they to do with art?”

“Luncheon is served, Madam.”

The double doors of the dining-room were flung open.

I found myself sitting between Mrs. W. and Miss N.

“Ah was so glad to hear you say you didn’t like it,” Miss N. applauded, her eyes sparkling, her lip moving with a delicate little smile. “You know, I abhor those things. They are decadent, like the rest of France and England. We are going backward instead of forward, I am quite sure. We have not the force we once had. It is all a race after pleasure and living and an interest in subjects of that kind. I am sure it isn’t healthy, normal art. I am sure life is better and brighter than that.”

“I am inclined to think so at times myself,” I replied.

We talked further, and I learned to my surprise that she suspected England to be decadent as a whole, falling behind in brain, brawn, and spirit, and that she thought America was much better.

“Do you know,” she observed, “I really think it would be a very good thing for us if we were conquered by Germany.”

I had found here, I fancied, some one who was really thinking for herself and a very charming young lady into the bargain. She was quick, apprehensive, all for a heartier point of view. I am not sure now that she was not merely being nice to me, and that, anyhow, she is not all wrong, and that the heartier point of view is the courage which can front life unashamed, which sees the divinity of fact and of beauty in the utmost seeming tragedy. Picasso’s grim presentation of decay and degradation is beginning to teach me something—the marvelous perfection of the spirit which is concerned with neither perfection, nor decay, but with life. It haunts me.

The charming luncheon was quickly over, and I think I gathered a very clear impression of the status of my host and hostess from their surroundings. Mr. W. was evidently liberal in his understanding of what constitutes a satisfactory home. It was not exceptional in that it differed greatly from the prevailing standard of luxury. But assuredly it was all in sharp contrast to Picasso’s grim representation of life and Degas’s revolutionary opposition to conventional standards.

Another man now made his appearance—an artist. I shall not forget him soon, for you do not often meet people who have the courage to appear at Sunday afternoons in a shabby, workaday business suit, unpolished shoes, a green neckerchief in lieu of collar and tie, and cuffless sleeves. I admired the quality, the workmanship, of the silver-set scarab which held his green linen neckerchief together, but I was a little puzzled as to whether he was very poor and his presence insisted upon, or comfortably progressive and indifferent to conventional dress. His face and body were quite thin; his hands delicate. He had an apprehensive eye that rarely met one’s direct gaze.

“Do you think art really needs that?” Miss N. asked me. She was referring to the green linen neckerchief.

“I admire the courage. It is at least individual.”

“It is after George Bernard Shaw. It has been done before,” replied Miss N.

“Then it requires almost more courage,” I replied.

Here Mrs. W. moved the sad excerpt from the morgue to the center of the room that he of the green neckerchief might gaze at it.

[Pg 742]

“I like it,” he pronounced. “The note is somber, but it is excellent work.”

Drawn by W. J. Glackens

“HOPED FOR THE DAY WHEN THE ISSUE
MIGHT BE TRIED OUT PHYSICALLY”

Then he took his departure with interesting abruptness. Almost immediately the Lady B. was extending her hand in an almost pathetic farewell. Her voice was lofty, sad, sustained. I wish I could describe it. There was just a suggestion of Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene. As she made her slow, graceful exit, I wanted to applaud loudly.

Mrs. W. turned to me as the nearest source of interest, and I realized with horror that she was going to fling her Picasso at my head again, and with as much haste as was decent I, too, took my leave.

Another evening I went with an American friend to call on two professional critics, one working in the field of literature, the other in art exclusively. I mention these two men and their labors because they were very interesting to me, representing, as they did, two fields of artistic livelihood in London, and both making moderate incomes, not large, but sufficient to live on in a simple way. They were men of mettle, as I discovered, urgent, thinking types of mind, quarreling to a certain extent with life and fate, and doing their best to read this very curious riddle of existence.

These two men lived in charming, though small, quarters not far from fashionable London, on the fringe of ultra-respectability, if not of it. Mr. F. was a conservative man, thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, pale, slender, remote, artistic. Mr. Lewis was in character not unlike Mr. F., I should have said, though[Pg 743] he was the older man, artistic, remote, ostensibly cultivated, living and doing all the refined things on principle more than anything else.

It amuses me now when I think of it, for of course neither of these gentlemen cared for me in the least, beyond my momentary vogue or repute in their small world. I must have appeared somewhat boorish and supercilious, but they were exceedingly pleasant. How did I like London? What did I think of the English? How did London contrast with New York? What had I seen?

My head was ringing with what I had already seen. London was going around in a ring for me. Its vast reaches were ever in my mind. I stated as succinctly as I could that I was puzzled in my mind as to what I did think, as I am generally by this phantasmagoria called life, while Mr. Lewis served an opening glass of port, and I toasted my feet before a delicious grate-fire. Already, as I have indicated in a way, I had decided that England was deficient in the vitality which America now possesses, certainly deficient in the raw creative imagination which is producing many new things in America, but far superior in what, for want of a better phrase, I must call social organization as it relates to social and commercial interchange generally. Something has developed in the English social consciousness a sense of responsibility. I really think that the English climate has had a great deal to do with this. It is so uniformly damp and cold and raw that it has produced a sober-minded race. When subsequently I encountered the climates of Paris, Rome, and the Riviera, I realized clearly how impossible it would be to produce the English temperament there. One can see the dark, moody, passionate temperament of the Italian evolving to perfection under his brilliant skies. The wine-like atmosphere of Paris speaks for itself. London is what it is, and the Englishmen likewise, because of the climate in which they have been reared.

I said as much without much protest, but when I ventured that the English might possibly be falling behind in the world’s race, and that other nations, such as the Germans and the Americans, might rapidly be displacing them, I evoked a storm of opposition. The sedate Mr. F. rose to this argument. It began at the dinner-table and was continued in the general living-room later. He sneered at the suggestion that the Germans could possibly conquer or displace England, and hoped for the day when the issue might be tried out physically. Mr. Lewis laughed as he spoke of the long way America had to go before it could achieve any social importance even within itself. It was a thrashing whirlpool of foreign elements. He had recently been to the United States, and in one of the British journals then on the stands was a long estimate by him of America’s weaknesses and potentialities. He poked fun at the careless, insulting manners of the people, their love of show, their love of praise. No Englishman, having tasted the comforts of civilized life in England, could ever live happily in America. There was no such thing as a serving class. He objected to American business methods as he had encountered them, and I could see that he really disliked America. To a certain extent he disliked me for being an American, and possibly resented my literary actuality for obtruding itself upon England. I enjoyed these two men as exceedingly able combatants—men against whose wits I could sharpen my own.

I mention them because, in a measure, they suggested the literary and artistic atmosphere of London. They went about, I was informed, to one London drawing-room and another. Mr. F. was considered an excellent judge of art; Mr. Lewis an important critic. Their mode of living constituted a touch of the better Grub Street of to-day. It was not bad.

“London sings in my ears.” I remember writing this somewhere about the fourth or fifth day of my stay. It was delicious, the sense of novelty and wonder it gave me. I am one of those who have been raised on Dickens and Thackeray and Lamb, but I must confess I found little to corroborate the world of vague impressions I had formed. Novels are a mere expression of temperament, anyhow.

New York and America are both so new, so lustful of change. Here, in these streets, when you walk out of a morning or an evening, you feel a pleasing stability. London is not going to change under your very eyes. You are not going to turn your[Pg 744] back to find, on looking again, a whole sky-line effaced. The city is restful, naïve, in a way tender and sweet, like an old song. London is more fatalistic, and therefore less hopeful than New York.

Drawn by W. J. Glackens

PICCADILLY CIRCUS

The first thing that impressed me was the grayish tinge of smoke that was over everything, a faint haze; and the next that, as a city, street for street and square for square, it was not so strident as New York, not nearly so harsh. The traffic was less noisy, the people were more thoughtful and considerate, the so-called rush, which characterizes New York, was less foolish. There is something rowdyish and ill-mannered about the street life of New York. This is not true of London. It struck me as simple, sedate, thoughtful, and I could only conclude that it sprang from a less-stirring atmosphere of opportunity. I fancy it is harder to get along in London. People do not change from one thing to another so much. The world there is more fixed in a pathetic routine, and people are more aware of their so-called “betters.” I hope not, but I felt it to be true.

I do not believe that it is given to any[Pg 745] writer wholly to suggest a city. The mind is like a voracious fish: it would like to eat up all the experiences and characteristics of a city or a nation, but this, fortunately, is not possible. My own mind was busy pounding at the gates of fact, but during all the while I was there I got only a little way. I remember being struck with the nature of St. James’s Park, which was near my hotel, the great column to the Duke of Marlborough, at the end of the street, the whirl of life in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, which were both very near. An office I visited in a narrow street interested me, and the storm of cabs which whirled by all the corners of this region. It was described to me as the center of London, and I am quite sure it was, for clubs, theaters, hotels, smart shops, and the like were all here. The heavy trading section was farther east, along the banks of the Thames, and between that and Regent Street, where my little hotel was located, lay the financial section, sprawling about St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Bank of England. One could go out of this great central world easily enough, but it was only, apparently, to get into minor centers. It was all decidedly pleasing, because it was new and strange, and because there was a world of civility prevailing which does not exist in America.

The amazing metropolitan atmosphere in which I found myself satisfied me completely for the time being. Life here was so complex and so extended that during days and days that involved visits—breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, suppers—with one personage and another, political, social, artistic, I was still busy snatching glimpses of the great lake of life that spread on every hand. In so far as I could judge on so short a notice, London seemed to me to represent a mood—a uniform, aware, conservative state of being, neither brilliant nor gay anywhere, though interesting always. About Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Charing Cross, and the Strand I suppose the average Londoner would insist that London is very gay; but I could not see it. Certainly it was not gay as similar sections in New York are gay. It is not in the Londoner himself to be so. He is solid, hard, phlegmatic, a little dreary, like a certain type of rain-bird or Northern loon, content to make the best of a rather dreary situation. On the other hand, I should not say that the city is depressing,—far from it,—though there are many who have told me they found it so. You have to represent a certain state of mind to be a Londoner, or a Britisher, even, a true one, and, on the whole, I think it is a more pleasant attitude than one finds in America, though not so brilliant. Creature comforts run high with this type of mind, and, after that, a certain happy acceptance of the commonplace. Nothing less than that could possibly explain the mile on mile of drab houses, of streets all alike, of doorways all alike, of chimneys all alike. That is what you feel all over England—a drab acceptance of the commonplace; and yet, when all is said and done, it works out into something so charming in its commonplaceness that it is almost irresistible. All the while I was in London I was never tired of looking at these dreary streets and congratulating myself that they composed so well. I do not wonder that Whistler found much to admire at Chelsea or that Turner could paint Thames water-scenes. I could, too, if I were an artist. As it was, I could see Goldsmith and Lamb and Gray and Dickens and much of Shakspere in all that I saw here. It must be the genius of the English people to be homy and simple, and yet charmingly idyllic in their very lack of imagination. It must be so.

One particular afternoon along the Thames it was raining. I saw the river in varying moods all the way from Blackfriars Bridge to Chelsea, and never once was it anything more than black-gray, varying at times from a pale or almost sunlit yellow to a solid leaden-black hue. It looked at times as though something remarkable were about to happen, so weirdly greenish yellow was the sky above the water; and the tall chimneys of Lambeth over the way, appearing and disappearing in the mist, were irresistible. There is a certain kind of barge which plies up and down the Thames with a collapsible mast and sail which looks for all the world like something off the Nile. They harmonize with the smoke and the gray, lowery skies. I was never weary of looking at them in the changing light and mist and rain. Gulls skimmed over the water here very freely all the way from Blackfriars to Bat[Pg 746]tersea, and along the Embankment they sat in scores, solemnly cogitating the state of the weather, perhaps. I was delighted with the picture they made in places, greedy, wide-winged, artistic things.

I had a novel experience with these same gulls one Sunday afternoon, which I may as well relate here. I had been out all morning reconnoitering strange sections of London, and arrived near Blackfriars Bridge about one o’clock. I was attracted by what seemed to me at first glance as thousands of gulls, lovely clouds of them, swirling about the heads of several different men at various points along the wall. It was too beautiful to miss. It reminded me of the gulls about the steamer at Fishguard. I drew near. The first man I saw was feeding them minnows out of a small box he had purchased for a penny, throwing the tiny fish aloft in the air and letting the gulls dive for them. They ate from his hand, circled above and about his head, walked on the wall before him, their jade bills and salmon-pink feet showing delightfully.

I was delighted, and hurried to the second. It was the same. I found the vender of small minnows near by, a man who sold them for this purpose, and purchased a few boxes. Instantly I became the center of another swirling cloud, wheeling and squeaking in hungry anticipation. It was a great sight. Finally I threw out the last minnows, tossing them all high in the air, and seeing not one escape, while I meditated on the speed of these birds, which, while scarcely moving a wing, rise and fall with incredible swiftness. It is a matter of gliding up and down with them. I left, my head full of birds, the Thames forever fixed in mind.

It seems odd to make separate comment on something so thoroughly involved with everything else in a trip of this kind as the streets of London; but they contrasted so strangely with those of other cities I have seen that I am forced to comment on them. For one thing, they are seldom straight for any distance, and they change their names as frequently and as unexpectedly as a thief. Bond Street speedily becomes Old Bond Street or New Bond Street, according to the direction in which you are going, and I never could see why the Strand should turn into Fleet Street as it went along, and then into Ludgate Hill, and then into Cannon Street. Neither could I understand why Whitechapel Road should change to Mile End Road; but that is neither here nor there. The thing that interested me about London streets first was that there were no high buildings, nothing, as a rule, over four or five stories, though now and then you actually find an eight- or nine-story building. There are some near Victoria Street in the vicinity of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster. For another thing, the vast majority of these buildings are comparatively old, not new, like those in New York or Rome or Berlin or Paris or Milan. London is older in its seeming than almost any of these other cities, and yet this may be due to the fact that it is smokier than any of the others. I saw it always in gray weather or through, at best, a sunlit golden haze, when it looked more like burnished brass than anything else. Then it was lovely. The buildings in almost all cases were of a vintage which has passed in America. Outside of some of the old palaces and castles in London,—St. James’s, Buckingham, the Tower, Windsor,—there are no fine buildings. The Houses of Parliament and the cathedrals are excluded, of course.

One evening I went with a friend of mine to visit the House of Parliament, that noble pile of buildings on the banks of the Thames. For days I had been skirting about them, interested in other things. The clock-tower, with its great round clock-face,—twenty-three feet in diameter, some one told me,—had been staring me in the face over a stretch of park space and intervening buildings on such evenings as Parliament was in session, and I frequently debated with myself whether I should trouble to go or not, even if some one invited me. I grow so weary of standard, completed things at times! However, I did go. It came about through the Hon. T. P. O’Connor, M.P., an old admirer of “Sister Carrie,” who, hearing that I was in London, invited me. He had just finished reading “Jennie Gerhardt” the night I met him, and I shall never forget the kindly glow of his face as, on meeting me in the dining-room of the House of Commons, he exclaimed:

[Pg 747]

“Ah, the biographer of that poor girl! And how charming she was, too! Ah me! Ah me!”

I can hear the soft brogue in his voice yet, and see the gay romance of his Irish eye. Are not the Irish all inborn cavaliers, anyhow?

I had been out in the East End all day, speculating on that shabby mass that have nothing, know nothing, dream nothing; or do they? I could have cried as dark fell, and I returned through long, humble streets alive with a home-hurrying mass of people—clouds of people not knowing whence they came or why. London always struck me as so vast and so pathetic, and now I was to return and go to dine where the laws are made for all England.

I was escorted by another friend, a Mr. M., since dead, who was, when I reached the hotel, quite disturbed lest we be late. I like the man who takes society and social forms seriously, though I would not be that man for all the world. M. was one such. He was, if you please, a stickler for law and order. The Houses of Parliament and the repute of the Hon. T. P. O’Connor meant much to him. I can see O’Connor’s friendly, comprehensive eye understanding it all—understanding in his deep, literary way why it should be so.

As I hurried through Westminster Hall, the great general entrance, once itself the ancient Parliament of England, the scene of the deposition of Edward II, of the condemnation of Charles I, of the trial of Warren Hastings, and the poling of the exhumed head of Cromwell, I was thinking, thinking, thinking. What is a place like this, anyhow, but a fanfare of names? If you know history, the long, strange tangle of steps or actions by which life ambles crab-wise from nothing to nothing, you know that it is little more than this. The present places are the thing, the present forms, salaries, benefices, and that dream of the mind which makes it all into something. As I walked through into the Central Hall, where we had to wait until T. P. was found, I studied the high, groined arches, the Gothic walls, the graven figures of the general anteroom. It was all rich, gilded, dark, lovely. And about me was a room full of men all titillating with a sense of their own importance—commoners, lords possibly, call-boys, ushers, and here and there persons crying of “Division! Division!” while a bell somewhere clanged raucously.

“There’s a vote on,” observed Mr. M. “Perhaps they won’t find him right away. Never mind; he’ll come back.”

He did return finally, with, after his first greetings, a “Well, now we’ll ate, drink, and be merry,” and then we went in.

At table, being an old member of Parliament, he explained many things swiftly and interestingly, how the buildings were arranged, the number of members, the procedure, and the like. He was, he told me, a member from Liverpool, which, by the way, returns some Irish members, which struck me as rather strange for an English city.

“Not at all, not at all. The English like the Irish—at times,” he added softly.

“I have just been out in your East End,” I said, “trying to find out how tragic London is, and I think my mood has made me a little color-blind. It’s rather a dreary world, I should say, and I often wonder whether law-making ever helps these people.”

He smiled that genial, equivocal, sophisticated smile of the Irish that always bespeaks the bland acceptance of things as they are, and tries to make the best of a bad mess.

“Yes, it’s bad,”—and nothing could possibly suggest the aroma of a brogue that went with this,—“but it’s no worse than some of your American cities—Lawrence, Lowell, Fall River.” (Trust the Irish to hand you an intellectual “Your another!”) “Conditions in Pittsburgh are as bad as anywhere, I think; but it’s true the East End is pretty bad. You want to remember that it’s typical London winter weather we’re having, and London smoke makes those gray buildings look rather forlorn, it’s true. But there’s some comfort there, as there is everywhere. My old Irish father was one for thinking that we all have our rewards here or hereafter. Perhaps theirs is to be hereafter.” And he rolled his eyes humorously and sanctimoniously heavenward.

An able man this, full, as I knew, from reading his weekly and his books, of a deep, kindly understanding of life, but one who, despite his knowledge of the tragedies of existence, refused to be cast down.

He was going up the Nile shortly in a house-boat with a party of wealthy friends, and he told me that Lloyd George, the champion of the poor, was just making off[Pg 748] for a winter outing on the Riviera, but that I might, if I would come some morning, have breakfast with him. He was sure that the great commoner would be glad to see me. He wanted me to call at his rooms, his London official offices, as it were, at 5 Morpeth Mansions, and have a pleasant talk with him, which latterly I did. He wanted me to meet a Madame N., a French litterateur of over fifty, then staying at the same country place with him near Maidenhead, and hear her very tragic history. He brought an ache to my heart by recounting this same,—a story to which only a Flaubert or a De Maupassant could do justice. It is much too long and too Gallic to relate here.

While he was in the midst of it, the call of “Division!” sounded once more through the halls, and he ran to take his place with his fellow-parliamentarians on some question of presumably vital importance. I can see him bustling away in his long frock-coat, his napkin in his hand, ready to be counted yea or nay, as the case might be.

Afterward, when he had outlined for me a tour in Ireland which I must sometime take, he took us up into the members’ gallery of the Commons in order to see how wonderful it was, and we sat as solemn as owls, contemplating the rather interesting scene below. I cannot say that I was seriously impressed. The Hall of Commons, I thought, was small and stuffy, not so large as the House of Representatives at Washington, by any means.

In delicious Irish whispers he explained a little concerning the arrangement of the place. The seat of the speaker was at the north end of the chamber on a straight line with the sacred wool sack of the House of Lords in another part of the building, however important that may be. If I would look under the rather shadowy canopy at the north end of this extremely square chamber, I would see him, “smothering under an immense white wig,” he explained. In front of the canopy was a table, the speaker’s table, with presumably the speaker’s official mace lying upon it. To the right of the speaker were the recognized seats of the government party, the ministers occupying the front bench. And then he pointed out to me Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bonar Law, and Mr. Winston Churchill, all men creating a great stir at the time. They were whispering and smiling in genial concert, while opposite them, on the left hand of the speaker, where the opposition was gathered, some droning M.P. from the North, I understood, a noble lord who chose to sit in the Commons rather than in the House of Lords, was delivering one of those typically intellectual commentaries which the English are fond of delivering. I could not see him from where I sat, but I could see him just the same. I knew that he was standing very straight, in the most suitable clothes for the occasion, his linen immaculate, one hand poised gracefully, ready to emphasize some rather obscure point, while he stated in the best English why this and this must be done. Every now and then, at a suitable point in his argument, some friendly and equally intelligent member would give voice to a soothing “Hyah! hyah!” or “Rathah!” Of the four hundred and seventy-six provided seats, I fancy something like over four hundred were vacant, their occupants being out in the dining-rooms, or off in those adjoining chambers where parliamentarians confer during hours that are not pressing, and where they are sought at the call for a division. I do not presume, however, that they were all in any so safe or sane places. I mock-reproachfully asked Mr. O’Connor why he was not in his seat, and he said in good Irish:

“Me boy, there are thricks in every thrade. I’ll be there whin me vote is wanted.”

We came away finally through long, floreated passages and towering rooms, where I paused to admire the intricate woodwork, the splendid gilding, and the tier upon tier of carven kings and queens in their respective niches. There was for me a flavor of great romance over it all. I could not help thinking that, pointless as it all might be, such joys and glories as we have are thus compounded. Out of the dull blatherings of half-articulate members, the maunderings of dreamers and schemers, come such laws and such policies as best express the moods of the time—of the British or any other empire. I have no great faith in laws, anyhow. They are ill-fitting garments at best, traps and mental catch-poles for the unwary only. But I thought as I came out into the swirling city again,[Pg 749] “It is a strange world. These clock-towers and halls will sometime fall into decay. The dome of our own capitol will be rent and broken, and through its ragged interstices will fall the pallor of the moon.” But life does not depend upon parliaments or men. It can get along with windless spaces and such forms and spirits as have not yet been dreamed of in the mind of man.

The Thames from Blackfriars Bridge to the Tower Bridge, along Upper and Lower Thames Street, which is on the right bank of the river going up-stream, was my first excursion, though, in making it, I saw little of the river. It is a street that runs parallel with it, and is intersected every fifty or a hundred feet by narrow lanes which lead down to docks at the water’s-edge. The Thames is a murky little stream above London Bridge, compared with such vast bodies as the Hudson and the Mississippi, but utterly delightful. I saw it on several occasions before and after, once in a driving rain off London Bridge, where twenty thousand vehicles were passing in the hour, it was said; once afterward at night when the boats below were faint, wind-driven lights and the crowd on the bridge black shadows. Once I walked along the Embankment from Blackfriars Bridge to Battersea Bridge and beyond to the giant plant of the General Electric Company, a very charming section of London.

But I was never more impressed than I was this day walking from Cleopatra’s Needle to the Tower. The section lying between Blackfriars Bridge and Tower Bridge is very interesting from a human, to say nothing of a river, point of view; I question whether from some points of view it is not the most interesting in London, though it gives only occasional glimpses of the river. London is curious. It is very modern in spots. It is too much like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston; but here between Blackfriars Bridge and the Tower, along Upper and Lower Thomas Street, I found something that delighted me. It smacked of Dickens, of Charles II, of Old England, and of a great many forgotten, far-off things which I felt, but could not readily call to mind. It was delicious, this narrow, winding street, with high walls,—high because the street was so narrow,—and alive with people bobbing along under umbrellas or walking stodgily in the rain. Lights were burning in all the stores and warehouses, dark recesses running back to the restless tide of the Thames, and they were full of an industrious commercial life.

It was interesting to me to think that I was in the center of so much that was old, but for the exact details I confess I cared little. Here the Thames was especially delightful. It presented such odd vistas. I watched the tumbling tide of water, whipped by gusty wind where moderate-sized tugs and tows were going by in the mist and rain. It was delicious, artistic, far more significant than quiescence and sunlight could have made it. I took note of the houses, the doorways, the quaint, winding passages, but for significance and charm they did not compare with the nebulous, indescribable mass of working boys and girls and men and women which moved before my gaze. The mouths of many of them were weak, their noses snub, their eyes squint, their chins undershot, their ears stub, their chests flat. Most of them had a waxy, meaty look, but for interest they were incomparable. American working crowds may be much more chipper, but not more interesting. I could not weary of looking at them.

I followed the Thames in the rain to the giant plant of the General Electric Company, and thought of Sir Thomas More, and Henry VIII, who married Anne Boleyn at the Old Church near Battersea Bridge, and wondered what they would think of this modern power-house. What a change from Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More to vast, whirling electric dynamos and a London subway system! A little below this, coming once more into a dreary neighborhood of the cheapest houses,—mud-colored brick,—I turned into a street called Lots Road, drab and gray, and, weary of rain and gloom, took a bus to my hotel. What I know of the Thames I have described. It is beautiful.

[Pg 750]

THE MONROE DOCTRINE IN THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE

HOW THAT CONTROVERSY PAVED THE WAY FOR THE PANAMA CANAL

BY CHARLES R. MILLER

Editor of “The New York Times”

WITH A MAP, AND WITH TWO CARTOONS FROM “PUNCH” REPRODUCED BY SPECIAL PERMISSION

EX-PRESIDENT HARRISON was very testy and Sir Richard Webster unmistakably cross one cool afternoon in September, 1899, when I found a place among the spectators in the Hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, where the Commission of Arbitration in the boundary dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela was in session. General Benjamin F. Tracy was drawn into the area of unpleasantness.

“That is not a way in which I am going to be addressed, General Tracy,” said Sir Richard to the ex-Secretary of the Navy.

Sir Richard Webster was the chief counsel of Great Britain before the Arbitration Commission; ex-President Harrison was the leading counsel of Venezuela, and General Tracy was his associate. It was about the forty-fourth day of the proceedings. The ill temper of these great men arose from no national antagonism, no professional jealousy, for in that noble strife of minds each had come to hold in high respect the legal attainments of the others. But they had entered upon the eighth week of perhaps the most wearisome and uninteresting trial of an international cause of which the chronicles of diplomacy hold any record, and court and counsel were tired out and bored beyond expression.

Two years earlier I had sat in the President’s room at the White House and heard Mr. Cleveland talk of the Venezuela boundary dispute and of his part in forwarding it to a settlement. It was in the month of February, 1897, two weeks before the expiration of President Cleveland’s second term. A few days earlier, on February 2, 1897, Sir Julian Pauncefote, on behalf of Great Britain, and José Andradé, representing Venezuela, had signed at Washington a treaty of which this was the first article:

The signing of that treaty, of which ratifications were exchanged on the following fourteenth of June, was a memorable triumph for President Cleveland,[Pg 751] for the Monroe Doctrine, and for the principle of arbitration between nations. For it was a message sent to Congress on December 17, 1895—a message which startled two worlds, that had brought about this agreement to arbitrate the questions in dispute.

In a two-hours’ talk on that February day Mr. Cleveland had reviewed some of the chief acts of his administration, and I asked him to tell me, as far as he felt free to do so, the reasons that had called forth his Venezuela message. He spoke at length upon the subject, and with much freedom. Expressing in substance the impression his words made upon me, I wrote at the time as follows of the message and of Mr. Cleveland’s part in bringing the dispute to a settlement:

It will be well to say in the beginning that the merits of the boundary dispute and the immediate results of the arbitration are not particularly under examination in this article. The finding of the Paris tribunal was a compromise. The extreme contentions of both disputants were denied, although those of Venezuela were abridged much more than the claims of Great Britain. But had England obtained at Paris every square mile of territory to which, in the ultimate stretch of her audacity, she had asserted right and title, the triumph of President Cleveland and of the Monroe Doctrine would have been in no wise dimmed.

The vital essence of that triumph lay in this, that under the constraint laid upon her by Mr. Cleveland’s message of December 17, England submitted to a judicial determination of her title to territory which for more than half a century she had sought to wrest without due proof of ownership from a country too weak to resist her continuing encroachments.

“If a European Power by an extension of its boundaries takes possession of the territory of one of our neighboring republics against its will, and in derogation of its rights,” said Mr. Cleveland in his message, “it is difficult to see why, to that extent, such European Power does not thereby attempt to extend its system of government to that portion of this continent which is taken,” and this, the message continued, “is the precise action which President Monroe declared to be ‘dangerous to our peace and safety.’”

For Great Britain to take territory on this continent before proving title was an act of which the United States by its President complained as “a willful aggression upon its rights and interests.” Great Britain heeded the protest, yielded to our demand for a judicial examination and finding, and Venezuela had her day in court, and that, not the actual and precise position of the boundary line as finally traced, was the whole point of the matter so far as the United States and the Monroe Doctrine were involved in it. That was our triumph.

Historically, the dispute over the boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela dates from the discovery of America and the Spanish occupation. Following in the track of Columbus, who in his third voyage, in 1498, had sailed along the Orinoco delta, his first sight of the mainland of America, the Spaniards, early in the sixteenth century, had explored the country in search of gold. The El Dorado of fable was supposed to lie somewhere in the region between the upper waters of the Orinoco and Essequibo. By right of discovery, exploration, and settlement, for settlements were established later, the Spaniards gained the right to call Guayana their own, for that name was at first given to the South American shore of the Caribbean Sea.

[Pg 752]

THE DISPUTED TERRITORY

On this map the Schomburgk Line is laid down in conformity with the claims of Great Britain as to its proper position. By the arbitration Great Britain lost the two strips of land within that line indicated on the map by shaded sections, one at the mouth of the Orinoco and the other between Yuruan and Mt. Roraima. Those shaded sections comprise about 5000 square miles, an area a trifle larger than the State of Connecticut, and represent what Venezuela gained in territory within the Schomburgk Line as defined by Great Britain. Venezuela’s political gain consisted in the complete control of the mouth of the Orinoco, the natural outlet to nearly all of Venezuela and of a large part of Colombia.—EDITOR.

❏
LARGER IMAGE

There was in truth a store of gold in the land; the explorers carried stories of their new wealth back to Spain, and before the end of the sixteenth century Sir Walter Raleigh, with a body of English adventurers and certain Dutchmen, visited Guayana in quest of treasure. The Dutch West India Company planted a settlement near the mouth of the Essequibo about the year 1624, and was strong enough to hold it against the Spaniards, who up to that time had been in undisputed possession. The title of the Dutch to the territory upon which they had established themselves was confirmed by the treaty of Münster in 1648, in which Spain recognized the Netherlands as free and independent states. Early in the last[Pg 753] century England captured from the Dutch their settlements of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo, and in the treaty of 1814 these were formally ceded to her. Thus British Guiana came into being. On the one hand, therefore, Venezuela, when she revolted from Spain in 1811, became vested with the title to all the territory which Spain had held by virtue of discovery and exploration save the districts she had ceded to the Dutch; while, on the other hand, England held British Guiana by cession from the Dutch, who had acquired it from Spain by the treaty of Münster.

In that treaty Spain and Holland had not been at pains to draw the boundary line between Guayana, now British Guiana, and the Captaincy General of Caracas, now Venezuela, and from that act of omission arose all the trouble. For many years after England entered into lawful possession of British Guiana by the treaty of 1814 no dispute over the undefined boundary arose. With the running of what is called the Schomburgk Line in 1849 begins the unbroken chain of events that led to the boundary controversy, brought it to a critical stage, called forth the message of December, 1895, and culminated in the finding and award of the Paris tribunal.

In 1841 the British engineer Sir Robert Schomburgk was commissioned by his Government to ascertain and fix by metes and bounds the line between British Guiana and Venezuela. Then began Venezuela’s protest, and then, too, began the singular migrations of the Schomburgk Line. Lord Aberdeen abandoned it in 1844, but in 1886 it was laid down in British official publications as having made a wide detour to the west, the British maps presenting to the eyes of the Venezuelans a startling incursion upon territory they had supposed to be their own by undisputed title. “The Statesman’s Year Book” of 1885 stated the area of British Guiana to be 76,000 square miles. In 1887, according to the “Year Book,” the area of the colony had expanded to 109,000 square miles. Nor was this the limit of the westward sweep of British pretensions, for in 1890 England obligingly consented to arbitrate her title to a vast tract of territory embracing thousands of square miles wholly outside the Schomburgk Line, and, a circumstance that has oftener explained than excused England’s land hunger, including within its boundaries some of Venezuela’s richest gold mines.

The protests of Venezuela and her appeals for justice became insistent. She demanded an arbitration of the British claims, and her demands meeting with refusal, in 1887 she broke off diplomatic relations. Our aid was invoked by her, and Secretary Bayard tendered our good offices to promote a friendly settlement. Great Britain firmly refused to arbitrate the question except upon the basis of an antecedent concession to her of a very large part of the territory in dispute, including the mouth of the Orinoco and all territory within the extended Schomburgk Line. Meanwhile the Venezuelans grew more and more uneasy as they observed the behavior of British war-ships in and near the mouth of the Orinoco, and the acts of British subjects asserting and exercising rights of occupation and settlement upon territory they held, and rightly held, to be their own.

This was the situation when Secretary of State Richard Olney addressed to Ambassador Bayard in London, on July 20, 1895, that letter of instructions which the British ambassador at Washington described as a “fiery note.” Another British authority called it “Olney’s hectoring note.” Lord Salisbury, very much at his ease, and taking his time about it, replied to this note on November 26. He explained that “it could not be answered until it had been carefully considered by the law officers of the Crown.” It may be recalled that Earl Russell, before making reply to the vigorous protest of our minister, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, against the fitting out of the Alabama in a British shipyard, referred the matter to the “law officers of the Crown.” One of these learned gentlemen having unfortunately lost his mind, there was a delay of some days, of which the Alabama took advantage to escape the jurisdiction by putting out to sea. As the decision of the law officers, when tardily rendered, was that the ship must be seized, it would appear that England should lay the responsibility for the Alabama award of $15,500,000 that she paid to us upon the too deliberate working of her legal machinery.

[Pg 754]

Secretary Olney in his letter, which of course Mr. Bayard was instructed to lay before Lord Salisbury, had embodied all the substantive declarations of the Monroe Doctrine, and in the very words of Mr. Monroe’s message of 1823. The first fruit of the doctrine, he pointed out, was the independence of South America, for it was to the European Powers banded together in the Holy Alliance, and then preparing to assist Spain in the recapture of her revolted colonies, that Monroe addressed his warning message. Every administration since Monroe’s had given its sanction and indorsement to the doctrine. It had been successfully invoked to put an end to the empire forced upon the Mexican people by Napoleon III, and now it was upon no general justification of interposing in a controversy between two other nations, but specifically upon the Monroe Doctrine, that we based our remonstrance against Great Britain’s high-handed ways with Venezuela.

Great Britain’s assertion of title to disputed territory, followed by her refusal to submit her title to investigation, was “a substantial appropriation of the territory to her own use,” and we should ignore our established policy if we did not “give warning that the transaction will be regarded as injurious to the people of the United States, as well as oppressive in itself.” “While the measures necessary or appropriate for the vindication of that policy are to be determined by another branch of the Government,” continued Mr. Olney, “it is clearly for the Executive to leave nothing undone which may tend to render such determination unnecessary.” This is the passage, doubtless, which provoked the epithets “fiery” and “hectoring.” Those who ponder its meaning may feel that its words were at least ominous.

Lord Salisbury based his reply of November 26 in the main upon the familiar European contention that while the Monroe Doctrine is interesting, and may have had a salutary effect when first promulgated, it has never “been inscribed by competent authority in the code of international law,” and that Mr. Olney’s principle that “American questions are for American decision ... cannot be sustained by any reasoning drawn from the law of nations.” He reviewed the dispute with Venezuela, defended with many and plausible citations of authority Great Britain’s procedure in the territory claimed by her, made a tart reference to “large tracts” of territory once Mexican but now a part of the United States, and firmly declined “to submit to the arbitration of another Power or of foreign jurists, however eminent, claims based on the extravagant pretensions of Spanish officials in the last century, and involving the transfer of British subjects who have for many years enjoyed the settled rule of a British colony to a nation of different race and language, whose political system is subject to frequent disturbances, and whose institutions as yet offer very inadequate protection to life and property.”

The substance and meaning of Lord Salisbury’s despatch, and the attitude which Great Britain assumed, were set forth with conspicuous moderation and fairness by Mr. Cleveland in his Princeton lectures:

It was then that President Cleveland, patient, but knowing that patience has its bounds, loving peace, and willing to make the full measure of sacrifice to that high end, but with firm conviction that our[Pg 755] interposition in the controversy was necessary and could not longer be delayed, sent to Congress the special message of December 17, 1895. That message fixed the attention of the civilized world upon the Venezuela boundary dispute, a matter which had up to that time held only small place in the thoughts of men other than the immediate official participants; for President Cleveland’s plain words brought clearly into view the possibility of war—war between the United States and Great Britain. Christmas was at hand. At that season nobody was thinking of war, and war between the English and ourselves had long been held to be at any and all seasons unthinkable. The civilized world was startled; it is not too much to say that some men of large affairs and international dealings were stunned. “The crime of the century,” was the phrase applied to the message by some whose alarm at the possibility of war was equaled by their ignorance of the long series of disturbing events which led Mr. Cleveland to perpetrate that “crime.”

It was no crime; it was a saving act, a step that made for peace, and removed a source of long-standing irritation that was a menace to peace. The pen of Richard Olney was the one to set forth the legal basis of our demand—the pen of a great lawyer, not too much cramped by the circumstance that it was also the pen of a diplomat. Mr. Cleveland’s strong hand was the one to write the words that proclaimed the Nation’s duty. The Monroe Doctrine has never had a sturdier defender or a sounder defense. Lord Salisbury’s amusingly English and almost sneering references to the doctrine as one “to be mentioned with respect on account of the distinguished statesman to whom it is due,” but having no relation to the affairs of the present day, evoked that memorable sentence in Mr. Cleveland’s message, in which he said that the Monroe Doctrine “was intended to apply to every stage of our National life, and cannot become obsolete while our Republic endures.”

To the Salisbury argument that the doctrine must be ruled out because it has never been inscribed in the code of international law, and “cannot be sustained by any reasoning drawn from the law of nations,” Mr. Cleveland replied that “the Monroe Doctrine finds its recognition in those principles of international law which are based on the theory that every nation shall have its rights protected and its just claims enforced.” When we urged upon Great Britain the resort to arbitration, we were “without any convictions as to the final merits of the dispute”; we desired to be informed whether Great Britain sought under a claim of boundary “to extend her possessions on this continent without right, or whether she merely sought possession of territory fairly included within her lines of ownership.”

Having been apprised of Great Britain’s refusal of an impartial arbitration, “nothing remains,” said the President, “but to accept the situation, to recognize its plain requirements, and to deal with it accordingly.”

Mr. Cleveland, therefore, suggested to Congress an adequate appropriation for the expenses of a commission appointed by the Executive to “make the necessary investigation and report upon the matter with the least possible delay.” Words of grave import followed this recommendation:

The commission of inquiry was appointed. It promptly began and indus[Pg 756]triously pursued its investigations for many months, the governments of Great Britain and Venezuela willingly contributing to the success of the commission’s labors by placing at its disposal elaborate statements and all available evidence, while in the archives of Spain and Holland documents were made accessible that threw much light upon the remote origins of the controversy. But before the commission had finished its work, Great Britain and Venezuela, by the treaty of January 2, 1897, agreed to an arbitration. The labors of the commission were not in vain, however. It reached the conclusion that neither the extreme claims of Great Britain nor those of Venezuela were admissible, being unsupported by proofs of title, and the great mass of documentary evidence it had collected was of much use and value for the arbitral tribunal.

By the terms of the Pauncefote-Andradé Treaty, signed at Washington January 2, 1897, Great Britain and Venezuela agreed to the appointment of an arbitral tribunal “to determine the boundary line between the colony of British Guiana and the United States of Venezuela.” The tribunal was to “ascertain the extent of the territories belonging to, or that might lawfully be claimed by, the United Netherlands, or by the Kingdom of Spain, respectively, at the time of the acquisition of the colony of British Guiana,” in order to establish the chain of lawful title. Rules of procedure were prescribed in the treaty. Adverse holding for fifty years, or exclusive political control, as well as actual settlement of a district was to be considered as making a good title; recognition and effect were to be given to rights and claims resting on other grounds valid in international law; and such effect was to be given to the occupation, at the time of signing the treaty, of the territory of one of the parties by the citizens or subjects of the other, as the equities of the case and the principles of international law should be deemed to require. It was provided in article II that the tribunal should consist of five jurists. Those named on the part of Great Britain were Baron Herschel, and Sir Richard Collins of the Supreme Court of Judicature. Baron Herschel having died before the convening of the tribunal, Lord Chief-Justice Russell was named to fill the vacancy. On the part of Venezuela, Chief-Justice Fuller of the United States Supreme Court, and Associate-Justice David Brewer of that court, were named. The fifth member of the tribunal named by these four was Frederic de Martens, the Russian jurist, who became president of the tribunal.

The tribunal assembled in Paris on January 25, 1899. After various and necessary adjournments, it began the formal consideration of the case on June 15. After seven weeks of painstaking toil, in which the story of Spain’s earliest search for the gold of the West, the terms of the treaty of Münster, the law and practice of nations in respect to discovery, occupation, and settlement, and an intolerable mass and multitude of documentary and legal details pertaining to each and all of these matters, had been minutely examined and expounded for the information, but certainly not the edification, of the five learned jurists sitting in judgment in the case, the evidence of nervous strain and irritation to which I have referred in the beginning of this article was apparent. On the forty-seventh day Sir Richard Webster sarcastically invited the attention of ex-President Harrison to certain comments of Sir Travers Twiss on the Oregon case. “I had read Twiss on the Oregon case through long before I had the privilege of seeing you,” replied Mr. Harrison. “This investigation has been long and wearisome,” said General Tracy, but he reminded the tribunal that it involved the “investigation of four hundred years of history.” And on the fiftieth day Mr. Harrison, in closing his argument, said: “Counsel who addresses this tribunal comes to his work in a frame of weariness of mind and body, and he addresses judges who are weary.”

It was on the fifty-sixth day that the tribunal announced its award. The true divisional line, as determined by the unanimous decision of the five jurists, gave sanction, as has been said, to the extreme pretensions of neither party. A large area west of the Essequibo River, to which Venezuela, without warrant, had laid claim, was held to be British territory; but, on the other hand, valuable tracts within the Schomburgk Line were awarded to Venezuela, the most important being the region of which the coast-line[Pg 757] runs from Barima Point, at the mouth of the Orinoco, to Point Playa. The confirmation of the title to this territory, as to which Great Britain had firmly refused arbitration, gave Venezuela exclusive control of the mouth of her great river and of both its banks. The vast area, including the rich gold-mines, which Great Britain had belted about by the audacious westward extension of her claims, went altogether to Venezuela.

From London “Punch” for December 28, 1895

“THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON!!”

PRESIDENT CLEVELAND: “Waal, Salisbury, sir, whether you like it or not, we propose to arbitrate on this matter ourselves, and, in that event, we shall abide by our own decision.”

“An inquiry [as to the true divisional line between the Republic of Venezuela and British Guiana] should, of course, be conducted carefully and judicially.... When report is made [by a Commission appointed by Congress] and accepted, it will, in my opinion, be the duty of the United States to resist by every means in its power, as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests, the appropriation by Great Britain of any lands, [etc., etc.,] ... which after investigation we have determined of right to belong to Venezuela.”—President Cleveland’s message to Congress, vide “Time’s,” December 18.

Of the whole territory in dispute, far the larger portion went to Great Britain, and some few persons who uttered cries of distress over the message of December 17 counted this as a rebuke and rebuff for President Cleveland. That was the very hardihood of perversity in taking a false view. Mr. Cleveland had declared that our Government was “without any convictions as to the final merits of the dispute.” The supreme, the vital point is[Pg 758] that in the award of the Paris tribunal, accepted by both parties, law triumphed over force. The boundary line was traced, and titles with which Great Britain had vested herself by her own acts, heedless of the protests of Venezuela and rejecting her and our appeals for adjudication, were passed upon by an impartial arbitral tribunal according to evidence and the principles of public law. Whoever gained, whoever lost, that was quite immaterial from our point of view. The process of territorial expansion by stealthy encroachment, by unwarranted shifting of boundaries, and the alteration of maps and statistics, was at an end. The sovereignty of the lawful owner replaced that of the squatter. Venezuela was delivered from duress and from peril, no longer was her soil or her destiny under the menace of foreign control, and the situation created by the attempt of a power over the sea to extend the European system within this hemisphere, which Monroe declared to be dangerous to our peace and safety, and against which Mr. Cleveland had invoked the Monroe Doctrine, no longer existed. Mr. Cleveland had triumphed, the Monroe Doctrine had triumphed, peace had triumphed. General Harrison and Sir Richard Webster parted with expressions of mutual esteem, and the report of the proceedings of the Paris tribunal, in eleven folio parts, now on the shelves of the New York Public Library, was presented by the Marquis of Salisbury, while to Mr. Richard Olney was tendered not long ago the appointment as Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s.

The consequences of this successful and momentous assertion of the Monroe Doctrine may now be traced. Three times within the century of its declaration the doctrine was firmly asserted and maintained by the United States as the public system of the Western World, for it may with entire propriety be called our public system, as the concert of Europe is the public system of that continent. First, when President Monroe proclaimed it as a warning to the Holy Alliance, plotting the restoration to Spain of her revolted colonies in Latin America. Second, when Secretary Seward’s repeated protests against the establishment of an empire and an emperor, the Austrian Maximilian, in Mexico against the will of the people by French arms, were ominously reinforced by the despatch of General Sheridan to the banks of the Rio Grande with 80,000 disciplined and experienced troops, freed from active service by the ending of the war between the States, the French evacuation of Mexico speedily following. The absence of any mention of the Monroe Doctrine in Secretary Seward’s correspondence in respect to the French adventurer in Mexico is without significance. The spirit and the principle of Monroe’s declaration were the declared motives of his action. Third, when President Cleveland, by virtue of the doctrine, “intended to apply to every stage of our National life,” constrained England to submit her boundary dispute with Venezuela to a judicial settlement. The next application of the doctrine, the fourth in this series, all of primary importance, fell within the present century, when the substitution of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty for the Clayton-Bulwer convention of half a century earlier dissolved our partnership with Great Britain in an agreement to extend a joint protectorship over any transportation route across the isthmus, and so cleared the way for the building and exclusive control by ourselves of the Panama Canal.

The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was never popular in this country. It was entered into at a time, in 1850, when the discovery of gold in California, and the consequent tide of travel to the land of easily acquired riches, brought into view the need for facilities of transportation across the isthmus; and also, it should be said, when the responsible statesmen of the Nation were perhaps less mindful than at any other time since Monroe’s administration of the import and the saving force of the doctrine that bears his name. Nevertheless, the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty itself, after a fashion, a most illogical and inconsistent fashion, was on our part an attempt to apply the prohibitions of the doctrine against European colonization in this hemisphere. Great Britain was encroaching upon the territory of Central American States, and she stood in the way of the building of the canal. We negotiated the treaty to free ourselves from this embarrassment, and by that singular bargain, through the waiver of a right, we secured the recognition of a right; that is, we persuaded Great Britain to assent to Monroe[Pg 759] Doctrine principles in Central America at the price of taking her as a partner in any undertaking for a transportation route across the isthmus, which was in itself contrary to the spirit of the doctrine.

The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, ending our war with Mexico, was signed February 2, 1848. By its terms Mexico ceded to us the territory now included within the borders of the States of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and New Mexico. Great Britain strenuously opposed the cession to us of any territory on the Pacific coast. Failing to control the acts of Mexico in that respect, she took measures in her own way to offset our great territorial gain. Six days after signing the treaty she despatched her fleet from Vera Cruz to the coast of Nicaragua, and forcibly took possession of San Juan at the mouth of the river of that name. She set up a governor, erected fortifications, and changed the name of the place to Greytown. This gave her command of the only canal route then under consideration, for it was at a much later time that the Panama route came to the fore as more practicable. The seizure of San Juan was a move so plainly hostile to our interests that our Government at once sent a diplomatic representative to Nicaragua, and a treaty known as the Hise Treaty was negotiated in June, 1849, by which Nicaragua granted to the United States “the exclusive right and privilege” of constructing a canal or railway between the two oceans across Nicaraguan territory. This treaty was not sent to the Senate and was never ratified by either country.

The occupation of San Juan, or Greytown, by the British, and their proceedings upon the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, where they had set up a trumpery Indian king, and by virtue of a “treaty” with him assumed a protectorate over the region, were a cause of growing uneasiness at Washington. In pursuance of her age-long policy of insuring her domination of the seas by occupying strategic points giving control of great routes of navigation, Great Britain had with a cool disregard of our rights and interests seized upon vantage-ground in Central America that would make her mistress of interoceanic communication. Holding Greytown, she was in complete control of any Nicaraguan canal, for the only practicable route was that which would make Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River a part of the canal. Thus, upon the one hand, our freedom of action in respect to a canal was hampered, and, upon the other, England, notwithstanding her many excuses and protestations to the contrary, was manifestly establishing a colony in Central America.

With a view to the removal of these sources of embarrassment and of difference between the two countries, Mr. Clayton, Secretary of State, pressed Great Britain to withdraw her pretensions to dominion over the Mosquito Coast. Her reply was a refusal, but an intimation was given that the British Government would be willing to enter into a treaty for a joint protectorate over the proposed canal. This was the germ of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, negotiated at Washington between Secretary of State Clayton and Sir Henry Bulwer, the British minister, and signed April 19, 1850. Article I of the treaty, here subjoined, is a declaratory and self-denying ordinance:

These stipulations applied only to a canal route across Nicaragua in Central America, not to Panama. But we carried our spirit of complacent self-denial to a further and extraordinary length in article VIII. The first clause of that article is here quoted:

James Buchanan, then our Minister to England, in a memorandum for Lord Clarendon, written on January 6, 1854, referring to the relation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty to the Monroe Doctrine, said that while that doctrine would be maintained whenever the peace and safety of the United States made it necessary, “yet to have acted upon it in Central America might have brought us into collision with Great Britain, an event always to be deplored, and if possible avoided”; therefore these “dangerous questions” were settled by a resort to friendly negotiations. In view of the flimsy nature of Great Britain’s asserted rights in Central America, and of the manifest unfriendliness of the motives that had prompted her to plant her flag, her colonies, and her forts in the pathway of communication between our Atlantic and Pacific coasts, it must be said that Mr. Buchanan’s memorandum could not easily have been outdone in politeness. The sounder opinion, the opinion which the country has held and acted upon, is expressed by Francis Wharton in that edition of the “Digest of International Law of the United States” which he edited:

The appearance of Ferdinand de Lesseps upon the isthmus and the public discussion of his canal project brought the possibilities of foreign control plainly into view, and public opinion in this country ripened into form and expression. “The policy of this country,” said President Hayes in his message to Congress on March 8, 1880, “is a canal under American control. The United States cannot consent to the surrender of this control to any European Power or to any combination of European Powers. If existing treaties between the United States and other nations, or if the rights of sovereignty or property of other nations stand in the way of this policy—a contingency which is not apprehended—suitable steps should be taken by just and liberal negotiations to promote and establish the American policy.” And Secretary Blaine in 1881 instructed Minister Lowell to let it be known that in the opinion of the President our treaty of 1846 guaranteeing to New Granada, afterward the United[Pg 761] States of Colombia, the protection of the projected canal across the Isthmus of Panama, did not require reinforcement or assent from any other Power; and that any attempt to supersede it by an agreement between European Powers would “partake of the nature of an alliance against the United States, and would be regarded by this Government as an indication of an unfriendly feeling.”

From London “Punch” for October 11, 1899

PEACE AND PLENTY

LORD SALISBURY (chuckling): “I like arbitration—in the proper place!”

In a further instruction to Mr. Lowell, on November 19, 1881, Secretary Blaine stated at length the reasons for holding that the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty had become obsolete, or at least inapplicable to the conditions existing thirty years after its ratification, and he expressed the hope of the President that Great Britain would consent to such modifications as would remove every obstacle to our fortification and holding political control of the canal “in conjunction with the country in which it is located.”

President Cleveland, in his first administration, did not approve the policy of exclusive American ownership, control, and guaranty, favoring rather a neutralized canal[Pg 762] “open to all nations and subject to the ambitions and warlike necessities of none.” But Mr. Gresham, Secretary of State in Mr. Cleveland’s second term, expressed the “deep conviction” of our Government that the canal should be constructed “under distinctively American auspices.” Secretary Olney, who succeeded Mr. Gresham, in a memorable communication rejected the argument frequently heard, that the treaty had been abrogated by Great Britain’s persistent violation of the provision relating to her Mosquito Coast colony, and recorded the conclusion that if the treaty has now become inapplicable or injurious, the true remedy was “a direct and straightforward application to Great Britain for a reconsideration of the whole matter.”

Thus, in the slow process of time public opinion was prepared and the way cleared for the ending of a joint protectorate agreement with Great Britain by the substitution of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty for the convention negotiated fifty years before between Mr. Clayton and Sir Henry Bulwer. The time for action had now come. The French company was bankrupt, the commercial demand for a canal had become more pressing, and the voyage of the Oregon from the Pacific coast around Cape Horn to take her place with the blockading squadron that encircled the harbor entrance at Santiago de Cuba brought vividly to the minds of the American people the vital need of a canal as a measure of national defense. Commissions were studying routes and making estimates of cost. There could no longer be any doubt that the two oceans were to be connected, and with all possible speed, by a navigable way. There was an obstacle—the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. If we built a Nicaragua canal, we must forego “any exclusive control,” and we must submit to the engagements of article V, that the United States and Great Britain jointly will “protect it from interruption, seizure, or unjust confiscation, and that they will guarantee the neutrality thereof.” We must observe the further stipulation of article VI, requiring us to join Great Britain in inviting other nations to enter into the arrangement for the construction, control, and guaranty of this American canal. If we chose to build at Panama, we were bound by article VIII to make a new treaty with Great Britain for a joint protectorate over that route.

Never for a day after President Cleveland’s Venezuela message would the American people have been in a mood to sanction any canal undertaking under these vexatious and impossible conditions. We were quite done with the idea of a joint protectorate over an isthmian canal. The resolve had been taken to build a canal, and the conclusion reached that it must be a canal of our own construction and under our exclusive control.

Most fortunately, we found the Government of Great Britain in an assenting mood. Indeed, the contrast between the rasping quality of Lord Salisbury’s notes declining arbitration of the Venezuela boundary dispute and the candid, placable tone of Lord Lansdowne’s correspondence in the negotiations that led to the superseding of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty by the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty silenced, if it did not shame, those half-hearted Americans who had denounced Mr. Cleveland’s memorable message of December 17 as “the crime of the century” and a menace to the friendly relations between ourselves and our kinsmen of England. Following President McKinley’s message of December, 1898, in which he pointed out that the prospective expansion of American commerce and influence in the Pacific called more imperatively than ever for the control of the projected canal by the United States, Lord Pauncefote was instructed to acquaint himself with our attitude. He was informed that we desired at once to enter upon the necessary pourparlers, with a view to such modifications of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty as would remove all obstacles to our construction of the canal, which it was evident would not be undertaken by private capital. To this her Majesty’s Government assented, and a draft of the proposed convention was handed to Lord Pauncefote by Secretary Hay on January 11, 1899. This convention her Majesty’s Government, after due consideration, “accepted unconditionally as a signal proof,” said Lord Lansdowne, “of their friendly disposition and of their desire not to impede the execution of a project declared to be of National importance to the people of the United States.”

This was the first form of the Hay-[Pg 763]Pauncefote convention, signed at Washington in February, 1900. Consideration by the Senate followed, but it was not ratified until December 20 of that year, and then with three amendments which proved to be unacceptable to Great Britain. As to the first of these amendments, declaring the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty to be “hereby superseded,” Lord Lansdowne, in his memorandum of August 3, 1901, objected that no attempt had been made to ascertain the views of his Government upon the entire abrogation of the former treaty, which dealt with several matters for which no provision had been made in the new instrument; and with rather startling frankness he pointed out that if the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty were wholly abrogated, “both Powers would, except in the vicinity of the canal, recover entire freedom of action in Central America, a change which might be of substantial importance.” That was enough to make the Senate open its eyes, for it was not exactly the purpose of our Government to confer upon Great Britain entire freedom of action in Central America.

The statesmanship and the diplomacy of John Hay found a way to reconcile these divergences and bring the negotiations to a successful end. He submitted a new draft of the treaty, providing by a separate article that the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty should be superseded, a method of accomplishing that important object more acceptable to Great Britain than procedure by Senate amendment. Lord Lansdowne’s comment upon this article of the draft was that “the purpose to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer convention is not, I think, inadmissible if it can be shown that sufficient provision is made in the new treaty for such portions of the convention as ought, in the interests of this country, to remain in force.” The victory for American control and for the Monroe Doctrine was won. From that point the negotiations proceeded smoothly. Lord Lansdowne suggested the article, accepted by Secretary Hay, providing that the general principle of the treaty should not be affected by any change of sovereignty over the territory traversed by the canal. The question of our right to take measures for the defense of the canal presented no great difficulty.

To the first of the rules for the neutralization of the canal, as it appeared in Mr. Hay’s draft, Lord Lansdowne suggested an amendment which served to bring into the clear light of day both our purpose to secure exclusively American control over the canal, and Great Britain’s willingness to consent thereto. After the words “the canal shall be free and open to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations,” his lordship proposed to add, “which shall agree to observe these rules,” and further on the words “so agreeing” after the clause declaring that there should be “no discrimination against any nation,” and so forth. To this, Mr. Hay informed him, there would be opposition “because of the strong objection to inviting other Powers to become contract parties to a treaty affecting the canal”; and he suggested as a substitute for Lord Lansdowne’s amendment “the canal shall be free and open to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations observing these rules,” and instead of “any nations so agreeing” the words “any such nation.” The difference was vital, for all connotation of inviting formal agreements with other nations disappeared. Lord Lansdowne at once accepted this form of the amendment, which he wrote “seemed to us equally efficacious for the purpose which we had in view, namely, to insure that Great Britain should not be placed in a less advantageous position than other Powers, while they stopped short of conferring upon other nations a contractual right to the use of the canal.”

The minds of the two governments had now met. The amendments proposed on each site, with the modifications noted, were agreed upon. The treaty was reduced to final form, engrossed for signature, and on November 19, 1901, Lord Pauncefote had the honor to inform the Marquis of Lansdowne that on the preceding day he had visited the State Department and had “signed the new treaty for the construction of an interoceanic canal.” The Senate ratified the treaty on December 16 following.

Venezuela had opened the way for Panama. The hand withdrawn from broad areas east of the Orinoco had relinquished its lawful rights under the canal partnership, and in both cases at our instance. In the one, Lord Salisbury’s noble British contempt of our demands and our doctrine[Pg 764] forced us into an unaccustomed attitude of firmness. In the other, the Marquis of Lansdowne’s open-minded, amicable, and statesmanlike disposition favored our interest, and left us free to give to the commerce of the world a channel of communication that had been the dream of centuries. We had expressly set up the principle of the Monroe Doctrine as the warrant of our interference for the protection of Venezuela, and Great Britain gave heed by submitting to impartial examination titles she had insisted upon enforcing as though they were beyond dispute. Ill-judged concessions contrary to the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, made in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, we recalled by a substitute agreement with Great Britain which left us with a free hand for the construction and control of the canal as an exclusively American work. The vitality, the continuing and constant applicability, of the Monroe Doctrine at every stage of our National existence, as Mr. Cleveland put it, could hardly be more conclusively demonstrated than by the record of the American Government’s part in bringing about the agreement to arbitrate the Venezuela boundary dispute, and in replacing the outworn Clayton-Bulwer convention by the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty.

A CURIOUS PHASE OF THE HAYES-TILDEN CONTROVERSY

BY VICTOR ROSEWATER

Editor of “The Omaha Daily Bee”

I  HAVE been intensely interested in the articles appearing in THE CENTURY for May and June upon the Presidential election of 1876. While I could have no part in, nor recollection of, that controversy, acquaintance with two of the prominent figures in it some time ago led me to look into one phase of the question, and the facts concerning it brought out by the congressional investigation, which seem to me to bear vitally upon this discussion, though they have been entirely ignored. I refer to what was known as “the Oregon muddle,” being the attempt of the Democrats to secure one of the electoral votes of Oregon for Tilden, who had plainly no moral right to it.

At the November election the lowest vote polled by a Republican Presidential elector in Oregon was 15,206, while the highest vote polled by a Democratic elector was only 14,157. After the returns were in, and it was discovered that the electoral college was to be so close that one or two votes might turn it one way or another, the Democrats ascertained that one of the Republican electors in Oregon was a deputy postmaster, and they at once set up the claim that he was ineligible, and that, as a consequence, the Democrat receiving the highest vote was entitled to serve.

At that time Oregon was under Democratic control, had a Democratic governor, Democratic state officers, and one of the United States senators was a Democrat high in the national councils. Before he realized what was at stake, E. A. Cronin, the high man on the Democratic ticket, had announced publicly that he admitted his defeat, and that he would not serve even if he were declared to be elected and offered a certificate, something to that effect having been rumored as coming from the Democratic state officials.

It was at this point that the managers of the Tilden campaign in New York came to the conclusion that something had to be done and done at once. A telegram was sent to Dr. George L. Miller at Omaha, then a member of the Democratic national committee and editor of the Omaha “Herald,” requesting him to proceed at once to Portland and get in touch with the party representatives there. Dr. Miller, it seemed, had already acted on his[Pg 765] own account, and had despatched in his stead a close, personal friend, and active Democrat, J. N. H. Patrick, also of Omaha, who had mining interests in Utah, and who was acquainted in the far West.

According to the testimony adduced in the congressional investigation, which embodies as documentary evidence copies of all the telegraphic messages that passed to and fro in connection with the case, Patrick reached Portland in the latter part of November, and immediately called upon C. B. Bellinger, the chairman of the Democratic state committee for Oregon. According to Bellinger, Patrick informed him who he was and the object of his visit, and, as a result of the conference, promised to secure $10,000 to be placed at his disposal to pay the expenses of the contest. Cronin was sent for, and introduced to Patrick, who told him how important it was for him to serve, and intimated that if his vote should make Mr. Tilden President, he would be able to get about anything he wanted from Mr. Tilden. Three thousand dollars of the money transmitted to Oregon through Patrick’s agency was used to retain a firm of Republican lawyers to argue before the governor the question of issuing the certificate to Cronin, the selection of the particular firm, however, being guided by the fact that the senior partner was also the editor of the Portland “Oregonian,” with the hope that it would be induced “not to be too severe in criticizing” the Democratic machinations.

Mr. Patrick evidently communicated with the governor at some time, because he telegraphed to Mr. Tilden, under date of December 1, a cipher translation of the following message:

In the investigation Governor Grover denied having sent this telegram or ever having seen it, but the fact stared every one in the face that just six days later Governor Grover did exactly what the telegram said he would do. The telegram was in the handwriting of Mr. Patrick.

The other message upon which great stress was laid is reproduced in facsimile in the official report, and reads as follows:

The explanation of this conglomeration of words is perhaps best had by quoting directly from the congressional report:

It was, however, shown that the cipher-despatches in this case could not be translated from the dictionary by adopting the key of taking the corresponding word on the opposite column, but in every instance they could be translated from the dictionary by taking the corresponding word in the columns eight columns ahead. It further appeared from the testimony, and no attempt was made to impeach it, or the translation made in this way, or to con[Pg 766]tradict the claim that all these cipher-despatches were sent by this dictionary or its duplicate in accordance with the key as above stated,—and, besides, Pelton, Kelly, Bellinger, and Miller all testified that the despatches were made up from a dictionary cipher,—that the translation of the despatch just quoted is as follows:

Mr. Patrick, after having concluded his arrangements with the local representatives of the party in Oregon, and having provided the money necessary for them to carry out the agreed plan, seems to have dropped out of the negotiations.

Governor Grover, as promised, decided the contest against the Republican elector, and in conjunction with the secretary of state had the certificate of election made out for the two uncontested Republicans and Cronin, the Democrat. These certificates were made out in triplicate, and were all delivered to Cronin, copies being refused the Republican electors. When the time came for the electoral college to meet and vote, the three Republicans got together, the contested member, Watts, having in the interval resigned his post-office position, and, after declaring the vacancy, reappointed Watts, who was then eligible to serve as elector, the three casting the vote for Rutherford B. Hayes.

Cronin and the crowd of Democrats who had assembled simultaneously moved over to the other end of the room, and under pretense that the Republicans refused to act with him, Cronin called in another Democrat, a man named Miller, and went through the form of appointing him to fill a vacancy, the two together following this up by appointing a third Democrat, Parker, to fill up the college, although neither of these two were candidates or were voted for at the election.

The three Democrats thereupon formally organized and proceeded to cast a ballot giving two votes to Rutherford B. Hayes, and one to Samuel J. Tilden. They made up the forms certifying to these facts, and appointed Cronin to carry the documents to Washington.

The disinterestedness of Cronin was further evinced by the fact that, although he was entitled to draw mileage and expenses as messenger, he refused to go until he was paid $3000 in gold by the Democratic campaign managers to reimburse him for his time and expenses, the money being part of that supplied from the national committee at New York under the arrangements made by Mr. Patrick.

“The Oregon muddle” furnished one of the disputed points passed upon by the electoral commission, and the three votes of Oregon were finally recorded for the Republican candidate who was later installed as President.

Mr. J. N. H. Patrick died here about eight years ago. Dr. George L. Miller is still alive, but his now failing mind will prevent him throwing further light on the subject. The point which, in my judgment, ought to be emphasized, is that if the Democrats in charge of Mr. Tilden’s political fortunes at that time believed that he had carried, and was entitled to, the votes of Florida and Louisiana, they would not have set so high a value upon, or have gone to so questionable lengths to obtain, this lone electoral vote in Oregon; nor have they accused the Republicans of doing anything reprehensible on behalf of Hayes which by the record was not matched by their performance in Oregon.

Color-Tone, engraved for THE CENTURY by H. Davidson

LOUISE

FROM THE TINTED MARBLE BUST BY EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN

❏
LARGER IMAGE

[Pg 767]

T. TEMBAROM

BY FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT

Author of “That Lass o’ Lowrie’s,” “The Shuttle,” etc.

WITH DECORATIVE PICTURES BY CHARLES S. CHAPMAN

CHAPTER XXVI

THE neighborhood of Temple Barholm was not, upon the whole, a brilliant one. Indeed, it had been frankly designated by the casual guest as dull.

Most of the residents took their sober season in London, the men of the family returning gladly to the pheasants, the women not regretfully to their gardens and tennis, because their successes in town had not been particularly delirious. The guests who came to them were generally as respectable and law-abiding as themselves, and introduced no iconoclastic diversions. For the greater portion of the year, in fact, diners out were of the neighborhood and met the neighborhood, and were reduced to discussing neighborhood topics, which was not, on the whole, a fevered joy.

In such circumstances it cannot be found amazing that a situation such as Temple Barholm presented should provide rich food for conversation, supposition, argument, and humorous comment.

T. Tembarom himself, after the duke had established him, furnished an unlimited source of interest. His household became a perennial fount of quiet discussion. Lady Mallowe and her daughter were the members of it who met with the most attention. They appeared to have become members of it rather than visitors. Her ladyship had plainly elected to extend her stay even beyond the period to which a relative might feel entitled to hospitality. She was not going away, the neighborhood decided, until she had achieved that which she really had come to accomplish. Lady Joan would be obliged to stay also, if her mother intended that she should. But the poor American—What was he going to do in the end? What was she going to do? What was Lady Mallowe going to do if there was no end at all? He was not as unhappy-looking a lover as one might have expected, they said. He kept up his spirits wonderfully. Perhaps[Pg 768] she was not always as icily indifferent to him as she chose to appear in public.

So they talked it over as they looked on.

“How they gossip! How delightfully they gossip!” said the duke. “But it is such a perfect subject. They have never been so enthralled before. Dear young man! how grateful we ought to be for him!”

One of the most discussed features of the case was the duke’s own cultivation of the central figure. There was an actual oddity about it. He drove from Stone Hover to Temple Barholm repeatedly. He invited Tembarom to the castle and had long talks with him—long, comfortable talks in secluded, delightful rooms or under great trees on the lawn. He wanted to hear anecdotes of his past, to draw him on to giving his points of view. When he spoke of him to his daughters, he called him “T. Tembarom,” but the slight derision of his earlier tone modified itself.

“That delightful young man will shortly become my closest intimate,” he said. “He not only keeps up my spirits, but he opens up vistas. Vistas after a man’s seventy-second birthday!”

“I like him first rate,” Tembarom said to Miss Alicia. “I liked him the minute he got up laughing like an old sport when he fell out of the pony carriage.”

As he became more intimate with him, he liked him still better. Obscured though it was by airy, elderly persiflage, he began to come upon a background of stability and points of view wholly to be relied on in his new acquaintance. It had evolved itself out of long and varied experience with the aid of brilliant mentality. The old peer’s reasons were always logical. He laughed at most things, but at a few he did not laugh at all. After several of the long conversations Tembarom began to say to himself that this seemed like a man you need not be afraid to talk things over with—things you didn’t want to speak of to everybody.

“Seems to me,” he said thoughtfully to Miss Alicia, “he’s an old fellow you could tie to. I’ve got on to one thing when I’ve listened to him: he talks all he wants to and laughs a lot, but he never gives himself away. He wouldn’t give another fellow away either if he said he wouldn’t. He knows how not to.”

There was an afternoon on which, during a drive they took together, the duke was enlightened as to several points which had given him cause for reflection, among others the story beloved of Captain Palliser and his audiences.

“I guess you’ve known a good many women,” T. Tembarom remarked on this occasion after a few minutes of thought. “Living all over the world as you’ve done, you’d be likely to come across a whole raft of them one time and another.”

“A whole raft of them, one time and another,” agreed the duke. “Yes.”

“You’ve liked them, haven’t you?”

“Immensely. Sometimes a trifle disastrously. Find me a more absolutely interesting object in the universe than a woman—any woman, and I will devote the remainder of my declining years to the study of it,” answered his grace.

He said it with a decision which made T. Tembarom turn to look at him, and after his look decide to proceed.

“Have you ever known a bit of a slim thing”—he made an odd embracing gesture with his arm—“the size that you could pick up with one hand and set on your knee as if she was a child”—the duke remained still, knowing this was only the beginning, and pricking up his ears as he took a rapid kaleidoscopic view of all the “Ladies” in the neighborhood, and as hastily waved them aside—“a bit of a thing that some way seems to mean it all to you—and moves the world?” The conclusion was one which brought the incongruous touch of maturity into his face.

“Not one of the ‘Ladies,’” the duke was mentally summing the matter up. “Certainly not Lady Joan, after all. Not, I think, even the young person in the department store.”

He leaned back in his corner the better to inspect his companion directly.

“You have, I see,” he replied quietly. “Once I myself did.” He had cried out, “Ah! Heloïse!” though he had laughed at himself when he seemed facing his ridiculous tragedy.

“Yes,” confessed T. Tembarom. “I met her at the boarding-house where I lived. Her father was a Lancashire man and an inventor. I guess you’ve heard of him; his name is Joseph Hutchinson.”

The whole country had heard of him; more countries, indeed, than one had[Pg 769] heard. He was the man who was going to make his fortune in America because T. Tembarom had stood by him in his extremity. He would make a fortune in America and another in England and possibly several others on the Continent. He had learned to read in the village school, and the girl was his daughter.

“Yes,” replied the duke.

“I don’t know whether the one you knew had that quiet little way of seeing right straight into a thing, and making you see it, too,” said Tembarom.

“She had,” answered the duke, and an odd expression wavered in his eyes because he was looking backward across forty years which seemed a hundred.

“That’s what I meant by moving the world,” T. Tembarom went on. “You know she’s right, and you’ve got to do what she says, if you love her.”

“And you always do,” said the duke—“always and forever. There are very few. They are the elect.”

T. Tembarom took it gravely.

“I said to her once that there wasn’t more than one of her in the world because there couldn’t be enough to make two of that kind. I wasn’t joshing either; I meant it. It’s her quiet little voice and her quiet, babyfied eyes that get you where you can’t move. And it’s something else you don’t know anything about. It’s her never doing anything for herself, but just doing it because it’s the right thing for you.”

The duke’s chin had sunk a little on his breast, and looking back across the hundred years, he forgot for a moment where he was.

“Ah! Heloïse!” he sighed unconsciously.

“What did you say?” asked T. Tembarom. The duke came back.

“I was thinking of the time when I was nine and twenty,” he answered. “It was not yesterday nor even the day before. The one I knew died when she was twenty-four.”

“Died!” said Tembarom. “Good Lord!” He dropped his head and even changed color. “A fellow can’t get on to a thing like that. It seems as if it couldn’t happen. Suppose—” he caught his breath hard and then pulled himself up—“Nothing could happen to her before she knew that I’ve proved what I said—just proved it, and done every single thing she told me to do!”

“I am sure you have,” the duke said.

“It’s because of that I began to say this.” Tembarom spoke hurriedly that he might thrust away the sudden dark thought. “You’re a man, and I’m a man; far away ahead of me as you are, you’re a man, too. I was crazy to get her to marry me and come here with me, and she wouldn’t.”

The duke’s eyes lighted anew.

“She had her reasons,” he said.

“She laid ’em out as if she’d been my mother instead of a little red-headed angel. She didn’t waste a word,—just told me what I was up against. She’d lived in the village with her grandmother, and she knew. She said I’d got to come and find out for myself what no one else could teach me. She told me about the kind of girls I’d see—beauties that were different from anything I’d ever seen before. And it was up to me to see all of them—the best of them.”

“Ladies?” interjected the duke, gently.

“Yes. With titles like those in novels, she said, and clothes like the ‘Woman’s Pictorial.’ The kind of girls, she said, that would make her look like a housemaid. Housemaid be darned!” he exclaimed, suddenly growing hot. “I’ve seen the whole lot of them, I’ve done my darndest to get next, and there’s not one—” he stopped short. “Why should any of them look at me, anyhow?” he added suddenly.

“That was not her point,” remarked the duke. “She wanted you to look at them, and you have looked.” T. Tembarom’s eagerness was inspiring to behold.

“I have, haven’t I?” he cried. “That was what I wanted to ask you. I’ve done as she said. I haven’t shirked a thing. I’ve followed them around when I knew they hadn’t any use on earth for me. Some of them have handed me the lemon pretty straight. Why shouldn’t they? But I don’t believe she knew how tough it might be for a fellow sometimes.”

“No, she did not,” the duke said.

To his hearer Palliser’s story became an amusing thing, read in the light of this most delicious frankness. It was Palliser himself who had played the fool, and not T. Tembarom, who had simply known what he wanted, and had, with business[Pg 770]like directness, applied himself to finding a method of obtaining it. The young women he gave his time to must be “Ladies” because Miss Hutchinson had required it from him. The female flower of the noble houses had been passed in review before him to practise upon, so to speak. The handsomer they were, the more dangerously charming, the better Miss Hutchinson would be pleased. And he had been regarded as a presumptuous aspirant! It was a situation for a comedy. But the “Ladies” would not enjoy it if they were told. It was also not the Duke of Stone who would tell them.

In courts he had learned to wear a composed countenance when he was prompted to smile, and he wore one now. He enjoyed the society of T. Tembarom increasingly every hour. He provided him with every joy.

Their drive was a long one, and they talked a good deal. They talked of the Hutchinsons, of the invention, of the business “deals” Tembarom had entered into at the outset, and of their tremendously encouraging result. It was not mere rumor that Hutchinson would end by being a rich man. The girl would be an heiress. How complex her position would be! And being of the elect who unknowingly bear with them the power that “moves the world,” how would she affect Temple Barholm and its surrounding neighborhood?

“I wish to God she was here now!” exclaimed Tembarom, suddenly. “There’s times when you want a little thing like that just to talk things over with, just to ask, because you—you’re dead sure she’d never lose her head and give herself away without knowing she was doing it. It’s the keeping your mouth shut that’s so hard for most people, the not saying a darned thing, whatever happens, till just the right time.”

“Women cannot often do it,” said the duke. “Very few men can.”

“You’re right,” Tembarom answered, and there was a trifle of anxiety in his tone. “There’s women, just the best kind, that you daren’t tell a big thing to. Not that they’d mean to give it away,—perhaps they wouldn’t know when they did it,—but they’d feel so anxious they’d get—they’d get—”

“Rattled,” put in the duke, and knew of whom he was thinking. He saw Miss Alicia’s delicate, timid face as he spoke.

T. Tembarom laughed.

“That’s just it,” he answered. “They wouldn’t go back on you for worlds, but—well, you have to be careful with them.”

“He’s got something on his mind,” mentally commented the duke. “He is wondering if he will tell it to me.”

“And there’s times when you’d give half you’ve got to be able to talk a thing out and put it up to some one else for a while. I could do it with her. That’s why I said I wish to God that she was here.”

“You have learned to know how to keep still,” the duke said. “So have I. We learned it in different schools, but we have both learned.”

As he was saying the words, he thought he was going to hear something when he had finished saying them; he knew that he would without a doubt. T. Tembarom made a quick move in his seat; he lost a shade of color and cleared his throat as he bent forward, casting a glance at the backs of the coachman and footman on the high seat above them.

“Can these fellows hear me?” he asked.

“No,” the duke answered; “if you speak as you are speaking now.”

“You are the biggest man about here,” the young man went on. “You stand for everything that English people care for, and you were born knowing all the things I don’t. I’ve been carrying a big load for quite a while, and I guess I’m not big enough to handle it alone, perhaps. Anyhow, I want to be sure I’m not making fool mistakes. The worst of it is that I’ve got to keep still if I’m right, and I’ve got to keep still if I’m wrong. I’ve got to keep still, anyhow.”

“I learned to hold my tongue in places where, if I had not held it, I might have plunged nations into bloodshed,” the duke said. “Tell me all you choose.”

As a result of which, by the time their drive had ended and they returned to Stone Hover, he had told him, and the duke sat in his corner of the carriage with an unusual light in his eyes and a flush of somewhat excited color on his cheek.

“You’re a queer fellow, T. Tembarom,” he said, when they parted in the drawing-room after taking tea.[Pg 771] “You exhilarate me. You make me laugh. If I were an emotional person, you would at moments make me cry. There’s an affecting uprightness about you. You’re rather a fine fellow too, ’pon my life.” Putting a waxen, gout-knuckled old hand on his shoulder, and giving him a friendly push which was half a pat, he added, “You are, by God!”

After his guest had left him, the duke stood for some minutes gazing into the fire with a complicated smile and the air of a man who finds himself quaintly enriched.

“I have had ambitions in the course of my existence—several of them,” he said, “but even in over-vaulting moments never have I aspired to such an altitude as this—to be, as it were, part of a melodrama. One feels that one scarcely deserves it.”

CHAPTER XXVII

MR. TEMPLE BARHOLM seems in better spirits,” Lady Mallowe said to Captain Palliser as they walked on the terrace in the starlit dusk after dinner.

Captain Palliser took his cigar from his mouth and looked at the glowing end of it.

“He mayn’t exactly like all this, but he’s getting something out of it.”

“He is not getting much of what he evidently wants most. I am out of all patience,” said Lady Mallowe. “Joan treads him in the mire and sails about professing to be conducting herself flawlessly. She is too clever for me,” she added with bitterness.

Palliser laughed softly and said:

“She has got something up her sleeve, and so has he.”

“He!” Lady Mallowe quite ejaculated the word. “She always has. That’s her abominable secretive way. But he! T. Tembarom with something up his sleeve! One can’t imagine it.”

“Almost everybody has. I found that out long years ago,” said Palliser, looking at his cigar end again as if consulting it. “Since I arrived at the conclusion, I always take it for granted, and look out for it. I’ve become rather clever in following such things up, and I have taken an unusual interest in T. Tembarom from the first.”

Lady Mallowe turned her handsome face, much softened by an enwreathing gauze scarf, toward him anxiously.

“Do you think his depression, or whatever it is, means Joan?” she asked.

“If he is depressed by her, you need not be discouraged,” smiled Palliser. “The time to lose hope would be when, despite her ingenuities, he became entirely cheerful. But,” he added after a pause, “I have an idea there is some other little thing.”

“Do you suppose that some young woman he has left behind in New York is demanding her rights?” said Lady Mallowe, with annoyance. “That is exactly the kind of thing Joan would like to hear, and so entirely natural. Some shop-girl or other.”

“Quite natural, as you say; but he would scarcely be running up to London and consulting Scotland Yard about her,” Palliser answered.

“Scotland Yard!” ejaculated his companion.

“Scotland Yard has also come to him,” he went on. “Did you chance to see a red-faced person who spent a morning with him last week?”

“He looked like a butcher, and I thought he might be one of his friends,” Lady Mallowe said.

“I recognized the man. He is an extremely clever detective, much respected for his resources in the matter of following clues which are so attenuated as to be scarcely clues at all.”

“Clues have no connection with Joan,” said Lady Mallowe, still more annoyed. “All London knows her miserable story.”

“Have you—” Captain Palliser’s tone was thoughtful—“has any one ever seen Strangeways?”

“No. Can you imagine anything more absurdly romantic? A creature without a memory, shut up in a remote wing of a place like this, as if he were the Man with the Iron Mask. Romance is not quite compatible with T. Tembarom.”

“He leaves everything to one’s imagination,” remarked Palliser.[Pg 772] “All one knows is that he isn’t a relative; that he isn’t mad, but only too nervous to see or be seen. Queer situation. I’ve found there is always a reason for things; the queerer they are, the more sure it is that there’s a reason. What is the reason Strangeways is kept here, and where would a detective come in? Just on general principles I’m rather going into the situation. There’s a reason, and it would be amusing to find it out. Don’t you think so?”

He spoke casually, and Lady Mallowe’s answer was casual, though she knew from experience that he was not as casual as he chose to seem. He was clever; and Temple Barholm as the estate of a distant relative and T. Tembarom as its owner were not assets to deal with indifferently.

“It’s quite natural that you should feel an interest,” she answered. “But the romantic stranger is too romantic, though I will own Scotland Yard is a little odd.”

“Yes, that is exactly what I thought,” said Palliser.

He had in fact thought a good deal and followed the thing up a good deal in a quiet amateur way, though with annoyingly little result. Occasionally he had felt rather a fool for his pains, because he had been led to so few facts of importance and had found himself so often confronted by T. Tembarom’s entirely frank grin. His own mental attitude was not a complex one. Lady Mallowe’s summing up had been correct enough on the whole. Temple Barholm ought to be a substantial asset, regarded in its connection with its present owner. Little dealings in stocks—sometimes rather large ones when luck was with him—had brought desirable returns to Captain Palliser throughout a number of years. Just now he was taking an interest in a somewhat imposing scheme, or what might prove an imposing one if it were managed properly and presented to the right persons. If T. Tembarom had been sufficiently lured by the spirit of speculation to plunge into old Hutchinson’s affair, as he evidently had done, he was plainly of the temperament attracted by the game of chance. There had been no reason but that of temperament which could have led him to invest. He had found himself suddenly a moneyed man and had liked the game. Never having so much as heard of Little Ann Hutchinson, Captain Palliser not unnaturally argued after this wise. There seemed no valid reason why, if a vague invention had allured, a less vague scheme, managed in a more businesslike manner, should not. This Mexican silver-and-copper-mine was a dazzling thing to talk about. He could go into details. He had, in fact, allowed a good deal of detail to trail through his conversation at times. It had not been difficult to accomplish this in his talks with Lady Mallowe in his host’s presence. Lady Mallowe was always ready to talk of mines, gold, silver, or copper. It happened at times that one could manage to secure a few shares without the actual payment of money. There were little hospitalities or social amiabilities now and then which might be regarded as value received. So she had made it easy for Captain Palliser to talk.

T. Tembarom had at the outset seemed to present, so to speak, no surface. Palliser had soon ceased to be at all sure that his social ambitions were to be relied on as a lever. Besides which, when the old Duke of Stone took delighted possession of him, dined with him, drove with him, sat and gossiped with him by the hour, there was not much one could do for him. Strangeways had at first meant only eccentricity. The veriest chance had led Palliser to find himself regarding the opening up of possible vistas.

From a certain window in a certain wing of the house a much-praised view was to be seen. Nothing was more natural than that on the occasion of a curious sunset Palliser should, in coming from his room, decide to take a look at it. As he[Pg 773] passed through a corridor Pearson came out of a room near him.

“How is Mr. Strangeways to-day?” Palliser asked.

“Not quite so well, I am afraid, sir,” was the answer.

“Sorry to hear it,” replied Palliser, and passed on.

When returning, he walked somewhat slowly down the corridor. As he turned into it he thought he heard the murmur of voices. One was that of T. Tembarom, and he was evidently using argument. It sounded as if he were persuading some one to agree with him, and the persuasion was earnest. He was not arguing with Pearson or a housemaid. Why was he arguing with his pensioner? His voice was as low as it was eager, and the other man’s replies were not to be heard. Only just after Palliser had passed the door there broke out an appeal which was a sort of cry.

“No! My God, no! Don’t send me away! Don’t send me away!”

One could not, even if so inclined, stand and listen near a door while servants might chance to be wandering about. Palliser went on his way with a sense of having been slightly startled.

“He wants to get rid of him, and the fellow is giving him trouble,” he said to himself. “That voice is not American. Not in the least.” It set him thinking and observing. When Tembarom wore the look which was not a look of depression, but of something more puzzling, he thought that he could guess at its reason. By the time he talked with Lady Mallowe he had gone much further than he chose to let her know.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE popularity of Captain Palliser’s story of the “Ladies” had been great at the outset, but with the passage of time it had oddly waned. That the Duke of Stone had immensely taken up Mr. Temple Barholm had of course resulted in his being accepted in such a manner gave him many opportunities to encounter one and all. He appeared at dinners, teas, and garden parties. Miss Alicia, whom he had in some occult manner impressed upon people until they found themselves actually paying a sort of court to her, was always his companion.

“One realizes one cannot possibly leave her out of anything,” had been said. “He has somehow established her as if she were his mother or his aunt—or his interpreter. And such clothes, my dear, one doesn’t often behold. Worth and Paquin and Doucet must go sleepless for weeks to invent them. They are without a flaw in shade or line or texture.” Which was true, because Mrs. Mellish of the Bond Street shop had become quite obsessed by her idea and committed extravagances Miss Alicia offered up contrite prayers to atone for, while Tembarom, simply chortling in his glee, signed checks to pay for their exquisite embodiment. That he was not reluctant to avail himself of social opportunities was made manifest by the fact that he never refused an invitation. He appeared upon any spot to which hospitality bade him, and unashamedly placed himself on record as a neophyte upon almost all occasions. In a brief period of time, however, every young woman who might have expected to find herself an object of such ambitions realized that his methods of approach and attack were not marked by the usual characteristics of aspirants of his class. He evidently desired to see and be seen. He presented himself, as it were, for inspection and consideration, but while he was attentive, he did not press attentions upon any one. He did not make advances in the ordinary sense of the word. He never essayed flattering or even admiring remarks. He said queer things at which one often could not help but laugh, but he somehow wore no air of saying them with the intention of offering them as witticisms which might be regarded as allurements. He did not ogle, he did not simper or shuffle about nervously and turn red or pale, as eager and awkward youths have a habit of doing under the stress of unrequited admiration. He conducted himself with a detached good nature which seemed to take but small account of attitudes less unoffending than his own.

“He is not in the least forward,” Bea[Pg 774]trice Talchester said, the time arriving when she and her sisters occasionally talked him over with their special friends, the Granthams, “and he is not forever under one’s feet, as the pushing sort usually is.”

“But he never declines an invitation. There is no doubt that he wants to see people,” said Lady Honora, with the pretty little nose and the dimples. She had ceased to turn up the pretty little nose, and she showed a dimple as she added: “Gwynedd is tremendously taken with him. She is teaching him to play croquet. They spend hours together.”

“He’s beginning to play a pretty good game,” said Gwynedd. “He’s not stupid, at all events.”

“I don’t understand him, or I don’t understand Captain Palliser’s story,” Amabel Grantham argued. “Lucy and I are quite out of the running, but I honestly believe that he takes as much notice of us as he does of any of you.”

“He said, however, that the things that mattered were not only titles, but looks. He asked how many of us were ‘lookers.’ Don’t be modest, Amabel. Neither you nor Lucy are out of the running,” Beatrice amiably suggested.

“There may be a sort of explanation,” Honora put the idea forward somewhat thoughtfully. “Captain Palliser insists that he is much shrewder than he seems. Perhaps he is cautious, and is looking us all over before he commits himself.”

“He is a Temple Barholm, after all,” said Gwynedd, with boldness. “He’s rather good-looking. He has the nicest white teeth and the most cheering grin I ever saw, and he’s as ‘rich as grease is,’ as I heard a housemaid say one day. I’m getting quite resigned to his voice, or it is improving, I don’t know which.

“But,” added Lady Gwynedd, “he is not going to commit himself to any of us, incredible as it may seem. The one person he stares at sometimes is Joan Fayre, and he only looks at her as if he were curious and wouldn’t object to finding out why she treats him so outrageously. He isn’t annoyed; he’s only curious.”

“He’s a likable thing,” said Amabel Grantham. “He’s even rather a dear. I’ve begun to like him myself.”

“I hear you are learning to play croquet,” the Duke of Stone remarked to him a day or so later. “How do you like it?”

“Lady Gwynedd Talchester is teaching me,” Tembarom answered. “I’d learn to iron shirt-waists if she would give me lessons. She’s one of the two that have dimples,” he added, reflection in his tone. “I guess that’ll count. Shouldn’t you think it would?”

“Miss Hutchinson?” queried the duke.

Tembarom nodded.

“Yes, it’s always her,” he answered without a ray of humor. “I just want to stack ’em up.”

“You are doing it,” the duke replied with a slightly twisted mouth. There were, in fact, moments when he might have fallen into fits of laughter while Tembarom was seriousness itself. “I’m doing my stunt, of course, but I like them,” said he. “They’re mighty nice to me when you consider what they’re up against. And these two with the dimples, Lady Gwynedd and Lady Honora, are just peaches.”

They were having one of their odd long talks under a particularly splendid copper beech which provided the sheltered out-of-door corner his grace liked best. When they took their seats together in this retreat, it was mysteriously understood that they were settling themselves down to en[Pg 775]joyment of their own, and must not be disturbed.

“What dear papa talks to him about, and what he talks about to dear papa,” Lady Celia had more than once murmured in her gently remote, high-nosed way, “I cannot possibly imagine. Sometimes when I have passed them on my way to the croquet lawn I have really seen them both look as absorbed as people in a play. Of course it is very good for papa. It has had quite a marked effect on his digestion. But isn’t it odd!”

“I wish,” Lady Edith remarked almost wistfully, “that I could get on better with him myself conversationally. But I don’t know what to talk about, and it makes me nervous.”

Their father, on the contrary, found in him unique resources, and this afternoon it occurred to him that he had never so far heard him express himself freely on the subject of Palliser. If led to do so, he would probably reveal that he had views of Captain Palliser of which he might not have been suspected, and the manner in which they would unfold themselves would more than probably be illuminating. The duke was, in fact, serenely sure that he required neither warning nor advice, and he had no intention of offering either. He wanted to hear the views.

“Do you know,” he said as he stirred his tea, “I’ve been thinking about Palliser, and it has occurred to me more than once that I should like to hear just how he strikes you?”

“What I got on to first was how I struck him,” answered Tembarom, with a reasonable air. “That was dead easy.”

There was no hint of any vaunt of superior shrewdness. His was merely the level-toned manner of an observer of facts in detail.

“He has given you an opportunity of seeing a good deal of him,” the duke added. “What do you gather from him—unless he has made up his mind that you shall not gather anything at all?”

“A fellow like that couldn’t fix it that way, however much he wanted to,” Tembarom answered again reasonably. “Just his trying to do it would give him away.”

“You mean you have gathered things?”

“Oh, I’ve gathered enough, though I didn’t go after it. It hung on the bushes. Anyhow, it seemed to me that way. I guess you run up against that kind everywhere. There’s stacks of them in New York—different shapes and sizes.”

“If you met a man of his particular shape and size in New York, how would you describe him?” the duke asked.

“I should never have met him when I was there. He wouldn’t have come my way. He’d have been on Wall Street, doing high-class bucket-shop business, or he’d have had a swell office selling copper-mines—any old kind of mine that’s going to make ten million a minute, the sort of deal he’s in now. But I don’t believe you asked me because you thought I wasn’t on to him.”

“Frankly speaking, no,” answered the duke. “Does he talk to you about the mammoth mines and the rubber forests?”

“Say, that’s where he wins out with me,” Tembarom replied admiringly. “He gets in such fine work that I switch him on to it whenever I want cheering up. It makes me sort o’ forget things that worry me just to see a man act the part right up to the top notch the way he does it. The very way his clothes fit, the style he’s got his hair brushed, and that swell, careless lounge of his, are half of the make-up. You see, most of us couldn’t mistake him for anything else but just what he looks like—a gentleman visiting round among his friends and a million miles from wanting to butt in with business. The thing that first got me interested was watching how he slid in the sort of guff he wanted you to get worked up about and think over. Why, if I ’d been what I look like to him, he’d have had my pile long ago, and he wouldn’t be loafing round here any more.”

“What do you think you look like to him?” his host inquired.

“I look as if I’d eat out of his hand,” Tembarom answered, quite unbiased by any touch of wounded vanity. “Why shouldn’t I? And I’m not trying to wake him up, either. I like to look that way to him and to his sort. It gives me a chance to watch and get wise to things. He’s a high-school education in himself. I like to hear him talk. I asked him to come and stay at the house so that I could hear him talk.”

“Did he introduce the mammoth mines in his first call?” the duke inquired.

[Pg 776]

“Oh, I don’t mean that kind of talk. I didn’t know how much good I was going to get out of him at first. But he was the kind I hadn’t known, and it seemed like he was part of the whole thing—like the girls with title that Ann said I must get next to. And an easy way of getting next to the man kind was to let him come and stay. He wanted to, all right. I guess that’s the way he lives when he’s down on his luck, getting invited to stay at places. Like Lady Mallowe,” he added, quite without prejudice.

“You do sum them up, don’t you?” smiled the duke.

“Well, I don’t see how I could help it,” he said impartially. “They’re printed in sixty-four-point black-face, seems to me.”

“What is that?” the duke inquired with interest. He thought it might be a new and desirable bit of slang. “I don’t know that one.”

“Biggest type there is,” grinned Tembarom. “It’s the kind that’s used for head-lines. That’s newspaper-office talk.”

“Ah, technical, I see. Well, you are not printed in sixty-four-point black-face so far as they are concerned. They don’t find themselves able to sum you up. That fact is one of my recreations.”

“I’ll tell you why,” Tembarom explained with his clearly unprejudiced air. “There’s nothing much about me to sum up, anyhow. I’m too sort of plain sailing and ordinary. I’m not making for anywhere they’d think I’d want to go. I’m not hiding anything they’d be sure I’d want to hide.”

“By the Lord! you’re not!” exclaimed the duke.

“When I first came here, every one of them had a fool idea I’d want to pretend I’d never set eyes on a newsboy or a bootblack, and that I couldn’t find my way in New York when I got off Fifth Avenue. I used to see them thinking they’d got to look as if they believed it, if they wanted to keep next. When I just let out and showed I didn’t care a darn and hadn’t sense enough to know that it mattered, it nearly made them throw a fit. They had to turn round and fix their faces all over again and act like it was ‘interesting.’ That’s what Lady Mallowe calls it. She says it’s so ‘interesting!’ Now, Palliser—” he paused and grinned again.

“Yes, Palliser? Don’t let us neglect Palliser,” his host encouraged him.

“He’s in a worse mix-up than the rest because he’s got more to lose. If he could work this mammoth-mine song and dance with the right people, there’d be money enough in it to put him on Easy Street. That’s where he’s aiming for. The company’s just where it has to have a boost. It’s just got to. If it doesn’t, there’ll be a bust up that may end in fitting out a high-toned promoter or so in a striped yellow-and-black Jersey suit and set him to breaking rocks or playing with oakum. I’ll tell you, poor old Palliser gets the Willies sometimes after he’s read his mail. He turns the color of écru baby Irish. That’s a kind of lace I got a dressmaker to tell me about when I wrote up receptions and dances for the Sunday ‘Earth.’ Écru baby Irish—that’s Palliser’s color after he read his letters.”

“I dare say the fellow’s in a devil of a mess, if the truth were known,” the duke said.

“And here’s ‘T. T.,’ hand-made and hand-painted for the part of the kind of sucker he wants.” T. Tembarom’s manner was almost sympathetic in its appreciation. “I can tell you I’m having a real good time with Palliser. It looked like I’d just dropped from heaven when he first saw me. If he’d been the praying kind, I’d have been just the sort he’d have prayed for when he said his ‘Now-I-lay-me’s’ before he went to bed. There wasn’t a chance in a hundred that I wasn’t a fool that had his head swelled so that he’d swallow any darned thing if you handed it to him smooth enough. First time he called he asked me a lot of questions about New York business. That was pretty smart of him. He wanted to find out, sort of careless, how much I knew—or how little.”

The duke was leaning back luxuriously in his chair and gazing at him as he might have gazed at the work of an old master of which each line and shade was of absorbing interest.

“I can see him,” he said. “I see him.”

“He found out I knew nothing,” Tembarom continued.[Pg 777] “And what was to hinder him trying to teach me something, by gee! Nothing on top of the green earth. I was there, waiting with my mouth open, it seemed like.”

“And he has tried—in his best manner?” said his grace.

“What he hasn’t tried wouldn’t be worth trying,” Tembarom answered cheerfully. “Sometimes it seems like a shame to waste it. I’ve got so I know how to start him when he doesn’t know I’m doing it. I tell you, he’s fine. Gentlemanly—that’s his way, you know. High-toned friend that just happens to know of a good thing and thinks enough of you in a sort of reserved way to feel like it’s a pity not to give you a chance to come in on the ground floor, if you’ve got the sense to see the favor he’s friendly enough to do you. It’s such a favor that it’d just disgust a man if you could possibly turn it down. But of course you’re to take it or leave it. It’s not to his interest to push it. Lord, no! Whatever you did, his way is that he’d not condescend to say a darned word. High-toned silence, that’s all.”

The Duke of Stone was chuckling very softly. His chuckles rather broke his words when he spoke.

“By—by—Jove!” he said. “You—you do see it, don’t you? You do see it.”

“Why,” he said, “it’s what keeps me up. You know a lot more about me than any one else does, but there’s a whole raft of things I think about that I couldn’t hang round any man’s neck. If I tried to hang them round yours, you’d know that I would be having a hell of a time here, if I’d let myself think too much. If I didn’t see it, as you call it, if I didn’t see so many things, I might begin to get sorry for myself.” There was a pause of a second. “Gee!” he said, “gee! this not hearing a thing about Ann! I’ve got to keep going to stand it. Well, Strangeways gives me some work to do. And I’ve got Palliser. He’s a little sunbeam.”

A man-servant approaching to suggest a possible need of hot tea started at hearing his grace break into a sudden and plainly involuntary crow of glee. He had not heard that one before, either. Palliser as a little sunbeam brightening the pathway of T. Tembarom was, in the particular existing circumstances, all that could be desired of fine humor. It somewhat recalled the situation of the “Ladies” of the noble houses of Pevensy, Talchester, and Stone unconsciously passing in review for the satisfaction of little Miss Hutchinson. Tembarom laughed a little himself, but he went on with seriousness:

“There’s one thing sure enough. I’ve got on to it by listening and working out what he would do by what he doesn’t know he says. If he could put the screws on me in any way, he wouldn’t hold back. It’d be all quite polite and gentlemanly, but he’d do it all the same. And he’s dead-sure that everybody’s got something they’d like to hide—or get. That’s what he works things out from.”

“Does he think you have something to hide—or get?” the duke inquired, quickly.

“He’s sure of it. But he doesn’t know yet whether it’s get or hide. He noses about. Pearson’s seen him. He asks questions and plays he ain’t doing it and ain’t interested, anyhow.”

“He doesn’t like you, he doesn’t like you,” the duke said rather thoughtfully. “He has a way of conveying that you are far more subtle than you choose to look. He says an air of entire frankness is one of the chief assets of American promoters.”

Tembarom smiled the smile of recognition. “Yes,” he said, “it looks like that’s a long way round, doesn’t it? But it’s not far to T. T. when you want to hitch on the connection. Anyhow, that’s the way he means it to look. If ever I was suspected of being in any mix-up, everybody would remember he’d said that.”

“It’s very amusin’,” said the duke.

They had become even greater friends and intimates by this time than the already astonished neighborhood suspected them of being. That they spent much time together in an amazing degree of familiarity was the talk of the country, in fact, one of the most frequent resources of conversation. Everybody endeavored to find reason for the situation, but none had been presented which seemed of sufficiently logical convincingness. The duke was eccentric, of course. That was easy to hit upon. He was amiably perverse and good-humoredly cynical. He was of course immensely amused by the incongruity of the acquaintance. This being the case, why exactly he had never before chosen for himself a companion equally out of the picture it was not easy to explain. Palliser, it is true, suggested it was Tembarom’s “cheek” which stood him in good stead, and his being so entirely a bounder that he did not know he was one, and was[Pg 778] ready to make an ass of himself to any extent. The frankest statement of the situation, if any one had so chosen to put it, would have been that he was regarded as a sort of court fool without cap or bells.

No one was aware of the odd confidences which passed between the weirdly dissimilar pair. No one guessed that the old peer sat and listened to stories of a red-headed, slim-bodied girl in a dingy New York boarding-house, that he liked them sufficiently to encourage their telling, that he had made a mental picture of a certain look in a pair of maternally yearning and fearfully convincing round young eyes, that he knew the burnished fullness and glow of the red hair until he could imagine the feeling of its texture and abundant warmth in the hand. And this subject was only one of many. And of others they talked with interest, doubt, argument, speculation, holding a living thrill.

The tap of croquet-mallets sounded hollow and clear from the sunken lawn below the mass of shrubs between them and the players as the duke repeated:

“It’s hugely amusin’,” dropping his “g,” which was not one of his usual affectations.

“Confound it!” he said next, wrinkling the thin, fine skin round his eyes in a speculative smile, “I wish I had had a son of my own just like you.”

All of Tembarom’s white teeth revealed themselves.

“I’d have liked to be in it,” he replied, “but I shouldn’t have been like me.”

“Yes, you would.” The duke put the tips of his fingers delicately together. “You are of the kind which in all circumstances is like itself.” He looked about him, taking in the turreted, majestic age and mass of the castle. “You would have been born here. You would have learned to ride your pony down the avenue. You would have gone to Eton and to Oxford. I don’t think you would have learned much, but you would have been decidedly edifying and companionable. You would have had a sense of humor which would have made you popular in society and at court. A young fellow who makes those people laugh holds success in his hand. They want to be made to laugh as much as I do. Good God! how they are obliged to be bored and behave decently under it! You would have seen and known more things to be humorous about than you know now.”

“Would I have been Lord Temple Temple Barholm or something of that sort?” Tembarom asked.

“You would have been the Marquis of Belcarey,” the duke replied, looking him over thoughtfully, “and your name would probably have been Hugh Lawrence Gilbert Henry Charles Adelbert, or words to that effect.”

“A regular six-shooter,” grinned Tembarom. “I should have liked it all right if I hadn’t been born in Brooklyn. But that starts you out in a different way. Do you think, if I’d been born the Marquis of Bel—what’s his name—I should have been on to Palliser’s little song and dance, and had as much fun out of it?”

“On my soul, I believe you would,” the duke answered. “Brooklyn or Stone Hover Castle, I’m hanged if you wouldn’t have been you.”

CHAPTER XXIX

AFTER this came a pause. Each man sat thinking his own thoughts, which, while marked with difference in form, were doubtless subtly alike in the line they followed. During the silence T. Tembarom looked out at the late afternoon shadows lengthening themselves in darkening velvet across the lawns.

At last he said:

“I never told you that I’ve been reading some of the ’steen thousand books in the library. I started it about a month ago. And somehow they’ve got me going.”

“No, you have not mentioned it,” his grace answered, and laughed a little. “You frequently fail to mention things. When first we knew each other I used to wonder if you were naturally a secretive fellow; but you are not. You always have a reason for your silences.”

[Pg 779]

“It took about ten years to kick that into me—ten good years, I should say.”

“I have often thought that if books attracted you the library would help you to get through a good many of the hundred and thirty-six hours a day you’ve spoken of, and get through them pretty decently,” commented the duke.

“That’s what’s happened,” Tembarom answered. “There’s not so many now. I can cut ’em off in chunks.”

“How did it begin?”

He listened with much pleasure while Tembarom told him how it had begun and how it had gone on.

“I’d been having a pretty bad time one day. Strangeways had been worse—a darned sight worse—just when I thought he was better. I’d been trying to help him to think straight; and suddenly I made a break, somehow, and must have touched exactly the wrong spring. It seemed as if I set him nearly crazy. I had to leave him to Pearson right away. Then it poured rain steady for about eight hours, and I couldn’t get out and ‘take a walk.’ Then I went wandering into the picture-gallery and found Lady Joan there, looking at Miles Hugo. And she ordered me out, or blamed near it.”

“You are standing a good deal,” said the duke.

“Yes, I am—but so is she.” He set his hard young jaw, and stared once more at the velvet shadows.

“I tell you, for a fellow that knows nothing this novel-reading is an easy way of finding out a lot of things,” he resumed. “You find out what different kinds of people there are, and what different kinds of ways. If you’ve lived in one place, and been up against nothing but earning your living, you think that’s all there is of it—that it’s the whole thing. But it isn’t, by gee!” His air became thoughtful. “I’ve begun to kind of get on to what all this means”—glancing about him—“to you people; and how a fellow like T. T. must look to you. I’ve always sort of guessed, but reading a few dozen novels has helped me to see why it’s that way. I’ve yelled right out laughing over it many a time. That fellow called Thackeray—I can’t read his things right straight through—but he’s an eye-opener.”

“You have tried nothing but novels?” his enthralled hearer inquired.

“Not yet. I shall come to the others in time. I’m sort of hungry for these things about people. It’s the ways they’re different that gets me going.

“Reading novels put me wise to things in a new way. Lady Joan’s been wiping her feet on me hard for a good while, and I sort of made up my mind I’d got to let her until I was sure where I was. I won’t say I didn’t mind it, but I could stand it. But once when she caught me looking at her, the way she looked back at me made me see all of a sudden that it would be easier for her if I told her straight that she was mistaken.”

[Pg 780]

“That she is mistaken in thinking—?”

“What she does think. She wouldn’t have thought it if the old lady hadn’t been driving her mad by hammering it in. She’d have hated me all right, and I don’t blame her when I think of how poor Jem was treated; but she wouldn’t have thought that every time I tried to be decent and friendly to her I was butting in and making a sick fool of myself. She’s got to stay where her mother keeps her, and she’s got to listen to her. Oh, hell! She’s got to be told!”

The duke set the tips of his fingers together. “How would you do it?” he asked.

“Just straight,” replied T. Tembarom. “There’s no other way.”

From the old worldling broke forth an involuntary low laugh, which was a sort of cackle. So this was what was coming.

“I cannot think of any devious method,” he said, “which would make it less than a delicate thing to do. A beautiful young woman, whose host you are, has flouted you furiously for weeks, under the impression that you are offensively in love with her. You propose to tell her that her judgment has betrayed her, and that, as you say, ‘There’s nothing doing.’”

“Not a darned thing, and never has been,” said T. Tembarom. He looked quite grave and not at all embarrassed. He plainly did not see it as a situation to be regarded with humor.

“If she will listen—” the duke began.

“Oh, she’ll listen,” put in Tembarom. “I’ll make her.”

His was a self-contradicting countenance, the duke reflected, as he took him in with a somewhat long look. One did not usually see a face built up of boyishness and maturity, simpleness which was baffling, and a good nature which could be hard. At the moment, it was both of these last at one and the same time.

“I know something of Lady Joan and I know something of you,” he said, “but I don’t exactly foresee what will happen. I will not say that I should not like to be present.”

“There’ll be nobody present but just me and her,” Tembarom answered.

CHAPTER XXX

THE visits of Lady Mallowe and Captain Palliser had had their features. Neither of the pair had come to one of the most imposing “places” in Lancashire to live a life of hermit-like seclusion and dullness. They had arrived with the intention of availing themselves of all such opportunities for entertainment as could be guided in their direction by the deftness of experience. As a result, there had been hospitalities at Temple Barholm such as it had not beheld during the last generation at least. T. Tembarom had looked on, an interested spectator, as these festivities had been adroitly arranged and managed for him. He had not, however, in the least resented acting as a sort of figurehead in the position of sponsor and host.

“They think I don’t know I’m not doing it all myself,” was his easy mental summing-up. “They’ve got the idea that I’m pleased because I believe I’m It. But that’s all to the merry. It’s what I’ve set my mind on having going on here, and I couldn’t have started it as well myself. I shouldn’t have known how. They’re teaching me. All I hope is that Ann’s grandmother is keeping tab.”

“Do you and Rose happen to know old Mrs. Hutchinson?” he had inquired of Pearson the night before the talk with the duke.

“Well, not to say exactly know her, sir, but everybody knows of her,” said Pearson. “She is a most remarkable old person, sir—most remarkable.” Then, after watching his face for a moment or so, he added tentatively, “Would you perhaps wish us to make her acquaintance for—for any reason, sir?”

Tembarom thought the matter over speculatively. He had learned that his first liking for Pearson had been founded upon a rock. He was always to be trusted to understand, and also to apply a quite unusual intelligence to such matters as he became aware of without having been told about them.

“What I’d like would be for her to hear that there’s plenty doing at Temple Barholm; that people are coming and going all the time; and that there’s ladies to burn—and most of them lookers, at that,” was his answer.

How Pearson had discovered the exotic subtleties of his master’s situation and mental attitude toward it, only those of his class and gifted with his occult powers could explain in detail. The fact exists that Pearson did know an immense number of things his employer had not mentioned to him, and held them locked in his bosom in honored security, like a little[Pg 781] gentleman. He made his reply with a polite conviction which carried weight.

“It would not be necessary for either Rose or me to make old Mrs. Hutchinson’s acquaintance with a view to informing her of anything which occurs on the estate or in the village, sir,” he remarked. “Mrs. Hutchinson knows more of things than any one ever tells her. She sits in her cottage there, and she just knows things and sees through people in a way that’d be almost unearthly, if she wasn’t a good old person, and so respectable that there’s those that touches their hats to her as if she belonged to the gentry. She’s got a blue eye, sir.”

“Has she?” exclaimed Tembarom.

“Yes, sir. As blue as a baby’s, sir, and as clear, though she’s past eighty. Oh, sir! you can depend upon old Mrs. Hutchinson as to who’s been here, and even what they’ve thought about it. The village just flocks to her to tell her the news and get advice about things. She’d know.”

It was as a result of this that on his return from Stone Hover he dismissed the carriage at the gates and walked through them to make a visit in the village. Old Mrs. Hutchinson, sitting knitting in her chair behind the abnormally flourishing fuchsias, geraniums, and campanula carpaticas in her cottage-window, looked between the banked-up flower-pots to see that Mr. Temple Barholm had opened her wicket-gate and was walking up the clean-brushed path to her front door. When he knocked she called out in the broad Lancashire she had always spoken, “Coom in!” When he entered he took off his hat and looked at her, friendly but hesitant, and with the expression of a young man who has not quite made up his mind as to what he is about to encounter.

“I’m Temple Temple Barholm, Mrs. Hutchinson,” he announced.

“I know that,” she answered. “Not that tha looks loike the Temple Barholms, but I’ve been watchin’ thee walk an’ drive past here ever since tha coom to the place.”

She watched him steadily with an astonishingly limpid pair of old eyes. They were old and young at the same time; old because they held deeps of wisdom, young because they were so alive and full of question.

“I don’t know whether I ought to have come to see you or not,” he said.

“Well, tha’st coom,” she replied, going on with her knitting. “Sit thee doun and have a bit of a chat.”

“Say!” he broke out. “Ain’t you going to shake hands with me?” He held his hand out impetuously. He knew he was all right if she’d shake hands.

“Theer’s nowt agen that, surely,” she answered, with a shrewd bit of a smile. She gave him her hand. “If I was na stiff in my legs, it’s my place to get up an’ mak’ thee a curtsey, but th’ rheumatics has no respect even for th’ lord o’ th’ manor.”

“If you got up and made me a curtsey,” Tembarom said, “I should throw a fit. Say, Mrs. Hutchinson, I bet you know that as well as I do.”

The shrewd bit of smile lighted her eyes as well as twinkled about her mouth.

“Sit thee doun,” she said again.

[Pg 782]

So he sat down and looked at her as straight as she looked at him.

“Tha’d give a good bit,” she said presently, over her flashing needles, “to know how much Little Ann’s tow’d me about thee.”

“I’d give a lot to know how much it’d be square to ask you to tell me about her,” he gave back to her, hesitating yet eager.

“What does tha mean by square?” she demanded.

“I mean ‘fair.’ Can I talk to you about her at all? I promised I’d stick it out here and do as she said. She told me she wasn’t going to write to me or let her father write. I’ve promised, and I’m not going to fall down when I’ve said a thing. I’m going to be as good as I know how.”

“So tha coom to see her grandmother?”

He reddened, but held his head up.

“I’m not going to ask her grandmother a thing she doesn’t want me to be told. But I’ve been up against it pretty hard lately. I read some things in the New York papers about her father and his invention, and about her traveling round with him and helping him with his business.”

“In Germany they wur,” she put in, forgetting herself. “They’re havin’ big doin’s over th’ invention. What Joe’d do wi’out th’ lass I canna tell. She’s doin’ every bit o’ th’ managin’ an’ contrivin’ wi’ them furriners—but he’ll never know it.”

Her face flushed and she stopped herself sharply.

“I’m talkin’ about her to thee!” she said. “I would na ha’ believed it o’ mysen.”

He got up from his chair.

“I guess I oughtn’t to have come,” he said restlessly. “But you haven’t told me more than I got here and there in the papers. That was what startled me. It was like watching her. I could hear her talking and see the way she was doing things till it drove me half crazy. All of a sudden I just got wild and made up my mind I’d come here. I’ve wanted to do it many a time, but I’ve kept away.”

“Tha showed sense i’ doin’ that,” remarked Mrs. Hutchinson. “She’d not ha’ thowt well o’ thee if tha’d coom runnin’ to her grandmother every day or so. What she likes about thee is as she thinks tha’s got a strong backbone o’ thy own.

“Happen a look at a lass’s grandmother—when tha canna get at th’ lass hersen—is a bit o’ comfort,” she added. “But don’t tha go walkin’ by here to look in at th’ window too often. She would na think well o’ that either.”

“Say! There’s one thing I’m going to get off my chest before I go,” he announced, “just one thing. She can go where she likes and do what she likes, but I’m going to marry her when she’s done it—unless something knocks me on the head and finishes me. I’m going to marry her.”

“Tha art, art tha?” laconically.

“I’m keeping up my end here, and it’s no slouch of a job, but I’m not forgetting what she promised for one minute! And I’m not forgetting what her promise means,” he said, obstinately.

“Tha’d like me to tell her that?” she said.

“If she doesn’t know it, you telling her wouldn’t cut any ice,” was his reply. “I’m saying it because I want you to know it, and because it does me good to say it out loud. I’m going to marry her.”

“That’s for her and thee to settle,” she commented impersonally.

“It is settled,” he answered. “There’s no way out of it. Will you shake hands with me again before I go?”

“Aye,” she consented, “I will.”

When she took his hand she held it a minute. Her own was warm, and there was no limpness about it. The secret which had seemed to conceal itself behind her eyes had some difficulty in keeping itself wholly in the background.

“She knows aw’ tha does,” she said coolly, as if she were not suddenly revealing immensities. “She knows who cooms an’ who goes, an’ what they think o’ thee, an’ how tha gets on wi’ ’em. Now get thee gone, lad, an’ dunnot tha coom back till her or me sends for thee.”

WITHIN an hour of this time the afternoon post brought to Lady Mallowe a letter which she read with an expression in which her daughter recognized relief. It was in fact a letter for which she had waited with anxiety, and the invitation it contained was a tribute to her social skill at its highest water-mark. In her less heroic moments, she had felt doubts of receiving it, which had caused shudders to run the entire length of her spine.

[Pg 783]

“I’m going to Broome Haughton,” she announced to Joan.

“When?” Joan inquired.

“At the end of the week. I am invited for a fortnight.”

“Am I going?” Joan asked.

“No. You will go to London to meet some friends who are coming over from Paris.”

Joan knew that comment was unnecessary. Both she and her mother were on intimate terms with these hypothetical friends who so frequently turned up from Paris or elsewhere when it was necessary that she should suddenly go back to London and live in squalid seclusion in the unopened house, with a charwoman to provide her with underdone or burnt chops, and eggs at eighteen a shilling, while the shutters of the front rooms were closed, and dusty desolation reigned.

“If you had conducted yourself sensibly you need not have gone,” continued her mother. “I could have made an excuse and left you here. You would at least have been sure of good food and decent comforts.”

“After your visit, are we to return here?” was Lady Joan’s sole reply.

“I do not know what will happen when I leave Broome Haughton,” her mother added, a note of rasped uncertainty in her voice.

In truth, the future was a hideous thing to contemplate if no rescue at all was in sight. It would be worse for her than for Joan, because Joan did not care what happened or did not happen, and she cared desperately. She knew perfectly well that the girl had somehow found out that Sir Moses Monaldini was to be at Broome Haughton, and that when he left there he was going abroad. She knew also that she had not been able to conceal that his indifference had of late given her some ghastly hours, and that her play for this lagging invitation had been a frantically bold one. That the most ingenious efforts and devices had ended in success only after such delay made it all the more necessary that no straw must remain unseized on.

“I can wear some of your things, with a little alteration,” she said. “Rose will do it for me. Hats and gloves and ornaments do not require altering. I shall need things you will not need in London. Where are your keys?”

Lady Joan rose and got them for her. She even flushed slightly. They were often obliged to borrow each other’s possessions, but for a moment she felt herself moved by a sort of hard pity.

“We are like rats in a trap,” she remarked. “I hope you will get out.”

“If I do, you will be left inside. Get out yourself! Get out yourself!” said Lady Mallowe in a fierce whisper.

Her regrets at the necessity of their leaving Temple Barholm were expressed with fluent touchingness at the dinner-table. The visit had been so delightful. Mr. Temple Barholm and Miss Alicia had been so kind. The loveliness of the whole dear place had so embraced them that they felt as if they were leaving a home instead of ending a delightful visit. It was extraordinary what an effect the house had on one. It was as if one had lived in it always—and always would. So few places gave one the same feeling. They should both look forward—greedy as it seemed—to being allowed some time to come again. She had decided from the first that it was not necessary to go to any extreme of caution or subtlety with her host and Miss Alicia. Her method of paving the way for future visits was perhaps more than a shade too elaborate. She felt, however, that it sufficed. For the most part, Lady Joan sat with lids dropped over her burning eyes. She tried to force herself not to listen. This was the kind of thing which made her sick with humiliation. Howsoever rudimentary these people were, they could not fail to comprehend that a foothold in the house was being bid for. They should at least see that she did not join in the bidding. Her own visit had been filled with feelings at war with one another. In the long-past three months of happiness, Jem—her Jem—had described the house to her—the rooms, gardens, pleached walks, pictures, the very furniture itself. She could enter no room, walk in no spot she did not seem to know, and passionately love in spite of herself. She loved them so much that there were times when she yearned to stay in the place at any cost, and others when she could not endure the misery it woke in her—the pure misery.

T. Tembarom thought he never had seen Lady Joan look as handsome as she looked to-night. The color on her cheek[Pg 784] burned, her eyes had a driven loneliness in them. She had a wonderfully beautiful mouth, and its curve drooped in a new way. He wished Ann could get her in a corner and sit down and talk sense to her. He remembered what he had said to the duke. Perhaps this was the time. If she was going away, and her mother meant to drag her back again when she was ready, it would make it easier for her to leave the place knowing she need not hate to come back. But the duke wasn’t making any miss hit when he said it wouldn’t be easy. She was not like Ann, who would feel some pity for the biggest fool on earth if she had to throw him down hard. Lady Joan would feel neither compunctions nor relentings. He knew the way she could look at a fellow. If he couldn’t make her understand what he was aiming at, they would both be worse off than they would be if he left things as they were. But—the hard line showed itself about his mouth—he wasn’t going to leave things as they were.

As they passed through the hall after dinner, Lady Mallowe glanced at a side-table on which lay some letters arrived by the late post. An imposing envelop was on the top of the rest. Joan saw her face light as she took it up.

“I think this is from Broome Haughton,” she said. “If you will excuse me, I will go into the library and read it. It may require answering at once.”

She turned hot and cold, poor woman, and went away, so that she might be free from the disaster of an audience if anything had gone wrong. It would be better to be alone even if things had gone right. The letter was from Sir Moses Monaldini.

The men had come into the drawing-room when she returned. As she entered, Joan did not glance up from the book she was reading, but at the first sound of her voice she knew what the letter meant.

“I was obliged to dash off a note to Broome Haughton so that it would be ready for the early post,” Lady Mallowe said. She was at her best. Palliser saw that some years had slipped from her shoulders. The moment which relieves or even promises to relieve fears does astonishing things. Tembarom wondered whether she had had good news. Her brilliant air of social ease returned to her, and she began to talk fluently of what was being done in London, and to touch lightly upon the possibility of taking part in great functions. Persons whose fortunate names had ceased to fall easily from her lips appeared again upon the horizon. Miss Alicia was impressed anew with the feeling that she had known every brilliant or important personage in the big world of social London; that she had taken part in every dazzling event. Tembarom somehow realized that she had been afraid of something or other, and was for some reason not afraid any more. Such a change, whatsoever the reason for it, ought to have had some effect on her daughter. Surely she would share her luck, if luck had come to her.

But Lady Joan sat apart and kept her eyes upon her book. This was one of the things she often chose to do, in spite of her mother’s indignant protest.

“I came here because you brought me,” she would answer. “I did not come to be entertaining or polite.”

She was not reading this evening. She heard every word of Lady Mallowe’s agreeable and slightly excited conversation. She did not know exactly what had happened; but she knew that it was something which had buoyed her up with a hopefulness which exhilarated her and before her own future Joan saw the blank wall of stone building itself higher and higher. If Sir Moses had capitulated, she would be counted out. A cruel little smile touched her lips, as she reviewed the number of things she could not do to earn her living. She could not take in sewing or washing, and there was nothing she could teach. Starvation or marriage. The wall built itself higher and yet higher. What a hideous thing it was for a penniless girl to be brought up merely to be a beauty, and in consequence supposably a great lady. And yet if she was born to a certain rank and had height and figure, a lovely mouth, a delicate nose, unusual eyes and lashes, to train her to be a dressmaker or a housemaid would be a stupid investment of capital. If nothing tragic interfered and the right man wanted such a girl, she had been trained to please him. But tragic things had happened, and before her grew the wall while she pretended to read her book.

T. Tembarom was coming toward her.[Pg 785] She had heard Palliser suggest a game of billiards.

“Will you come and play billiards with us?” Tembarom asked. “Palliser says you play splendidly.”

“She plays brilliantly,” put in Lady Mallowe. “Come, Joan.”

“No, thank you,” she answered. “Let me stay here and read.”

Lady Mallowe protested. She tried an air of playful maternal reproach because she was in good spirits. Joan saw Palliser smiling quietly, and there was that in his smile which suggested to her that he was thinking her an obstinate fool.

“You had better show Temple Barholm what you can do,” he remarked. “This will be your last chance, as you leave so soon. Never ought you let a last chance slip by. I never do.”

Tembarom stood still and looked down at her from his good height. He did not know what Palliser’s speech meant, but an instinct made him feel that it somehow held an ugly, quiet taunt.

“What I would like to do,” was the unspoken crudity which passed through his mind, “would be to swat him on the mouth. He’s getting at her just when she ought to be let alone.”

“Would you like it better to stay here and read?” he inquired.

“Much better, if you please,” was her reply.

“Then that goes,” he answered, and left her.

He swept the others out of the room with a good-natured promptness which put an end to argument. When he said of anything “Then that goes,” it usually did so.

WHEN she was alone Joan sat and gazed not at her wall but at the pictures that came back to her out of a part of her life which seemed to have been lived centuries ago. They were the pictures that came back continually without being called, the clearness of which always startled her afresh. Sometimes she thought they sprang up to add to her torment, but sometimes it seemed as if they came to save her from herself—her mad, wicked self. After all, there were moments when to know that she had been the girl whose eighteen-year-old heart had leaped so when she turned and met Jem’s eyes, as he stood gazing at her under the beech-tree, was something to cling to. She had been that girl and Jem had been—Jem. Her throat strained itself because sobs rose in it, and her eyes were hot with the swell of tears.

She could hear voices and laughter and the click of balls from the billiard-room. Her mother and Palliser laughed the most, but she knew the sound of her mother’s voice would cease soon, because she would come back to her. She knew the kind of scene they would pass through together when she returned. The old things would be said, the old arguments used, but a new one would be added. It was at once horrible and ridiculous that she must sit and listen—and stare at the growing wall. It was as she caught her breath against the choking swell of tears that she heard Lady Mallowe returning. She came in with an actual sweep across the room. Her society air had fled, and she was unadornedly furious when she stopped before Joan’s chair. For a few seconds she actually glared; then she broke forth in a suppressed undertone.

“Come into the billiard-room. I command it!”

Joan lifted her eyes from her book. Her voice was as low as her mother’s, but steadier.

“No,” she answered.

“Is this conduct to continue? Is it?” Lady Mallowe panted.

“Yes,” said Joan, and laid her book on the table near her. There was nothing else to say. Words made things worse.

Lady Mallowe had lost her head, but she still spoke in the suppressed voice.

“You shall behave yourself!” she cried, under her breath, and actually made a passionate half-start toward her.

“Wouldn’t it be wise to remember that you cannot make the kind of scene here that you can in your own house?” said Joan. “We are a bad-tempered pair. But when we are guests in other people’s houses—”

“You think you can take advantage of that!” she said. “Don’t trust yourself too far. Do you imagine that just when all might go well for me I will allow you to spoil everything?”

[Pg 786]

“How can I spoil everything?”

“By behaving as you have been behaving since we came here—refusing to make a home for yourself; by hanging round my neck so that it will appear that any one who takes me must take you also. I came in here to tell you,” she went on, “that this is your last chance. I shall never give you another.”

Joan remained silent, and her silence added to her mother’s helpless rage. She moved a step nearer to her and flung the javelin which she always knew would strike deep.

“You have made yourself a laughing-stock for all London for years. You are mad about a man who disgraced and ruined himself.”

She saw the javelin quiver as it struck; but Joan’s voice as it answered her had a quality of low and deadly steadiness.

“You have said that a thousand times, and you will say it another thousand—though you know the story was a lie and was proved to be one.”

Lady Mallowe knew her way thoroughly.

“Who remembers the denials? What the world remembers is that Jem Temple Barholm was stamped as a cheat and a trickster. No one has time to remember the other thing. He is dead—dead! When a man’s dead it’s too late.”

She was desperate enough to drive her javelin home deeper than she had ever chanced to drive it before. The truth—the awful truth she uttered shook Joan from head to foot. She sprang up and stood before her in heart-wrung fury.

“Oh! You are a hideously cruel woman!” she cried. “They say even tigers care for their young! But you—you can say that to me. ‘When a man’s dead, it’s too late.’”

“It is too late—it is too late!” Lady Mallowe persisted. Why had not she struck this note before? It was breaking Joan’s will: “I would say anything to bring you to your senses. I came here because it is your last chance. Palliser knew what he was saying when he made a joke of it just now. He knew it wasn’t a joke. You might have been the Duchess of Merthshire; you might have been Lady St. Maur, with a husband with millions. And here you are. You know what’s before you—when I am out of the trap.”

Joan laughed. It was a wild little laugh, and she felt there was no sense in it.

“I might apply for a place in Miss Alicia’s Home for Decayed Gentlewomen,” she said.

Lady Mallowe nodded her head fiercely.

“Apply, then. There will be no place for you in the home I am going to live in,” she retorted.

Joan ceased moving about. She was about to hear the one argument that was new.

“You may as well tell me,” she said wearily.

“I have had a letter from Sir Moses Monaldini. He is to be at Broome Haughton. He is going there purposely to meet me. What he writes can mean only one thing. He means to ask me to marry him. I’m your mother, and I’m nearly twenty years older than you; but you see that I’m out of the trap first.”

“I knew you would be,” answered Joan.

“He detests you,” Lady Mallowe went on. “He will not hear of your living with us—or even near us. He says you are old enough to take care of yourself. Take my advice. I am doing you a good turn in giving it. This New York newsboy is mad over you. If he hadn’t been we should have been bundled out of the house before this. He never has spoken to a lady before in his life, and he feels as if you were a goddess. Go into the billiard-room this instant, and do all a woman can. Go!” And she actually stamped her foot on the carpet. “You might live in the very house you would have lived in with Jem Temple Barholm, on the income he could have given you.”

She saw the crassness of her blunder the next moment. If she had had an advantage, she had lost it.

Wickedly, without a touch of mirth, Joan laughed in her face.

“Jem’s house and Jem’s money—and the New York newsboy in his shoes,” she flung at her. “T. Tembarom to live with until one’s death-bed. T. Tembarom!”

Suddenly, something was giving way in her, Lady Mallowe thought again. Joan slipped into a chair and dropped her head and hidden face on the table.

“Oh! Mother! Mother!” she ended.[Pg 787] “Oh! Jem! Jem!”

Was she sobbing or trying to choke sobbing back? There was no time to be lost. Her mother had never known a scene to end in this way before.

“Crying!” There was absolute spite in her voice. “That shows you know what you are in for, at all events. But I’ve said my last word. What does it matter to me, after all? You’re in the trap. I’m not. Get out as best you can.”

She turned her back and went out of the room—as she had come into it—with a sweep Joan would have smiled at as rather vulgar if she had seen it. As a child in the nursery, she had often seen that her ladyship was vulgar.

But she did not see the sweep because her face was hidden. Something in her had broken this time, as her mother had felt. That bitter, sordid truth, driven home as it had been, had done it. Who had time to remember denials, or lies proved to be lies? Nobody in the world. Who had time to give to the defense of a dead man? There was not time enough to give to living ones. It was true—true! When a man is dead, it is too late. The wall had built itself until it reached her sky; but it was not the wall she bent her head and sobbed over. It was that suddenly she had seen again Jem’s face as he had stood with slow-growing pallor, and looked round at the ring of eyes which stared at him; Jem’s face as he strode by her without a glance and went out of the room. She forgot everything else on earth. She forgot where she was. She was eighteen again, and she sobbed in her arms as eighteen sobs when its heart is torn from it.

“Oh, Jem! Jem!” she cried. “If you were only in the same world with me! If you were just in the same world!”

She had forgotten all else, indeed. She forgot too long. She did not know how long. It seemed that no more than a few minutes had passed before she was without warning struck with the shock of feeling that some one was in the room with her, standing near her, looking at her. She had been mad not to remember that exactly this thing would be sure to happen, by some abominable chance. Her movement as she rose was almost violent, she could not hold herself still, and her face was horribly wet with shameless, unconcealable tears. Shameless she felt them—indecent—a sort of nudity of the soul. If it had been a servant who had intruded, or if it had been Palliser it would have been intolerable enough. But it was T. Tembarom who confronted her with his common face, moved mysteriously by some feeling she resented even more than she resented his presence. He was too grossly ignorant to know that a man of breeding, having entered by chance, would have turned and gone away, professing not to have seen. He seemed to think—the dolt!—that he must make some apology.

“Say! Lady Joan!” he began. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to butt in.”

“Then go away,” she commanded. “Instantly—instantly!”

She knew he must see that she spoke almost through her teeth in her effort to control her sobbing breath. But he made no move toward leaving her. He even drew nearer, looking at her in a sort of meditative, obstinate way.

“N-no,” he replied deliberately. “I guess—I won’t.”

“You won’t?” Lady Joan repeated after him. “Then I will.”

He made a stride forward and laid his hand on her arm.

“No. Not on your life. You won’t, either—if I can help it. And you’re going to let me help it.”

Almost any one but herself—any one, at least, who did not resent his very existence—would have felt the drop in his voice which suddenly struck the note of boyish, friendly appeal in the last sentence. “You’re going to let me,” he repeated.

She stood looking down at the daring, unconscious hand on her arm.

“I suppose,” she said, with cutting slowness, “that you do not even know that you are insolent. Take your hand away,” in arrogant command.

He removed it with an unabashed half-smile.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I didn’t even know I’d put it there. It was a break—but I wanted to keep you.”

That he not only wanted to keep her, but intended to do so, was apparent. His air was neither rough nor brutal, but he had ingeniously placed himself in the outlet between the big table and the way to the door, He put his hands in his pockets in his vulgar, unconscious way, and watched her.

[Pg 788]

“Say, Lady Joan!” he broke forth, in the frank outburst of a man who wants to get something over. “I should be a fool if I didn’t see that you’re up against it—hard! What’s the matter?” His voice dropped again.

There was something in the drop this time which—perhaps because of her recent emotion—sounded to her almost as if he were asking the question with the protecting sympathy of the tone one would use in speaking to a child. How dare he! But it came home to her that Jem had once said “What’s the matter?” to her in the same way.

“Do you think it likely that I should confide in you?” she said, and inwardly quaked at the memory as she said it.

“No,” he answered, considering the matter gravely. “It’s not likely—the way things look to you now. But if you knew me better perhaps it would be likely.”

“I once explained to you that I do not intend to know you better,” she gave answer.

He nodded acquiescently.

“Yes. I got on to that. And it’s because it’s up to me that I came out here to tell you something I want you to know before you go away. I’m going to confide in you.”

“Cannot even you see that I am not in the mood to accept confidences?” she exclaimed.

“Yes, I can. But you’re going to accept this one,” steadily. “No,” as she made a swift movement, “I’m not going to clear the way till I’ve done.”

“I insist!” she cried. “If you were—” He put out his hand, but not to touch her.

“I know what you’re going to say. If I were a gentleman—Well, I’m not laying any claims to anything—but I’m a sort of a man, anyhow, though you mayn’t think it. And you’re going to listen.”

(To be continued)

THE SPIRIT OF THE CENTURY

“THE magazine needs no other aim than to be worthy of the name it bears.”

Thus wrote THE CENTURY’S first editor, Dr. J. G. Holland, in the first number of this magazine nearly forty-three years ago. He referred, of course, to the magazine’s original title, which was “Scribner’s Monthly”; but THE CENTURY’S earnest ambition to realize the full meaning of its present significant title can find no fitter expression. It continues to believe that success will be attained only as it becomes really the representative magazine of this new and spectacular century of American life.

For the information of many inquiring friends, it seems wise at this time to say that there will be no “new” CENTURY in the sense of a changed CENTURY. There can be none. In remaining the “old” CENTURY, merely growing with the times, merely holding fast to its historic place in the front of progress, this magazine, in these richer days of hard thinking and prompt acting and strenuous living, these tumultuous days of changing eras, remains by mere definition the organ of what is noblest and forwardest in American life. The first editor of this magazine stated editorially that it was conducted in “the free spirit of modern progress and the broadest literary catholicity.” The fourth editor joyfully reaffirms this creed. There can be no simpler and more comprehensive statement of this magazine’s present spirit and purposes.

In the twentieth-anniversary number, Richard Watson Gilder, who, on Dr. Holland’s death in 1881, succeeded to the editorship, reaffirmed the creed in these words:

Allowing for different conditions, Mr. Gilder might have written this for to-day.

In the same editorial utterance Mr. Gilder dwelt strongly upon “the spirit of experiment” which, he said, had always inspired the magazine’s policy. This we take to be merely another phrase for Dr. Holland’s “free spirit of modern progress.”

Five years later, on the occasion of our twenty-fifth anniversary, Mr. Gilder wrote in these pages:

[Pg 790]

American life is richer many times over in feeling and action, and especially in meaning, than when Mr. Gilder penned these words. The intervening years have brought to the surface a myriad of surging currents of human desire and necessity and passion, then concealed, almost unsuspected, below the surface.

It cannot have escaped any reader of THE CENTURY that we are living in a period of amazing achievement as well as of portentous social development. Yet any worker in the furrows of life may well be pardoned for failure to realize the detail and immensity of our achievement. Could one devote himself wholly to discovering the facts of modern accomplishment, it would take a busy life to get abreast of the mere news of it, and to keep there. Ours are times of such variety and complexity that none can be expected to grasp much more than the technicalities of his own work-bench.

Like most prophesies, Mr. Gilder’s has been only partly fulfilled. Yet the eighteen years since he uttered it have proved at least that it was true, though its realization has been delayed by the extraordinary activity of these later years. The history of all human progress shows that the art of any period is, so to speak, the flowering of that period. The bloom appears only after stem and stalk have shot to their full growth, and leaves have expanded and darkened to their maturity. The bubbling sap of Mr. Gilder’s time is showing now in new and surprising growth, and our problem to-day is not so much to enjoy the flowering literature which he promised as to study and to measure and to comprehend as nearly as possible the wealth of scientific and social and political and industrial achievement which has amazingly developed.

There is no escaping the fact that civilization, like the river tumbling and swirling between two lakes, is passing turbulently from the old convention of the last several generations to the unknown, almost unguessable convention of the not distant future. The feminist movement, the uprising of labor, the surging of innumerable socialistic currents, can mean nothing else than the certain readjustment of social levels. The demand of the people for the heritage of the bosses is not short of revolution. The rebellious din of frantic impressionistic groups is nothing if not strenuous protest against a frozen art. The changed Sabbath and the tempered sermon mark the coldly critical appraisement of religious creeds. And science, meantime, straining and sweating under the lash of progress, is passing from wonder unto wonder.

Perhaps Mr. Gilder’s period of literary flowering, though surely coming, must be postponed another decade. The need of the moment is to discover where we are, what is accomplishing about us. Where[Pg 791] have all these struggling activities brought us? What have they really done? What do they mean? Whither do they tend?

It is time we look this question of the present squarely in the eye, in order, if for no other reason, that we may intelligently face the future. It is time that, in business phrase, we take account of stock. It is time that the chemist, for example, trembling over the revelations of his amazing combinations, know that the psychologist, too, is excited about the astonishing developments of his own laboratory; that the elated conquerors of the air realize the achievement of those who plod in the groaning shops of town; that the biologist, amazed at his artificial propagation of life, appreciate the telegraphic annihilation of space.

Thus only may we wisely choose our steps in these uncertain times, remembering that change is not always degeneration; oftener it is progress. There are periods when men live literature, not write it, and consequently literary barrenness may mean merely lying fallow, and still be progress. Especially must we not be too hasty of judgment, for while there are times to preach and times to act and times to pronounce judgment, there are at long intervals also times, between the passings out and the comings in, when it behooves all men to watch and to wait and to study the signs. There are abundant reasons to believe that such a time is at hand, and THE CENTURY, now, as in the past, stands by to help.

During the months, perhaps the years, to come, in Dr. Holland’s “free spirit of modern progress,” in Mr. Gilder’s “spirit of experiment,” and in Mr. Johnson’s spirit of public helpfulness, THE CENTURY will offer to its readers a summing-up of the results of this wonderful period, and a fair presentation of the changes attendant upon the passing of our present order and the establishment of the new.

Not as an advocate shall we present these causes, nor again in protest; but in the fair, free, unbiased spirit of investigation. Facts must precede opinions. It is poor rowing against the rapids between the lakes. Let us study these manifestations fairly and sympathetically before we draw conclusions. It will be THE CENTURY’S pleasure and public duty to enlist the services of able authorities in every cause, and to present each justly from its own point of view.

Such a program will, we feel sure, help materially the cause of human progress, because it will help men and women to comprehend life as it passes.

As for the rest, we shall conserve the best that THE CENTURY has stood for in the past. We shall offer a larger proportion of fiction than formerly, and shall bring it as near to truth, and make it as interpretative of life, as conditions allow. We shall maintain illustration at the highest point modern method will permit. We shall cultivate history and poetry and the essay. We shall explore conditions at home and abroad. We shall make this magazine, fearlessly and in the white light of to-day, as nearly the magazine of the century as courage and devotion and eyes that see and minds that shrink not can do.

[Pg 792]

IN LIGHTER VEIN

WORLD REFORMERS—AND DUSTERS

THOUGH often entranced by that brilliant group of cosmic problem-solvers—Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Chesterton, and others—I insist on my personal irresponsibility for the state of Mankind as a whole. These men are always nursing civilization. They regard it as a sort of potted plant which they fear to find frost-bitten of a morning. This is especially clear in the latest writings of Mr. H. G. Wells, who would tidy up the whole world at once. At one swoop he would remove the shirts from our clothes-lines and the errors from our minds. The world is too large for his feather duster; he had thought to find it a smaller planet that he might have kept at least half-way clean. Now see what he has on his hands—everything in a mess, Africa backward, China careless, the sex relation by no means straightened out, socialism, imperialism, industrialism, planless progressivism littering up things, and nobody caring a rap—at times it seems to the good housewifely soul almost too much for one person to manage. And then that infernal human diversity—slow minds, stupid minds, minds made up too soon, or not at all, closed minds, tough minds, tender minds—what’s to be done with them? He burns to do something. At least he says he does.

In one of his books he describes himself in fancy as going about the country and, with the keenest joy, spearing Anglican bishops. Though I am myself a stranger to the sport, I believe the pleasure of spearing bishops is exaggerated. For once begun it must lead logically to a daily drudgery of slaughter among the great crowds of folks who are not intellectually independent or morally daring—lead, in short, to the massacre of those who are not particularly exciting, a large task and tedious.

I wonder if we commonplace persons are not right after all in a certain instinct of distrust toward these gifted writers. We believe implicitly in their fancies and not at all in their facts. We believe in the world they have invented and not in the world they have observed; and we distrust them utterly as world-pushers. The signs are plain—terribly plain sometimes—that it is when they have the smallest notions that they say their largest things.

The Senior Wrangler.

[Pg 793]

LADY CLARA VERE DE VERE: NEW STYLE

(REFORMER, UPLIFTER, SOCIAL SERVICER AND BELIEVER IN BETTERMENT)

BY ANNE O’HAGAN

WITH A PICTURE BY E. L. BLUMENSCHEIN

LADY CLARA: NEW STYLE

[Pg 794]

Drawn by Reginald Birch

“THE PET HAS BECOME OF MATERIAL AID TO HIM IN HIS WALL STREET WORK”

THE NEWS IN WALL STREET

BY JAMES L. FORD

Author of “The Literary Shop”

WITH PICTURES BY REGINALD BIRCH AND MAY WILSON PRESTON

ALGY BOND is one of the brokers who is doing remarkably well in Wall Street now. He is widely known as a cotillion leader, as vice-president of the Westminster Kennel Club, and as a member of the MacDowell Musical Union. He has lately trained Grassmere Dolly—his intelligent French poodle—so that the pet has become of material aid to him in his Wall Street work.

MONEY has been easier in Wall Street since the sale of many gilt-edged mining and industrial securities brought a number of eager home-builders into the market. The new fashion of papering the walls of country homes with these beautiful and durable specimens of steel-engraving has created a lively demand for the stocks in question.

THE opening of the new station of the Herald Ice Fund at the corner of Wall and Broad streets created a profound sensation in the financial district. The Stock-Exchange closed during the distribution of the ice, and many pitiful scenes were enacted as the members of the great banking-houses crowded about the wagon and fought for the chilly cubes that were handed out to them. An office boy generously shared his piece with a bank president. The magnate burst into tears, and promised that he would make his benefactor rich by never giving him a tip on the stock-market.

YEGGMEN entered the office of Bilkheimer Brothers, Bankers and Brokers, last Saturday night, and blew open the safe with dynamite. When Mr. Abie Bilkheimer, the popular bond specialist, and the head of the firm, reached his office on Monday morning, he found a ten-dollar bill and a card on which were inscribed a few words of heartfelt sympathy from the yeggmen.

THAT a cat cannot live in a vacuum has been proved by a series of recent experiments carried on by the Wall Street Class for Scientific Study to which many of the younger brokers belong. It was found that the quickest method of killing a cat is to lock it in the vaults of that trust company which claims the largest capital and surplus.

[Pg 795]

MANY charitable persons have been in the habit of scattering pennies from the gallery of the Stock-Exchange, but this practice has been forbidden since Looey Pinchenstein (the organizer of the pool in Rio and Hernandez copper) fractured his nose in the scramble. Pennies will hereafter be left with the doorman to distribute at the close of the day.

“A POOR TICKER-TIED BROKER”

Drawn by May Wilson Preston

THE Tribune Fresh Air Fund has received a touching letter from little Willie Noodle, inclosing thirty-eight cents—which he had saved in a toy bank from his candy money—and expressing the hope that it would help to send a poor ticker-tied broker on an outing to the sea-shore.

THE other day a gentleman of provincial aspect was found wandering on Wall Street in a dazed and feeble condition. Upon being questioned as to the nature of his errand there, he announced his intention of opening an account with a Wall Street brokerage firm.... When the police finally rescued him from the surging mob of brokers, it was found that he had suffered severe contusions about the hips and breasts. He is at present confined in one of the private wards of the observation pavilion.

[Pg 796]

THE RYMBEL FAMILY. FROM A RECENT PORTRAIT BY OLIVER HERFORD

HOW THE RYMBELS BROKE INTO VERSE

THE above portrait is the first authentic likeness of the eccentric Rymbels. It portrays them rymbling, chez eux. It is, in particular, a speaking, not to say a shouting, likeness of Mr. Rymbel.

This interesting, demented, and extremely misunderstood verse family was first discovered and laid bare to the public by Mr. Herford in the August issue of THE CENTURY. As a result of his happy discovery, and because of his two remarkable rymbels in that issue, he has lately been appointed Rymbel Laureate of America. Since their successful début, public interest in the Rymbels has increased amazingly. In New York the fever is now at its height. Everybody’s rymbling it. Rude, ridiculous, and ribald rymbels are arriving by every post.

For those who are not already confirmed rymbelists it may be merciful to explain that, roughly speaking, a rymbel is any poem of two, four, or six stanzas, preferably of five lines each, in which the ultimate word in one verse must inevitably be a miscue for the subject-matter of the next. This miscue is due to three things: eccentricity, deafness, and dementia, all of them pronounced Rymbel family characteristics.

Whenever Mr. Rymbel embarks on the first verse, Mrs. Rymbel, because of her deafness and lightness of mind, seizes on the most unexpected meaning embodied in the last word of her husband’s verse, and proceeds properly to mangle it in the second, after which the children take up the tangled skein, and do a little mangling on their own.

In the masterly canvas at the head of this page, Mr. R. is seen inflated with an afflatus and embarking on his first verse. Mrs. R., with a tight hold on the baby, is feverishly awaiting her all important cue. Symbol, their beautiful daughter, is the seated lady shown at the right of Mr. R. The astute reader will already have guessed, because of the prevalence of flowering hay in her hair, that, mentally, Symbol is, to put it charitably, only sparking on one cylinder. Ramble, the eldest son, has, it will be seen, just rebuked Rondeau and Rhyme, the twins, who, after hearing parts of their father’s verse, have turned to their mother to mutter: “What’s the matter with his metre-motor, mater?”

Miss Carolyn Wells, who has for years been on the most intimate terms with the Rymbels, and who might almost be called a member of the family, has preserved, as souvenirs of a boy-and-girl affair with Master Ramble, two noteworthy examples of rymbelican verse. In the first of these the Rymbels have touchingly voiced their preferences for the nobler and loftier bards of our day. It is entitled:

A RYMBEL OF RHYMERS

MR. L. FRANK TOOKER of Callao, Peru, insists that the rymbel is didactic, and that its highest form is found in Spanish South America, where it is used to inculcate the prudence and self-restraint for which that region is preëminent. In illustration of this contention, he sends this from Callao:

THE PRUDENT LOVER

AGAIN the low rymbling sound of Miss Carolyn Wells!! This time ART is her impassioned theme. She writes from Hansontown, Herfordshire.

ON A PORTRAIT OF NANCY

Drawing by Birch

THE “ELITE” BATHING DRESS

Now so much in vogue at Newport

WE have been distressed to learn, from our great Metropolitan dailies, that the ladies of assured and ultramundane position at Newport have recently suffered severely from the unwarrantable intrusion on Bailey’s Beach of certain Sunday Supplement sketch artists, society editors, female policemen, independent kodakers, and foreign noblemen. As an indirect result of these intrusions the “Elite” bathing dress has been designed to assuage the sensibilities of the more modest and fastidious among the hostesses of Newport. Our illustration shows Mrs. Reginald Ochrepoint and Wu, her clever pet, ready for their morning dip.

[Pg 798]

Drawn by C. F. Peters

FROM GRAVE TO GAY

THE FRESHMAN: “Oh—er—might I be excused from my lectures for a few days? The truth is—er—I want very much to attend the funeral of an old and trusted friend.”

THE DEAN: “Well, really, Robinson,—I wonder if that is quite necessary?—Now, if it were your father or your mother, I should, of course, be only too delighted.”

THE CONSERVATIVE OWL

[Pg 800]

THE OMNIVOROUS BOOK-WORM

  THE DE VINNE PRESS, NEW YORK