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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Youth and the Bright Medusa, by Willa Cather
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Youth and the Bright Medusa
+
+Author: Willa Cather
+
+Release Date: September 30, 2004  [eBook #13555]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Project Gutenberg Beginners
+Projects, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA
+
+by
+
+WILLA CATHER
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"We must not look at Goblin men,
+We must not buy their fruits;
+Who knows upon what soil they fed
+Their hungry, thirsty roots?"
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+COMING, APHRODITE!
+
+THE DIAMOND MINE
+
+A GOLD SLIPPER
+
+SCANDAL
+
+PAUL'S CASE
+
+A WAGNER MATINÉE
+
+THE SCULPTOR'S FUNERAL
+
+"A DEATH IN THE DESERT"
+
+
+
+
+The author wishes to thank _McClure's Magazine_, _The Century
+Magazine_ and _Harper's Magazine_ for their courtesy in permitting
+the re-publication of three stories in this collection.
+
+The last four stories in the volume, _Paul's Case_, _A Wagner Matinée_,
+_The Sculptor's Funeral_, "_A Death in the Desert_," are re-printed from
+the author's first book of stories, entitled "The Troll Garden,"
+published in 1905.
+
+
+
+
+
+Coming, Aphrodite!
+
+
+I
+
+Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on
+the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him.
+He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north,
+where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court
+and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very
+cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners
+were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built
+against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day
+and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window,
+was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked
+his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog's bed, and often
+a bone or two for his comfort.
+
+The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surly
+disposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it told
+on his nerves. His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at very
+exclusive dog shows. When he and his master went out to prowl about
+University Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III was
+invariably fresh and shining. His pink skin showed through his mottled
+coat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, and
+he wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler's. Hedger,
+as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with a
+shapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes that
+had become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put on
+gloves unless the day was biting cold.
+
+Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the
+rear apartment--two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west.
+His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors,
+which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy
+of the occupant. The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, by
+a trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture. She went
+to auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored it
+away here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing.
+Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to young
+people who came to New York to "write" or to "paint"--who proposed to
+live by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desired
+artistic surroundings.
+
+When Hedger first moved in, these rooms were occupied by a young man who
+tried to write plays,--and who kept on trying until a week ago, when the
+nurse had put him out for unpaid rent.
+
+A few days after the playwright left, Hedger heard an ominous murmur of
+voices through the bolted double doors: the lady-like intonation of the
+nurse--doubtless exhibiting her treasures--and another voice, also a
+woman's, but very different; young, fresh, unguarded, confident. All the
+same, it would be very annoying to have a woman in there. The only
+bath-room on the floor was at the top of the stairs in the front hall,
+and he would always be running into her as he came or went from his bath.
+He would have to be more careful to see that Caesar didn't leave bones
+about the hall, too; and she might object when he cooked steak and onions
+on his gas burner.
+
+As soon as the talking ceased and the women left, he forgot them. He was
+absorbed in a study of paradise fish at the Aquarium, staring out at
+people through the glass and green water of their tank. It was a highly
+gratifying idea; the incommunicability of one stratum of animal life with
+another,--though Hedger pretended it was only an experiment in unusual
+lighting. When he heard trunks knocking against the sides of the narrow
+hall, then he realized that she was moving in at once. Toward noon,
+groans and deep gasps and the creaking of ropes, made him aware that a
+piano was arriving. After the tramp of the movers died away down the
+stairs, somebody touched off a few scales and chords on the instrument,
+and then there was peace. Presently he heard her lock her door and go
+down the hall humming something; going out to lunch, probably. He stuck
+his brushes in a can of turpentine and put on his hat, not stopping to
+wash his hands. Caesar was smelling along the crack under the bolted
+doors; his bony tail stuck out hard as a hickory withe, and the hair was
+standing up about his elegant collar.
+
+Hedger encouraged him. "Come along, Caesar. You'll soon get used to a new
+smell."
+
+In the hall stood an enormous trunk, behind the ladder that led to the
+roof, just opposite Hedger's door. The dog flew at it with a growl of
+hurt amazement. They went down three flights of stairs and out into the
+brilliant May afternoon.
+
+Behind the Square, Hedger and his dog descended into a basement oyster
+house where there were no tablecloths on the tables and no handles on the
+coffee cups, and the floor was covered with sawdust, and Caesar was
+always welcome,--not that he needed any such precautionary flooring. All
+the carpets of Persia would have been safe for him. Hedger ordered steak
+and onions absentmindedly, not realizing why he had an apprehension that
+this dish might be less readily at hand hereafter. While he ate, Caesar
+sat beside his chair, gravely disturbing the sawdust with his tail.
+
+After lunch Hedger strolled about the Square for the dog's health and
+watched the stages pull out;--that was almost the very last summer of the
+old horse stages on Fifth Avenue. The fountain had but lately begun
+operations for the season and was throwing up a mist of rainbow water
+which now and then blew south and sprayed a bunch of Italian babies that
+were being supported on the outer rim by older, very little older,
+brothers and sisters. Plump robins were hopping about on the soil; the
+grass was newly cut and blindingly green. Looking up the Avenue through
+the Arch, one could see the young poplars with their bright, sticky
+leaves, and the Brevoort glistening in its spring coat of paint, and
+shining horses and carriages,--occasionally an automobile, misshapen and
+sullen, like an ugly threat in a stream of things that were bright and
+beautiful and alive.
+
+While Caesar and his master were standing by the fountain, a girl
+approached them, crossing the Square. Hedger noticed her because she wore
+a lavender cloth suit and carried in her arms a big bunch of fresh
+lilacs. He saw that she was young and handsome,--beautiful, in fact, with
+a splendid figure and good action. She, too, paused by the fountain and
+looked back through the Arch up the Avenue. She smiled rather
+patronizingly as she looked, and at the same time seemed delighted. Her
+slowly curving upper lip and half-closed eyes seemed to say: "You're gay,
+you're exciting, you are quite the right sort of thing; but you're none
+too fine for me!"
+
+In the moment she tarried, Caesar stealthily approached her and sniffed
+at the hem of her lavender skirt, then, when she went south like an
+arrow, he ran back to his master and lifted a face full of emotion and
+alarm, his lower lip twitching under his sharp white teeth and his hazel
+eyes pointed with a very definite discovery. He stood thus, motionless,
+while Hedger watched the lavender girl go up the steps and through the
+door of the house in which he lived.
+
+"You're right, my boy, it's she! She might be worse looking, you know."
+
+When they mounted to the studio, the new lodger's door, at the back of
+the hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs
+just brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the old
+hall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door and
+complained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particular
+flavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never spoken to her since.) He
+was used to the old smell, and he preferred it to that of the lilacs, and
+so did his companion, whose nose was so much more discriminating. Hedger
+shut his door vehemently, and fell to work.
+
+Most young men who dwell in obscure studios in New York have had a
+beginning, come out of something, have somewhere a home town, a family, a
+paternal roof. But Don Hedger had no such background. He was a foundling,
+and had grown up in a school for homeless boys, where book-learning was a
+negligible part of the curriculum. When he was sixteen, a Catholic priest
+took him to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to keep house for him. The priest
+did something to fill in the large gaps in the boy's education,--taught
+him to like "Don Quixote" and "The Golden Legend," and encouraged him to
+mess with paints and crayons in his room up under the slope of the
+mansard. When Don wanted to go to New York to study at the Art League,
+the priest got him a night job as packer in one of the big department
+stores. Since then, Hedger had taken care of himself; that was his only
+responsibility. He was singularly unencumbered; had no family duties, no
+social ties, no obligations toward any one but his landlord. Since he
+travelled light, he had travelled rather far. He had got over a good deal
+of the earth's surface, in spite of the fact that he never in his life
+had more than three hundred dollars ahead at any one time, and he had
+already outlived a succession of convictions and revelations about his
+art.
+
+Though he was now but twenty-six years old, he had twice been on the
+verge of becoming a marketable product; once through some studies of New
+York streets he did for a magazine, and once through a collection of
+pastels he brought home from New Mexico, which Remington, then at the
+height of his popularity, happened to see, and generously tried to push.
+But on both occasions Hedger decided that this was something he didn't
+wish to carry further,--simply the old thing over again and got
+nowhere,--so he took enquiring dealers experiments in a "later manner,"
+that made them put him out of the shop. When he ran short of money, he
+could always get any amount of commercial work; he was an expert
+draughtsman and worked with lightning speed. The rest of his time he
+spent in groping his way from one kind of painting into another, or
+travelling about without luggage, like a tramp, and he was chiefly
+occupied with getting rid of ideas he had once thought very fine.
+
+Hedger's circumstances, since he had moved to Washington Square, were
+affluent compared to anything he had ever known before. He was now able
+to pay advance rent and turn the key on his studio when he went away for
+four months at a stretch. It didn't occur to him to wish to be richer
+than this. To be sure, he did without a great many things other people
+think necessary, but he didn't miss them, because he had never had them.
+He belonged to no clubs, visited no houses, had no studio friends, and he
+ate his dinner alone in some decent little restaurant, even on Christmas
+and New Year's. For days together he talked to nobody but his dog and the
+janitress and the lame oysterman.
+
+After he shut the door and settled down to his paradise fish on that
+first Tuesday in May, Hedger forgot all about his new neighbour. When the
+light failed, he took Caesar out for a walk. On the way home he did his
+marketing on West Houston Street, with a one-eyed Italian woman who
+always cheated him. After he had cooked his beans and scallopini, and
+drunk half a bottle of Chianti, he put his dishes in the sink and went up
+on the roof to smoke. He was the only person in the house who ever went
+to the roof, and he had a secret understanding with the janitress about
+it. He was to have "the privilege of the roof," as she said, if he opened
+the heavy trapdoor on sunny days to air out the upper hall, and was
+watchful to close it when rain threatened. Mrs. Foley was fat and dirty
+and hated to climb stairs,--besides, the roof was reached by a
+perpendicular iron ladder, definitely inaccessible to a woman of her
+bulk, and the iron door at the top of it was too heavy for any but
+Hedger's strong arm to lift. Hedger was not above medium height, but he
+practised with weights and dumb-bells, and in the shoulders he was as
+strong as a gorilla.
+
+So Hedger had the roof to himself. He and Caesar often slept up there on
+hot nights, rolled in blankets he had brought home from Arizona. He
+mounted with Caesar under his left arm. The dog had never learned to
+climb a perpendicular ladder, and never did he feel so much his master's
+greatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his arm
+for this perilous ascent. Up there was even gravel to scratch in, and a
+dog could do whatever he liked, so long as he did not bark. It was a kind
+of Heaven, which no one was strong enough to reach but his great,
+paint-smelling master.
+
+On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon in
+the west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then one
+of them darted away from the group and shot off into the gauzy blue with
+a soft little trail of light, like laughter. Hedger and his dog were
+delighted when a star did this. They were quite lost in watching the
+glittering game, when they were suddenly diverted by a sound,--not
+from the stars, though it was music. It was not the Prologue to
+Pagliacci, which rose ever and anon on hot evenings from an Italian
+tenement on Thompson Street, with the gasps of the corpulent baritone who
+got behind it; nor was it the hurdy-gurdy man, who often played at the
+corner in the balmy twilight. No, this was a woman's voice, singing the
+tempestuous, over-lapping phrases of Signor Puccini, then comparatively
+new in the world, but already so popular that even Hedger recognized his
+unmistakable gusts of breath. He looked about over the roofs; all was
+blue and still, with the well-built chimneys that were never used now
+standing up dark and mournful. He moved softly toward the yellow
+quadrangle where the gas from the hall shone up through the half-lifted
+trapdoor. Oh yes! It came up through the hole like a strong draught, a
+big, beautiful voice, and it sounded rather like a professional's. A
+piano had arrived in the morning, Hedger remembered. This might be a very
+great nuisance. It would be pleasant enough to listen to, if you could
+turn it on and off as you wished; but you couldn't. Caesar, with the gas
+light shining on his collar and his ugly but sensitive face, panted and
+looked up for information. Hedger put down a reassuring hand.
+
+"I don't know. We can't tell yet. It may not be so bad."
+
+He stayed on the roof until all was still below, and finally descended,
+with quite a new feeling about his neighbour. Her voice, like her figure,
+inspired respect,--if one did not choose to call it admiration. Her door
+was shut, the transom was dark; nothing remained of her but the obtrusive
+trunk, unrightfully taking up room in the narrow hall.
+
+
+II
+
+For two days Hedger didn't see her. He was painting eight hours a day
+just then, and only went out to hunt for food. He noticed that she
+practised scales and exercises for about an hour in the morning; then she
+locked her door, went humming down the hall, and left him in peace. He
+heard her getting her coffee ready at about the same time he got his.
+Earlier still, she passed his room on her way to her bath. In the evening
+she sometimes sang, but on the whole she didn't bother him. When he was
+working well he did not notice anything much. The morning paper lay
+before his door until he reached out for his milk bottle, then he kicked
+the sheet inside and it lay on the floor until evening. Sometimes
+he read it and sometimes he did not. He forgot there was anything of
+importance going on in the world outside of his third floor studio.
+Nobody had ever taught him that he ought to be interested in other
+people; in the Pittsburgh steel strike, in the Fresh Air Fund, in the
+scandal about the Babies' Hospital. A grey wolf, living in a Wyoming
+canyon, would hardly have been less concerned about these things than was
+Don Hedger.
+
+One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of the
+hall, having just given Caesar his bath and rubbed him into a glow with a
+heavy towel. Before the door, lying in wait for him, as it were, stood a
+tall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown that fell away from her
+marble arms. In her hands she carried various accessories of the bath.
+
+"I wish," she said distinctly, standing in his way, "I wish you wouldn't
+wash your dog in the tub. I never heard of such a thing! I've found his
+hair in the tub, and I've smelled a doggy smell, and now I've caught you
+at it. It's an outrage!"
+
+Hedger was badly frightened. She was so tall and positive, and was fairly
+blazing with beauty and anger. He stood blinking, holding on to his
+sponge and dog-soap, feeling that he ought to bow very low to her. But
+what he actually said was:
+
+"Nobody has ever objected before. I always wash the tub,--and, anyhow,
+he's cleaner than most people."
+
+"Cleaner than me?" her eyebrows went up, her white arms and neck and her
+fragrant person seemed to scream at him like a band of outraged nymphs.
+Something flashed through his mind about a man who was turned into a dog,
+or was pursued by dogs, because he unwittingly intruded upon the bath of
+beauty.
+
+"No, I didn't mean that," he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluish
+stubble of his muscular jaws. "But I know he's cleaner than I am."
+
+"That I don't doubt!" Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal,
+and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robe
+close about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar was
+frightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door and
+to his own bed in the corner among the bones.
+
+Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs and
+coughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He had
+washed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar's sponge, it was quite
+possible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. The
+playwright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator who
+occupied the front apartment,--but he, as he admitted, "was usually
+pye-eyed, when he wasn't in Buffalo." He went home to Buffalo sometimes
+to rest his nerves.
+
+It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tub
+after Caesar;--but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisoned
+for the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realized
+the unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tub
+that any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and left
+cigarette ends on the moulding.
+
+All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get back
+at her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain. When he
+heard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped quickly into
+the hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her.
+
+"I don't wish to be exigent, Miss,"--he had certain grand words that he
+used upon occasion--"but if this is your trunk, it's rather in the way
+here."
+
+"Oh, very well!" she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into her
+handbag. "I'll have it moved when I can get a man to do it," and she went
+down the hall with her free, roving stride.
+
+Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left on
+the table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower.
+
+
+III
+
+In the closet that was built against the partition separating his room
+from Miss Bower's, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it on
+hooks and hangers, some of it on the floor. When he opened his closet
+door now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing, and
+he suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter overcoat.
+Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy clothes
+and she would give them a beating and hang them in the court. The closet
+was in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one hot afternoon
+he set himself to the task. First he threw out a pile of forgotten
+laundry and tied it up in a sheet. The bundle stood as high as his middle
+when he had knotted the corners. Then he got his shoes and overshoes
+together. When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition,
+a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure,--a knot hole,
+evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west room. He had never
+noticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stooped
+and squinted through it.
+
+Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad,
+doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did not
+happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity was
+not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he
+continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman's body so
+beautiful as this one,--positively glorious in action. As she swung her
+arms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular energy
+seemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips. The soft
+flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her flesh
+together, enveloped her in a luminous mist which, as she turned and
+twisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh, dissolve in pure
+light and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture. Hedger's
+fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing the
+whole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal seemed to explode
+in his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was discharged
+into the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from the
+up-thrust chin or the lifted breasts.
+
+He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen.
+When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair that
+had come down, and examined with solicitude a little reddish mole that
+grew under her left arm-pit. Then, with her hand on her hip, she walked
+unconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into her
+bedchamber.
+
+Disappeared--Don Hedger was crouching on his knees, staring at the golden
+shower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of gold
+sleeping on the faded Turkish carpet. The spot was enchanted; a vision
+out of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself there
+in Helianthine fire.
+
+When he crawled out of his closet, he stood blinking at the grey sheet
+stuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt a
+little sick as he contemplated the bundle. Everything here was different;
+he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoes
+and himself and all his slovenly habits. The black calico curtains that
+ran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were three
+greasy frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself--He felt desperate.
+He couldn't stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winter
+clothes and ran down four flights into the basement.
+
+"Mrs. Foley," he began, "I want my room cleaned this afternoon,
+thoroughly cleaned. Can you get a woman for me right away?"
+
+"Is it company you're having?" the fat, dirty janitress enquired. Mrs.
+Foley was the widow of a useful Tammany man, and she owned real estate in
+Flatbush. She was huge and soft as a feather bed. Her face and arms were
+permanently coated with dust, grained like wood where the sweat had
+trickled.
+
+"Yes, company. That's it."
+
+"Well, this is a queer time of the day to be asking for a cleaning woman.
+It's likely I can get you old Lizzie, if she's not drunk. I'll send Willy
+round to see."
+
+Willy, the son of fourteen, roused from the stupor and stain of his fifth
+box of cigarettes by the gleam of a quarter, went out. In five minutes he
+returned with old Lizzie,--she smelling strong of spirits and wearing
+several jackets which she had put on one over the other, and a number of
+skirts, long and short, which made her resemble an animated dish-clout.
+She had, of course, to borrow her equipment from Mrs. Foley, and toiled
+up the long flights, dragging mop and pail and broom. She told Hedger to
+be of good cheer, for he had got the right woman for the job, and showed
+him a great leather strap she wore about her wrist to prevent dislocation
+of tendons. She swished about the place, scattering dust and splashing
+soapsuds, while he watched her in nervous despair. He stood over Lizzie
+and made her scour the sink, directing her roughly, then paid her and got
+rid of her. Shutting the door on his failure, he hurried off with his dog
+to lose himself among the stevedores and dock labourers on West Street.
+
+A strange chapter began for Don Hedger. Day after day, at that hour in
+the afternoon, the hour before his neighbour dressed for dinner, he
+crouched down in his closet to watch her go through her mysterious
+exercises. It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable; there
+was nothing shy or retreating about this unclad girl,--a bold body,
+studying itself quite coolly and evidently well pleased with itself,
+doing all this for a purpose. Hedger scarcely regarded his action as
+conduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. More than once
+he went out and tried to stay away for the whole afternoon, but at about
+five o'clock he was sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark.
+The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will,--and he had always
+considered his will the strongest thing about him. When she threw herself
+upon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath. His
+nerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and brought out
+the sweat on his forehead. The dog would come and tug at his sleeve,
+knowing that something was wrong with his master. If he attempted a
+mournful whine, those strong hands closed about his throat.
+
+When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge of
+the couch, sat for hours without moving. He was not painting at all now.
+This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes done,
+and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the stupor of
+work. He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had worked from
+models for years, and a woman's body was no mystery to him. Yet now he
+did nothing but sit and think about one. He slept very little, and with
+the first light of morning he awoke as completely possessed by this woman
+as if he had been with her all the night before. The unconscious
+operations of life went on in him only to perpetuate this excitement. His
+brain held but one image now--vibrated, burned with it. It was a
+heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness.
+
+Women had come and gone in Hedger's life. Not having had a mother to
+begin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, had
+been casual. He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with Indians
+and with the peasant women of foreign countries. He had friends among the
+silk-skirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in Washington
+Square, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the country. He felt
+an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out
+of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum,
+he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on
+upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders
+hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard
+them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he
+believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted.
+He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles,
+effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in
+embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough,
+he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, in
+thought, and in the universe.
+
+He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so
+broken up his life,--no curiosity about her every-day personality. He
+shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower's coming and
+going, not to encounter, but to avoid her. He wished that the girl who
+wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of his way,
+that she did not exist. With her he had naught to make. But in a room
+full of sun, before an old mirror, on a little enchanted rug of sleeping
+colours, he had seen a woman who emerged naked through a door, and
+disappeared naked. He thought of that body as never having been clad, or
+as having worn the stuffs and dyes of all the centuries but his own. And
+for him she had no geographical associations; unless with Crete, or
+Alexandria, or Veronese's Venice. She was the immortal conception, the
+perennial theme.
+
+The first break in Hedger's lethargy occurred one afternoon when two
+young men came to take Eden Bower out to dine. They went into her music
+room, laughed and talked for a few minutes, and then took her away with
+them. They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for food
+himself; he waited for them to come back. At last he heard them coming
+down the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left. One of them
+sat down at the piano, and they all began to sing. This Hedger found
+absolutely unendurable. He snatched up his hat and went running down the
+stairs. Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old times were coming back.
+They had supper in the oysterman's basement and then sat down in front of
+their own doorway. The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regal
+glory; but Hedger did not see the moon; he was looking, murderously, for
+men. Presently two, wearing straw hats and white trousers and carrying
+canes, came down the steps from his house. He rose and dogged them across
+the Square. They were laughing and seemed very much elated about
+something. As one stopped to light a cigarette, Hedger caught from the
+other:
+
+"Don't you think she has a beautiful talent?"
+
+His companion threw away his match. "She has a beautiful figure." They
+both ran to catch the stage.
+
+Hedger went back to his studio. The light was shining from her transom.
+For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered through
+that fatal aperture. She was sitting, fully dressed, in the window,
+smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops. He watched her
+until she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty smile, and
+turned out the light.
+
+The next morning, when Miss Bower went out, Hedger followed her. Her
+white skirt gleamed ahead of him as she sauntered about the Square. She
+sat down behind the Garibaldi statue and opened a music book she carried.
+She turned the leaves carelessly, and several times glanced in his
+direction. He was on the point of going over to her, when she rose
+quickly and looked up at the sky. A flock of pigeons had risen from
+somewhere in the crowded Italian quarter to the south, and were wheeling
+rapidly up through the morning air, soaring and dropping, scattering and
+coming together, now grey, now white as silver, as they caught or
+intercepted the sunlight. She put up her hand to shade her eyes and
+followed them with a kind of defiant delight in her face.
+
+Hedger came and stood beside her. "You've surely seen them before?"
+
+"Oh, yes," she replied, still looking up. "I see them every day from my
+windows. They always come home about five o'clock. Where do they live?"
+
+"I don't know. Probably some Italian raises them for the market. They
+were here long before I came, and I've been here four years."
+
+"In that same gloomy room? Why didn't you take mine when it was vacant?"
+
+"It isn't gloomy. That's the best light for painting."
+
+"Oh, is it? I don't know anything about painting. I'd like to see your
+pictures sometime. You have such a lot in there. Don't they get dusty,
+piled up against the wall like that?"
+
+"Not very. I'd be glad to show them to you. Is your name really Eden
+Bower? I've seen your letters on the table."
+
+"Well, it's the name I'm going to sing under. My father's name is Bowers,
+but my friend Mr. Jones, a Chicago newspaper man who writes about music,
+told me to drop the 's.' He's crazy about my voice."
+
+Miss Bower didn't usually tell the whole story,--about anything. Her
+first name, when she lived in Huntington, Illinois, was Edna, but Mr.
+Jones had persuaded her to change it to one which he felt would be worthy
+of her future. She was quick to take suggestions, though she told him she
+"didn't see what was the matter with 'Edna.'"
+
+She explained to Hedger that she was going to Paris to study. She was
+waiting in New York for Chicago friends who were to take her over, but
+who had been detained. "Did you study in Paris?" she asked.
+
+"No, I've never been in Paris. But I was in the south of France all last
+summer, studying with C----. He's the biggest man among the moderns,--at
+least I think so."
+
+Miss Bower sat down and made room for him on the bench. "Do tell me about
+it. I expected to be there by this time, and I can't wait to find out
+what it's like."
+
+Hedger began to relate how he had seen some of this Frenchman's work in
+an exhibition, and deciding at once that this was the man for him, he had
+taken a boat for Marseilles the next week, going over steerage. He
+proceeded at once to the little town on the coast where his painter
+lived, and presented himself. The man never took pupils, but because
+Hedger had come so far, he let him stay. Hedger lived at the master's
+house and every day they went out together to paint, sometimes on the
+blazing rocks down by the sea. They wrapped themselves in light woollen
+blankets and didn't feel the heat. Being there and working with C---- was
+being in Paradise, Hedger concluded; he learned more in three months than
+in all his life before.
+
+Eden Bower laughed. "You're a funny fellow. Didn't you do anything but
+work? Are the women very beautiful? Did you have awfully good things to
+eat and drink?"
+
+Hedger said some of the women were fine looking, especially one girl who
+went about selling fish and lobsters. About the food there was nothing
+remarkable,--except the ripe figs, he liked those. They drank sour wine,
+and used goat-butter, which was strong and full of hair, as it was
+churned in a goat skin.
+
+"But don't they have parties or banquets? Aren't there any fine hotels
+down there?"
+
+"Yes, but they are all closed in summer, and the country people are poor.
+It's a beautiful country, though."
+
+"How, beautiful?" she persisted.
+
+"If you want to go in, I'll show you some sketches, and you'll see."
+
+Miss Bower rose. "All right. I won't go to my fencing lesson this
+morning. Do you fence? Here comes your dog. You can't move but he's after
+you. He always makes a face at me when I meet him in the hall, and shows
+his nasty little teeth as if he wanted to bite me."
+
+In the studio Hedger got out his sketches, but to Miss Bower, whose
+favourite pictures were Christ Before Pilate and a redhaired Magdalen of
+Henner, these landscapes were not at all beautiful, and they gave her no
+idea of any country whatsoever. She was careful not to commit herself,
+however. Her vocal teacher had already convinced her that she had a great
+deal to learn about many things.
+
+"Why don't we go out to lunch somewhere?" Hedger asked, and began to dust
+his fingers with a handkerchief--which he got out of sight as swiftly as
+possible.
+
+"All right, the Brevoort," she said carelessly. "I think that's a good
+place, and they have good wine. I don't care for cocktails."
+
+Hedger felt his chin uneasily. "I'm afraid I haven't shaved this morning.
+If you could wait for me in the Square? It won't take me ten minutes."
+
+Left alone, he found a clean collar and handkerchief, brushed his coat
+and blacked his shoes, and last of all dug up ten dollars from the bottom
+of an old copper kettle he had brought from Spain. His winter hat was of
+such a complexion that the Brevoort hall boy winked at the porter as he
+took it and placed it on the rack in a row of fresh straw ones.
+
+
+IV
+
+That afternoon Eden Bower was lying on the couch in her music room, her
+face turned to the window, watching the pigeons. Reclining thus she could
+see none of the neighbouring roofs, only the sky itself and the birds
+that crossed and recrossed her field of vision, white as scraps of paper
+blowing in the wind. She was thinking that she was young and handsome and
+had had a good lunch, that a very easy-going, light-hearted city lay in
+the streets below her; and she was wondering why she found this queer
+painter chap, with his lean, bluish cheeks and heavy black eyebrows, more
+interesting than the smart young men she met at her teacher's studio.
+
+Eden Bower was, at twenty, very much the same person that we all know her
+to be at forty, except that she knew a great deal less. But one thing she
+knew: that she was to be Eden Bower. She was like some one standing
+before a great show window full of beautiful and costly things, deciding
+which she will order. She understands that they will not all be delivered
+immediately, but one by one they will arrive at her door. She already
+knew some of the many things that were to happen to her; for instance,
+that the Chicago millionaire who was going to take her abroad with his
+sister as chaperone, would eventually press his claim in quite another
+manner. He was the most circumspect of bachelors, afraid of everything
+obvious, even of women who were too flagrantly handsome. He was a nervous
+collector of pictures and furniture, a nervous patron of music, and a
+nervous host; very cautious about his health, and about any course of
+conduct that might make him ridiculous. But she knew that he would at
+last throw all his precautions to the winds.
+
+People like Eden Bower are inexplicable. Her father sold farming
+machinery in Huntington, Illinois, and she had grown up with no
+acquaintances or experiences outside of that prairie town. Yet from her
+earliest childhood she had not one conviction or opinion in common with
+the people about her,--the only people she knew. Before she was out of
+short dresses she had made up her mind that she was going to be an
+actress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would be
+much admired by men and would have everything she wanted. When she was
+thirteen, and was already singing and reciting for church entertainments,
+she read in some illustrated magazine a long article about the late Czar
+of Russia, then just come to the throne or about to come to it. After
+that, lying in the hammock on the front porch on summer evenings, or
+sitting through a long sermon in the family pew, she amused herself by
+trying to make up her mind whether she would or would not be the Czar's
+mistress when she played in his Capital. Now Edna had met this
+fascinating word only in the novels of Ouida,--her hard-worked little
+mother kept a long row of them in the upstairs storeroom, behind the
+linen chest. In Huntington, women who bore that relation to men were
+called by a very different name, and their lot was not an enviable one;
+of all the shabby and poor, they were the shabbiest. But then, Edna had
+never lived in Huntington, not even before she began to find books like
+"Sapho" and "Mademoiselle de Maupin," secretly sold in paper covers
+throughout Illinois. It was as if she had come into Huntington, into the
+Bowers family, on one of the trains that puffed over the marshes behind
+their back fence all day long, and was waiting for another train to take
+her out.
+
+As she grew older and handsomer, she had many beaux, but these small-town
+boys didn't interest her. If a lad kissed her when he brought her home
+from a dance, she was indulgent and she rather liked it. But if he
+pressed her further, she slipped away from him, laughing. After she began
+to sing in Chicago, she was consistently discreet. She stayed as a guest
+in rich people's houses, and she knew that she was being watched like a
+rabbit in a laboratory. Covered up in bed, with the lights out, she
+thought her own thoughts, and laughed.
+
+This summer in New York was her first taste of freedom. The Chicago
+capitalist, after all his arrangements were made for sailing, had been
+compelled to go to Mexico to look after oil interests. His sister knew
+an excellent singing master in New York. Why should not a discreet,
+well-balanced girl like Miss Bower spend the summer there, studying
+quietly? The capitalist suggested that his sister might enjoy a summer on
+Long Island; he would rent the Griffith's place for her, with all the
+servants, and Eden could stay there. But his sister met this proposal
+with a cold stare. So it fell out, that between selfishness and greed,
+Eden got a summer all her own,--which really did a great deal toward
+making her an artist and whatever else she was afterward to become. She
+had time to look about, to watch without being watched; to select
+diamonds in one window and furs in another, to select shoulders and
+moustaches in the big hotels where she went to lunch. She had the easy
+freedom of obscurity and the consciousness of power. She enjoyed both.
+She was in no hurry.
+
+While Eden Bower watched the pigeons, Don Hedger sat on the other side of
+the bolted doors, looking into a pool of dark turpentine, at his idle
+brushes, wondering why a woman could do this to him. He, too, was sure of
+his future and knew that he was a chosen man. He could not know, of
+course, that he was merely the first to fall under a fascination which
+was to be disastrous to a few men and pleasantly stimulating to many
+thousands. Each of these two young people sensed the future, but not
+completely. Don Hedger knew that nothing much would ever happen to him.
+Eden Bower understood that to her a great deal would happen. But she did
+not guess that her neighbour would have more tempestuous adventures
+sitting in his dark studio than she would find in all the capitals of
+Europe, or in all the latitude of conduct she was prepared to permit
+herself.
+
+
+V
+
+One Sunday morning Eden was crossing the Square with a spruce young man
+in a white flannel suit and a panama hat. They had been breakfasting at
+the Brevoort and he was coaxing her to let him come up to her rooms and
+sing for an hour.
+
+"No, I've got to write letters. You must run along now. I see a friend of
+mine over there, and I want to ask him about something before I go up."
+
+"That fellow with the dog? Where did you pick him up?" the young man
+glanced toward the seat under a sycamore where Hedger was reading the
+morning paper.
+
+"Oh, he's an old friend from the West," said Eden easily. "I won't
+introduce you, because he doesn't like people. He's a recluse. Good-bye.
+I can't be sure about Tuesday. I'll go with you if I have time after my
+lesson." She nodded, left him, and went over to the seat littered with
+newspapers. The young man went up the Avenue without looking back.
+
+"Well, what are you going to do today? Shampoo this animal all morning?"
+Eden enquired teasingly.
+
+Hedger made room for her on the seat. "No, at twelve o'clock I'm going
+out to Coney Island. One of my models is going up in a balloon this
+afternoon. I've often promised to go and see her, and now I'm going."
+
+Eden asked if models usually did such stunts. No, Hedger told her, but
+Molly Welch added to her earnings in that way. "I believe," he added,
+"she likes the excitement of it. She's got a good deal of spirit. That's
+why I like to paint her. So many models have flaccid bodies."
+
+"And she hasn't, eh? Is she the one who comes to see you? I can't help
+hearing her, she talks so loud."
+
+"Yes, she has a rough voice, but she's a fine girl. I don't suppose you'd
+be interested in going?"
+
+"I don't know," Eden sat tracing patterns on the asphalt with the end of
+her parasol. "Is it any fun? I got up feeling I'd like to do something
+different today. It's the first Sunday I've not had to sing in church. I
+had that engagement for breakfast at the Brevoort, but it wasn't very
+exciting. That chap can't talk about anything but himself."
+
+Hedger warmed a little. "If you've never been to Coney Island, you ought
+to go. It's nice to see all the people; tailors and bar-tenders and
+prize-fighters with their best girls, and all sorts of folks taking a
+holiday."
+
+Eden looked sidewise at him. So one ought to be interested in people of
+that kind, ought one? He was certainly a funny fellow. Yet he was never,
+somehow, tiresome. She had seen a good deal of him lately, but she kept
+wanting to know him better, to find out what made him different from men
+like the one she had just left--whether he really was as different as he
+seemed. "I'll go with you," she said at last, "if you'll leave that at
+home." She pointed to Caesar's flickering ears with her sunshade.
+
+"But he's half the fun. You'd like to hear him bark at the waves when
+they come in."
+
+"No, I wouldn't. He's jealous and disagreeable if he sees you talking to
+any one else. Look at him now."
+
+"Of course, if you make a face at him. He knows what that means, and he
+makes a worse face. He likes Molly Welch, and she'll be disappointed if I
+don't bring him."
+
+Eden said decidedly that he couldn't take both of them. So at twelve
+o'clock when she and Hedger got on the boat at Desbrosses street, Caesar
+was lying on his pallet, with a bone.
+
+Eden enjoyed the boat-ride. It was the first time she had been on the
+water, and she felt as if she were embarking for France. The light warm
+breeze and the plunge of the waves made her very wide awake, and she
+liked crowds of any kind. They went to the balcony of a big, noisy
+restaurant and had a shore dinner, with tall steins of beer. Hedger had
+got a big advance from his advertising firm since he first lunched with
+Miss Bower ten days ago, and he was ready for anything.
+
+After dinner they went to the tent behind the bathing beach, where the
+tops of two balloons bulged out over the canvas. A red-faced man in a
+linen suit stood in front of the tent, shouting in a hoarse voice and
+telling the people that if the crowd was good for five dollars more, a
+beautiful young woman would risk her life for their entertainment. Four
+little boys in dirty red uniforms ran about taking contributions in their
+pillbox hats. One of the balloons was bobbing up and down in its tether
+and people were shoving forward to get nearer the tent.
+
+"Is it dangerous, as he pretends?" Eden asked.
+
+"Molly says it's simple enough if nothing goes wrong with the balloon.
+Then it would be all over, I suppose."
+
+"Wouldn't you like to go up with her?"
+
+"I? Of course not. I'm not fond of taking foolish risks."
+
+Eden sniffed. "I shouldn't think sensible risks would be very much fun."
+
+Hedger did not answer, for just then every one began to shove the other
+way and shout, "Look out. There she goes!" and a band of six pieces
+commenced playing furiously.
+
+As the balloon rose from its tent enclosure, they saw a girl in green
+tights standing in the basket, holding carelessly to one of the ropes
+with one hand and with the other waving to the spectators. A long rope
+trailed behind to keep the balloon from blowing out to sea.
+
+As it soared, the figure in green tights in the basket diminished to a
+mere spot, and the balloon itself, in the brilliant light, looked like a
+big silver-grey bat, with its wings folded. When it began to sink, the
+girl stepped through the hole in the basket to a trapeze that hung below,
+and gracefully descended through the air, holding to the rod with both
+hands, keeping her body taut and her feet close together. The crowd,
+which had grown very large by this time, cheered vociferously. The men
+took off their hats and waved, little boys shouted, and fat old women,
+shining with the heat and a beer lunch, murmured admiring comments upon
+the balloonist's figure. "Beautiful legs, she has!"
+
+"That's so," Hedger whispered. "Not many girls would look well in that
+position." Then, for some reason, he blushed a slow, dark, painful
+crimson.
+
+The balloon descended slowly, a little way from the tent, and the
+red-faced man in the linen suit caught Molly Welch before her feet
+touched the ground, and pulled her to one side. The band struck up "Blue
+Bell" by way of welcome, and one of the sweaty pages ran forward and
+presented the balloonist with a large bouquet of artificial flowers. She
+smiled and thanked him, and ran back across the sand to the tent.
+
+"Can't we go inside and see her?" Eden asked. "You can explain to the
+door man. I want to meet her." Edging forward, she herself addressed the
+man in the linen suit and slipped something from her purse into his hand.
+
+They found Molly seated before a trunk that had a mirror in the lid and a
+"make-up" outfit spread upon the tray. She was wiping the cold cream and
+powder from her neck with a discarded chemise.
+
+"Hello, Don," she said cordially. "Brought a friend?"
+
+Eden liked her. She had an easy, friendly manner, and there was something
+boyish and devil-may-care about her.
+
+"Yes, it's fun. I'm mad about it," she said in reply to Eden's questions.
+"I always want to let go, when I come down on the bar. You don't feel
+your weight at all, as you would on a stationary trapeze."
+
+The big drum boomed outside, and the publicity man began shouting to
+newly arrived boatloads. Miss Welch took a last pull at her cigarette.
+"Now you'll have to get out, Don. I change for the next act. This time I
+go up in a black evening dress, and lose the skirt in the basket before I
+start down."
+
+"Yes, go along," said Eden. "Wait for me outside the door. I'll stay and
+help her dress."
+
+Hedger waited and waited, while women of every build bumped into him and
+begged his pardon, and the red pages ran about holding out their caps for
+coins, and the people ate and perspired and shifted parasols against the
+sun. When the band began to play a two-step, all the bathers ran up out
+of the surf to watch the ascent. The second balloon bumped and rose, and
+the crowd began shouting to the girl in a black evening dress who stood
+leaning against the ropes and smiling. "It's a new girl," they called.
+"It ain't the Countess this time. You're a peach, girlie!"
+
+The balloonist acknowledged these compliments, bowing and looking down
+over the sea of upturned faces,--but Hedger was determined she should not
+see him, and he darted behind the tent-fly. He was suddenly dripping with
+cold sweat, his mouth was full of the bitter taste of anger and his
+tongue felt stiff behind his teeth. Molly Welch, in a shirt-waist and a
+white tam-o'-shanter cap, slipped out from the tent under his arm and
+laughed up in his face. "She's a crazy one you brought along. She'll get
+what she wants!"
+
+"Oh, I'll settle with you, all right!" Hedger brought out with
+difficulty.
+
+"It's not my fault, Donnie. I couldn't do anything with her. She bought
+me off. What's the matter with you? Are you soft on her? She's safe
+enough. It's as easy as rolling off a log, if you keep cool." Molly Welch
+was rather excited herself, and she was chewing gum at a high speed as
+she stood beside him, looking up at the floating silver cone. "Now
+watch," she exclaimed suddenly. "She's coming down on the bar. I advised
+her to cut that out, but you see she does it first-rate. And she got rid
+of the skirt, too. Those black tights show off her legs very well. She
+keeps her feet together like I told her, and makes a good line along the
+back. See the light on those silver slippers,--that was a good idea I
+had. Come along to meet her. Don't be a grouch; she's done it fine!"
+
+Molly tweaked his elbow, and then left him standing like a stump, while
+she ran down the beach with the crowd.
+
+Though Hedger was sulking, his eye could not help seeing the low blue
+welter of the sea, the arrested bathers, standing in the surf, their arms
+and legs stained red by the dropping sun, all shading their eyes and
+gazing upward at the slowly falling silver star.
+
+Molly Welch and the manager caught Eden under the arms and lifted her
+aside, a red page dashed up with a bouquet, and the band struck up "Blue
+Bell." Eden laughed and bowed, took Molly's arm, and ran up the sand in
+her black tights and silver slippers, dodging the friendly old women, and
+the gallant sports who wanted to offer their homage on the spot.
+
+When she emerged from the tent, dressed in her own clothes, that part of
+the beach was almost deserted. She stepped to her companion's side and
+said carelessly: "Hadn't we better try to catch this boat? I hope you're
+not sore at me. Really, it was lots of fun."
+
+Hedger looked at his watch. "Yes, we have fifteen minutes to get to the
+boat," he said politely.
+
+As they walked toward the pier, one of the pages ran up panting. "Lady,
+you're carrying off the bouquet," he said, aggrievedly.
+
+Eden stopped and looked at the bunch of spotty cotton roses in her hand.
+"Of course. I want them for a souvenir. You gave them to me yourself."
+
+"I give 'em to you for looks, but you can't take 'em away. They belong to
+the show."
+
+"Oh, you always use the same bunch?"
+
+"Sure we do. There ain't too much money in this business."
+
+She laughed and tossed them back to him. "Why are you angry?" she asked
+Hedger. "I wouldn't have done it if I'd been with some fellows, but I
+thought you were the sort who wouldn't mind. Molly didn't for a minute
+think you would."
+
+"What possessed you to do such a fool thing?" he asked roughly.
+
+"I don't know. When I saw her coming down, I wanted to try it. It looked
+exciting. Didn't I hold myself as well as she did?"
+
+Hedger shrugged his shoulders, but in his heart he forgave her.
+
+The return boat was not crowded, though the boats that passed them, going
+out, were packed to the rails. The sun was setting. Boys and girls sat on
+the long benches with their arms about each other, singing. Eden felt a
+strong wish to propitiate her companion, to be alone with him. She had
+been curiously wrought up by her balloon trip; it was a lark, but not
+very satisfying unless one came back to something after the flight. She
+wanted to be admired and adored. Though Eden said nothing, and sat with
+her arms limp on the rail in front of her, looking languidly at the
+rising silhouette of the city and the bright path of the sun, Hedger felt
+a strange drawing near to her. If he but brushed her white skirt with his
+knee, there was an instant communication between them, such as there had
+never been before. They did not talk at all, but when they went over the
+gang-plank she took his arm and kept her shoulder close to his. He felt
+as if they were enveloped in a highly charged atmosphere, an invisible
+network of subtle, almost painful sensibility. They had somehow taken
+hold of each other.
+
+An hour later, they were dining in the back garden of a little French
+hotel on Ninth Street, long since passed away. It was cool and leafy
+there, and the mosquitoes were not very numerous. A party of South
+Americans at another table were drinking champagne, and Eden murmured
+that she thought she would like some, if it were not too expensive.
+"Perhaps it will make me think I am in the balloon again. That was a very
+nice feeling. You've forgiven me, haven't you?"
+
+Hedger gave her a quick straight look from under his black eyebrows, and
+something went over her that was like a chill, except that it was warm
+and feathery. She drank most of the wine; her companion was indifferent
+to it. He was talking more to her tonight than he had ever done before.
+She asked him about a new picture she had seen in his room; a queer thing
+full of stiff, supplicating female figures. "It's Indian, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes. I call it Rain Spirits, or maybe, Indian Rain. In the Southwest,
+where I've been a good deal, the Indian traditions make women have to do
+with the rain-fall. They were supposed to control it, somehow, and to be
+able to find springs, and make moisture come out of the earth. You see
+I'm trying to learn to paint what people think and feel; to get away from
+all that photographic stuff. When I look at you, I don't see what a
+camera would see, do I?"
+
+"How can I tell?"
+
+"Well, if I should paint you, I could make you understand what I see."
+For the second time that day Hedger crimsoned unexpectedly, and his eyes
+fell and steadily contemplated a dish of little radishes. "That
+particular picture I got from a story a Mexican priest told me; he said
+he found it in an old manuscript book in a monastery down there, written
+by some Spanish Missionary, who got his stories from the Aztecs. This one
+he called 'The Forty Lovers of the Queen,' and it was more or less about
+rain-making."
+
+"Aren't you going to tell it to me?" Eden asked.
+
+Hedger fumbled among the radishes. "I don't know if it's the proper kind
+of story to tell a girl."
+
+She smiled; "Oh, forget about that! I've been balloon riding today. I
+like to hear you talk."
+
+Her low voice was flattering. She had seemed like clay in his hands ever
+since they got on the boat to come home. He leaned back in his chair,
+forgot his food, and, looking at her intently, began to tell his story,
+the theme of which he somehow felt was dangerous tonight.
+
+The tale began, he said, somewhere in Ancient Mexico, and concerned the
+daughter of a king. The birth of this Princess was preceded by unusual
+portents. Three times her mother dreamed that she was delivered of
+serpents, which betokened that the child she carried would have power
+with the rain gods. The serpent was the symbol of water. The Princess
+grew up dedicated to the gods, and wise men taught her the rain-making
+mysteries. She was with difficulty restrained from men and was guarded at
+all times, for it was the law of the Thunder that she be maiden until
+her marriage. In the years of her adolescence, rain was abundant with her
+people. The oldest man could not remember such fertility. When the
+Princess had counted eighteen summers, her father went to drive out a war
+party that harried his borders on the north and troubled his prosperity.
+The King destroyed the invaders and brought home many prisoners. Among
+the prisoners was a young chief, taller than any of his captors, of such
+strength and ferocity that the King's people came a day's journey to look
+at him. When the Princess beheld his great stature, and saw that his arms
+and breast were covered with the figures of wild animals, bitten into the
+skin and coloured, she begged his life from her father. She desired that
+he should practise his art upon her, and prick upon her skin the signs of
+Rain and Lightning and Thunder, and stain the wounds with herb-juices, as
+they were upon his own body. For many days, upon the roof of the King's
+house, the Princess submitted herself to the bone needle, and the women
+with her marvelled at her fortitude. But the Princess was without shame
+before the Captive, and it came about that he threw from him his needles
+and his stains, and fell upon the Princess to violate her honour; and her
+women ran down from the roof screaming, to call the guard which stood at
+the gateway of the King's house, and none stayed to protect their
+mistress.
+
+When the guard came, the Captive was thrown into bonds, and he was
+gelded, and his tongue was torn out, and he was given for a slave to the
+Rain Princess.
+
+The country of the Aztecs to the east was tormented by thirst, and their
+king, hearing much of the rain-making arts of the Princess, sent an
+embassy to her father, with presents and an offer of marriage. So the
+Princess went from her father to be the Queen of the Aztecs, and she took
+with her the Captive, who served her in everything with entire fidelity
+and slept upon a mat before her door.
+
+The King gave his bride a fortress on the outskirts of the city, whither
+she retired to entreat the rain gods. This fortress was called the
+Queen's House, and on the night of the new moon the Queen came to it from
+the palace. But when the moon waxed and grew toward the round, because
+the god of Thunder had had his will of her, then the Queen returned to
+the King. Drought abated in the country and rain fell abundantly by
+reason of the Queen's power with the stars.
+
+When the Queen went to her own house she took with her no servant but the
+Captive, and he slept outside her door and brought her food after she had
+fasted. The Queen had a jewel of great value, a turquoise that had fallen
+from the sun, and had the image of the sun upon it. And when she desired
+a young man whom she had seen in the army or among the slaves, she sent
+the Captive to him with the jewel, for a sign that he should come to her
+secretly at the Queen's House upon business concerning the welfare of
+all. And some, after she had talked with them, she sent away with
+rewards; and some she took into her chamber and kept them by her for one
+night or two. Afterward she called the Captive and bade him conduct the
+youth by the secret way he had come, underneath the chambers of the
+fortress. But for the going away of the Queen's lovers the Captive took
+out the bar that was beneath a stone in the floor of the passage, and put
+in its stead a rush-reed, and the youth stepped upon it and fell through
+into a cavern that was the bed of an underground river, and whatever was
+thrown into it was not seen again. In this service nor in any other did
+the Captive fail the Queen.
+
+But when the Queen sent for the Captain of the Archers, she detained him
+four days in her chamber, calling often for food and wine, and was
+greatly content with him. On the fourth day she went to the Captive
+outside her door and said: "Tomorrow take this man up by the sure way, by
+which the King comes, and let him live."
+
+In the Queen's door were arrows, purple and white. When she desired the
+King to come to her publicly, with his guard, she sent him a white arrow;
+but when she sent the purple, he came secretly, and covered himself with
+his mantle to be hidden from the stone gods at the gate. On the fifth
+night that the Queen was with her lover, the Captive took a purple arrow
+to the King, and the King came secretly and found them together. He
+killed the Captain with his own hand, but the Queen he brought to public
+trial. The Captive, when he was put to the question, told on his fingers
+forty men that he had let through the underground passage into the river.
+The Captive and the Queen were put to death by fire, both on the same
+day, and afterward there was scarcity of rain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Eden Bower sat shivering a little as she listened. Hedger was not trying
+to please her, she thought, but to antagonize and frighten her by his
+brutal story. She had often told herself that his lean, big-boned lower
+jaw was like his bull-dog's, but tonight his face made Caesar's most
+savage and determined expression seem an affectation. Now she was looking
+at the man he really was. Nobody's eyes had ever defied her like this.
+They were searching her and seeing everything; all she had concealed from
+Livingston, and from the millionaire and his friends, and from the
+newspaper men. He was testing her, trying her out, and she was more ill
+at ease than she wished to show.
+
+"That's quite a thrilling story," she said at last, rising and winding
+her scarf about her throat. "It must be getting late. Almost every one
+has gone."
+
+They walked down the Avenue like people who have quarrelled, or who wish
+to get rid of each other. Hedger did not take her arm at the street
+crossings, and they did not linger in the Square. At her door he tried
+none of the old devices of the Livingston boys. He stood like a post,
+having forgotten to take off his hat, gave her a harsh, threatening
+glance, muttered "goodnight," and shut his own door noisily.
+
+There was no question of sleep for Eden Bower. Her brain was working like
+a machine that would never stop. After she undressed, she tried to calm
+her nerves by smoking a cigarette, lying on the divan by the open window.
+But she grew wider and wider awake, combating the challenge that had
+flamed all evening in Hedger's eyes. The balloon had been one kind of
+excitement, the wine another; but the thing that had roused her, as a
+blow rouses a proud man, was the doubt, the contempt, the sneering
+hostility with which the painter had looked at her when he told his
+savage story. Crowds and balloons were all very well, she reflected, but
+woman's chief adventure is man. With a mind over active and a sense of
+life over strong, she wanted to walk across the roofs in the starlight,
+to sail over the sea and face at once a world of which she had never been
+afraid.
+
+Hedger must be asleep; his dog had stopped sniffing under the double
+doors. Eden put on her wrapper and slippers and stole softly down the
+hall over the old carpet; one loose board creaked just as she reached the
+ladder. The trap-door was open, as always on hot nights. When she stepped
+out on the roof she drew a long breath and walked across it, looking up
+at the sky. Her foot touched something soft; she heard a low growl, and
+on the instant Caesar's sharp little teeth caught her ankle and waited.
+His breath was like steam on her leg. Nobody had ever intruded upon his
+roof before, and he panted for the movement or the word that would let
+him spring his jaw. Instead, Hedger's hand seized his throat.
+
+"Wait a minute. I'll settle with him," he said grimly. He dragged the dog
+toward the manhole and disappeared. When he came back, he found Eden
+standing over by the dark chimney, looking away in an offended attitude.
+
+"I caned him unmercifully," he panted. "Of course you didn't hear
+anything; he never whines when I beat him. He didn't nip you, did he?"
+
+"I don't know whether he broke the skin or not," she answered
+aggrievedly, still looking off into the west.
+
+"If I were one of your friends in white pants, I'd strike a match to find
+whether you were hurt, though I know you are not, and then I'd see your
+ankle, wouldn't I?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+He shook his head and stood with his hands in the pockets of his old
+painting jacket. "I'm not up to such boy-tricks. If you want the place
+to yourself, I'll clear out. There are plenty of places where I can spend
+the night, what's left of it. But if you stay here and I stay here--" He
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+Eden did not stir, and she made no reply. Her head drooped slightly, as
+if she were considering. But the moment he put his arms about her they
+began to talk, both at once, as people do in an opera. The instant avowal
+brought out a flood of trivial admissions. Hedger confessed his crime,
+was reproached and forgiven, and now Eden knew what it was in his look
+that she had found so disturbing of late.
+
+Standing against the black chimney, with the sky behind and blue shadows
+before, they looked like one of Hedger's own paintings of that period;
+two figures, one white and one dark, and nothing whatever distinguishable
+about them but that they were male and female. The faces were lost, the
+contours blurred in shadow, but the figures were a man and a woman, and
+that was their whole concern and their mysterious beauty,--it was the
+rhythm in which they moved, at last, along the roof and down into the
+dark hole; he first, drawing her gently after him. She came down very
+slowly. The excitement and bravado and uncertainty of that long day and
+night seemed all at once to tell upon her. When his feet were on the
+carpet and he reached up to lift her down, she twined her arms about his
+neck as after a long separation, and turned her face to him, and her
+lips, with their perfume of youth and passion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One Saturday afternoon Hedger was sitting in the window of Eden's music
+room. They had been watching the pigeons come wheeling over the roofs
+from their unknown feeding grounds.
+
+"Why," said Eden suddenly, "don't we fix those big doors into your studio
+so they will open? Then, if I want you, I won't have to go through the
+hall. That illustrator is loafing about a good deal of late."
+
+"I'll open them, if you wish. The bolt is on your side."
+
+"Isn't there one on yours, too?"
+
+"No. I believe a man lived there for years before I came in, and the
+nurse used to have these rooms herself. Naturally, the lock was on
+the lady's side."
+
+Eden laughed and began to examine the bolt. "It's all stuck up with
+paint." Looking about, her eye lighted upon a bronze Buddah which was
+one of the nurse's treasures. Taking him by his head, she struck the bolt
+a blow with his squatting posteriors. The two doors creaked, sagged, and
+swung weakly inward a little way, as if they were too old for such
+escapades. Eden tossed the heavy idol into a stuffed chair. "That's
+better," she exclaimed exultantly. "So the bolts are always on the lady's
+side? What a lot society takes for granted!"
+
+Hedger laughed, sprang up and caught her arms roughly. "Whoever takes you
+for granted--Did anybody, ever?"
+
+"Everybody does. That's why I'm here. You are the only one who knows
+anything about me. Now I'll have to dress if we're going out for dinner."
+
+He lingered, keeping his hold on her. "But I won't always be the only
+one, Eden Bower. I won't be the last."
+
+"No, I suppose not," she said carelessly. "But what does that matter? You
+are the first."
+
+As a long, despairing whine broke in the warm stillness, they drew apart.
+Caesar, lying on his bed in the dark corner, had lifted his head at this
+invasion of sunlight, and realized that the side of his room was broken
+open, and his whole world shattered by change. There stood his master and
+this woman, laughing at him! The woman was pulling the long black hair of
+this mightiest of men, who bowed his head and permitted it.
+
+
+VI
+
+In time they quarrelled, of course, and about an abstraction,--as young
+people often do, as mature people almost never do. Eden came in late one
+afternoon. She had been with some of her musical friends to lunch at
+Burton Ives' studio, and she began telling Hedger about its splendours.
+He listened a moment and then threw down his brushes. "I know exactly
+what it's like," he said impatiently. "A very good department-store
+conception of a studio. It's one of the show places."
+
+"Well, it's gorgeous, and he said I could bring you to see him. The boys
+tell me he's awfully kind about giving people a lift, and you might get
+something out of it."
+
+Hedger started up and pushed his canvas out of the way. "What could I
+possibly get from Burton Ives? He's almost the worst painter in the
+world; the stupidest, I mean."
+
+Eden was annoyed. Burton Ives had been very nice to her and had begged
+her to sit for him. "You must admit that he's a very successful one,"
+she said coldly.
+
+"Of course he is! Anybody can be successful who will do that sort of
+thing. I wouldn't paint his pictures for all the money in New York."
+
+"Well, I saw a lot of them, and I think they are beautiful."
+
+Hedger bowed stiffly.
+
+"What's the use of being a great painter if nobody knows about you?" Eden
+went on persuasively. "Why don't you paint the kind of pictures people
+can understand, and then, after you're successful, do whatever you like?"
+
+"As I look at it," said Hedger brusquely, "I am successful."
+
+Eden glanced about. "Well, I don't see any evidences of it," she said,
+biting her lip. "He has a Japanese servant and a wine cellar, and keeps a
+riding horse."
+
+Hedger melted a little. "My dear, I have the most expensive luxury in the
+world, and I am much more extravagant than Burton Ives, for I work to
+please nobody but myself."
+
+"You mean you could make money and don't? That you don't try to get a
+public?"
+
+"Exactly. A public only wants what has been done over and over. I'm
+painting for painters,--who haven't been born."
+
+"What would you do if I brought Mr. Ives down here to see your things?"
+
+"Well, for God's sake, don't! Before he left I'd probably tell him what I
+thought of him."
+
+Eden rose. "I give you up. You know very well there's only one kind of
+success that's real."
+
+"Yes, but it's not the kind you mean. So you've been thinking me a scrub
+painter, who needs a helping hand from some fashionable studio man? What
+the devil have you had anything to do with me for, then?"
+
+"There's no use talking to you," said Eden walking slowly toward the
+door. "I've been trying to pull wires for you all afternoon, and this is
+what it comes to." She had expected that the tidings of a prospective
+call from the great man would be received very differently, and had been
+thinking as she came home in the stage how, as with a magic wand, she
+might gild Hedger's future, float him out of his dark hole on a tide of
+prosperity, see his name in the papers and his pictures in the windows on
+Fifth Avenue.
+
+Hedger mechanically snapped the midsummer leash on Caesar's collar and
+they ran downstairs and hurried through Sullivan Street off toward the
+river. He wanted to be among rough, honest people, to get down where the
+big drays bumped over stone paving blocks and the men wore corduroy
+trowsers and kept their shirts open at the neck. He stopped for a drink
+in one of the sagging bar-rooms on the water front. He had never in his
+life been so deeply wounded; he did not know he could be so hurt. He had
+told this girl all his secrets. On the roof, in these warm, heavy summer
+nights, with her hands locked in his, he had been able to explain all his
+misty ideas about an unborn art the world was waiting for; had been able
+to explain them better than he had ever done to himself. And she had
+looked away to the chattels of this uptown studio and coveted them for
+him! To her he was only an unsuccessful Burton Ives.
+
+Then why, as he had put it to her, did she take up with him? Young,
+beautiful, talented as she was, why had she wasted herself on a scrub?
+Pity? Hardly; she wasn't sentimental. There was no explaining her. But in
+this passion that had seemed so fearless and so fated to be, his own
+position now looked to him ridiculous; a poor dauber without money or
+fame,--it was her caprice to load him with favours. Hedger ground his
+teeth so loud that his dog, trotting beside him, heard him and looked up.
+
+While they were having supper at the oyster-man's, he planned his escape.
+Whenever he saw her again, everything he had told her, that he should
+never have told any one, would come back to him; ideas he had never
+whispered even to the painter whom he worshipped and had gone all the way
+to France to see. To her they must seem his apology for not having horses
+and a valet, or merely the puerile boastfulness of a weak man. Yet if she
+slipped the bolt tonight and came through the doors and said, "Oh, weak
+man, I belong to you!" what could he do? That was the danger. He would
+catch the train out to Long Beach tonight, and tomorrow he would go on to
+the north end of Long Island, where an old friend of his had a summer
+studio among the sand dunes. He would stay until things came right in his
+mind. And she could find a smart painter, or take her punishment.
+
+When he went home, Eden's room was dark; she was dining out somewhere. He
+threw his things into a hold-all he had carried about the world with him,
+strapped up some colours and canvases, and ran downstairs.
+
+
+VII
+
+Five days later Hedger was a restless passenger on a dirty, crowded
+Sunday train, coming back to town. Of course he saw now how unreasonable
+he had been in expecting a Huntington girl to know anything about
+pictures; here was a whole continent full of people who knew nothing
+about pictures and he didn't hold it against them. What had such things
+to do with him and Eden Bower? When he lay out on the dunes, watching the
+moon come up out of the sea, it had seemed to him that there was no
+wonder in the world like the wonder of Eden Bower. He was going back to
+her because she was older than art, because she was the most overwhelming
+thing that had ever come into his life.
+
+He had written her yesterday, begging her to be at home this evening,
+telling her that he was contrite, and wretched enough.
+
+Now that he was on his way to her, his stronger feeling unaccountably
+changed to a mood that was playful and tender. He wanted to share
+everything with her, even the most trivial things. He wanted to tell her
+about the people on the train, coming back tired from their holiday with
+bunches of wilted flowers and dirty daisies; to tell her that the
+fish-man, to whom she had often sent him for lobsters, was among the
+passengers, disguised in a silk shirt and a spotted tie, and how his wife
+looked exactly like a fish, even to her eyes, on which cataracts were
+forming. He could tell her, too, that he hadn't as much as unstrapped his
+canvases,--that ought to convince her.
+
+In those days passengers from Long Island came into New York by ferry.
+Hedger had to be quick about getting his dog out of the express car in
+order to catch the first boat. The East River, and the bridges, and the
+city to the west, were burning in the conflagration of the sunset; there
+was that great home-coming reach of evening in the air.
+
+The car changes from Thirty-fourth Street were too many and too
+perplexing; for the first time in his life Hedger took a hansom cab for
+Washington Square. Caesar sat bolt upright on the worn leather cushion
+beside him, and they jogged off, looking down on the rest of the world.
+
+It was twilight when they drove down lower Fifth Avenue into the Square,
+and through the Arch behind them were the two long rows of pale violet
+lights that used to bloom so beautifully against the grey stone and
+asphalt. Here and yonder about the Square hung globes that shed a
+radiance not unlike the blue mists of evening, emerging softly when
+daylight died, as the stars emerged in the thin blue sky. Under them the
+sharp shadows of the trees fell on the cracked pavement and the sleeping
+grass. The first stars and the first lights were growing silver against
+the gradual darkening, when Hedger paid his driver and went into the
+house,--which, thank God, was still there! On the hall table lay his
+letter of yesterday, unopened.
+
+He went upstairs with every sort of fear and every sort of hope clutching
+at his heart; it was as if tigers were tearing him. Why was there no gas
+burning in the top hall? He found matches and the gas bracket. He
+knocked, but got no answer; nobody was there. Before his own door were
+exactly five bottles of milk, standing in a row. The milk-boy had taken
+spiteful pleasure in thus reminding him that he forgot to stop his order.
+
+Hedger went down to the basement; it, too, was dark. The janitress was
+taking her evening airing on the basement steps. She sat waving a
+palm-leaf fan majestically, her dirty calico dress open at the neck. She
+told him at once that there had been "changes." Miss Bower's room was to
+let again, and the piano would go tomorrow. Yes, she left yesterday, she
+sailed for Europe with friends from Chicago. They arrived on Friday,
+heralded by many telegrams. Very rich people they were said to be,
+though the man had refused to pay the nurse a month's rent in lieu of
+notice,--which would have been only right, as the young lady had agreed
+to take the rooms until October. Mrs. Foley had observed, too, that he
+didn't overpay her or Willy for their trouble, and a great deal of
+trouble they had been put to, certainly. Yes, the young lady was very
+pleasant, but the nurse said there were rings on the mahogany table where
+she had put tumblers and wine glasses. It was just as well she was gone.
+The Chicago man was uppish in his ways, but not much to look at. She
+supposed he had poor health, for there was nothing to him inside his
+clothes.
+
+Hedger went slowly up the stairs--never had they seemed so long, or his
+legs so heavy. The upper floor was emptiness and silence. He unlocked
+his room, lit the gas, and opened the windows. When he went to put his
+coat in the closet, he found, hanging among his clothes, a pale,
+flesh-tinted dressing gown he had liked to see her wear, with a
+perfume--oh, a perfume that was still Eden Bower! He shut the door behind
+him and there, in the dark, for a moment he lost his manliness. It was
+when he held this garment to him that he found a letter in the pocket.
+
+The note was written with a lead pencil, in haste: She was sorry that he
+was angry, but she still didn't know just what she had done. She had
+thought Mr. Ives would be useful to him; she guessed he was too proud.
+She wanted awfully to see him again, but Fate came knocking at her door
+after he had left her. She believed in Fate. She would never forget him,
+and she knew he would become the greatest painter in the world. Now she
+must pack. She hoped he wouldn't mind her leaving the dressing gown;
+somehow, she could never wear it again.
+
+After Hedger read this, standing under the gas, he went back into the
+closet and knelt down before the wall; the knot hole had been plugged up
+with a ball of wet paper,--the same blue note-paper on which her letter
+was written.
+
+He was hard hit. Tonight he had to bear the loneliness of a whole
+lifetime. Knowing himself so well, he could hardly believe that such a
+thing had ever happened to him, that such a woman had lain happy and
+contented in his arms. And now it was over. He turned out the light and
+sat down on his painter's stool before the big window. Caesar, on the
+floor beside him, rested his head on his master's knee. We must leave
+Hedger thus, sitting in his tank with his dog, looking up at the stars.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+COMING, APHRODITE! This legend, in electric lights over the Lexington
+Opera House, had long announced the return of Eden Bower to New York
+after years of spectacular success in Paris. She came at last, under the
+management of an American Opera Company, but bringing her own _chef
+d'orchestre_.
+
+One bright December afternoon Eden Bower was going down Fifth Avenue in
+her car, on the way to her broker, in Williams Street. Her thoughts were
+entirely upon stocks,--Cerro de Pasco, and how much she should buy of
+it,--when she suddenly looked up and realized that she was skirting
+Washington Square. She had not seen the place since she rolled out of it
+in an old-fashioned four-wheeler to seek her fortune, eighteen years ago.
+
+"_Arrêtez, Alphonse. Attendez moi_," she called, and opened the door
+before he could reach it. The children who were streaking over the
+asphalt on roller skates saw a lady in a long fur coat, and short,
+high-heeled shoes, alight from a French car and pace slowly about the
+Square, holding her muff to her chin. This spot, at least, had changed
+very little, she reflected; the same trees, the same fountain, the white
+arch, and over yonder, Garibaldi, drawing the sword for freedom. There,
+just opposite her, was the old red brick house.
+
+"Yes, that is the place," she was thinking. "I can smell the carpets now,
+and the dog,--what was his name? That grubby bathroom at the end of the
+hall, and that dreadful Hedger--still, there was something about him, you
+know--" She glanced up and blinked against the sun. From somewhere in the
+crowded quarter south of the Square a flock of pigeons rose, wheeling
+quickly upward into the brilliant blue sky. She threw back her head,
+pressed her muff closer to her chin, and watched them with a smile of
+amazement and delight. So they still rose, out of all that dirt and noise
+and squalor, fleet and silvery, just as they used to rise that summer
+when she was twenty and went up in a balloon on Coney Island!
+
+Alphonse opened the door and tucked her robes about her. All the way down
+town her mind wandered from Cerro de Pasco, and she kept smiling and
+looking up at the sky.
+
+When she had finished her business with the broker, she asked him to look
+in the telephone book for the address of M. Gaston Jules, the picture
+dealer, and slipped the paper on which he wrote it into her glove. It was
+five o'clock when she reached the French Galleries, as they were called.
+On entering she gave the attendant her card, asking him to take it to M.
+Jules. The dealer appeared very promptly and begged her to come into his
+private office, where he pushed a great chair toward his desk for her and
+signalled his secretary to leave the room.
+
+"How good your lighting is in here," she observed, glancing about. "I met
+you at Simon's studio, didn't I? Oh, no! I never forget anybody who
+interests me." She threw her muff on his writing table and sank into the
+deep chair. "I have come to you for some information that's not in my
+line. Do you know anything about an American painter named Hedger?"
+
+He took the seat opposite her. "Don Hedger? But, certainly! There are
+some very interesting things of his in an exhibition at V----'s. If you
+would care to--"
+
+She held up her hand. "No, no. I've no time to go to exhibitions. Is he a
+man of any importance?"
+
+"Certainly. He is one of the first men among the moderns. That is to say,
+among the very moderns. He is always coming up with something different.
+He often exhibits in Paris, you must have seen--"
+
+"No, I tell you I don't go to exhibitions. Has he had great success? That
+is what I want to know."
+
+M. Jules pulled at his short grey moustache. "But, Madame, there are many
+kinds of success," he began cautiously.
+
+Madame gave a dry laugh. "Yes, so he used to say. We once quarrelled on
+that issue. And how would you define his particular kind?"
+
+M. Jules grew thoughtful. "He is a great name with all the young men, and
+he is decidedly an influence in art. But one can't definitely place a man
+who is original, erratic, and who is changing all the time."
+
+She cut him short. "Is he much talked about at home? In Paris, I mean?
+Thanks. That's all I want to know." She rose and began buttoning her
+coat. "One doesn't like to have been an utter fool, even at twenty."
+
+"_Mais, non_!" M. Jules handed her her muff with a quick, sympathetic
+glance. He followed her out through the carpeted show-room, now closed to
+the public and draped in cheesecloth, and put her into her car with words
+appreciative of the honour she had done him in calling.
+
+Leaning back in the cushions, Eden Bower closed her eyes, and her face,
+as the street lamps flashed their ugly orange light upon it, became
+hard and settled, like a plaster cast; so a sail, that has been filled by
+a strong breeze, behaves when the wind suddenly dies. Tomorrow night the
+wind would blow again, and this mask would be the golden face of
+Aphrodite. But a "big" career takes its toll, even with the best of luck.
+
+
+
+
+The Diamond Mine
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I first became aware that Cressida Garnet was on board when I saw young
+men with cameras going up to the boat deck. In that exposed spot she was
+good-naturedly posing for them--amid fluttering lavender scarfs--wearing
+a most unseaworthy hat, her broad, vigorous face wreathed in smiles. She
+was too much an American not to believe in publicity. All advertising
+was good. If it was good for breakfast foods, it was good for prime
+donna,--especially for a prima donna who would never be any younger and
+who had just announced her intention of marrying a fourth time.
+
+Only a few days before, when I was lunching with some friends at
+Sherry's, I had seen Jerome Brown come in with several younger men,
+looking so pleased and prosperous that I exclaimed upon it.
+
+"His affairs," some one explained, "are looking up. He's going to marry
+Cressida Garnet. Nobody believed it at first, but since she confirms it
+he's getting all sorts of credit. That woman's a diamond mine."
+
+If there was ever a man who needed a diamond mine at hand, immediately
+convenient, it was Jerome Brown. But as an old friend of Cressida Garnet,
+I was sorry to hear that mining operations were to be begun again.
+
+I had been away from New York and had not seen Cressida for a year; now I
+paused on the gangplank to note how very like herself she still was, and
+with what undiminished zeal she went about even the most trifling things
+that pertained to her profession. From that distance I could recognize
+her "carrying" smile, and even what, in Columbus, we used to call "the
+Garnet look."
+
+At the foot of the stairway leading up to the boat deck stood two of the
+factors in Cressida's destiny. One of them was her sister, Miss Julia; a
+woman of fifty with a relaxed, mournful face, an ageing skin that browned
+slowly, like meerchaum, and the unmistakable "look" by which one knew a
+Garnet. Beside her, pointedly ignoring her, smoking a cigarette while he
+ran over the passenger list with supercilious almond eyes, stood a youth
+in a pink shirt and a green plush hat, holding a French bull-dog on the
+leash. This was "Horace," Cressida's only son. He, at any rate, had not
+the Garnet look. He was rich and ruddy, indolent and insolent, with soft
+oval cheeks and the blooming complexion of twenty-two. There was the
+beginning of a silky shadow on his upper lip. He seemed like a ripe fruit
+grown out of a rich soil; "oriental," his mother called his peculiar
+lusciousness. His aunt's restless and aggrieved glance kept flecking him
+from the side, but the two were as motionless as the _bouledogue_,
+standing there on his bench legs and surveying his travelling basket with
+loathing. They were waiting, in constrained immobility, for Cressida to
+descend and reanimate them,--will them to do or to be something. Forward,
+by the rail, I saw the stooped, eager back for which I was unconsciously
+looking: Miletus Poppas, the Greek Jew, Cressida's accompanist and
+shadow. We were all there, I thought with a smile, except Jerome Brown.
+
+The first member of Cressida's party with whom I had speech was Mr.
+Poppas. When we were two hours out I came upon him in the act of dropping
+overboard a steamer cushion made of American flags. Cressida never
+sailed, I think, that one of these vivid comforts of travel did not reach
+her at the dock. Poppas recognized me just as the striped object left his
+hand. He was standing with his arm still extended over the rail, his
+fingers contemptuously sprung back. "Lest we forget!" he said with a
+shrug. "Does Madame Cressida know we are to have the pleasure of your
+company for this voyage?" He spoke deliberate, grammatical English--he
+despised the American rendering of the language--but there was an
+indescribably foreign quality in his voice,--a something muted; and
+though he aspirated his "th's" with such conscientious thoroughness,
+there was always the thud of a "d" in them. Poppas stood before me in a
+short, tightly buttoned grey coat and cap, exactly the colour of his
+greyish skin and hair and waxed moustache; a monocle on a very wide black
+ribbon dangled over his chest. As to his age, I could not offer a
+conjecture. In the twelve years I had known his thin lupine face behind
+Cressida's shoulder, it had not changed. I was used to his cold,
+supercilious manner, to his alarming, deep-set eyes,--very close
+together, in colour a yellowish green, and always gleaming with something
+like defeated fury, as if he were actually on the point of having it out
+with you, or with the world, at last.
+
+I asked him if Cressida had engagements in London.
+
+"Quite so; the Manchester Festival, some concerts at Queen's Hall, and
+the Opera at Covent Garden; a rather special production of the operas
+of Mozart. That she can still do quite well,--which is not at all, of
+course, what we might have expected, and only goes to show that our
+Madame Cressida is now, as always, a charming exception to rules."
+Poppas' tone about his client was consistently patronizing, and he was
+always trying to draw one into a conspiracy of two, based on a mutual
+understanding of her shortcomings.
+
+I approached him on the one subject I could think of which was more
+personal than his usefulness to Cressida, and asked him whether he still
+suffered from facial neuralgia as much as he had done in former years,
+and whether he was therefore dreading London, where the climate used to
+be so bad for him.
+
+"And is still," he caught me up, "And is still! For me to go to London is
+martyrdom, _chère Madame_. In New York it is bad enough, but in London it
+is the _auto da fé_, nothing less. My nervous system is exotic in any
+country washed by the Atlantic ocean, and it shivers like a little
+hairless dog from Mexico. It never relaxes. I think I have told you about
+my favourite city in the middle of Asia, _la sainte Asie_, where the
+rainfall is absolutely nil, and you are protected on every side by
+hundreds of metres of warm, dry sand. I was there when I was a child
+once, and it is still my intention to retire there when I have finished
+with all this. I would be there now, n-ow-ow," his voice rose
+querulously, "if Madame Cressida did not imagine that she needs me,--and
+her fancies, you know," he flourished his hands, "one gives in to them.
+In humouring her caprices you and I have already played some together."
+
+We were approaching Cressida's deck chairs, ranged under the open windows
+of her stateroom. She was already recumbent, swathed in lavender scarfs
+and wearing purple orchids--doubtless from Jerome Brown. At her left,
+Horace had settled down to a French novel, and Julia Garnet, at her
+right, was complainingly regarding the grey horizon. On seeing me,
+Cressida struggled under her fur-lined robes and got to her feet,--which
+was more than Horace or Miss Julia managed to do. Miss Julia, as I could
+have foretold, was not pleased. All the Garnets had an awkward manner
+with me. Whether it was that I reminded them of things they wished to
+forget, or whether they thought I esteemed Cressida too highly and the
+rest of them too lightly, I do not know; but my appearance upon their
+scene always put them greatly on their dignity. After Horace had offered
+me his chair and Miss Julia had said doubtfully that she thought I was
+looking rather better than when she last saw me, Cressida took my arm and
+walked me off toward the stern.
+
+"Do you know, Carrie, I half wondered whether I shouldn't find you here,
+or in London, because you always turn up at critical moments in my life."
+She pressed my arm confidentially, and I felt that she was once more
+wrought up to a new purpose. I told her that I had heard some rumour of
+her engagement.
+
+"It's quite true, and it's all that it should be," she reassured me.
+"I'll tell you about it later, and you'll see that it's a real solution.
+They are against me, of course,--all except Horace. He has been such a
+comfort."
+
+Horace's support, such as it was, could always be had in exchange for his
+mother's signature, I suspected. The pale May day had turned bleak and
+chilly, and we sat down by an open hatchway which emitted warm air from
+somewhere below. At this close range I studied Cressida's face, and felt
+reassured of her unabated vitality; the old force of will was still
+there, and with it her characteristic optimism, the old hope of a
+"solution."
+
+"You have been in Columbus lately?" she was saying. "No, you needn't tell
+me about it," with a sigh. "Why is it, Caroline, that there is so little
+of my life I would be willing to live over again? So little that I can
+even think of without depression. Yet I've really not such a bad
+conscience. It may mean that I still belong to the future more than to
+the past, do you think?"
+
+My assent was not warm enough to fix her attention, and she went on
+thoughtfully: "Of course, it was a bleak country and a bleak period. But
+I've sometimes wondered whether the bleakness may not have been in me,
+too; for it has certainly followed me. There, that is no way to talk!"
+she drew herself up from a momentary attitude of dejection. "Sea air
+always lets me down at first. That's why it's so good for me in the end."
+
+"I think Julia always lets you down, too," I said bluntly. "But perhaps
+that depression works out in the same way."
+
+Cressida laughed. "Julia is rather more depressing than Georgie, isn't
+she? But it was Julia's turn. I can't come alone, and they've grown to
+expect it. They haven't, either of them, much else to expect."
+
+At this point the deck steward approached us with a blue envelope. "A
+wireless for you, Madame Garnet."
+
+Cressida put out her hand with impatience, thanked him graciously, and
+with every indication of pleasure tore open the blue envelope. "It's
+from Jerome Brown," she said with some confusion, as she folded the paper
+small and tucked it between the buttons of her close-fitting gown,
+"Something he forgot to tell me. How long shall you be in London? Good; I
+want you to meet him. We shall probably be married there as soon as my
+engagements are over." She rose. "Now I must write some letters. Keep two
+places at your table, so that I can slip away from my party and dine with
+you sometimes."
+
+I walked with her toward her chair, in which Mr. Poppas was now
+reclining. He indicated his readiness to rise, but she shook her head and
+entered the door of her deck suite. As she passed him, his eye went over
+her with assurance until it rested upon the folded bit of blue paper in
+her corsage. He must have seen the original rectangle in the steward's
+hand; having found it again, he dropped back between Horace and Miss
+Julia, whom I think he disliked no more than he did the rest of the
+world. He liked Julia quite as well as he liked me, and he liked me quite
+as well as he liked any of the women to whom he would be fitfully
+agreeable upon the voyage. Once or twice, during each crossing, he did
+his best and made himself very charming indeed, to keep his hand in,--for
+the same reason that he kept a dummy keyboard in his stateroom, somewhere
+down in the bowels of the boat. He practised all the small economies;
+paid the minimum rate, and never took a deck chair, because, as Horace
+was usually in the cardroom, he could sit in Horace's.
+
+The three of them lay staring at the swell which was steadily growing
+heavier. Both men had covered themselves with rugs, after dutifully
+bundling up Miss Julia. As I walked back and forth on the deck, I was
+struck by their various degrees of in-expressiveness. Opaque brown eyes,
+almond-shaped and only half open; wolfish green eyes, close-set and
+always doing something, with a crooked gleam boring in this direction or
+in that; watery grey eyes, like the thick edges of broken skylight glass:
+I would have given a great deal to know what was going on behind each
+pair of them.
+
+These three were sitting there in a row because they were all woven into
+the pattern of one large and rather splendid life. Each had a bond, and
+each had a grievance. If they could have their will, what would they do
+with the generous, credulous creature who nourished them, I wondered? How
+deep a humiliation would each egotism exact? They would scarcely have
+harmed her in fortune or in person (though I think Miss Julia looked
+forward to the day when Cressida would "break" and could be mourned
+over),--but the fire at which she warmed herself, the little secret
+hope,--the illusion, ridiculous or sublime, which kept her going,--that
+they would have stamped out on the instant, with the whole Garnet pack
+behind them to make extinction sure. All, except, perhaps, Miletus
+Poppas. He was a vulture of the vulture race, and he had the beak of one.
+But I always felt that if ever he had her thus at his mercy,--if ever he
+came upon the softness that was hidden under so much hardness, the warm
+credulity under a life so dated and scheduled and "reported" and
+generally exposed,--he would hold his hand and spare.
+
+The weather grew steadily rougher. Miss Julia at last plucked Poppas by
+the sleeve and indicated that she wished to be released from her
+wrappings. When she disappeared, there seemed to be every reason to hope
+that she might be off the scene for awhile. As Cressida said, if she had
+not brought Julia, she would have had to bring Georgie, or some other
+Garnet. Cressida's family was like that of the unpopular Prince of
+Wales, of whom, when he died, some wag wrote:
+
+_If it had been his brother,
+Better him than another.
+If it had been his sister,
+No one would have missed her._
+
+Miss Julia was dampening enough, but Miss Georgie was aggressive and
+intrusive. She was out to prove to the world, and more especially to
+Ohio, that all the Garnets were as like Cressida as two peas. Both
+sisters were club-women, social service workers, and directors in musical
+societies, and they were continually travelling up and down the Middle
+West to preside at meetings or to deliver addresses. They reminded one of
+two sombre, bumping electrics, rolling about with no visible means of
+locomotion, always running out of power and lying beached in some
+inconvenient spot until they received a check or a suggestion from
+Cressy. I was only too well acquainted with the strained, anxious
+expression that the sight of their handwriting brought to Cressida's face
+when she ran over her morning mail at breakfast. She usually put their
+letters by to read "when she was feeling up to it" and hastened to open
+others which might possibly contain something gracious or pleasant.
+Sometimes these family unburdenings lay about unread for several days.
+Any other letters would have got themselves lost, but these bulky
+epistles, never properly fitted to their envelopes, seemed immune to
+mischance and unfailingly disgorged to Cressida long explanations as to
+why her sisters had to do and to have certain things precisely upon her
+account and because she was so much a public personage.
+
+The truth was that all the Garnets, and particularly her two sisters,
+were consumed by an habitual, bilious, unenterprising envy of Cressy.
+They never forgot that, no matter what she did for them or how far she
+dragged them about the world with her, she would never take one of them
+to live with her in her Tenth Street house in New York. They thought that
+was the thing they most wanted. But what they wanted, in the last
+analysis, was to _be_ Cressida. For twenty years she had been plunged in
+struggle; fighting for her life at first, then for a beginning, for
+growth, and at last for eminence and perfection; fighting in the dark,
+and afterward in the light,--which, with her bad preparation, and with
+her uninspired youth already behind her, took even more courage. During
+those twenty years the Garnets had been comfortable and indolent and
+vastly self-satisfied; and now they expected Cressida to make them equal
+sharers in the finer rewards of her struggle. When her brother Buchanan
+told me he thought Cressida ought "to make herself one of them," he
+stated the converse of what he meant. They coveted the qualities which
+had made her success, as well as the benefits which came from it. More
+than her furs or her fame or her fortune, they wanted her personal
+effectiveness, her brighter glow and stronger will to live.
+
+"Sometimes," I have heard Cressida say, looking up from a bunch of those
+sloppily written letters, "sometimes I get discouraged."
+
+For several days the rough weather kept Miss Julia cloistered in
+Cressida's deck suite with the maid, Luisa, who confided to me that the
+Signorina Garnet was "_dificile_." After dinner I usually found Cressida
+unincumbered, as Horace was always in the cardroom and Mr. Poppas either
+nursed his neuralgia or went through the exercise of making himself
+interesting to some one of the young women on board. One evening, the
+third night out, when the sea was comparatively quiet and the sky was
+full of broken black clouds, silvered by the moon at their ragged edges,
+Cressida talked to me about Jerome Brown.
+
+I had known each of her former husbands. The first one, Charley Wilton,
+Horace's father, was my cousin. He was organist in a church in Columbus,
+and Cressida married him when she was nineteen. He died of tuberculosis
+two years after Horace was born. Cressida nursed him through a long
+illness and made the living besides. Her courage during the three years
+of her first marriage was fine enough to foreshadow her future to any
+discerning eye, and it had made me feel that she deserved any number of
+chances at marital happiness. There had, of course, been a particular
+reason for each subsequent experiment, and a sufficiently alluring
+promise of success. Her motives, in the case of Jerome Brown, seemed to
+me more vague and less convincing than those which she had explained to
+me on former occasions.
+
+"It's nothing hasty," she assured me. "It's been coming on for several
+years. He has never pushed me, but he was always there--some one to count
+on. Even when I used to meet him at the Whitings, while I was still
+singing at the Metropolitan, I always felt that he was different from the
+others; that if I were in straits of any kind, I could call on him. You
+can't know what that feeling means to me, Carrie. If you look back,
+you'll see it's something I've never had."
+
+I admitted that, in so far as I knew, she had never been much addicted to
+leaning on people.
+
+"I've never had any one to lean on," she said with a short laugh. Then
+she went on, quite seriously: "Somehow, my relations with people always
+become business relations in the end. I suppose it's because,--except for
+a sort of professional personality, which I've had to get, just as I've
+had to get so many other things,--I've not very much that's personal to
+give people. I've had to give too much else. I've had to try too hard for
+people who wouldn't try at all."
+
+"Which," I put in firmly, "has done them no good, and has robbed the
+people who really cared about you."
+
+"By making me grubby, you mean?"
+
+"By making you anxious and distracted so much of the time; empty."
+
+She nodded mournfully. "Yes, I know. You used to warn me. Well,
+there's not one of my brothers and sisters who does not feel that I
+carried off the family success, just as I might have carried off the
+family silver,--if there'd been any! They take the view that there were
+just so many prizes in the bag; I reached in and took them, so there were
+none left for the others. At my age, that's a dismal truth to waken up
+to."
+
+Cressida reached for my hand and held it a moment, as if she needed
+courage to face the facts in her case. "When one remembers one's first
+success; how one hoped to go home like a Christmas tree full of
+presents--How much one learns in a life-time! That year when Horace was a
+baby and Charley was dying, and I was touring the West with the Williams
+band, it was my feeling about my own people that made me go at all. Why I
+didn't drop myself into one of those muddy rivers, or turn on the gas in
+one of those dirty hotel rooms, I don't know to this day. At twenty-two
+you must hope for something more than to be able to bury your husband
+decently, and what I hoped for was to make my family happy. It was the
+same afterward in Germany. A young woman must live for human people.
+Horace wasn't enough. I might have had lovers, of course. I suppose you
+will say it would have been better if I had."
+
+Though there seemed no need for me to say anything, I murmured that I
+thought there were more likely to be limits to the rapacity of a lover
+than to that of a discontented and envious family.
+
+"Well," Cressida gathered herself up, "once I got out from under it all,
+didn't I? And perhaps, in a milder way, such a release can come again.
+You were the first person I told when I ran away with Charley, and for a
+long while you were the only one who knew about Blasius Bouchalka. That
+time, at least, I shook the Garnets. I wasn't distracted or empty. That
+time I was all there!"
+
+"Yes," I echoed her, "that time you were all there. It's the greatest
+possible satisfaction to remember it."
+
+"But even that," she sighed, "was nothing but lawyers and accounts in the
+end--and a hurt. A hurt that has lasted. I wonder what is the matter with
+me?"
+
+The matter with Cressida was, that more than any woman I have ever known,
+she appealed to the acquisitive instinct in men; but this was not easily
+said, even in the brutal frankness of a long friendship.
+
+We would probably have gone further into the Bouchalka chapter of her
+life, had not Horace appeared and nervously asked us if we did not wish
+to take a turn before we went inside. I pleaded indolence, but Cressida
+rose and disappeared with him. Later I came upon them, standing at the
+stern above the huddled steerage deck, which was by this time bathed in
+moonlight, under an almost clear sky. Down there on the silvery floor,
+little hillocks were scattered about under quilts and shawls; family
+units, presumably,--male, female, and young. Here and there a black shawl
+sat alone, nodding. They crouched submissively under the moonlight as if
+it were a spell. In one of those hillocks a baby was crying, but the
+sound was faint and thin, a slender protest which aroused no response.
+Everything was so still that I could hear snatches of the low talk
+between my friends. Cressida's voice was deep and entreating. She was
+remonstrating with Horace about his losses at bridge, begging him to keep
+away from the cardroom.
+
+"But what else is there to do on a trip like this, my Lady?" he
+expostulated, tossing his spark of a cigarette-end overboard. "What is
+there, now, to do?"
+
+"Oh, Horace!" she murmured, "how can you be so? If I were twenty-two, and
+a boy, with some one to back me--"
+
+Horace drew his shoulders together and buttoned his top-coat. "Oh, I've
+not your energy, Mother dear. We make no secret of that. I am as I am. I
+didn't ask to be born into this charming world."
+
+To this gallant speech Cressida made no answer. She stood with her hand
+on the rail and her head bent forward, as if she had lost herself in
+thought. The ends of her scarf, lifted by the breeze, fluttered upward,
+almost transparent in the argent light. Presently she turned away,--as
+if she had been alone and were leaving only the night sea behind
+her,--and walked slowly forward; a strong, solitary figure on the white
+deck, the smoke-like scarf twisting and climbing and falling back upon
+itself in the light over her head. She reached the door of her stateroom
+and disappeared. Yes, she was a Garnet, but she was also Cressida; and
+she had done what she had done.
+
+
+II
+
+My first recollections of Cressida Garnet have to do with the Columbus
+Public Schools; a little girl with sunny brown hair and eager bright
+eyes, looking anxiously at the teacher and reciting the names and
+dates of the Presidents: "James Buchanan, 1857-1861; Abraham Lincoln,
+1861-1865"; etc. Her family came from North Carolina, and they had that
+to feel superior about before they had Cressy. The Garnet "look," indeed,
+though based upon a strong family resemblance, was nothing more than the
+restless, preoccupied expression of an inflamed sense of importance. The
+father was a Democrat, in the sense that other men were doctors or
+lawyers. He scratched up some sort of poor living for his family behind
+office windows inscribed with the words "Real Estate. Insurance.
+Investments." But it was his political faith that, in a Republican
+community, gave him his feeling of eminence and originality. The Garnet
+children were all in school then, scattered along from the first grade
+to the ninth. In almost any room of our school building you might chance
+to enter, you saw the self-conscious little face of one or another of
+them. They were restrained, uncomfortable children, not frankly boastful,
+but insinuating, and somehow forever demanding special consideration and
+holding grudges against teachers and classmates who did not show it them;
+all but Cressida, who was naturally as sunny and open as a May morning.
+
+It was no wonder that Cressy ran away with young Charley Wilton, who
+hadn't a shabby thing about him except his health. He was her first
+music teacher, the choir-master of the church in which she sang. Charley
+was very handsome; the "romantic" son of an old, impoverished family. He
+had refused to go into a good business with his uncles and had gone
+abroad to study music when that was an extravagant and picturesque thing
+for an Ohio boy to do. His letters home were handed round among the
+members of his own family and of other families equally conservative.
+Indeed, Charley and what his mother called "his music" were the romantic
+expression of a considerable group of people; young cousins and old aunts
+and quiet-dwelling neighbours, allied by the amity of several
+generations. Nobody was properly married in our part of Columbus unless
+Charley Wilton, and no other, played the wedding march. The old ladies of
+the First Church used to say that he "hovered over the keys like a
+spirit." At nineteen Cressida was beautiful enough to turn a much harder
+head than the pale, ethereal one Charley Wilton bent above the organ.
+
+That the chapter which began so gracefully ran on into such a stretch of
+grim, hard prose, was simply Cressida's relentless bad luck. In her
+undertakings, in whatever she could lay hold of with her two hands, she
+was successful; but whatever happened to her was almost sure to be bad.
+Her family, her husbands, her son, would have crushed any other woman I
+have ever known. Cressida lived, more than most of us, "for others"; and
+what she seemed to promote among her beneficiaries was indolence and envy
+and discord--even dishonesty and turpitude.
+
+Her sisters were fond of saying--at club luncheons--that Cressida had
+remained "untouched by the breath of scandal," which was not strictly
+true. There were captious people who objected to her long and close
+association with Miletus Poppas. Her second husband, Ransome McChord, the
+foreign representative of the great McChord Harvester Company, whom she
+married in Germany, had so persistently objected to Poppas that she was
+eventually forced to choose between them. Any one who knew her well could
+easily understand why she chose Poppas.
+
+While her actual self was the least changed, the least modified by
+experience that it would be possible to imagine, there had been,
+professionally, two Cressida Garnets; the big handsome girl, already
+a "popular favourite" of the concert stage, who took with her to Germany
+the raw material of a great voice;--and the accomplished artist who came
+back. The singer that returned was largely the work of Miletus Poppas.
+Cressida had at least known what she needed, hunted for it, found it, and
+held fast to it. After experimenting with a score of teachers and
+accompanists, she settled down to work her problem out with Poppas. Other
+coaches came and went--she was always trying new ones--but Poppas
+survived them all. Cressida was not musically intelligent; she never
+became so. Who does not remember the countless rehearsals which were
+necessary before she first sang _Isolde_ in Berlin; the disgust of the
+conductor, the sullenness of the tenor, the rages of the blonde
+_teufelin_, boiling with the impatience of youth and genius, who sang her
+_Brangaena_? Everything but her driving power Cressida had to get from
+the outside.
+
+Poppas was, in his way, quite as incomplete as his pupil. He possessed a
+great many valuable things for which there is no market; intuitions,
+discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions and
+shadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida. I remember that when
+"Trilby" was published she fell into a fright and said such books ought
+to be prohibited by law; which gave me an intimation of what their
+relationship had actually become.
+
+Poppas was indispensable to her. He was like a book in which she had
+written down more about herself than she could possibly remember--and
+it was information that she might need at any moment. He was the one
+person who knew her absolutely and who saw into the bottom of her grief.
+An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
+Poppas knew all the simple things that were so desperately hard for
+Cressida, all the difficult things in which she could count on herself;
+her stupidities and inconsistencies, the chiaroscuro of the voice itself
+and what could be expected from the mind somewhat mismated with it. He
+knew where she was sound and where she was mended. With him she could
+share the depressing knowledge of what a wretchedly faulty thing any
+productive faculty is.
+
+But if Poppas was necessary to her career, she was his career. By the
+time Cressida left the Metropolitan Opera Company, Poppas was a rich
+man. He had always received a retaining fee and a percentage of her
+salary,--and he was a man of simple habits. Her liberality with Poppas
+was one of the weapons that Horace and the Garnets used against Cressida,
+and it was a point in the argument by which they justified to themselves
+their rapacity. Whatever they didn't get, they told themselves, Poppas
+would. What they got, therefore, they were only saving from Poppas. The
+Greek ached a good deal at the general pillage, and Cressida's
+conciliatory methods with her family made him sarcastic and spiteful. But
+he had to make terms, somehow, with the Garnets and Horace, and with the
+husband, if there happened to be one. He sometimes reminded them, when
+they fell to wrangling, that they must not, after all, overturn the boat
+under them, and that it would be better to stop just before they drove
+her wild than just after. As he was the only one among them who
+understood the sources of her fortune,--and they knew it,--he was able,
+when it came to a general set-to, to proclaim sanctuary for the goose
+that laid the golden eggs.
+
+That Poppas had caused the break between Cressida and McChord was another
+stick her sisters held over her. They pretended to understand perfectly,
+and were always explaining what they termed her "separation"; but they
+let Cressida know that it cast a shadow over her family and took a good
+deal of living down.
+
+A beautiful soundness of body, a seemingly exhaustless vitality, and a
+certain "squareness" of character as well as of mind, gave Cressida
+Garnet earning powers that were exceptional even in her lavishly rewarded
+profession. Managers chose her over the heads of singers much more
+gifted, because she was so sane, so conscientious, and above all, because
+she was so sure. Her efficiency was like a beacon to lightly anchored
+men, and in the intervals between her marriages she had as many suitors
+as Penelope. Whatever else they saw in her at first, her competency so
+impressed and delighted them that they gradually lost sight of everything
+else. Her sterling character was the subject of her story. Once, as she
+said, she very nearly escaped her destiny. With Blasius Bouchalka she
+became almost another woman, but not quite. Her "principles," or his lack
+of them, drove those two apart in the end. It was of Bouchalka that we
+talked upon that last voyage I ever made with Cressida Garnet, and not of
+Jerome Brown. She remembered the Bohemian kindly, and since it was the
+passage in her life to which she most often reverted, it is the one I
+shall relate here.
+
+
+III
+
+Late one afternoon in the winter of 189-, Cressida and I were walking in
+Central Park after the first heavy storm of the year. The snow had been
+falling thickly all the night before, and all day, until about four
+o'clock. Then the air grew much warmer and the sky cleared. Overhead it
+was a soft, rainy blue, and to the west a smoky gold. All around the
+horizon everything became misty and silvery; even the big, brutal
+buildings looked like pale violet water-colours on a silver ground. Under
+the elm trees along the Mall the air was purple as wisterias. The
+sheep-field, toward Broadway, was smooth and white, with a thin gold wash
+over it. At five o'clock the carriage came for us, but Cressida sent the
+driver home to the Tenth Street house with the message that she would
+dine uptown, and that Horace and Mr. Poppas were not to wait for her.
+As the horses trotted away we turned up the Mall.
+
+"I won't go indoors this evening for any one," Cressida declared. "Not
+while the sky is like that. Now we will go back to the laurel wood.
+They are so black, over the snow, that I could cry for joy. I don't know
+when I've felt so care-free as I feel tonight. Country winter, country
+stars--they always make me think of Charley Wilton."
+
+She was singing twice a week, sometimes oftener, at the Metropolitan that
+season, quite at the flood-tide of her powers, and so enmeshed in
+operatic routine that to be walking in the park at an unaccustomed hour,
+unattended by one of the men of her entourage, seemed adventurous. As we
+strolled along the little paths among the snow banks and the bronze
+laurel bushes, she kept going back to my poor young cousin, dead so long.
+"Things happen out of season. That's the worst of living. It was untimely
+for both of us, and yet," she sighed softly, "since he had to die, I'm
+not sorry. There was one beautifully happy year, though we were so poor,
+and it gave him--something! It would have been too hard if he'd had to
+miss everything." (I remember her simplicity, which never changed any
+more than winter or Ohio change.) "Yes," she went on, "I always feel very
+tenderly about Charley. I believe I'd do the same thing right over again,
+even knowing all that had to come after. If I were nineteen tonight, I'd
+rather go sleigh-riding with Charley Wilton than anything else I've ever
+done."
+
+We walked until the procession of carriages on the driveway, getting
+people home to dinner, grew thin, and then we went slowly toward the
+Seventh Avenue gate, still talking of Charley Wilton. We decided to dine
+at a place not far away, where the only access from the street was a
+narrow door, like a hole in the wall, between a tobacconist's and a
+flower shop. Cressida deluded herself into believing that her incognito
+was more successful in such non-descript places. She was wearing a long
+sable coat, and a deep fur hat, hung with red cherries, which she had
+brought from Russia. Her walk had given her a fine colour, and she
+looked so much a personage that no disguise could have been wholly
+effective.
+
+The dining-rooms, frescoed with conventional Italian scenes, were built
+round a court. The orchestra was playing as we entered and selected
+our table. It was not a bad orchestra, and we were no sooner seated than
+the first violin began to speak, to assert itself, as if it were suddenly
+done with mediocrity.
+
+"We have been recognized," Cressida said complacently. "What a good tone
+he has, quite unusual. What does he look like?" She sat with her back to
+the musicians.
+
+The violinist was standing, directing his men with his head and with the
+beak of his violin. He was a tall, gaunt young man, big-boned and rugged,
+in skin-tight clothes. His high forehead had a kind of luminous pallour,
+and his hair was jet black and somewhat stringy. His manner was excited
+and dramatic. At the end of the number he acknowledged the applause, and
+Cressida looked at him graciously over her shoulder. He swept her with a
+brilliant glance and bowed again. Then I noticed his red lips and thick
+black eyebrows.
+
+"He looks as if he were poor or in trouble," Cressida said. "See how
+short his sleeves are, and how he mops his face as if the least thing
+upset him. This is a hard winter for musicians."
+
+The violinist rummaged among some music piled on a chair, turning over
+the sheets with flurried rapidity, as if he were searching for a lost
+article of which he was in desperate need. Presently he placed some
+sheets upon the piano and began vehemently to explain something to the
+pianist. The pianist stared at the music doubtfully--he was a plump old
+man with a rosy, bald crown, and his shiny linen and neat tie made him
+look as if he were on his way to a party. The violinist bent over him,
+suggesting rhythms with his shoulders and running his bony finger up and
+down the pages. When he stepped back to his place, I noticed that the
+other players sat at ease, without raising their instruments.
+
+"He is going to try something unusual," I commented. "It looks as if it
+might be manuscript."
+
+It was something, at all events, that neither of us had heard before,
+though it was very much in the manner of the later Russian composers who
+were just beginning to be heard in New York. The young man made a
+brilliant dash of it, despite a lagging, scrambling accompaniment by the
+conservative pianist. This time we both applauded him vigorously and
+again, as he bowed, he swept us with his eye.
+
+The usual repertory of restaurant music followed, varied by a charming
+bit from Massenet's "Manon," then little known in this country. After we
+paid our check, Cressida took out one of her visiting cards and wrote
+across the top of it: _"We thank you for the unusual music and the
+pleasure your playing has given us."_ She folded the card in the middle,
+and asked the waiter to give it to the director of the orchestra. Pausing
+at the door, while the porter dashed out to call a cab, we saw, in the
+wall mirror, a pair of wild black eyes following us quite despairingly
+from behind the palms at the other end of the room. Cressida observed as
+we went out that the young man was probably having a hard struggle. "He
+never got those clothes here, surely. They were probably made by a
+country tailor in some little town in Austria. He seemed wild enough to
+grab at anything, and was trying to make himself heard above the dishes,
+poor fellow. There are so many like him. I wish I could help them all! I
+didn't quite have the courage to send him money. His smile, when he bowed
+to us, was not that of one who would take it, do you think?"
+
+"No," I admitted, "it wasn't. He seemed to be pleading for recognition. I
+don't think it was money he wanted."
+
+A week later I came upon some curious-looking manuscript songs on the
+piano in Cressida's music room. The text was in some Slavic tongue with
+a French translation written underneath. Both the handwriting and the
+musical script were done in a manner experienced, even distinguished. I
+was looking at them when Cressida came in.
+
+"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed. "I meant to ask you to try them over. Poppas
+thinks they are very interesting. They are from that young violinist,
+you remember,--the one we noticed in the restaurant that evening. He sent
+them with such a nice letter. His name is Blasius Bouchalka (Boú-kal-ka),
+a Bohemian."
+
+I sat down at the piano and busied myself with the manuscript, while
+Cressida dashed off necessary notes and wrote checks in a large square
+checkbook, six to a page. I supposed her immersed in sumptuary
+preoccupations when she suddenly looked over her shoulder and said,
+"Yes, that legend, _Sarka_, is the most interesting. Run it through a few
+times and I'll try it over with you."
+
+There was another, "_Dans les ombres des fôrets tristes_", which I
+thought quite as beautiful. They were fine songs; very individual, and
+each had that spontaneity which makes a song seem inevitable and, once
+for all, "done." The accompaniments were difficult, but not unnecessarily
+so; they were free from fatuous ingenuity and fine writing.
+
+"I wish he'd indicated his tempi a little more clearly," I remarked as I
+finished Sarka for the third time. "It matters, because he really has
+something to say. An orchestral accompaniment would be better, I should
+think."
+
+"Yes, he sent the orchestral arrangement. Poppas has it. It works out
+beautifully,--so much colour in the instrumentation. The English horn
+comes in so effectively there," she rose and indicated the passage, "just
+right with the voice. I've asked him to come next Sunday, so please be
+here if you can. I want to know what you think of him."
+
+Cressida was always at home to her friends on Sunday afternoon unless she
+was billed for the evening concert at the Opera House, in which case we
+were sufficiently advised by the daily press. Bouchalka must have been
+told to come early, for when I arrived on Sunday, at four, he and
+Cressida had the music-room quite to themselves and were standing by the
+piano in earnest conversation. In a few moments they were separated by
+other early comers, and I led Bouchalka across the hall to the
+drawing-room. The guests, as they came in, glanced at him curiously. He
+wore a dark blue suit, soft and rather baggy, with a short coat, and a
+high double-breasted vest with two rows of buttons coming up to the loops
+of his black tie. This costume was even more foreign-looking than his
+skin-tight dress clothes, but it was more becoming. He spoke hurried,
+elliptical English, and very good French. All his sympathies were French
+rather than German--the Czecks lean to the one culture or to the other. I
+found him a fierce, a transfixing talker. His brilliant eyes, his gaunt
+hands, his white, deeply-lined forehead, all entered into his speech.
+
+I asked him whether he had not recognized Madame Garnet at once when we
+entered the restaurant that evening more than a week ago.
+
+"_Mais, certainement!_ I hear her twice when she sings in the afternoon,
+and sometimes at night for the last act. I have a friend who buys a
+ticket for the first part, and he comes out and gives to me his pass-back
+check, and I return for the last act. That is convenient if I am broke."
+He explained the trick with amusement but without embarrassment, as if it
+were a shift that we might any of us be put to.
+
+I told him that I admired his skill with the violin, but his songs much
+more.
+
+He threw out his red under-lip and frowned. "Oh, I have no instrument!
+The violin I play from necessity; the flute, the piano, as it happens.
+For three years now I write all the time, and it spoils the hand for
+violin."
+
+When the maid brought him his tea, he took both muffins and cakes and
+told me that he was very hungry. He had to lunch and dine at the place
+where he played, and he got very tired of the food. "But since," his
+black eyebrows nearly met in an acute angle, "but since, before, I eat
+at a bakery, with the slender brown roach on the pie, I guess I better
+let alone well enough." He paused to drink his tea; as he tasted one of
+the cakes his face lit with sudden animation and he gazed across the hall
+after the maid with the tray--she was now holding it before the aged and
+ossified 'cellist of the Hempfstangle Quartette. "_Des gâteaux_" he
+murmured feelingly, "_ou est-ce qu'elle peut trouver de tels gâteaux ici
+â_ New York?"
+
+I explained to him that Madame Garnet had an accomplished cook who made
+them,--an Austrian, I thought.
+
+He shook his head. "_Austrichienne? Je ne pense pas._"
+
+Cressida was approaching with the new Spanish soprano, Mme. Bartolas, who
+was all black velvet and long black feathers, with a lace veil over her
+rich pallour and even a little black patch on her chin. I beckoned them.
+"Tell me, Cressida, isn't Ruzenka an Austrian?"
+
+She looked surprised. "No, a Bohemian, though I got her in Vienna."
+Bouchalka's expression, and the remnant of a cake in his long fingers,
+gave her the connection. She laughed. "You like them? Of course, they are
+of your own country. You shall have more of them." She nodded and went
+away to greet a guest who had just come in.
+
+A few moments later, Horace, then a beautiful lad in Eton clothes,
+brought another cup of tea and a plate of cakes for Bouchalka. We sat
+down in a corner, and talked about his songs. He was neither boastful nor
+deprecatory. He knew exactly in what respects they were excellent. I
+decided as I watched his face, that he must be under thirty. The deep
+lines in his forehead probably came there from his habit of frowning
+densely when he struggled to express himself, and suddenly elevating his
+coal-black eyebrows when his ideas cleared. His teeth were white, very
+irregular and interesting. The corrective methods of modern dentistry
+would have taken away half his good looks. His mouth would have been
+much less attractive for any re-arranging of those long, narrow,
+over-crowded teeth. Along with his frown and his way of thrusting out his
+lip, they contributed, somehow, to the engaging impetuousness of his
+conversation. As we talked about his songs, his manner changed. Before
+that he had seemed responsive and easily pleased. Now he grew abstracted,
+as if I had taken away his pleasant afternoon and wakened him to his
+miseries. He moved restlessly in his clothes. When I mentioned Puccini,
+he held his head in his hands.
+
+"Why is it they like that always and always? A little, oh yes, very nice.
+But so much, always the same thing! Why?" He pierced me with the
+despairing glance which had followed us out of the restaurant.
+
+I asked him whether he had sent any of his songs to the publishers and
+named one whom I knew to be discriminating. He shrugged his shoulders.
+"They not want Bohemian songs. They not want my music. Even the street
+cars will not stop for me here, like for other people. Every time, I wait
+on the corner until somebody else make a signal to the car, and then it
+stop,--but not for me."
+
+Most people cannot become utterly poor; whatever happens, they can right
+themselves a little. But one felt that Bouchalka was the sort of person
+who might actually starve or blow his brains out. Something very
+important had been left out either of his make-up or of his education;
+something that we are not accustomed to miss in people.
+
+Gradually the parlour was filled with little groups of friends, and I
+took Bouchalka back to the music-room where Cressida was surrounded by
+her guests; feathered women, with large sleeves and hats, young men of no
+importance, in frock coats, with shining hair, and the smile which is
+intended to say so many flattering things but which really expresses
+little more than a desire to get on. The older men were standing about
+waiting for a word _à deux_ with the hostess. To these people Bouchalka
+had nothing to say. He stood stiffly at the outer edge of the circle,
+watching Cressida with intent, impatient eyes, until, under the pretext
+of showing him a score, she drew him into the alcove at the back end of
+the long room, where she kept her musical library. The bookcases ran from
+the floor to the ceiling. There was a table and a reading-lamp, and a
+window seat looking upon the little walled garden. Two persons could be
+quite withdrawn there, and yet be a part of the general friendly scene.
+Cressida took a score from the shelf, and sat down with Bouchalka upon
+the window seat, the book open between them, though neither of them
+looked at it again. They fell to talking with great earnestness. At last
+the Bohemian pulled out a large, yellowing silver watch, held it up
+before him, and stared at it a moment as if it were an object of horror.
+He sprang up, bent over Cressida's hand and murmured something, dashed
+into the hall and out of the front door without waiting for the maid to
+open it. He had worn no overcoat, apparently. It was then seven o'clock;
+he would surely be late at his post in the up-town restaurant. I hoped he
+would have wit enough to take the elevated.
+
+After supper Cressida told me his story. His parents, both poor
+musicians,--the mother a singer--died while he was yet a baby, and he
+was left to the care of an arbitrary uncle who resolved to make a priest
+of him. He was put into a monastery school and kept there. The organist
+and choir-director, fortunately for Blasius, was an excellent musician, a
+man who had begun his career brilliantly, but who had met with crushing
+sorrows and disappointments in the world. He devoted himself to his
+talented pupil, and was the only teacher the young man ever had. At
+twenty-one, when he was ready for the novitiate, Blasius felt that the
+call of life was too strong for him, and he ran away out into a world
+of which he knew nothing. He tramped southward to Vienna, begging and
+playing his fiddle from town to town. In Vienna he fell in with a gipsy
+band which was being recruited for a Paris restaurant and went with them
+to Paris. He played in cafés and in cheap theatres, did transcribing for
+a music publisher, tried to get pupils. For four years he was the mouse,
+and hunger was the cat. She kept him on the jump. When he got work he
+did not understand why; when he lost a job he did not understand why.
+During the time when most of us acquire a practical sense, get a
+half-unconscious knowledge of hard facts and market values, he had been
+shut away from the world, fed like the pigeons in the bell-tower of his
+monastery. Bouchalka had now been in New York a year, and for all he knew
+about it, Cressida said, he might have landed the day before yesterday.
+
+Several weeks went by, and as Bouchalka did not reappear on Tenth Street,
+Cressida and I went once more to the place where he had played, only to
+find another violinist leading the orchestra. We summoned the proprietor,
+a Swiss-Italian, polite and solicitous. He told us the gentleman was not
+playing there any more,--was playing somewhere else, but he had forgotten
+where. We insisted upon talking to the old pianist, who at last
+reluctantly admitted that the Bohemian had been dismissed. He had arrived
+very late one Sunday night three weeks ago, and had hot words with the
+proprietor. He had been late before, and had been warned. He was a very
+talented fellow, but wild and not to be depended upon. The old man gave
+us the address of a French boarding-house on Seventh Avenue where
+Bouchalka used to room. We drove there at once, but the woman who kept
+the place said that he had gone away two weeks before, leaving no
+address, as he never got letters. Another Bohemian, who did engraving
+on glass, had a room with her, and when he came home perhaps he could
+tell where Bouchalka was, for they were friends.
+
+It took us several days to run Bouchalka down, but when we did find him
+Cressida promptly busied herself in his behalf. She sang his _"Sarka"_
+with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at a Sunday night concert, she got
+him a position with the Symphony Orchestra, and persuaded the
+conservative Hempfstangle Quartette to play one of his chamber
+compositions from manuscript. She aroused the interest of a publisher in
+his work, and introduced him to people who were helpful to him.
+
+By the new year Bouchalka was fairly on his feet. He had proper clothes
+now, and Cressida's friends found him attractive. He was usually at her
+house on Sunday afternoons; so usually, indeed, that Poppas began
+pointedly to absent himself. When other guests arrived, the Bohemian and
+his patroness were always found at the critical point of discussion,--at
+the piano, by the fire, in the alcove at the end of the room--both of
+them interested and animated. He was invariably respectful and admiring,
+deferring to her in every tone and gesture, and she was perceptibly
+pleased and flattered,--as if all this were new to her and she were
+tasting the sweetness of a first success.
+
+One wild day in March Cressida burst tempestuously into my apartment and
+threw herself down, declaring that she had just come from the most trying
+rehearsal she had ever lived through. When I tried to question her about
+it, she replied absently and continued to shiver and crouch by the fire.
+Suddenly she rose, walked to the window, and stood looking out over the
+Square, glittering with ice and rain and strewn with the wrecks of
+umbrellas. When she turned again, she approached me with determination.
+
+"I shall have to ask you to go with me," she said firmly. "That crazy
+Bouchalka has gone and got a pleurisy or something. It may be pneumonia;
+there is an epidemic of it just now. I've sent Dr. Brooks to him, but I
+can never tell anything from what a doctor says. I've got to see
+Bouchalka and his nurse, and what sort of place he's in. I've been
+rehearsing all day and I'm singing tomorrow night; I can't have so much
+on my mind. Can you come with me? It will save time in the end."
+
+I put on my furs, and we went down to Cressida's carriage, waiting below.
+She gave the driver a number on Seventh Avenue, and then began feeling
+her throat with the alarmed expression which meant that she was not going
+to talk. We drove in silence to the address, and by this time it was
+growing dark. The French landlady was a cordial, comfortable person who
+took Cressida in at a glance and seemed much impressed. Cressida's
+incognito was never successful. Her black gown was inconspicuous enough,
+but over it she wore a dark purple velvet carriage coat, lined with fur
+and furred at the cuffs and collar. The Frenchwoman's eye ran over it
+delightedly and scrutinized the veil which only half-concealed the
+well-known face behind it. She insisted upon conducting us up to the
+fourth floor herself, running ahead of us and turning up the gas jets in
+the dark, musty-smelling halls. I suspect that she tarried outside the
+door after we sent the nurse for her walk.
+
+We found the sick man in a great walnut bed, a relic of the better days
+which this lodging house must have seen. The grimy red plush carpet, the
+red velvet chairs with broken springs, the double gilt-framed mirror
+above the mantel, had all been respectable, substantial contributions to
+comfort in their time. The fireplace was now empty and grateless, and an
+ill-smelling gas stove burned in its sooty recess under the cracked
+marble. The huge arched windows were hung with heavy red curtains, pinned
+together and lightly stirred by the wind which rattled the loose frames.
+
+I was examining these things while Cressida bent over Bouchalka. Her
+carriage cloak she threw over the foot of his bed, either from a
+protective impulse, or because there was no place else to put it. After
+she had greeted him and seated herself, the sick man reached down and
+drew the cloak up over him, looking at it with weak, childish pleasure
+and stroking the velvet with his long fingers. "_Couleur de gloire,
+couleur des reines!_" I heard him murmur. He thrust the sleeve under his
+chin and closed his eyes. His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound in
+the room. If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, he
+looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration, naive and
+uninquiring, as if he were smiling at a dream or a miracle.
+
+The nurse was gone for an hour, and we sat quietly, Cressida with her
+eyes fixed on Bouchalka, and I absorbed in the strange atmosphere of the
+house, which seemed to seep in under the door and through the walls.
+Occasionally we heard a call for "_de l'eau chaude_!" and the heavy trot
+of a serving woman on the stairs. On the floor below somebody was
+struggling with Schubert's Marche Militaire on a coarse-toned upright
+piano. Sometimes, when a door was opened, one could hear a parrot
+screaming, "_Voilà, voilà, tonnerre!_" The house was built before 1870,
+as one could tell from windows and mouldings, and the walls were thick.
+The sounds were not disturbing and Bouchalka was probably used to them.
+
+When the nurse returned and we rose to go, Bouchalka still lay with his
+cheek on her cloak, and Cressida left it. "It seems to please him," she
+murmured as we went down the stairs. "I can go home without a wrap. It's
+not far." I had, of course, to give her my furs, as I was not singing
+_Donna Anna_ tomorrow evening and she was.
+
+After this I was not surprised by any devout attitude in which I happened
+to find the Bohemian when I entered Cressida's music-room unannounced,
+or by any radiance on her face when she rose from the window-seat in the
+alcove and came down the room to greet me.
+
+Bouchalka was, of course, very often at the Opera now. On almost any
+night when Cressida sang, one could see his narrow black head--high
+above the temples and rather constrained behind the ears--peering from
+some part of the house. I used to wonder what he thought of Cressida as
+an artist, but probably he did not think seriously at all. A great voice,
+a handsome woman, a great prestige, all added together made a "great
+artist," the common synonym for success. Her success, and the material
+evidences of it, quite blinded him. I could never draw from him anything
+adequate about Anna Straka, Cressida's Slavic rival, and this perhaps
+meant that he considered comparison disloyal. All the while that Cressida
+was singing reliably, and satisfying the management, Straka was singing
+uncertainly and making history. Her voice was primarily defective, and
+her immediate vocal method was bad. Cressida was always living up to her
+contract, delivering the whole order in good condition; while the Slav
+was sometimes almost voiceless, sometimes inspired. She put you off with
+a hope, a promise, time after time. But she was quite as likely to put
+you off with a revelation,--with an interpretation that was inimitable,
+unrepeatable.
+
+Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a
+great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme.
+Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he
+managed to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to see
+herself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her that he
+carried somewhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quite
+beyond herself. Things that had been chilled under the grind came to life
+in her that winter, with the breath of Bouchalka's adoration. Then, if
+ever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside her
+window; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer. She wished
+there were no Poppas, no Horace, no Garnets. She longed to be only the
+bewitching creature Bouchalka imagined her.
+
+One April day when we were driving in the Park, Cressida, superb in a
+green-and-primrose costume hurried over from Paris, turned to me smiling
+and said: "Do you know, this is the first spring I haven't dreaded. It's
+the first one I've ever really had. Perhaps people never have more than
+one, whether it comes early or late." She told me that she was
+overwhelmingly in love.
+
+Our visit to Bouchalka when he was ill had, of course, been reported, and
+the men about the Opera House had made of it the only story they have the
+wit to invent. They could no more change the pattern of that story than
+the spider could change the design of its web. But being, as she said,
+"in love" suggested to Cressida only one plan of action; to have the
+Tenth Street house done over, to put more money into her brothers'
+business, send Horace to school, raise Poppas' percentage, and then with
+a clear conscience be married in the Church of the Ascension. She went
+through this program with her usual thoroughness. She was married in June
+and sailed immediately with her husband. Poppas was to join them in
+Vienna in August, when she would begin to work again. From her letters I
+gathered that all was going well, even beyond her hopes.
+
+When they returned in October, both Cressida and Blasius seemed changed
+for the better. She was perceptibly freshened and renewed. She attacked
+her work at once with more vigour and more ease; did not drive herself so
+relentlessly. A little carelessness became her wonderfully. Bouchalka was
+less gaunt, and much less flighty and perverse. His frank pleasure in the
+comfort and order of his wife's establishment was ingratiating, even if
+it was a little amusing. Cressida had the sewing-room at the top of the
+house made over into a study for him. When I went up there to see him, I
+usually found him sitting before the fire or walking about with his hands
+in his coat pockets, admiring his new possessions. He explained the
+ingenious arrangement of his study to me a dozen times.
+
+With Cressida's friends and guests, Bouchalka assumed nothing for
+himself. His deportment amounted to a quiet, unobtrusive appreciation of
+her and of his good fortune. He was proud to owe his wife so much.
+Cressida's Sunday afternoons were more popular than ever, since she
+herself had so much more heart for them. Bouchalka's picturesque presence
+stimulated her graciousness and charm. One still found them conversing
+together as eagerly as in the days when they saw each other but seldom.
+Consequently their guests were never bored. We felt as if the Tenth
+Street house had a pleasant climate quite its own. In the spring, when
+the Metropolitan company went on tour, Cressida's husband accompanied
+her, and afterward they again sailed for Genoa.
+
+During the second winter people began to say that Bouchalka was becoming
+too thoroughly domesticated, and that since he was growing heavier in
+body he was less attractive. I noticed his increasing reluctance to stir
+abroad. Nobody could say that he was "wild" now. He seemed to dread
+leaving the house, even for an evening. Why should he go out, he said,
+when he had everything he wanted at home? He published very little. One
+was given to understand that he was writing an opera. He lived in the
+Tenth Street house like a tropical plant under glass. Nowhere in New York
+could he get such cookery as Ruzenka's. Ruzenka ("little Rose") had,
+like her mistress, bloomed afresh, now that she had a man and a
+compatriot to cook for. Her invention was tireless, and she took things
+with a high hand in the kitchen, confident of a perfect appreciation. She
+was a plump, fair, blue-eyed girl, giggly and easily flattered, with
+teeth like cream. She was passionately domestic, and her mind was full of
+homely stories and proverbs and superstitions which she somehow worked
+into her cookery. She and Bouchalka had between them a whole literature
+of traditions about sauces and fish and pastry. The cellar was full of
+the wines he liked, and Ruzenka always knew what wines to serve with the
+dinner. Blasius' monastery had been famous for good living.
+
+That winter was a very cold one, and I think the even temperature of the
+house enslaved Bouchalka. "Imagine it," he once said to me when I dropped
+in during a blinding snowstorm and found him reading before the fire. "To
+be warm all the time, every day! It is like Aladdin. In Paris I have had
+weeks together when I was not warm once, when I did not have a bath once,
+like the cats in the street. The nights were a misery. People have
+terrible dreams when they are so cold. Here I waken up in the night so
+warm I do not know what it means. Her door is open, and I turn on my
+light. I cannot believe in myself until I see that she is there."
+
+I began to think that Bouchalka's wildness had been the desperation which
+the tamest animals exhibit when they are tortured or terrorized.
+Naturally luxurious, he had suffered more than most men under the pinch
+of penury. Those first beautiful compositions, full of the folk-music of
+his own country, had been wrung out of him by home-sickness and
+heart-ache. I wondered whether he could compose only under the spur of
+hunger and loneliness, and whether his talent might not subside with his
+despair. Some such apprehension must have troubled Cressida, though his
+gratitude would have been propitiatory to a more exacting task-master.
+She had always liked to make people happy, and he was the first one who
+had accepted her bounty without sourness. When he did not accompany her
+upon her spring tour, Cressida said it was because travelling interfered
+with composition; but I felt that she was deeply disappointed. Blasius,
+or Bla[vz]ej, as his wife had with difficulty learned to call him, was
+not showy or extravagant. He hated hotels, even the best of them.
+Cressida had always fought for the hearthstone and the fireside, and the
+humour of Destiny is sometimes to give us too much of what we desire. I
+believe she would have preferred even enthusiasm about other women to his
+utter _oisiveté_. It was his old fire, not his docility, that had won
+her.
+
+During the third season after her marriage Cressida had only twenty-five
+performances at the Metropolitan, and she was singing out of town a great
+deal. Her husband did not bestir himself to accompany her, but he
+attended, very faithfully, to her correspondence and to her business at
+home. He had no ambitious schemes to increase her fortune, and he carried
+out her directions exactly. Nevertheless, Cressida faced her concert
+tours somewhat grimly, and she seldom talked now about their plans for
+the future.
+
+The crisis in this growing estrangement came about by accident,--one of
+those chance occurrences that affect our lives more than years of ordered
+effort,--and it came in an inverted form of a situation old to comedy.
+Cressida had been on the road for several weeks; singing in Minneapolis,
+Cleveland, St. Paul, then up into Canada and back to Boston. From Boston
+she was to go directly to Chicago, coming down on the five o'clock train
+and taking the eleven, over the Lake Shore, for the West. By her schedule
+she would have time to change cars comfortably at the Grand Central
+station.
+
+On the journey down from Boston she was seized with a great desire to see
+Blasius. She decided, against her custom, one might say against her
+principles, to risk a performance with the Chicago orchestra without
+rehearsal, to stay the night in New York and go west by the afternoon
+train the next day. She telegraphed Chicago, but she did not telegraph
+Blasius, because she wished--the old fallacy of affection!--to "surprise"
+him. She could take it for granted that, at eleven on a cold winter
+night, he would be in the Tenth Street house and nowhere else in New
+York. She sent Poppas--paler than usual with accusing scorn--and her
+trunks on to Chicago, and with only her travelling bag and a sense of
+being very audacious in her behaviour and still very much in love, she
+took a cab for Tenth Street.
+
+Since it was her intention to disturb Blasius as little as possible and
+to delight him as much as possible, she let herself in with her latch-key
+and went directly to his room. She did not find him there. Indeed, she
+found him where he should not have been at all. There must have been a
+trying scene.
+
+Ruzenka was sent away in the morning, and the other two maids as well. By
+eight o'clock Cressida and Bouchalka had the house to themselves. Nobody
+had any breakfast. Cressida took the afternoon train to keep her
+engagement with Theodore Thomas, and to think over the situation. Blasius
+was left in the Tenth Street house with only the furnace man's wife to
+look after him. His explanation of his conduct was that he had been
+drinking too much. His digression, he swore, was casual. It had never
+occurred before, and he could only appeal to his wife's magnanimity. But
+it was, on the whole, easier for Cressida to be firm than to be yielding,
+and she knew herself too well to attempt a readjustment. She had never
+made shabby compromises, and it was too late for her to begin. When she
+returned to New York she went to a hotel, and she never saw Bouchalka
+alone again. Since he admitted her charge, the legal formalities were
+conducted so quietly that the granting of her divorce was announced in
+the morning papers before her friends knew that there was the least
+likelihood of one. Cressida's concert tours had interrupted the
+hospitalities of the house.
+
+While the lawyers were arranging matters, Bouchalka came to see me. He
+was remorseful and miserable enough, and I think his perplexity was quite
+sincere. If there had been an intrigue with a woman of her own class, an
+infatuation, an affair, he said, he could understand. But anything so
+venial and accidental--He shook his head slowly back and forth. He
+assured me that he was not at all himself on that fateful evening, and
+that when he recovered himself he would have sent Ruzenka away, making
+proper provision for her, of course. It was an ugly thing, but ugly
+things sometimes happened in one's life, and one had to put them away and
+forget them. He could have overlooked any accident that might have
+occurred when his wife was on the road, with Poppas, for example. I cut
+him short, and he bent his head to my reproof.
+
+"I know," he said, "such things are different with her. But when have I
+said that I am noble as she is? Never. But I have appreciated and I have
+adored. About me, say what you like. But if you say that in this there
+was any _méprise_ to my wife, that is not true. I have lost all my place
+here. I came in from the streets; but I understand her, and all the fine
+things in her, better than any of you here. If that accident had not
+been, she would have lived happy with me for years. As for me, I have
+never believed in this happiness. I was not born under a good star.
+How did it come? By accident. It goes by accident. She tried to give good
+fortune to an unfortunate man, _un miserable_; that was her mistake. It
+cannot be done in this world. The lucky should marry the lucky."
+Bouchalka stopped and lit a cigarette. He sat sunk in my chair as if he
+never meant to get up again. His large hands, now so much plumper than
+when I first knew him, hung limp. When he had consumed his cigarette he
+turned to me again.
+
+"I, too, have tried. Have I so much as written one note to a lady since
+she first put out her hand to help me? Some of the artists who sing my
+compositions have been quite willing to plague my wife a little if I make
+the least sign. With the Española, for instance, I have had to be very
+stern, _farouche_; she is so very playful. I have never given my wife the
+slightest annoyance of this kind. Since I married her, I have not kissed
+the cheek of one lady! Then one night I am bored and drink too much
+champagne and I become a fool. What does it matter? Did my wife marry the
+fool of me? No, she married me, with my mind and my feelings all here, as
+I am today. But she is getting a divorce from the fool of me, which she
+would never see _anyhow_! The stupidity which excuse me is the thing she
+will not overlook. Even in her memory of me she will be harsh."
+
+His view of his conduct and its consequences was fatalistic: he was meant
+to have just so much misery every day of his life; for three years it had
+been withheld, had been piling up somewhere, underground, overhead; now
+the accumulation burst over him. He had come to pay his respects to me,
+he said, to declare his undying gratitude to Madame Garnet, and to bid
+me farewell. He took up his hat and cane and kissed my hand. I have never
+seen him since. Cressida made a settlement upon him, but even Poppas,
+tortured by envy and curiosity, never discovered how much it was. It was
+very little, she told me. "_Pour des gâteaux,_" she added with a smile
+that was not unforgiving. She could not bear to think of his being in
+want when so little could make him comfortable.
+
+He went back to his own village in Bohemia. He wrote her that the old
+monk, his teacher, was still alive, and that from the windows of his room
+in the town he could see the pigeons flying forth from and back to the
+monastery bell-tower all day long. He sent her a song, with his own
+words, about those pigeons,--quite a lovely thing. He was the bell tower,
+and _les colombes_ were his memories of her.
+
+
+IV
+
+Jerome Brown proved, on the whole, the worst of Cressida's husbands, and,
+with the possible exception of her eldest brother, Buchanan Garnet, he
+was the most rapacious of the men with whom she had had to do. It was one
+thing to gratify every wish of a cake-loving fellow like Bouchalka, but
+quite another to stand behind a financier. And Brown would be a financier
+or nothing. After her marriage with him, Cressida grew rapidly older. For
+the first time in her life she wanted to go abroad and live--to get
+Jerome Brown away from the scene of his unsuccessful but undiscouraged
+activities. But Brown was not a man who could be amused and kept out of
+mischief in Continental hotels. He had to be a figure, if only a "mark,"
+in Wall street. Nothing else would gratify his peculiar vanity. The
+deeper he went in, the more affectionately he told Cressida that now all
+her cares and anxieties were over. To try to get related facts out of his
+optimism was like trying to find framework in a feather bed. All Cressida
+knew was that she was perpetually "investing" to save investments. When
+she told me she had put a mortgage on the Tenth Street house, her eyes
+filled with tears. "Why is it? I have never cared about money, except to
+make people happy with it, and it has been the curse of my life. It has
+spoiled all my relations with people. Fortunately," she added
+irrelevantly, drying her eyes, "Jerome and Poppas get along well." Jerome
+could have got along with anybody; that is a promoter's business. His
+warm hand, his flushed face, his bright eye, and his newest funny
+story,--Poppas had no weapons that could do execution with a man like
+that.
+
+Though Brown's ventures never came home, there was nothing openly
+disastrous until the outbreak of the revolution in Mexico jeopardized
+his interests there. Then Cressida went to England--where she could
+always raise money from a faithful public--for a winter concert tour.
+When she sailed, her friends knew that her husband's affairs were in a
+bad way; but we did not know how bad until after Cressida's death.
+
+Cressida Garnet, as all the world knows, was lost on the _Titanic_.
+Poppas and Horace, who had been travelling with her, were sent on a week
+earlier and came as safely to port as if they had never stepped out of
+their London hotel. But Cressida had waited for the first trip of the sea
+monster--she still believed that all advertising was good--and she went
+down on the road between the old world and the new. She had been ill, and
+when the collision occurred she was in her stateroom, a modest one
+somewhere down in the boat, for she was travelling economically.
+Apparently she never left her cabin. She was not seen on the decks, and
+none of the survivors brought any word of her.
+
+On Monday, when the wireless messages were coming from the _Carpathia_
+with the names of the passengers who had been saved, I went, with so
+many hundred others, down to the White Star offices. There I saw
+Cressida's motor, her redoubtable initials on the door, with four men
+sitting in the limousine. Jerome Brown, stripped of the promoter's
+joviality and looking flabby and old, sat behind with Buchanan Garnet,
+who had come on from Ohio. I had not seen him for years. He was now an
+old man, but he was still conscious of being in the public eye, and sat
+turning a cigar about in his face with that foolish look of importance
+which Cressida's achievement had stamped upon all the Garnets. Poppas was
+in front, with Horace. He was gnawing the finger of his chamois glove as
+it rested on the top of his cane. His head was sunk, his shoulders drawn
+together; he looked as old as Jewry. I watched them, wondering whether
+Cressida would come back to them if she could. After the last names were
+posted, the four men settled back into the powerful car--one of the best
+made--and the chauffeur backed off. I saw him dash away the tears from
+his face with the back of his driving glove. He was an Irish boy, and had
+been devoted to Cressida.
+
+When the will was read, Henry Gilbert, the lawyer, an old friend of her
+early youth, and I, were named executors. A nice job we had of it. Most
+of her large fortune had been converted into stocks that were almost
+worthless. The marketable property realized only a hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars. To defeat the bequest of fifty thousand dollars to
+Poppas, Jerome Brown and her family contested the will. They brought
+Cressida's letters into court to prove that the will did not represent
+her intentions, often expressed in writing through many years, to
+"provide well" for them.
+
+Such letters they were! The writing of a tired, overdriven woman;
+promising money, sending money herewith, asking for an acknowledgment
+of the draft sent last month, etc. In the letters to Jerome Brown she
+begged for information about his affairs and entreated him to go with her
+to some foreign city where they could live quietly and where she could
+rest; if they were careful, there would "be enough for all." Neither
+Brown nor her brothers and sisters had any sense of shame about these
+letters. It seemed never to occur to them that this golden stream,
+whether it rushed or whether it trickled, came out of the industry, out
+of the mortal body of a woman. They regarded her as a natural source
+of wealth; a copper vein, a diamond mine.
+
+Henry Gilbert is a good lawyer himself, and he employed an able man to
+defend the will. We determined that in this crisis we would stand by
+Poppas, believing it would be Cressida's wish. Out of the lot of them, he
+was the only one who had helped her to make one penny of the money that
+had brought her so much misery. He was at least more deserving than the
+others. We saw to it that Poppas got his fifty thousand, and he actually
+departed, at last, for his city in la sainte Asie, where it never rains
+and where he will never again have to hold a hot water bottle to his
+face.
+
+The rest of the property was fought for to a finish. Poppas out of the
+way, Horace and Brown and the Garnets quarrelled over her personal
+effects. They went from floor to floor of the Tenth Street house. The
+will provided that Cressida's jewels and furs and gowns were to go to her
+sisters. Georgie and Julia wrangled over them down to the last moleskin.
+They were deeply disappointed that some of the muffs and stoles which
+they remembered as very large, proved, when exhumed from storage and
+exhibited beside furs of a modern cut, to be ridiculously scant. A year
+ago the sisters were still reasoning with each other about pearls and
+opals and emeralds.
+
+I wrote Poppas some account of these horrors, as during the court
+proceedings we had become rather better friends than of old. His reply
+arrived only a few days ago; a photograph of himself upon a camel, under
+which is written:
+
+    Traulich und Treu
+    ist's nur in der Tiefe:
+    falsch und feig
+ist was dort oben sich freut!
+
+His reply, and the memories it awakens--memories which have followed
+Poppas into the middle of Asia, seemingly,--prompted this informal
+narration.
+
+
+
+
+A Gold Slipper
+
+
+
+
+Marshall McKann followed his wife and her friend Mrs. Post down the
+aisle and up the steps to the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall with an
+ill-concealed feeling of grievance. Heaven knew he never went to
+concerts, and to be mounted upon the stage in this fashion, as if he were
+a "highbrow" from Sewickley, or some unfortunate with a musical wife, was
+ludicrous. A man went to concerts when he was courting, while he was a
+junior partner. When he became a person of substance he stopped that sort
+of nonsense. His wife, too, was a sensible person, the daughter of an old
+Pittsburgh family as solid and well-rooted as the McKanns. She would
+never have bothered him about this concert had not the meddlesome Mrs.
+Post arrived to pay her a visit. Mrs. Post was an old school friend of
+Mrs. McKann, and because she lived in Cincinnati she was always keeping
+up with the world and talking about things in which no one else was
+interested, music among them. She was an aggressive lady, with weighty
+opinions, and a deep voice like a jovial bassoon. She had arrived only
+last night, and at dinner she brought it out that she could on no account
+miss Kitty Ayrshire's recital; it was, she said, the sort of thing no one
+could afford to miss.
+
+When McKann went into town in the morning he found that every seat in the
+music-hall was sold. He telephoned his wife to that effect, and, thinking
+he had settled the matter, made his reservation on the 11.25 train for
+New York. He was unable to get a drawing-room because this same Kitty
+Ayrshire had taken the last one. He had not intended going to New York
+until the following week, but he preferred to be absent during Mrs.
+Post's incumbency.
+
+In the middle of the morning, when he was deep in his correspondence,
+his wife called him up to say the enterprising Mrs. Post had telephoned
+some musical friends in Sewickley and had found that two hundred
+folding-chairs were to be placed on the stage of the concert-hall, behind
+the piano, and that they would be on sale at noon. Would he please get
+seats in the front row? McKann asked if they would not excuse him, since
+he was going over to New York on the late train, would be tired, and
+would not have time to dress, etc. No, not at all. It would be foolish
+for two women to trail up to the stage unattended. Mrs. Post's husband
+always accompanied her to concerts, and she expected that much attention
+from her host. He needn't dress, and he could take a taxi from the
+concert-hall to the East Liberty station.
+
+The outcome of it all was that, though his bag was at the station, here
+was McKann, in the worst possible humour, facing the large audience to
+which he was well known, and sitting among a lot of music students and
+excitable old maids. Only the desperately zealous or the morbidly curious
+would endure two hours in those wooden chairs, and he sat in the front
+row of this hectic body, somehow made a party to a transaction for which
+he had the utmost contempt.
+
+When McKann had been in Paris, Kitty Ayrshire was singing at the Comique,
+and he wouldn't go to hear her--even there, where one found so little
+that was better to do. She was too much talked about, too much
+advertised; always being thrust in an American's face as if she were
+something to be proud of. Perfumes and petticoats and cutlets were named
+for her. Some one had pointed Kitty out to him one afternoon when she was
+driving in the Bois with a French composer--old enough, he judged, to be
+her father--who was said to be infatuated, carried away by her. McKann
+was told that this was one of the historic passions of old age. He had
+looked at her on that occasion, but she was so befrilled and befeathered
+that he caught nothing but a graceful outline and a small, dark head
+above a white ostrich boa. He had noted with disgust, however, the
+stooped shoulders and white imperial of the silk-hatted man beside her,
+and the senescent line of his back. McKann described to his wife this
+unpleasing picture only last night, while he was undressing, when he was
+making every possible effort to avert this concert party. But Bessie
+only looked superior and said she wished to hear Kitty Ayrshire sing, and
+that her "private life" was something in which she had no interest.
+
+Well, here he was; hot and uncomfortable, in a chair much too small for
+him, with a row of blinding footlights glaring in his eyes. Suddenly the
+door at his right elbow opened. Their seats were at one end of the front
+row; he had thought they would be less conspicuous there than in the
+centre, and he had not foreseen that the singer would walk over him every
+time she came upon the stage. Her velvet train brushed against his
+trousers as she passed him. The applause which greeted her was neither
+overwhelming nor prolonged. Her conservative audience did not know
+exactly how to accept her toilette. They were accustomed to dignified
+concert gowns, like those which Pittsburgh matrons (in those days!) wore
+at their daughters' coming-out teas.
+
+Kitty's gown that evening was really quite outrageous--the repartée of a
+conscienceless Parisian designer who took her hint that she wished
+something that would be entirely novel in the States. Today, after we
+have all of us, even in the uttermost provinces, been educated by Baskt
+and the various Ballets Russes, we would accept such a gown without
+distrust; but then it was a little disconcerting, even to the
+well-disposed. It was constructed of a yard or two of green velvet--a
+reviling, shrieking green which would have made a fright of any woman
+who had not inextinguishable beauty--and it was made without armholes, a
+device to which we were then so unaccustomed that it was nothing less
+than alarming. The velvet skirt split back from a transparent gold-lace
+petticoat, gold stockings, gold slippers. The narrow train was,
+apparently, looped to both ankles, and it kept curling about her feet
+like a serpent's tail, turning up its gold lining as if it were squirming
+over on its back. It was not, we felt, a costume in which to sing Mozart
+and Handel and Beethoven.
+
+Kitty sensed the chill in the air, and it amused her. She liked to be
+thought a brilliant artist by other artists, but by the world at large
+she liked to be thought a daring creature. She had every reason to
+believe, from experience and from example, that to shock the great crowd
+was the surest way to get its money and to make her name a household
+word. Nobody ever became a household word of being an artist, surely; and
+you were not a thoroughly paying proposition until your name meant
+something on the sidewalk and in the barber-shop. Kitty studied her
+audience with an appraising eye. She liked the stimulus of this
+disapprobation. As she faced this hard-shelled public she felt keen and
+interested; she knew that she would give such a recital as cannot often
+be heard for money. She nodded gaily to the young man at the piano, fell
+into an attitude of seriousness, and began the group of Beethoven and
+Mozart songs.
+
+Though McKann would not have admitted it, there were really a great many
+people in the concert-hall who knew what the prodigal daughter of their
+country was singing, and how well she was doing it. They thawed gradually
+under the beauty of her voice and the subtlety of her interpretation.
+She had sung seldom in concert then, and they had supposed her very
+dependent upon the accessories of the opera. Clean singing, finished
+artistry, were not what they expected from her. They began to feel, even,
+the wayward charm of her personality.
+
+McKann, who stared coldly up at the balconies during her first song,
+during the second glanced cautiously at the green apparition before him.
+He was vexed with her for having retained a débutante figure. He
+comfortably classed all singers--especially operatic singers--as "fat
+Dutchwomen" or "shifty Sadies," and Kitty would not fit into his clever
+generalization. She displayed, under his nose, the only kind of figure
+he considered worth looking at--that of a very young girl, supple and
+sinuous and quicksilverish; thin, eager shoulders, polished white
+arms that were nowhere too fat and nowhere too thin. McKann found it
+agreeable to look at Kitty, but when he saw that the authoritative
+Mrs. Post, red as a turkey-cock with opinions she was bursting to impart,
+was studying and appraising the singer through her lorgnette, he gazed
+indifferently out into the house again. He felt for his watch, but his
+wife touched him warningly with her elbow--which, he noticed, was not at
+all like Kitty's.
+
+When Miss Ayrshire finished her first group of songs, her audience
+expressed its approval positively, but guardedly. She smiled bewitchingly
+upon the people in front, glanced up at the balconies, and then turned to
+the company huddled on the stage behind her. After her gay and careless
+bows, she retreated toward the stage door. As she passed McKann, she
+again brushed lightly against him, and this time she paused long enough
+to glance down at him and murmur, "Pardon!"
+
+In the moment her bright, curious eyes rested upon him, McKann seemed to
+see himself as if she were holding a mirror up before him. He beheld
+himself a heavy, solid figure, unsuitably clad for the time and place,
+with a florid, square face, well-visored with good living and sane
+opinions--an inexpressive countenance. Not a rock face, exactly, but a
+kind of pressed-brick-and-cement face, a "business" face upon which years
+and feelings had made no mark--in which cocktails might eventually blast
+out a few hollows. He had never seen himself so distinctly in his
+shaving-glass as he did in that instant when Kitty Ayrshire's liquid eye
+held him, when her bright, inquiring glance roamed over his person. After
+her prehensile train curled over his boot and she was gone, his wife
+turned to him and said in the tone of approbation one uses when an infant
+manifests its groping intelligence, "Very gracious of her, I'm sure!"
+Mrs. Post nodded oracularly. McKann grunted.
+
+Kitty began her second number, a group of romantic German songs which
+were altogether more her affair than her first number. When she turned
+once to acknowledge the applause behind her, she caught McKann in the act
+of yawning behind his hand--he of course wore no gloves--and he thought
+she frowned a little. This did not embarrass him; it somehow made him
+feel important. When she retired after the second part of the program,
+she again looked him over curiously as she passed, and she took marked
+precaution that her dress did not touch him. Mrs. Post and his wife again
+commented upon her consideration.
+
+The final number was made up of modern French songs which Kitty sang
+enchantingly, and at last her frigid public was thoroughly aroused.
+While she was coming back again and again to smile and curtsy, McKann
+whispered to his wife that if there were to be encores he had better make
+a dash for his train.
+
+"Not at all," put in Mrs. Post. "Kitty is going on the same train. She
+sings in _Faust_ at the opera tomorrow night, so she'll take no chances."
+
+McKann once more told himself how sorry he felt for Post. At last Miss
+Ayrshire returned, escorted by her accompanist, and gave the people what
+she of course knew they wanted: the most popular aria from the French
+opera of which the title-rôle had become synonymous with her name--an
+opera written for her and to her and round about her, by the veteran
+French composer who adored her,--the last and not the palest flash of his
+creative fire. This brought her audience all the way. They clamoured for
+more of it, but she was not to be coerced. She had been unyielding
+through storms to which this was a summer breeze. She came on once more,
+shrugged her shoulders, blew them a kiss, and was gone. Her last smile
+was for that uncomfortable part of her audience seated behind her, and
+she looked with recognition at McKann and his ladies as she nodded good
+night to the wooden chairs.
+
+McKann hurried his charges into the foyer by the nearest exit and put
+them into his motor. Then he went over to the Schenley to have a glass
+of beer and a rarebit before train-time. He had not, he admitted to
+himself, been so much bored as he pretended. The minx herself was well
+enough, but it was absurd in his fellow-townsmen to look owlish and
+uplifted about her. He had no rooted dislike for pretty women; he even
+didn't deny that gay girls had their place in the world, but they ought
+to be kept in their place. He was born a Presbyterian, just as he was
+born a McKann. He sat in his pew in the First Church every Sunday, and he
+never missed a presbytery meeting when he was in town. His religion was
+not very spiritual, certainly, but it was substantial and concrete, made
+up of good, hard convictions and opinions. It had something to do with
+citizenship, with whom one ought to marry, with the coal business (in
+which his own name was powerful), with the Republican party, and with all
+majorities and established precedents. He was hostile to fads, to
+enthusiasms, to individualism, to all changes except in mining machinery
+and in methods of transportation.
+
+His equanimity restored by his lunch at the Schenley, McKann lit a big
+cigar, got into his taxi, and bowled off through the sleet.
+
+There was not a sound to be heard or a light to be seen. The ice
+glittered on the pavement and on the naked trees. No restless feet were
+abroad. At eleven o'clock the rows of small, comfortable houses looked as
+empty of the troublesome bubble of life as the Allegheny cemetery itself.
+Suddenly the cab stopped, and McKann thrust his head out of the window. A
+woman was standing in the middle of the street addressing his driver in
+a tone of excitement. Over against the curb a lone electric stood
+despondent in the storm. The young woman, her cloak blowing about her,
+turned from the driver to McKann himself, speaking rapidly and somewhat
+incoherently.
+
+"Could you not be so kind as to help us? It is Mees Ayrshire, the singer.
+The juice is gone out and we cannot move. We must get to the station.
+Mademoiselle cannot miss the train; she sings tomorrow night in New York.
+It is very important. Could you not take us to the station at East
+Liberty?"
+
+McKann opened the door. "That's all right, but you'll have to hurry. It's
+eleven-ten now. You've only got fifteen minutes to make the train. Tell
+her to come along."
+
+The maid drew back and looked up at him in amazement. "But, the
+hand-luggage to carry, and Mademoiselle to walk! The street is like
+glass!"
+
+McKann threw away his cigar and followed her. He stood silent by the door
+of the derelict, while the maid explained that she had found help. The
+driver had gone off somewhere to telephone for a car. Miss Ayrshire
+seemed not at all apprehensive; she had not doubted that a rescuer would
+be forthcoming. She moved deliberately; out of a whirl of skirts she
+thrust one fur-topped shoe--McKann saw the flash of the gold stocking
+above it--and alighted.
+
+"So kind of you! So fortunate for us!" she murmured. One hand she placed
+upon his sleeve, and in the other she carried an armful of roses that had
+been sent up to the concert stage. The petals showered upon the sooty,
+sleety pavement as she picked her way along. They would be lying there
+tomorrow morning, and the children in those houses would wonder if there
+had been a funeral. The maid followed with two leather bags. As soon as
+he had lifted Kitty into his cab she exclaimed:
+
+"My jewel-case! I have forgotten it. It is on the back seat, please. I am
+so careless!"
+
+He dashed back, ran his hand along the cushions, and discovered a small
+leather bag. When he returned he found the maid and the luggage bestowed
+on the front seat, and a place left for him on the back seat beside Kitty
+and her flowers.
+
+"Shall we be taking you far out of your way?" she asked sweetly. "I
+haven't an idea where the station is. I'm not even sure about the name.
+Céline thinks it is East Liberty, but I think it is West Liberty. An odd
+name, anyway. It is a Bohemian quarter, perhaps? A district where the law
+relaxes a trifle?"
+
+McKann replied grimly that he didn't think the name referred to that kind
+of liberty.
+
+"So much the better," sighed Kitty. "I am a Californian; that's the only
+part of America I know very well, and out there, when we called a place
+Liberty Hill or Liberty Hollow--well, we meant it. You will excuse me if
+I'm uncommunicative, won't you? I must not talk in this raw air. My
+throat is sensitive after a long program." She lay back in her corner and
+closed her eyes.
+
+When the cab rolled down the incline at East Liberty station, the New
+York express was whistling in. A porter opened the door. McKann sprang
+out, gave him a claim check and his Pullman ticket, and told him to get
+his bag at the check-stand and rush it on that train.
+
+Miss Ayrshire, having gathered up her flowers, put out her hand to take
+his arm. "Why, it's you!" she exclaimed, as she saw his face in the
+light. "What a coincidence!" She made no further move to alight, but sat
+smiling as if she had just seated herself in a drawing-room and were
+ready for talk and a cup of tea.
+
+McKann caught her arm. "You must hurry, Miss Ayrshire, if you mean to
+catch that train. It stops here only a moment. Can you run?"
+
+"Can I run!" she laughed. "Try me!"
+
+As they raced through the tunnel and up the inside stairway, McKann
+admitted that he had never before made a dash with feet so quick and sure
+stepping out beside him. The white-furred boots chased each other like
+lambs at play, the gold stockings flashed like the spokes of a bicycle
+wheel in the sun. They reached the door of Miss Ayrshire's state-room
+just as the train began to pull out. McKann was ashamed of the way he was
+panting, for Kitty's breathing was as soft and regular as when she was
+reclining on the back seat of his taxi. It had somehow run in his head
+that all these stage women were a poor lot physically--unsound, overfed
+creatures, like canaries that are kept in a cage and stuffed with
+song-restorer. He retreated to escape her thanks. "Good night! Pleasant
+journey! Pleasant dreams!" With a friendly nod in Kitty's direction he
+closed the door behind him.
+
+He was somewhat surprised to find his own bag, his Pullman ticket in the
+strap, on the seat just outside Kitty's door. But there was nothing
+strange about it. He had got the last section left on the train, No. 13,
+next the drawing-room. Every other berth in the car was made up. He was
+just starting to look for the porter when the door of the state-room
+opened and Kitty Ayrshire came out. She seated herself carelessly in the
+front seat beside his bag.
+
+"Please talk to me a little," she said coaxingly. "I'm always wakeful
+after I sing, and I have to hunt some one to talk to. Céline and I get so
+tired of each other. We can speak very low, and we shall not disturb any
+one." She crossed her feet and rested her elbow on his Gladstone. Though
+she still wore her gold slippers and stockings, she did not, he thanked
+Heaven, have on her concert gown, but a very demure black velvet with
+some sort of pearl trimming about the neck. "Wasn't it funny," she
+proceeded, "that it happened to be you who picked me up? I wanted a
+word with you, anyway."
+
+McKann smiled in a way that meant he wasn't being taken in. "Did you? We
+are not very old acquaintances."
+
+"No, perhaps not. But you disapproved tonight, and I thought I was
+singing very well. You are very critical in such matters?"
+
+He had been standing, but now he sat down. "My dear young lady, I am not
+critical at all. I know nothing about 'such matters.'"
+
+"And care less?" she said for him, "Well, then we know where we are, in
+so far as that is concerned. What did displease you? My gown, perhaps? It
+may seem a little _outré_ here, but it's the sort of thing all the
+imaginative designers abroad are doing. You like the English sort of
+concert gown better?"
+
+"About gowns," said McKann, "I know even less than about music. If I
+looked uncomfortable, it was probably because I was uncomfortable. The
+seats were bad and the lights were annoying."
+
+Kitty looked up with solicitude. "I was sorry they sold those seats. I
+don't like to make people uncomfortable in any way. Did the lights give
+you a headache? They are very trying. They burn one's eyes out in the
+end, I believe." She paused and waved the porter away with a smile as
+he came toward them. Half-clad Pittsburghers were tramping up and down
+the aisle, casting sidelong glances at McKann and his companion. "How
+much better they look with all their clothes on," she murmured. Then,
+turning directly to McKann again: "I saw you were not well seated, but I
+felt something quite hostile and personal. You were displeased with me.
+Doubtless many people are, but I seldom get an opportunity to question
+them. It would be nice if you took the trouble to tell me why you were
+displeased."
+
+She spoke frankly, pleasantly, without a shadow of challenge or hauteur.
+She did not seem to be angling for compliments. McKann settled himself
+in his seat. He thought he would try her out. She had come for it, and he
+would let her have it. He found, however, that it was harder to formulate
+the grounds of his disapproval than he would have supposed. Now that he
+sat face to face with her, now that she was leaning against his bag, he
+had no wish to hurt her.
+
+"I'm a hard-headed business man," he said evasively, "and I don't much
+believe in any of you fluffy-ruffles people. I have a sort of natural
+distrust of them all, the men more than the women."
+
+She looked thoughtful. "Artists, you mean?" drawing her words slowly.
+"What is your business?"
+
+"Coal."
+
+"I don't feel any natural distrust of business men, and I know ever so
+many. I don't know any coal-men, but I think I could become very much
+interested in coal. Am I larger-minded than you?"
+
+McKann laughed. "I don't think you know when you are interested or when
+you are not. I don't believe you know what it feels like to be really
+interested. There is so much fake about your profession. It's an
+affectation on both sides. I know a great many of the people who went to
+hear you tonight, and I know that most of them neither know nor care
+anything about music. They imagine they do, because it's supposed to be
+the proper thing."
+
+Kitty sat upright and looked interested. She was certainly a lovely
+creature--the only one of her tribe he had ever seen that he would cross
+the street to see again. Those were remarkable eyes she had--curious,
+penetrating, restless, somewhat impudent, but not at all dulled by
+self-conceit.
+
+"But isn't that so in everything?" she cried. "How many of your clerks
+are honest because of a fine, individual sense of honour? They are
+honest because it is the accepted rule of good conduct in business. Do
+you know"--she looked at him squarely--"I thought you would have
+something quite definite to say to me; but this is funny-paper stuff,
+the sort of objection I'd expect from your office-boy."
+
+"Then you don't think it silly for a lot of people to get together and
+pretend to enjoy something they know nothing about?"
+
+"Of course I think it silly, but that's the way God made audiences.
+Don't people go to church in exactly the same way? If there were a
+spiritual-pressure test-machine at the door, I suspect not many of you
+would get to your pews."
+
+"How do you know I go to church?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, people with these old, ready-made
+opinions usually go to church. But you can't evade me like that." She
+tapped the edge of his seat with the toe of her gold slipper. "You sat
+there all evening, glaring at me as if you could eat me alive. Now I give
+you a chance to state your objections, and you merely criticize my
+audience. What is it? Is it merely that you happen to dislike my
+personality? In that case, of course, I won't press you."
+
+"No," McKann frowned, "I perhaps dislike your professional personality.
+As I told you, I have a natural distrust of your variety."
+
+"Natural, I wonder?" Kitty murmured. "I don't see why you should
+naturally dislike singers any more than I naturally dislike coal-men. I
+don't classify people by their occupations. Doubtless I should find some
+coal-men repulsive, and you may find some singers so. But I have reason
+to believe that, at least, I'm one of the less repellent."
+
+"I don't doubt it," McKann laughed, "and you're a shrewd woman to boot.
+But you are, all of you, according to my standards, light people. You're
+brilliant, some of you, but you've no depth."
+
+Kitty seemed to assent, with a dive of her girlish head. "Well, it's a
+merit in some things to be heavy, and in others to be light. Some things
+are meant to go deep, and others to go high. Do you want all the women in
+the world to be profound?"
+
+"You are all," he went on steadily, watching her with indulgence, "fed on
+hectic emotions. You are pampered. You don't help to carry the burdens of
+the world. You are self-indulgent and appetent."
+
+"Yes, I am," she assented, with a candour which he did not expect. "Not
+all artists are, but I am. Why not? If I could once get a convincing
+statement as to why I should not be self-indulgent, I might change my
+ways. As for the burdens of the world--" Kitty rested her chin on her
+clasped hands and looked thoughtful. "One should give pleasure to others.
+My dear sir, granting that the great majority of people can't enjoy
+anything very keenly, you'll admit that I give pleasure to many more
+people than you do. One should help others who are less fortunate; at
+present I am supporting just eight people, besides those I hire. There
+was never another family in California that had so many cripples and
+hard-luckers as that into which I had the honour to be born. The only
+ones who could take care of themselves were ruined by the San Francisco
+earthquake some time ago. One should make personal sacrifices. I do; I
+give money and time and effort to talented students. Oh, I give something
+much more than that! something that you probably have never given to any
+one. I give, to the really gifted ones, my _wish,_ my desire, my light,
+if I have any; and that, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, is like giving one's blood!
+It's the kind of thing you prudent people never give. That is what was
+in the box of precious ointment." Kitty threw off her fervour with a
+slight gesture, as if it were a scarf, and leaned back, tucking her
+slipper up on the edge of his seat. "If you saw the houses I keep up,"
+she sighed, "and the people I employ, and the motor-cars I run--And,
+after all, I've only this to do it with." She indicated her slender
+person, which Marshall could almost have broken in two with his bare
+hands.
+
+She was, he thought, very much like any other charming woman, except that
+she was more so. Her familiarity was natural and simple. She was at ease
+because she was not afraid of him or of herself, or of certain half-clad
+acquaintances of his who had been wandering up and down the car oftener
+than was necessary. Well, he was not afraid, either.
+
+Kitty put her arms over her head and sighed again, feeling the smooth
+part in her black hair. Her head was small--capable of great agitation,
+like a bird's; or of great resignation, like a nun's. "I can't see why I
+shouldn't be self-indulgent, when I indulge others. I can't understand
+your equivocal scheme of ethics. Now I can understand Count Tolstoy's,
+perfectly. I had a long talk with him once, about his book 'What is Art?'
+As nearly as I could get it, he believes that we are a race who can exist
+only by gratifying appetites; the appetites are evil, and the existence
+they carry on is evil. We were always sad, he says, without knowing why;
+even in the Stone Age. In some miraculous way a divine ideal was
+disclosed to us, directly at variance with our appetites. It gave us a
+new craving, which we could only satisfy by starving all the other
+hungers in us. Happiness lies in ceasing to be and to cause being,
+because the thing revealed to us is dearer than any existence our
+appetites can ever get for us. I can understand that. It's something one
+often feels in art. It is even the subject of the greatest of all operas,
+which, because I can never hope to sing it, I love more than all the
+others." Kitty pulled herself up. "Perhaps you agree with Tolstoy?" she
+added languidly.
+
+"No; I think he's a crank," said McKann, cheerfully.
+
+"What do you mean by a crank?"
+
+"I mean an extremist."
+
+Kitty laughed. "Weighty word! You'll always have a world full of people
+who keep to the golden mean. Why bother yourself about me and Tolstoy?"
+
+"I don't, except when you bother me."
+
+"Poor man! It's true this isn't your fault. Still, you did provoke it by
+glaring at me. Why did you go to the concert?"
+
+"I was dragged."
+
+"I might have known!" she chuckled, and shook her head. "No, you don't
+give me any good reasons. Your morality seems to me the compromise of
+cowardice, apologetic and sneaking. When righteousness becomes alive and
+burning, you hate it as much as you do beauty. You want a little of each
+in your life, perhaps--adulterated, sterilized, with the sting taken out.
+It's true enough they are both fearsome things when they get loose in the
+world; they don't, often."
+
+McKann hated tall talk. "My views on women," he said slowly, "are
+simple."
+
+"Doubtless," Kitty responded dryly, "but are they consistent? Do you
+apply them to your stenographers as well as to me? I take it for
+granted you have unmarried stenographers. Their position, economically,
+is the same as mine."
+
+McKann studied the toe of her shoe. "With a woman, everything comes back
+to one thing." His manner was judicial.
+
+She laughed indulgently. "So we are getting down to brass tacks, eh? I
+have beaten you in argument, and now you are leading trumps."
+
+She put her hands behind her head and her lips parted in a half-yawn.
+"Does everything come back to one thing? I wish I knew! It's more than
+likely that, under the same conditions, I should have been very like your
+stenographers--if they are good ones. Whatever I was, I would have been a
+good one. I think people are very much alike. You are more different than
+any one I have met for some time, but I know that there are a great many
+more at home like you. And even you--I believe there is a real creature
+down under these custom-made prejudices that save you the trouble of
+thinking. If you and I were shipwrecked on a desert island, I have no
+doubt that we would come to a simple and natural understanding. I'm
+neither a coward nor a shirk. You would find, if you had to undertake any
+enterprise of danger or difficulty with a woman, that there are several
+qualifications quite as important as the one to which you doubtless
+refer."
+
+McKann felt nervously for his watch-chain. "Of course," he brought out,
+"I am not laying down any generalizations--" His brows wrinkled.
+
+"Oh, aren't you?" murmured Kitty. "Then I totally misunderstood. But
+remember"--holding up a finger--"it is you, not I, who are afraid to
+pursue this subject further. Now, I'll tell you something." She leaned
+forward and clasped her slim, white hands about her velvet knee. "I am
+as much a victim of these ineradicable prejudices as you. Your
+stenographer seems to you a better sort. Well, she does to me. Just
+because her life is, presumably, greyer than mine, she seems better. My
+mind tells me that dulness, and a mediocre order of ability, and poverty,
+are not in themselves admirable things. Yet in my heart I always feel
+that the sales-women in shops and the working girls in factories are more
+meritorious than I. Many of them, with my opportunities, would be more
+selfish than I am. Some of them, with their own opportunities, are more
+selfish. Yet I make this sentimental genuflection before the nun and the
+charwoman. Tell me, haven't you any weakness? Isn't there any foolish
+natural thing that unbends you a trifle and makes you feel gay?"
+
+"I like to go fishing."
+
+"To see how many fish you can catch?"
+
+"No, I like the woods and the weather. I like to play a fish and work
+hard for him. I like the pussy-willows and the cold; and the sky,
+whether it's blue or grey--night coming on, every thing about it."
+
+He spoke devoutly, and Kitty watched him through half-closed eyes. "And
+you like to feel that there are light-minded girls like me, who only care
+about the inside of shops and theatres and hotels, eh? You amuse me, you
+and your fish! But I mustn't keep you any longer. Haven't I given you
+every opportunity to state your case against me? I thought you would have
+more to say for yourself. Do you know, I believe it's not a case you have
+at all, but a grudge. I believe you are envious; that you'd like to be a
+tenor, and a perfect lady-killer!" She rose, smiling, and paused with her
+hand on the door of her stateroom. "Anyhow, thank you for a pleasant
+evening. And, by the way, dream of me tonight, and not of either of those
+ladies who sat beside you. It does not matter much whom we live with in
+this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of." She noticed
+his bricky flush. "You are very naive, after all, but, oh, so cautious!
+You are naturally afraid of everything new, just as I naturally want to
+try everything: new people, new religions--new miseries, even. If only
+there were more new things--If only you were really new! I might learn
+something. I'm like the Queen of Sheba--I'm not above learning. But you,
+my friend, would be afraid to try a new shaving soap. It isn't
+gravitation that holds the world in place; it's the lazy, obese cowardice
+of the people on it. All the same"--taking his hand and smiling
+encouragingly--"I'm going to haunt you a little. _Adios!_"
+
+When Kitty entered her state-room, Céline, in her dressing-gown, was
+nodding by the window.
+
+"Mademoiselle found the fat gentleman interesting?" she asked. "It is
+nearly one."
+
+"Negatively interesting. His kind always say the same thing. If I could
+find one really intelligent man who held his views, I should adopt them."
+
+"Monsieur did not look like an original," murmured Céline, as she began
+to take down her lady's hair.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McKann slept heavily, as usual, and the porter had to shake him in
+the morning. He sat up in his berth, and, after composing his hair with
+his fingers, began to hunt about for his clothes. As he put up the
+window-blind some bright object in the little hammock over his bed caught
+the sunlight and glittered. He stared and picked up a delicately turned
+gold slipper.
+
+"Minx! hussy!" he ejaculated. "All that tall talk--! Probably got it from
+some man who hangs about; learned it off like a parrot. Did she poke this
+in here herself last night, or did she send that sneak-faced Frenchwoman?
+I like her nerve!" He wondered whether he might have been breathing
+audibly when the intruder thrust her head between his curtains. He was
+conscious that he did not look a Prince Charming in his sleep. He dressed
+as fast as he could, and, when he was ready to go to the wash-room,
+glared at the slipper. If the porter should start to make up his berth in
+his absence--He caught the slipper, wrapped it in his pajama jacket, and
+thrust it into his bag. He escaped from the train without seeing his
+tormentor again.
+
+Later McKann threw the slipper into the waste-basket in his room at the
+Knickerbocker, but the chambermaid, seeing that it was new and mateless,
+thought there must be a mistake, and placed it in his clothes-closet. He
+found it there when he returned from the theatre that evening.
+Considerably mellowed by food and drink and cheerful company, he took the
+slipper in his hand and decided to keep it as a reminder that absurd
+things could happen to people of the most clocklike deportment. When he
+got back to Pittsburgh, he stuck it in a lock-box in his vault, safe from
+prying clerks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McKann has been ill for five years now, poor fellow! He still goes to the
+office, because it is the only place that interests him, but his partners
+do most of the work, and his clerks find him sadly changed--"morbid,"
+they call his state of mind. He has had the pine-trees in his yard cut
+down because they remind him of cemeteries. On Sundays or holidays, when
+the office is empty, and he takes his will or his insurance-policies
+out of his lock-box, he often puts the tarnished gold slipper on his
+desk and looks at it. Somehow it suggests life to his tired mind, as his
+pine-trees suggested death--life and youth. When he drops over some day,
+his executors will be puzzled by the slipper.
+
+As for Kitty Ayrshire, she has played so many jokes, practical and
+impractical, since then, that she has long ago forgotten the night when
+she threw away a slipper to be a thorn in the side of a just man.
+
+
+
+
+Scandal
+
+
+
+
+Kitty Ayrshire had a cold, a persistent inflammation of the vocal cords
+which defied the throat specialist. Week after week her name was posted
+at the Opera, and week after week it was canceled, and the name of one
+of her rivals was substituted. For nearly two months she had been
+deprived of everything she liked, even of the people she liked, and had
+been shut up until she had come to hate the glass windows between her and
+the world, and the wintry stretch of the Park they looked out upon. She
+was losing a great deal of money, and, what was worse, she was losing
+life; days of which she wanted to make the utmost were slipping by, and
+nights which were to have crowned the days, nights of incalculable
+possibilities, were being stolen from her by women for whom she had no
+great affection. At first she had been courageous, but the strain of
+prolonged uncertainty was telling on her, and her nervous condition did
+not improve her larynx. Every morning Miles Creedon looked down her
+throat, only to put her off with evasions, to pronounce improvement that
+apparently never got her anywhere, to say that tomorrow he might be able
+to promise something definite.
+
+Her illness, of course, gave rise to rumours--rumours that she had lost
+her voice, that at some time last summer she must have lost her
+discretion. Kitty herself was frightened by the way in which this cold
+hung on. She had had many sharp illnesses in her life, but always,
+before this, she had rallied quickly. Was she beginning to lose her
+resiliency? Was she, by any cursed chance, facing a bleak time when she
+would have to cherish herself? She protested, as she wandered about her
+sunny, many-windowed rooms on the tenth floor, that if she was going to
+have to live frugally, she wouldn't live at all. She wouldn't live on any
+terms but the very generous ones she had always known. She wasn't going
+to hoard her vitality. It must be there when she wanted it, be ready for
+any strain she chose to put upon it, let her play fast and loose with it;
+and then, if necessary, she would be ill for a while and pay the piper.
+But be systematically prudent and parsimonious she would not.
+
+When she attempted to deliver all this to Doctor Creedon, he merely put
+his finger on her lips and said they would discuss these things when she
+could talk without injuring her throat. He allowed her to see no one
+except the Director of the Opera, who did not shine in conversation and
+was not apt to set Kitty going. The Director was a glum fellow, indeed,
+but during this calamitous time he had tried to be soothing, and he
+agreed with Creedon that she must not risk a premature appearance. Kitty
+was tormented by a suspicion that he was secretly backing the little
+Spanish woman who had sung many of her parts since she had been ill. He
+furthered the girl's interests because his wife had a very special
+consideration for her, and Madame had that consideration because--But
+that was too long and too dreary a story to follow out in one's mind.
+Kitty felt a tonsilitis disgust for opera-house politics, which, when she
+was in health, she rather enjoyed, being no mean strategist herself. The
+worst of being ill was that it made so many things and people look base.
+
+She was always afraid of being disillusioned. She wished to believe that
+everything for sale in Vanity Fair was worth the advertised price. When
+she ceased to believe in these delights, she told herself, her pulling
+power would decline and she would go to pieces. In some way the chill of
+her disillusionment would quiver through the long, black line which
+reached from the box-office down to Seventh Avenue on nights when she
+sang. They shivered there in the rain and cold, all those people, because
+they loved to believe in her inextinguishable zest. She was no prouder of
+what she drew in the boxes than she was of that long, oscillating tail;
+little fellows in thin coats, Italians, Frenchmen, South-Americans,
+Japanese.
+
+When she had been cloistered like a Trappist for six weeks, with nothing
+from the outside world but notes and flowers and disquieting morning
+papers, Kitty told Miles Creedon that she could not endure complete
+isolation any longer.
+
+"I simply cannot live through the evenings. They have become horrors to
+me. Every night is the last night of a condemned man. I do nothing but
+cry, and that makes my throat worse."
+
+Miles Creedon, handsomest of his profession, was better looking with some
+invalids than with others. His athletic figure, his red cheeks, and
+splendid teeth always had a cheering effect upon this particular patient,
+who hated anything weak or broken.
+
+"What can I do, my dear? What do you wish? Shall I come and hold your
+lovely hand from eight to ten? You have only to suggest it."
+
+"Would you do that, even? No, _caro mio_, I take far too much of your
+time as it is. For an age now you have been the only man in the world
+to me, and you have been charming! But the world is big, and I am missing
+it. Let some one come tonight, some one interesting, but not too
+interesting. Pierce Tevis, for instance. He is just back from Paris. Tell
+the nurse I may see him for an hour tonight," Kitty finished pleadingly,
+and put her fingers on the doctor's sleeve. He looked down at them and
+smiled whimsically.
+
+Like other people, he was weak to Kitty Ayrshire. He would do for her
+things that he would do for no one else; would break any engagement,
+desert a dinner-table, leaving an empty place and an offended hostess, to
+sit all evening in Kitty's dressing-room, spraying her throat and calming
+her nerves, using every expedient to get her through a performance. He
+had studied her voice like a singing master; knew all of its
+idiosyncracies and the emotional and nervous perturbations which affected
+it. When it was permissible, sometimes when it was not permissible, he
+indulged her caprices. On this sunny morning her wan, disconsolate face
+moved him.
+
+"Yes, you may see Tevis this evening if you will assure me that you will
+not shed one tear for twenty-four hours. I may depend on your word?" He
+rose, and stood before the deep couch on which his patient reclined. Her
+arch look seemed to say, "On what could you depend more?" Creedon smiled,
+and shook his head. "If I find you worse tomorrow--"
+
+He crossed to the writing-table and began to separate a bunch of tiny
+flame-coloured rosebuds. "May I?" Selecting one, he sat down on the
+chair from which he had lately risen, and leaned forward while Kitty
+pinched the thorns from the stem and arranged the flower in his
+buttonhole.
+
+"Thank you. I like to wear one of yours. Now I must be off to the
+hospital. I've a nasty little operation to do this morning. I'm glad it's
+not you. Shall I telephone Tevis about this evening?"
+
+Kitty hesitated. Her eyes ran rapidly about, seeking a likely pretext.
+Creedon laughed.
+
+"Oh, I see. You've already asked him to come. You were so sure of me! Two
+hours in bed after lunch, with all the windows open, remember. Read
+something diverting, but not exciting; some homely British author;
+nothing _abandonné_. And don't make faces at me. Until to-morrow!"
+
+When her charming doctor had disappeared through the doorway, Kitty fell
+back on her cushions and closed her eyes. Her mocking-bird, excited by
+the sunlight, was singing in his big gilt cage, and a white lilac-tree
+that had come that morning was giving out its faint sweetness in the
+warm room. But Kitty looked paler and wearier than when the doctor was
+with her. Even with him she rose to her part just a little; couldn't help
+it. And he took his share of her vivacity and sparkle, like every one
+else. He believed that his presence was soothing to her. But he admired;
+and whoever admired, blew on the flame, however lightly.
+
+The mocking-bird was in great form this morning. He had the best
+bird-voice she had ever heard, and Kitty wished there were some way to
+note down his improvisations; but his intervals were not expressible in
+any scale she knew. Parker White had brought him to her, from Ojo
+Caliente, in New Mexico, where he had been trained in the pine forests by
+an old Mexican and an ill-tempered, lame master-bird, half thrush, that
+taught young birds to sing. This morning, in his song there were flashes
+of silvery Southern springtime; they opened inviting roads of memory. In
+half an hour he had sung his disconsolate mistress to sleep.
+
+That evening Kitty sat curled up on the deep couch before the fire,
+awaiting Pierce Tevis. Her costume was folds upon folds of diaphanous
+white over equally diaphanous rose, with a line of white fur about her
+neck. Her beautiful arms were bare. Her tiny Chinese slippers were
+embroidered so richly that they resembled the painted porcelain of old
+vases. She looked like a sultan's youngest, newest bride; a beautiful
+little toy-woman, sitting at one end of the long room which composed
+about her,--which, in the soft light, seemed happily arranged for her.
+There were flowers everywhere: rose-trees; camellia-bushes, red and
+white; the first forced hyacinths of the season; a feathery mimosa-tree,
+tall enough to stand under.
+
+The long front of Kitty's study was all windows. At one end was the
+fireplace, before which she sat. At the other end, back in a lighted
+alcove, hung a big, warm, sympathetic interior by Lucien Simon,--a group
+of Kitty's friends having tea in the painter's salon in Paris. The room
+in the picture was flooded with early lamp-light, and one could feel the
+grey, chill winter twilight in the Paris streets outside. There stood the
+cavalier-like old composer, who had done much for Kitty, in his most
+characteristic attitude, before the hearth. Mme. Simon sat at the
+tea-table. B----, the historian, and H----, the philologist, stood in
+animated discussion behind the piano, while Mme. H---- was tying on the
+bonnet of her lovely little daughter. Marcel Durand, the physicist, sat
+alone in a corner, his startling black-and-white profile lowered
+broodingly, his cold hands locked over his sharp knee. A genial,
+red-bearded sculptor stood over him, about to touch him on the shoulder
+and waken him from his dream.
+
+This painting made, as it were, another room; so that Kitty's study on
+Central Park West seemed to open into that charming French interior, into
+one of the most highly harmonized and richly associated rooms in Paris.
+There her friends sat or stood about, men distinguished, women at once
+plain and beautiful, with their furs and bonnets, their clothes that were
+so distinctly not smart--all held together by the warm lamp-light, by an
+indescribable atmosphere of graceful and gracious human living.
+
+Pierce Tevis, after he had entered noiselessly and greeted Kitty, stood
+before her fire and looked over her shoulder at this picture.
+
+"It's nice that you have them there together, now that they are
+scattered, God knows where, fighting to preserve just that. But your own
+room, too, is charming," he added at last, taking his eyes from the
+canvas.
+
+Kitty shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Bah! I can help to feed the lamp, but I can't supply the dear things it
+shines upon."
+
+"Well, tonight it shines upon you and me, and we aren't so bad." Tevis
+stepped forward and took her hand affectionately. "You've been over a
+rough bit of road. I'm so sorry. It's left you looking very lovely,
+though. Has it been very hard to get on?"
+
+She brushed his hand gratefully against her cheek and nodded.
+
+"Awfully dismal. Everything has been shut out from me but--gossip. That
+always gets in. Often I don't mind, but this time I have. People do tell
+such lies about me."
+
+"Of course we do. That's part of our fun, one of the many pleasures you
+give us. It only shows how hard up we are for interesting public
+personages; for a royal family, for romantic fiction, if you will. But I
+never hear any stories that wound me, and I'm very sensitive about you."
+
+"I'm gossiped about rather more than the others, am I not?"
+
+"I believe! Heaven send that the day when you are not gossiped about is
+far distant! Do you want to bite off your nose to spite your pretty face?
+You are the sort of person who makes myths. You can't turn around without
+making one. That's your singular good luck. A whole staff of publicity
+men, working day and night, couldn't do for you what you do for yourself.
+There is an affinity between you and the popular imagination."
+
+"I suppose so," said Kitty, and sighed. "All the same, I'm getting almost
+as tired of the person I'm supposed to be as of the person I really am. I
+wish you would invent a new Kitty Ayrshire for me, Pierce. Can't I do
+something revolutionary? Marry, for instance?"
+
+Tevis rose in alarm.
+
+"Whatever you do, don't try to change your legend. You have now the one
+that gives the greatest satisfaction to the greatest number of people.
+Don't disappoint your public. The popular imagination, to which you make
+such a direct appeal, for some reason wished you to have a son, so it has
+given you one. I've heard a dozen versions of the story, but it is always
+a son, never by any chance a daughter. Your public gives you what is best
+for you. Let well enough alone."
+
+Kitty yawned and dropped back on her cushions.
+
+"He still persists, does he, in spite of never being visible?"
+
+"Oh, but he has been seen by ever so many people. Let me think a moment."
+He sank into an attitude of meditative ease. "The best description I ever
+had of him was from a friend of my mother, an elderly woman, thoroughly
+truthful and matter-of-fact. She has seen him often. He is kept in
+Russia, in St. Petersburg, that was. He is about eight years old and of
+marvellous beauty. He is always that in every version. My old friend has
+seen him being driven in his sledge on the Nevskii Prospekt on winter
+afternoons; black horses with silver bells and a giant in uniform on the
+seat beside the driver. He is always attended by this giant, who is
+responsible to the Grand Duke Paul for the boy. This lady can produce no
+evidence beyond his beauty and his splendid furs and the fact that all
+the Americans in Petrograd know he is your son."
+
+Kitty laughed mournfully.
+
+"If the Grand Duke Paul had a son, any old rag of a son, the province of
+Moscow couldn't contain him! He may, for aught I know, actually pretend
+to have a son. It would be very like him." She looked at her finger-tips
+and her rings disapprovingly for a moment. "Do you know, I've been
+thinking that I would rather like to lay hands on that youngster. I
+believe he'd be interesting. I'm bored with the world."
+
+Tevis looked up and said quickly:
+
+"Would you like him, really?"
+
+"Of course I should," she said indignantly. "But, then, I like other
+things, too; and one has to choose. When one has only two or three things
+to choose from, life is hard; when one has many, it is harder still. No,
+on the whole, I don't mind that story. It's rather pretty, except for the
+Grand Duke. But not all of them are pretty."
+
+"Well, none of them are very ugly; at least I never heard but one that
+troubled me, and that was long ago."
+
+She looked interested.
+
+"That is what I want to know; how do the ugly ones get started? How did
+that one get going and what was it about? Is it too dreadful to repeat?"
+
+"No, it's not especially dreadful; merely rather shabby. If you really
+wish to know, and won't be vexed, I can tell you exactly how it got
+going, for I took the trouble to find out. But it's a long story, and you
+really had nothing whatever to do with it."
+
+"Then who did have to do with it? Tell me; I should like to know exactly
+how even one of them originated."
+
+"Will you be comfortable and quiet and not get into a rage, and let me
+look at you as much as I please?"
+
+Kitty nodded, and Tevis sat watching her indolently while he debated how
+much of his story he ought not to tell her. Kitty liked being looked at
+by intelligent persons. She knew exactly how good looking she was; and
+she knew, too, that, pretty as she was, some of those rather sallow
+women in the Simon painting had a kind of beauty which she would never
+have. This knowledge, Tevis was thinking, this important realization,
+contributed more to her loveliness than any other thing about her; more
+than her smooth, ivory skin or her changing grey eyes, the delicate
+forehead above them, or even the dazzling smile, which was gradually
+becoming too bright and too intentional,--out in the world, at least.
+Here by her own fire she still had for her friends a smile less electric
+than the one she flashed from stages. She could still be, in short,
+_intime_, a quality which few artists keep, which few ever had.
+
+Kitty broke in on her friend's meditations.
+
+"You may smoke. I had rather you did. I hate to deprive people of things
+they like."
+
+"No, thanks. May I have those chocolates on the tea-table? They are quite
+as bad for me. May you? No, I suppose not." He settled himself by the
+fire, with the candy beside him, and began in the agreeable voice which
+always soothed his listener.
+
+"As I said, it was a long while ago, when you first came back to this
+country and were singing at the Manhattan. I dropped in at the
+Metropolitan one evening to hear something new they were trying out. It
+was an off night, no pullers in the cast, and nobody in the boxes but
+governesses and poor relations. At the end of the first act two people
+entered one of the boxes in the second tier. The man was Siegmund Stein,
+the department-store millionaire, and the girl, so the men about me in
+the omnibus box began to whisper, was Kitty Ayrshire. I didn't know you
+then, but I was unwilling to believe that you were with Stein. I could
+not contradict them at that time, however, for the resemblance, if it was
+merely a resemblance, was absolute, and all the world knew that you were
+not singing at the Manhattan that night. The girl's hair was dressed just
+as you then wore yours. Moreover, her head was small and restless like
+yours, and she had your colouring, your eyes, your chin. She carried
+herself with the critical indifference one might expect in an artist who
+had come for a look at a new production that was clearly doomed to
+failure. She applauded lightly. She made comments to Stein when comments
+were natural enough. I thought, as I studied her face with the glass,
+that her nose was a trifle thinner than yours, a prettier nose, my dear
+Kitty, but stupider and more inflexible. All the same, I was troubled
+until I saw her laugh,--and then I knew she was a counterfeit. I had
+never seen you laugh, but I knew that you would not laugh like that. It
+was not boisterous; indeed, it was consciously refined,--mirthless,
+meaningless. In short, it was not the laugh of one whom our friends in
+there"--pointing to the Simon painting--"would honour with their
+affection and admiration."
+
+Kitty rose on her elbow and burst out indignantly:
+
+"So you would really have been hood-winked except for that! You may be
+sure that no woman, no intelligent woman, would have been. Why do we ever
+take the trouble to look like anything for any of you? I could count on
+my four fingers"--she held them up and shook them at him--"the men I've
+known who had the least perception of what any woman really looked like,
+and they were all dressmakers. Even painters"--glancing back in the
+direction of the Simon picture--"never get more than one type through
+their thick heads; they try to make all women look like some wife or
+mistress. You are all the same; you never see our real faces. What you do
+see, is some cheap conception of prettiness you got from a coloured
+supplement when you were adolescents. It's too discouraging. I'd rather
+take vows and veil my face for ever from such abominable eyes. In the
+kingdom of the blind any petticoat is a queen." Kitty thumped the cushion
+with her elbow. "Well, I can't do anything about it. Go on with your
+story."
+
+"Aren't you furious, Kitty! And I thought I was so shrewd. I've quite
+forgotten where I was. Anyhow, I was not the only man fooled. After the
+last curtain I met Villard, the press man of that management, in the
+lobby, and asked him whether Kitty Ayrshire was in the house. He said he
+thought so. Stein had telephoned for a box, and said he was bringing one
+of the artists from the other company. Villard had been too busy about
+the new production to go to the box, but he was quite sure the woman was
+Ayrshire, whom he had met in Paris.
+
+"Not long after that I met Dan Leland, a classmate of mine, at the
+Harvard Club. He's a journalist, and he used to keep such eccentric hours
+that I had not run across him for a long time. We got to talking about
+modern French music, and discovered that we both had a very lively
+interest in Kitty Ayrshire.
+
+"'Could you tell me,' Dan asked abruptly, 'why, with pretty much all the
+known world to choose her friends from, this young woman should flit
+about with Siegmund Stein? It prejudices people against her. He's a most
+objectionable person.'
+
+"'Have you,' I asked, 'seen her with him, yourself?'
+
+"Yes, he had seen her driving with Stein, and some of the men on his
+paper had seen her dining with him at rather queer places down town.
+Stein was always hanging about the Manhattan on nights when Kitty sang. I
+told Dan that I suspected a masquerade. That interested him, and
+he said he thought he would look into the matter. In short, we both
+agreed to look into it. Finally, we got the story, though Dan could never
+use it, could never even hint at it, because Stein carries heavy
+advertising in his paper.
+
+"To make you see the point, I must give you a little history of Siegmund
+Stein. Any one who has seen him never forgets him. He is one of the most
+hideous men in New York, but it's not at all the common sort of ugliness
+that comes from over-eating and automobiles. He isn't one of the fat
+horrors. He has one of those rigid, horselike faces that never tell
+anything; a long nose, flattened as if it had been tied down; a scornful
+chin; long, white teeth; flat cheeks, yellow as a Mongolian's; tiny,
+black eyes, with puffy lids and no lashes; dingy, dead-looking
+hair--looks as if it were glued on.
+
+"Stein came here a beggar from somewhere in Austria. He began by working
+on the machines in old Rosenthal's garment factory. He became a speeder,
+a foreman, a salesman; worked his way ahead steadily until the hour when
+he rented an old dwelling-house on Seventh Avenue and began to make
+misses' and juniors' coats. I believe he was the first manufacturer to
+specialize in those particular articles. Dozens of garment manufacturers
+have come along the same road, but Stein is like none of the rest of
+them. He is, and always was, a personality. While he was still at the
+machine, a hideous, underfed little whippersnapper, he was already a
+youth of many-coloured ambitions, deeply concerned about his dress, his
+associates, his recreations. He haunted the old Astor Library and the
+Metropolitan Museum, learned something about pictures and porcelains,
+took singing lessons, though he had a voice like a crow's. When he sat
+down to his baked apple and doughnut in a basement lunch-room, he would
+prop a book up before him and address his food with as much leisure and
+ceremony as if he were dining at his club. He held himself at a distance
+from his fellow-workmen and somehow always managed to impress them with
+his superiority. He had inordinate vanity, and there are many stories
+about his foppishness. After his first promotion in Rosenthal's factory,
+he bought a new overcoat. A few days later, one of the men at the
+machines, which Stein had just quitted, appeared in a coat exactly like
+it. Stein could not discharge him, but he gave his own coat to a newly
+arrived Russian boy and got another. He was already magnificent.
+
+"After he began to make headway with misses' and juniors' cloaks, he
+became a collector--etchings, china, old musical instruments. He had a
+dancing master, and engaged a beautiful Brazilian widow--she was said to
+be a secret agent for some South American republic--to teach him
+Spanish. He cultivated the society of the unknown great: poets, actors,
+musicians. He entertained them sumptuously, and they regarded him
+as a deep, mysterious Jew who had the secret of gold, which they had not.
+His business associates thought him a man of taste and culture, a patron
+of the arts, a credit to the garment trade.
+
+"One of Stein's many ambitions was to be thought a success with women. He
+got considerable notoriety in the garment world by his attentions to an
+emotional actress who is now quite forgotten, but who had her little hour
+of expectation. Then there was a dancer; then, just after Gorky's visit
+here, a Russian anarchist woman. After that the coat-makers and
+shirtwaist-makers began to whisper that Stein's great success was
+with Kitty Ayrshire.
+
+"It is the hardest thing in the world to disprove such a story, as Dan
+Leland and I discovered. We managed to worry down the girl's address
+through a taxi-cab driver who got next to Stein's chauffeur. She had an
+apartment in a decent-enough house on Waverly Place. Nobody ever came to
+see her but Stein, her sisters, and a little Italian girl from whom we
+got the story.
+
+"The counterfeit's name was Ruby Mohr. She worked in a shirtwaist
+factory, and this Italian girl, Margarita, was her chum. Stein came to
+the factory when he was hunting for living models for his new department
+store. He looked the girls over, and picked Ruby out from several
+hundred. He had her call at his office after business hours, tried her
+out in cloaks and evening gowns, and offered her a position. She never,
+however, appeared as a model in the Sixth Avenue store. Her likeness to
+the newly arrived prima donna suggested to Stein another act in the play
+he was always putting on. He gave two of her sisters positions as
+saleswomen, but Ruby he established in an apartment on Waverly Place.
+
+"To the outside world Stein became more mysterious in his behaviour
+than ever. He dropped his Bohemian friends. No more suppers and
+theatre-parties. Whenever Kitty sang, he was in his box at the Manhattan,
+usually alone, but not always. Sometimes he took two or three good
+customers, large buyers from St. Louis or Kansas City. His coat factory
+is still the biggest earner of his properties. I've seen him there with
+these buyers, and they carried themselves as if they were being let in on
+something; took possession of the box with a proprietory air, smiled and
+applauded and looked wise as if each and every one of them were friends
+of Kitty Ayrshire. While they buzzed and trained their field-glasses
+on the prima donna, Stein was impassive and silent. I don't imagine he
+even told many lies. He is the most insinuating cuss, anyhow. He probably
+dropped his voice or lifted his eyebrows when he invited them, and let
+their own eager imaginations do the rest. But what tales they took back
+to their provincial capitals!
+
+"Sometimes, before they left New York, they were lucky enough to see
+Kitty dining with their clever garment man at some restaurant, her back
+to the curious crowd, her face half concealed by a veil or a fur collar.
+Those people are like children; nothing that is true or probable
+interests them. They want the old, gaudy lies, told always in the same
+way. Siegmund Stein and Kitty Ayrshire--a story like that, once launched,
+is repeated unchallenged for years among New York factory sports. In St.
+Paul, St. Jo, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, there used to be clothing
+stores where a photograph of Kitty Ayrshire hung in the fitting-room or
+over the proprietor's desk.
+
+"This girl impersonated you successfully to the lower manufacturing world
+of New York for two seasons. I doubt if it could have been put across
+anywhere else in the world except in this city, which pays you so
+magnificently and believes of you what it likes. Then you went over to
+the Metropolitan, stopped living in hotels, took this apartment, and
+began to know people. Stein discontinued his pantomime at the right
+moment, withdrew his patronage. Ruby, of course, did not go back to
+shirtwaists. A business friend of Stein's took her over, and she dropped
+out of sight. Last winter, one cold, snowy night, I saw her once again.
+She was going into a saloon hotel with a tough-looking young fellow. She
+had been drinking, she was shabby, and her blue shoes left stains in the
+slush. But she still looked amazingly, convincingly like a battered,
+hardened Kitty Ayrshire. As I saw her going up the brass-edged stairs, I
+said to myself--"
+
+"Never mind that." Kitty rose quickly, took an impatient step to the
+hearth, and thrust one shining porcelain slipper out to the fire. "The
+girl doesn't interest me. There is nothing I can do about her, and of
+course she never looked like me at all. But what did Stein do without
+me?"
+
+"Stein? Oh, he chose a new rôle. He married with great
+magnificence--married a Miss Mandelbaum, a California heiress. Her
+people have a line of department stores along the Pacific Coast. The
+Steins now inhabit a great house on Fifth Avenue that used to belong to
+people of a very different sort. To old New-Yorkers, it's an historic
+house."
+
+Kitty laughed, and sat down on the end of her couch nearest her guest;
+sat upright, without cushions.
+
+"I imagine I know more about that house than you do. Let me tell you how
+I made the sequel to your story.
+
+"It has to do with Peppo Amoretti. You may remember that I brought Peppo
+to this country, and brought him in, too, the year the war broke out,
+when it wasn't easy to get boys who hadn't done military service out of
+Italy. I had taken him to Munich to have some singing lessons. After the
+war came on we had to get from Munich to Naples in order to sail at all.
+We were told that we could take only hand luggage on the railways, but I
+took nine trunks and Peppo. I dressed Peppo in knickerbockers, made him
+brush his curls down over his ears like doughnuts, and carry a little
+violin-case. It took us eleven days to reach Naples. I got my trunks
+through purely by personal persuasion. Once at Naples, I had a frightful
+time getting Peppo on the boat. I declared him as hand-luggage; he was so
+travel-worn and so crushed by his absurd appearance that he did not look
+like much else. One inspector had a sense of humour, and passed him at
+that, but the other was inflexible. I had to be very dramatic. Peppo was
+frightened, and there is no fight in him, anyhow.
+
+"_'Per me tutto e indifferente, Signorina,'_ he kept whimpering. 'Why
+should I go without it? I have lost it.'
+
+"'Which?' I screamed. '_Not_ the hat-trunk?'
+
+"'_No, no; mia voce._ It is gone since Ravenna.'
+
+"He thought he had lost his voice somewhere along the way. At last I told
+the inspector that I couldn't live without Peppo, and that I would throw
+myself into the bay. I took him into my confidence. Of course, when I
+found I had to play on that string, I wished I hadn't made the
+boy such a spectacle. But ridiculous as he was, I managed to make the
+inspector believe that I had kidnapped him, and that he was indispensable
+to my happiness. I found that incorruptible official, like most people,
+willing to aid one so utterly depraved. I could never have got that boy
+out for any proper, reasonable purpose, such as giving him a job or
+sending him to school. Well, it's a queer world! But I must cut all that
+and get to the Steins.
+
+"That first winter Peppo had no chance at the Opera. There was an iron
+ring about him, and my interest in him only made it all the more
+difficult. We've become a nest of intrigues down there; worse than the
+Scala. Peppo had to scratch along just any way. One evening he came to me
+and said he could get an engagement to sing for the grand rich Steins,
+but the condition was that I should sing with him. They would pay, oh,
+anything! And the fact that I had sung a private engagement with him
+would give him other engagements of the same sort. As you know, I
+never sing private engagements; but to help the boy along, I consented.
+
+"On the night of the party, Peppo and I went to the house together in a
+taxi. My car was ailing. At the hour when the music was about to begin,
+the host and hostess appeared at my dressing-room, up-stairs. Isn't he
+wonderful? Your description was most inadequate. I never encountered
+such restrained, frozen, sculptured vanity. My hostess struck me as
+extremely good natured and jolly, though somewhat intimate in her manner.
+Her reassuring pats and smiles puzzled me at the time, I remember, when I
+didn't know that she had anything in particular to be large-minded and
+charitable about. Her husband made known his willingness to conduct me
+to the music-room, and we ceremoniously descended a staircase blooming
+like the hanging-gardens of Babylon. From there I had my first glimpse
+of the company. They _were_ strange people. The women glittered like
+Christmas-trees. When we were half-way down the stairs, the buzz of
+conversation stopped so suddenly that some foolish remark I happened to
+be making rang out like oratory. Every face was lifted toward us. My
+host and I completed our descent and went the length of the drawing-room
+through a silence which somewhat awed me. I couldn't help wishing that
+one could ever get that kind of attention in a concert-hall. In the
+music-room Stein insisted upon arranging things for me. I must say that
+he was neither awkward nor stupid, not so wooden as most rich men who
+rent singers. I was properly affable. One has, under such circumstances,
+to be either gracious or pouty. Either you have to stand and sulk, like
+an old-fashioned German singer who wants the piano moved about for her
+like a tea-wagon, and the lights turned up and the lights turned
+down,--or you have to be a trifle forced, like a débutante trying to make
+good. The fixed attention of my audience affected me. I was aware of
+unusual interest, of a thoroughly enlisted public. When, however, my host
+at last left me, I felt the tension relax to such an extent that I
+wondered whether by any chance he, and not I, was the object of so much
+curiosity. But, at any rate, their cordiality pleased me so well that
+after Peppo and I had finished our numbers I sang an encore or two, and
+I stayed through Peppo's performance because I felt that they liked to
+look at me.
+
+"I had asked not to be presented to people, but Mrs. Stein, of course,
+brought up a few friends. The throng began closing in upon me, glowing
+faces bore down from every direction, and I realized that, among people
+of such unscrupulous cordiality, I must look out for myself. I ran
+through the drawing-room and fled up the stairway, which was thronged
+with Old Testament characters. As I passed them, they all looked at me
+with delighted, cherishing eyes, as if I had at last come back to my
+native hamlet. At the top of the stairway a young man, who looked like a
+camel with its hair parted on the side, stopped me, seized my hands and
+said he must present himself, as he was such an old friend of Siegmund's
+bachelor days. I said, 'Yes, how interesting!' The atmosphere was somehow
+so thick and personal that I felt uncomfortable.
+
+"When I reached my dressing-room Mrs. Stein followed me to say that I
+would, of course, come down to supper, as a special table had been
+prepared for me. I replied that it was not my custom.
+
+"'But here it is different. With us you must feel perfect freedom.
+Siegmund will never forgive me if you do not stay. After supper our car
+will take you home.' She was overpowering. She had the manner of an
+intimate and indulgent friend of long standing. She seemed to have come
+to make me a visit. I could only get rid of her by telling her that I
+must see Peppo at once, if she would be good enough to send him to me.
+She did not come back, and I began to fear that I would actually be
+dragged down to supper. It was as if I had been kidnapped. I felt like
+_Gulliver_ among the giants. These people were all too--well, too much
+what they were. No chill of manner could hold them off. I was
+defenseless. I must get away. I ran to the top of the staircase and
+looked down. There was that fool Peppo, beleaguered by a bevy of fair
+women. They were simply looting him, and he was grinning like an idiot. I
+gathered up my train, ran down, and made a dash at him, yanked him out of
+that circle of rich contours, and dragged him by a limp cuff up the
+stairs after me. I told him that I must escape from that house at once.
+If he could get to the telephone, well and good; but if he couldn't get
+past so many deep-breathing ladies, then he must break out of the front
+door and hunt me a cab on foot. I felt as if I were about to be immured
+within a harem.
+
+"He had scarcely dashed off when the host called my name several times
+outside the door. Then he knocked and walked in, uninvited. I told him
+that I would be inflexible about supper. He must make my excuses to his
+charming friends; any pretext he chose. He did not insist. He took up his
+stand by the fireplace and began to talk; said rather intelligent things.
+I did not drive him out; it was his own house, and he made himself
+agreeable. After a time a deputation of his friends came down the hall,
+somewhat boisterously, to say that supper could not be served until we
+came down. Stein was still standing by the mantel, I remember. He
+scattered them, without moving or speaking to them, by a portentous
+look. There is something hideously forceful about him. He took a very
+profound leave of me, and said he would order his car at once. In a
+moment Peppo arrived, splashed to the ankles, and we made our escape
+together.
+
+"A week later Peppo came to me in a rage, with a paper called _The
+American Gentleman_, and showed me a page devoted to three photographs:
+Mr. and Mrs. Siegmund Stein, lately married in New York City, and Kitty
+Ayrshire, operatic soprano, who sang at their house-warming. Mrs. Stein
+and I were grinning our best, looked frantic with delight, and Siegmund
+frowned inscrutably between us. Poor Peppo wasn't mentioned. Stein has a
+publicity sense."
+
+Tevis rose.
+
+"And you have enormous publicity value and no discretion. It was just
+like you to fall for such a plot, Kitty. You'd be sure to."
+
+"What's the use of discretion?" She murmured behind her hand. "If the
+Steins want to adopt you into their family circle, they'll get you in the
+end. That's why I don't feel compassionate about your Ruby. She and I are
+in the same boat. We are both the victims of circumstance, and in New
+York so many of the circumstances are Steins."
+
+
+
+
+Paul's Case
+
+
+
+
+It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh
+High School to account for his various misdemeanours. He had been
+suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal's office
+and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the faculty room
+suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle out-grown, and the tan
+velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for
+all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal
+pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his
+button-hole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not
+properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban
+of suspension.
+
+Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and
+a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical
+brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort
+of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large,
+as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter
+about them which that drug does not produce.
+
+When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there, Paul stated,
+politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie,
+but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensable
+for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their
+respective charges against him, which they did with such a rancour and
+aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder and
+impertinence were among the offences named, yet each of his instructors
+felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of
+the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the
+boy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which he
+seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had been
+making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher
+had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started
+back with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind him. The
+astonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt and embarrassed had
+he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and definitely personal
+as to be unforgettable. In one way and another, he had made all his
+teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical
+aversion. In one class he habitually sat with his hand shading his eyes;
+in another he always looked out of the window during the recitation; in
+another he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorous
+intent.
+
+His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized
+by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon
+him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He stood through
+it smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were
+continually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows that
+was contemptuous and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys than
+Paul had broken down and shed tears under that ordeal, but his set smile
+did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the nervous
+trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his overcoat, and
+an occasional jerking of the other hand which held his hat. Paul was
+always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that people
+might be watching him and trying to detect something. This conscious
+expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish mirthfulness, was
+usually attributed to insolence or "smartness."
+
+As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an
+impertinent remark of the boy's, and the Principal asked him whether he
+thought that a courteous speech to make to a woman. Paul shrugged his
+shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.
+
+"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or impolite,
+either. I guess it's a sort of way I have, of saying things regardless."
+
+The Principal asked him whether he didn't think that a way it would be
+well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told
+that he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was like a
+repetition of the scandalous red carnation.
+
+His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling
+of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which
+none of them understood. He added: "I don't really believe that smile of
+his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of haunted
+about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. There is something wrong
+about the fellow."
+
+The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw
+only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm
+afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master
+had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and
+wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his
+sleep.
+
+His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to
+have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling
+in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the
+grewsome game of intemperate reproach. One of them remembered having seen
+a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors.
+
+As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the Soldiers' Chorus from
+_Faust_, looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some of
+his teachers were not there to witness his lightheartedness. As it was
+now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher at
+Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper.
+
+When he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open. It was
+chilly outside, and he decided to go up into the picture gallery--always
+deserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli's gay studies of
+Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two that always
+exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the
+old guard, who sat in the corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch
+over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the place
+and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a
+while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought
+him to look at his watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with a
+start and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus Caesar, peering out
+from the cast-room, and an evil gesture at the Venus of Milo as he passed
+her on the stairway.
+
+When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room half-a-dozen boys were there
+already, and he began excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one of
+the few that at all approached fitting, and Paul thought it very
+becoming--though he knew the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow
+chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always excited
+while he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the
+preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music-room; but tonight he
+seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and plagued the boys until,
+telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on
+him.
+
+Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the
+house to seat the early comers. He was a model usher. Gracious and
+smiling he ran up and down the aisles. Nothing was too much trouble for
+him; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were his
+greatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought him
+a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the house
+filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the colour came
+to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were a great
+reception and Paul were the host. Just as the musicians came out to take
+their places, his English teacher arrived with checks for the seats which
+a prominent manufacturer had taken for the season. She betrayed some
+embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a _hauteur_ which
+subsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was startled for a moment,
+and had the feeling of wanting to put her out; what business had she here
+among all these fine people and gay colours? He looked her over and
+decided that she was not appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sit
+downstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably been sent her out of
+kindness, he reflected, as he put down a seat for her, and she had about
+as much right to sit there as he had.
+
+When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long
+sigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done before the Rico. It was
+not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but
+the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious spirit
+within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle
+found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights
+danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable
+splendour. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul forgot even the
+nastiness of his teacher's being there, and gave himself up to the
+peculiar intoxication such personages always had for him. The soloist
+chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the
+mother of many children; but she wore a satin gown and a tiara, and she
+had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her, which
+always blinded Paul to any possible defects.
+
+After a concert was over, Paul was often irritable and wretched until he
+got to sleep,--and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He had
+the feeling of not being able to let down; of its being impossible to
+give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could
+be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew and, after
+hastily changing his clothes in the dressing-room, slipped out to the
+side door where the singer's carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidly
+up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.
+
+Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square
+through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like
+those of a lighted card-board house under a Christmas tree. All the
+actors and singers of any importance stayed there when they were in the
+city, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived there in
+the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people go
+in and out, longing to enter and leave school-masters and dull care
+behind him for ever.
+
+At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who helped
+her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial _auf
+wiedersehen_,--which set Paul to wondering whether she were
+not an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to the
+hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the
+singer alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors which
+were opened by a negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that
+the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to
+feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building,
+into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and
+basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought
+into the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen
+them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday supplement. A quick gust
+of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was
+startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel
+driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty
+overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the
+concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between
+him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he
+wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
+pantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were
+destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.
+
+He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to
+come sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs,
+explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that were
+forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow
+wallpaper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box, and over
+his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin,
+and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red
+worsted by his mother, whom Paul could not remember.
+
+Half an hour later, Paul alighted from the Negley Avenue car and went
+slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a
+highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and
+where business men of moderate means begot and reared large families
+of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter
+catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly
+alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they
+lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing.
+His home was next the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it
+tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of
+sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had
+when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the
+waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, he
+experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the
+loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house permeated by
+kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavourless, colourless
+mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft
+lights and fresh flowers.
+
+The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt
+to the sight of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold bath-room
+with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spiggots; his
+father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his
+nightshirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much later
+than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul
+stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by
+his father tonight; that he could not toss again on that miserable bed.
+He would not go in. He would tell his father that he had no car fare, and
+it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the boys and stayed
+all night.
+
+Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house
+and tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised it
+cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There he
+stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made; but the
+floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. He
+found a soap-box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that
+streamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of
+rats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the
+dark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such
+reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out of
+the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened, Paul's
+head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard him
+getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar?
+Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had
+cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been horrified to
+think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should
+come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been
+no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paul
+entertained himself until daybreak.
+
+The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by
+the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to
+church and Sabbath-school, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons the
+burghers of Cordelia Street usually sat out on their front "stoops," and
+talked to their neighbours on the next stoop, or called to those across
+the street in neighbourly fashion. The men sat placidly on gay cushions
+placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in
+their Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
+to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; there
+were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of a
+kindergarten. The men on the steps--all in their shirt sleeves, their
+vests unbuttoned--sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs
+comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told
+anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They
+occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
+affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their
+own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their
+legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress at
+school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in
+their toy banks.
+
+On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest
+step of his "stoop," staring into the street, while his sisters, in their
+rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about how
+many shirt-waists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles
+some one had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm,
+and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made
+lemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamented
+with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine, and
+the neighbours joked about the suspicious colour of the pitcher.
+
+Today Paul's father, on the top step, was talking to a young man who
+shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young
+man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his
+father's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a
+ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, near-sighted
+eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved
+about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel
+corporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young
+man with a future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he was
+now barely twenty-six--he had been a trifle 'dissipated,' but in order to
+curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing
+of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oft
+reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first
+woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be an
+angular school-mistress, much older than he, who also wore thick glasses,
+and who had now borne him four children, all near-sighted, like herself.
+
+The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the
+Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business,
+arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home,
+and "knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy." His father
+told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of putting in an
+electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful
+apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he
+rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings, that were told and
+retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces in Venice,
+yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his
+fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of cash boys who had become
+famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.
+
+After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul
+nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's to get some
+help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for car-fare. This
+latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not
+like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul
+whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that
+he ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the
+dime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in
+the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that he thought
+a boy ought to be earning a little.
+
+Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odour of the dish-water from
+his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over
+his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in
+his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his
+arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown
+car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and began to live
+again.
+
+The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one
+of the downtown theatres was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the
+boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever
+he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment
+loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place among
+Edwards's following not only because the young actor, who could not
+afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he
+recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term "vocation."
+
+It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the
+rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and
+it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled
+the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a
+prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying
+splendid, brilliant things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the
+overture from _Martha_, or jerked at the serenade from _Rigoletto_, all
+stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously,
+yet delicately fired.
+
+Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore
+the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to
+him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life
+elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies,
+wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odours
+of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly-clad
+men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
+orchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.
+
+It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the
+stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance.
+Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all Charley
+Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about London
+of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls, with palms, and
+fountains, and soft lamps and richly apparelled women who never saw the
+disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled
+city, enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple,
+his wishing-carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed
+in perpetual sunshine.
+
+Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been
+perverted by garish fiction; but the truth was, he scarcely ever read at
+all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a
+youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friends
+urged upon him--well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music;
+any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ. He needed only
+the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of
+his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It
+was equally true that he was not stage-struck--not, at any rate, in the
+usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become an
+actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to
+do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the
+atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after
+blue league, away from everything.
+
+After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than
+ever repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the prosy men who never
+wore frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes; the women with their
+dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositions
+that govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think,
+for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to
+them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a
+joke, anyway. He had autograph pictures of all the members of the stock
+company which he showed his classmates, telling them the most incredible
+stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with
+the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the
+flowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and his
+audience grew listless, he would bid all the boys good-bye, announcing
+that he was going to travel for awhile; going to Naples, to California,
+to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back, conscious and nervously
+smiling; his sister was ill, and he would have to defer his voyage until
+spring.
+
+Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his
+instructors know how heartily he despised them, and how thoroughly he was
+appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to
+fool with theorems; adding--with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch of
+that nervous bravado which so perplexed them--that he was helping the
+people down at the stock company; they were old friends of his.
+
+The upshot of the matter was, that the Principal went to Paul's father,
+and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie
+Hall was told to get another usher in his stead; the doorkeeper at the
+theatre was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley Edwards
+remorsefully promised the boy's father not to see him again.
+
+The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's
+stories reached them--especially the women. They were hard-working women,
+most of them supporting indolent husbands or brothers, and they laughed
+rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid
+inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father, that Paul's
+was a bad case.
+
+The east-bound train was ploughing through a January snow-storm; the dull
+dawn was beginning to show grey when the engine whistled a mile out of
+Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy
+slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window glass with his hand, and peered
+out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom
+lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the
+fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks
+protruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and
+a gang of labourers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.
+
+Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had
+made the all-night journey in a day coach because he was afraid if he
+took a Pullman he might be seen by some Pittsburgh business man who had
+noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle woke him, he
+clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an
+uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still
+sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed
+oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled.
+Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.
+
+When he arrived at the Jersey City station, he hurried through his
+breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him.
+After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman,
+and had himself driven to a men's furnishing establishment which was just
+opening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying with
+endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put on in
+the fitting-room; the frock coat and dress clothes he had bundled into
+the cab with his new shirts. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe
+house. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected silver mounted
+brushes and a scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked, he
+said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had his
+purchases packed into various travelling bags.
+
+It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and,
+after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from
+Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he had
+come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story
+plausibly and had no trouble, since he offered to pay for them in
+advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath.
+
+Not once, but a hundred times Paul had planned this entry into New York.
+He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his
+scrap book at home there were pages of description about New York hotels,
+cut from the Sunday papers.
+
+When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a
+glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in
+his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the
+bell boy and sent him down for flowers. He moved about nervously until
+the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedly
+as he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and
+then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white
+bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the
+tassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his
+windows that he could scarcely see across the street; but within, the air
+was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the
+tabouret beside the couch, and threw himself down with a long sigh,
+covering himself with a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he
+had been in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much
+ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had
+all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the
+cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.
+
+It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre
+and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was
+virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of opportunity. The only
+thing that at all surprised him was his own courage--for he realized well
+enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive
+dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed
+about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter.
+Until now, he could not remember a time when he had not been dreading
+something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there--behind
+him, or before, or on either side. There had always been the shadowed
+corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which
+something seemed always to be watching him--and Paul had done things that
+were not pretty to watch, he knew.
+
+But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown
+down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.
+
+Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but
+yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny &
+Carson's deposit, as usual--but this time he was instructed to leave the
+book to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and
+nearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book and
+quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new
+deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his
+returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for a
+full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable
+pretext. The bank book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or
+Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From the
+time he slipped the bank notes into his pocket until he boarded the night
+train for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation.
+
+How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done; and
+this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the
+stairs. He watched the snow flakes whirling by his window until he fell
+asleep.
+
+When he awoke, it was four o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a
+start; one of his precious days gone already! He spent nearly an hour in
+dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror.
+Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had
+always wanted to be.
+
+When he went downstairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth avenue
+toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen's
+wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the winter twilight; boys
+in woollen mufflers were shovelling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages
+made fine spots of colour against the white street. Here and there on the
+corners whole flower gardens blooming behind glass windows, against which
+the snow flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of
+the valley--somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed
+thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage
+winter-piece.
+
+When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of
+the streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed
+from the hotels that reared their many stories fearlessly up into the
+storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream of
+carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by other
+streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the
+entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were
+running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk, up and
+down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above,
+about, within it all, was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of
+thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every
+side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.
+
+The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of
+realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the
+nervestuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow flakes.
+He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.
+
+When Paul came down to dinner, the music of the orchestra floated up the
+elevator shaft to greet him. As he stepped into the thronged corridor, he
+sank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The
+lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of colour--he
+had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to stand it. But only
+for a moment; these were his own people, he told himself. He went slowly
+about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms,
+reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted
+palace, built and peopled for him alone.
+
+When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The
+flowers, the white linen, the many-coloured wine glasses, the gay
+toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulating
+repetitions of the _Blue Danube_ from the orchestra, all flooded Paul's
+dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne
+was added--that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in
+his glass--Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all.
+This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was
+what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past. Had
+he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged
+looking business men boarded the early car? Mere rivets in a machine they
+seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with combings of children's hair always
+hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes.
+Cordelia Street--Ah, that belonged to another time and country! Had
+he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as
+far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such
+shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this
+one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.
+
+He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to
+meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to
+look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage properties
+were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in
+his loge at the Opera. He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of
+his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself
+different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings
+explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it
+passively. He had only to glance down at his dress coat to reassure
+himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.
+
+He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that
+night, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window.
+When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom;
+partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should
+wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no
+horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin
+above his bed.
+
+On Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted
+late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy,
+a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" over
+Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town,
+and the two boys went off together after dinner, not returning to the
+hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the
+confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the
+elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to
+make his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in the
+afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and
+the Pittsburgh papers.
+
+On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was
+this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in
+no way made himself conspicuous. His chief greediness lay in his ears and
+eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures
+were the grey winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment
+of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense
+of power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with
+himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every
+day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for
+pleasure, even at school; but to make himself noticed and admired, to
+assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good
+deal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful
+pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, "dress
+the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His
+golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he
+could.
+
+On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole
+affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth of
+detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a
+low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy's father
+had refunded the full amount of his theft, and that they had no intention
+of prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and
+expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and Paul's
+Sabbath-school teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that
+end. The rumour had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a
+New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring
+him home.
+
+Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair,
+weak in the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse
+than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over
+him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in
+hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the
+yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him
+with sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had
+suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweat
+broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him with
+his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror. With
+something of the childish belief in miracles with which he had so often
+gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed
+whistling down the corridor to the elevator.
+
+He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the
+music, than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of
+claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient. The
+glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, and
+for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he was
+game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever,
+the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his
+wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of these fortunate beings?
+Was he not still himself, and in his own place? He drummed a nervous
+accompaniment to the music and looked about him, telling himself over and
+over that it had paid.
+
+He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the violin and the chill sweetness
+of his wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caught
+an outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches before now. But
+the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too uncertain
+then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If he
+had to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. He looked
+affectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist. Ah, it
+had paid indeed!
+
+Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and
+feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had
+slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his
+tongue and throat were parched. There came upon him one of those fateful
+attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he was
+physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still and closed
+his eyes and let the tide of realities wash over him.
+
+His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told
+himself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon
+him like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and
+he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that
+stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding
+itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York,
+and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his
+dressing-table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up
+from dinner,--but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the look
+of it, anyway.
+
+He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again
+to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the
+world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid of
+anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the
+dark corner at last, and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there; but
+somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything
+clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he
+had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he
+sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so
+he went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry.
+
+When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab,
+directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town.
+The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the open
+fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks
+projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul
+dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind
+a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual
+picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every
+feature of both his drivers, the toothless old woman from whom he had
+bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his
+ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable
+to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly
+at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of the
+ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on
+his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth as he
+walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside,
+where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped
+and sat down.
+
+The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; all
+their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen
+in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, long
+before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their
+brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game in
+the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world
+is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped
+a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed a
+while, from his weak condition, seeming insensible to the cold.
+
+The sound of an approaching train woke him, and he started to his feet,
+remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late.
+He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his
+lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced
+nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right
+moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to
+him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone.
+There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of
+Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.
+
+He felt something strike his chest,--his body was being thrown swiftly
+through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs
+gently relaxed. Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed,
+the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the
+immense design of things.
+
+
+
+
+A Wagner Matinee
+
+
+
+
+I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy,
+blue-lined note-paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska
+village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as if it had been
+carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was from
+my uncle Howard, and informed me that his wife had been left a small
+legacy by a bachelor relative, and that it would be necessary for her to
+go to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to
+meet her at the station and render her whatever services might be
+necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I
+found it to be no later than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayed
+writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed my
+aunt altogether.
+
+The name of my Aunt Georgiana opened before me a gulf of recollection so
+wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a
+stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at
+ease and out of place amid the familiar surroundings of my study. I
+became, in short, the gangling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged
+with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and sore from the corn
+husking. I sat again before her parlour organ, fumbling the scales with
+my stiff, red fingers, while she, beside me, made canvas mittens for the
+huskers.
+
+The next morning, after preparing my landlady for a visitor, I set out
+for the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding
+my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was not
+until I got her into the carriage that she seemed really to recognize me.
+She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become
+black with soot and her black bonnet grey with dust during the journey.
+When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to bed at once
+and I did not see her again until the next morning.
+
+Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, she
+considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's battered figure
+with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who
+have left their ears and fingers north of Franz-Joseph-Land, or their
+health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a
+music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter
+sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green
+Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled
+the callow fancy of my uncle, Howard Carpenter, then an idle, shiftless
+boy of twenty-one. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard
+followed her, and the upshot of this infatuation was that she eloped with
+him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of her
+friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of
+course, had no money, took up a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty
+miles from the railroad. There they had measured off their land
+themselves, driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which
+they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting its revolutions.
+They built a dug-out in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings
+whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they
+got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of
+provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty
+years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead.
+
+I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my
+boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years
+when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three
+meals--the first of which was ready at six o'clock in the morning--and
+putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her
+ironing-board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite
+Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head
+sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing
+or mending, that I read my first Shakspere, and her old text-book on
+mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me
+my scales and exercises on the little parlour organ which her husband had
+bought her after fifteen years during which she had not so much as seen a
+musical instrument. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and
+counting, while I struggled with the "Joyous Farmer." She seldom talked
+to me about music, and I understood why. Once when I had been doggedly
+beating out some easy passages from an old score of _Euryanthe_ I had
+found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands
+over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying
+tremulously, "Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you."
+
+When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival in Boston, she was
+still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she
+was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for
+hungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick
+throughout the journey that she had no recollection of anything but her
+discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes, there were but a few hours
+of nightmare between the farm in Red Willow County and my study on
+Newbury Street. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon,
+to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when we
+used to milk together in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because I
+was more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to
+me, would tell me of the splendid performance of the _Huguenots_ she
+had seen in Paris, in her youth.
+
+At two o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I
+intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her, I grew
+doubtful about her enjoyment of it. I suggested our visiting the
+Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too
+timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about various
+changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten
+to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain
+weakling calf, "old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained,
+evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was further
+troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the
+freshly-opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if it
+were not used directly.
+
+I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, and
+found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their
+respective situations, and had once possessed the piano score of _The
+Flying Dutchman_. I began to think it would be best to get her back to
+Red Willow County without waking her, and regretted having suggested the
+concert.
+
+From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle less
+passive and inert, and for the first time seemed to perceive her
+surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware of
+her queer, country clothes, or might experience some painful
+embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been
+dead for a quarter of a century. But, again, I found how superficially I
+had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost
+as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the
+froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal. I have seen this
+same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown hotel at Denver,
+their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard faces
+unshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as solitary as though they
+were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon.
+
+The matinée audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour
+of faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there was
+only the colour of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft and
+firm, silky and sheer; red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, écru, rose,
+yellow, cream, and white, all the colours that an impressionist finds in
+a sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead shadow of a frock coat.
+My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of
+tube-paint on a palette.
+
+When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir
+of anticipation, and looked with quickening interest down over the rail
+at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that
+had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling
+calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had
+not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from
+ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in
+a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a
+shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their
+linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the
+instruments, the patches of yellow light on the smooth, varnished
+bellies of the 'cellos and the bass viols in the rear, the restless,
+wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows--I recalled how, in the first
+orchestra I ever heard, those long bow-strokes seemed to draw the heart
+out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out yards of paper ribbon from
+a hat.
+
+The first number was the Tannhauser overture. When the horns drew out the
+first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus, Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat
+sleeve. Then it was I first realized that for her this broke a silence of
+thirty years. With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of
+the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an
+overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat;
+and I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a
+wooden fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin
+pitted with sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain gullied clay banks about
+the naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dish-cloths were
+always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flat
+world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to
+daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the
+conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.
+
+The overture closed, my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said
+nothing. She sat staring dully at the orchestra. What, I wondered, did
+she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day, I knew, and her
+musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of a
+quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and
+Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain
+melodies of Verdi. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house she
+used to sit by my cot in the evening--when the cool, night wind blew in
+through the faded mosquito netting tacked over the window and I lay
+watching a certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield--and
+sing "Home to our mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break the
+heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.
+
+I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying
+vainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and winds
+might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows that
+drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a summer
+shower. Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left to at all
+comprehend this power which had kindled the world since she had left it?
+I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her
+peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility throughout
+the number from The Flying Dutchman, though her fingers worked
+mechanically upon her black dress, as if, of themselves, they were
+recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor hands! They had been
+stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead
+with;--on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a wedding
+ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands, I
+remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days.
+
+Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song," I heard a quick drawn breath
+and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were
+glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in my
+eyes as well. It never really died, then--the soul which can suffer so
+excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only;
+like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and
+yet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout the
+development and elaboration of the melody.
+
+During the intermission before the second half, I questioned my aunt and
+found that the "Prize Song" was not new to her. Some years before there
+had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp
+cow-puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Bayreuth when he was a boy,
+along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he used
+to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom which opened off
+the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, singing the
+"Prize Song," while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. She had
+hovered over him until she had prevailed upon him to join the country
+church, though his sole fitness for this step, in so far as I could
+gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody.
+Shortly afterward, he had gone to town on the Fourth of July, been drunk
+for several days, lost his money at a faro table, ridden a saddled Texas
+steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collar-bone. All this
+my aunt told me huskily, wanderingly, as though she were talking in the
+weak lapses of illness.
+
+"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate,
+Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with a well meant effort at jocularity.
+
+Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth.
+From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever since
+you left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest of
+reproaches.
+
+The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the _Ring,_
+and closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but
+almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rain-storm. From
+time to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights, burning softly under
+their dull glass globes.
+
+The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the
+shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what
+happy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that
+before the last number she had been carried out where the myriad graves
+are, into the grey, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some
+world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope
+has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.
+
+The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and
+laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman
+made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped the green felt cover over his
+instrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouthpieces;
+the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the
+chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.
+
+I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. "I don't
+want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"
+
+I understood. For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond
+with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with
+weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings
+where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking
+up refuse about the kitchen door.
+
+
+
+
+The Sculptor's Funeral
+
+
+
+
+A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little Kansas
+town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already twenty
+minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over everything; in the pale
+starlight the line of bluffs across the wide, white meadows south of the
+town made soft, smoke-coloured curves against the clear sky. The men
+on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other, their hands
+thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their
+shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from time to time
+toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along the river
+shore. They conversed in low tones and moved about restlessly,
+seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them. There was but one of
+the company who looked as if he knew exactly why he was there, and he
+kept conspicuously apart; walking to the far end of the platform,
+returning to the station door, then pacing up the track again, his chin
+sunk in the high collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping
+forward, his gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by a
+tall, spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled
+out from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning his
+neck forward until his back made the angle of a jack-knife three-quarters
+open.
+
+"I reckon she's a-goin' to be pretty late agin to-night, Jim," he
+remarked in a squeaky falsetto. "S'pose it's the snow?"
+
+"I don't know," responded the other man with a shade of annoyance,
+speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew fiercely
+and thickly in all directions.
+
+The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the other
+side of his mouth. "It ain't likely that anybody from the East will come
+with the corpse, I s'pose," he went on reflectively.
+
+"I don't know," responded the other, more curtly than before.
+
+"It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other. I like an order
+funeral myself. They seem more appropriate for people of some
+repytation," the spare man continued, with an ingratiating concession in
+his shrill voice, as he carefully placed his toothpick in his vest
+pocket. He always carried the flag at the G.A.R. funerals in the town.
+
+The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up the
+siding. The spare man rejoined the uneasy group. "Jim's ez full ez a
+tick, ez ushel," he commented commiseratingly.
+
+Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet on
+the platform. A number of lanky boys, of all ages, appeared as, suddenly
+and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from the
+waiting-room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove, or
+half asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggage
+trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from the
+driver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding. They
+straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and a flash
+of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold, vibrant
+scream, the worldwide call for men. It stirred them like the note of a
+trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming home
+tonight, in his boyhood.
+
+The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh
+lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of shivering
+poplars that sentinelled the meadows, the escaping steam hanging in grey
+masses against the pale sky and blotting out the Milky Way. In a moment
+the red glare from the headlight streamed up the snow-covered track
+before the siding and glittered on the wet, black rails. The burly man
+with the dishevelled red beard walked swiftly up the platform toward the
+approaching train, uncovering his head as he went. The group of men
+behind him hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and awkwardly
+followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up to
+the express car just as the door was thrown open, the man in the G.A.R.
+suit thrusting his head forward with curiosity. The express messenger
+appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a young man in a long ulster and
+travelling cap.
+
+"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man.
+
+The group on the platform swayed uneasily. Philip Phelps, the banker,
+responded with dignity: "We have come to take charge of the body. Mr.
+Merrick's father is very feeble and can't be about."
+
+"Send the agent out here," growled the express messenger, "and tell the
+operator to lend a hand."
+
+The coffin was got out of its rough-box and down on the snowy platform.
+The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed a
+close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which lay
+across the black cover. No one said anything. The baggage man stood by
+his truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and
+the fireman dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and
+long oil-can, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of the
+dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked about him
+helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of that black, uneasy,
+stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of an individual to be
+addressed.
+
+"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.
+
+The man with the red beard for the first time stepped up and joined the
+others. "No, they have not come yet; the family is scattered. The body
+will be taken directly to the house." He stooped and took hold of one of
+the handles of the coffin.
+
+"Take the long hill road up, Thompson, it will be easier on the horses,"
+called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of the hearse
+and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.
+
+Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: "We didn't
+know whether there would be any one with him or not," he explained. "It's
+a long walk, so you'd better go up in the hack." He pointed to a single
+battered conveyance, but the young man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but I
+think I will go up with the hearse. If you don't object," turning to the
+undertaker, "I'll ride with you."
+
+They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight up the
+long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village were
+shining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on every
+side, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide as the
+soft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence.
+
+When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,
+weather-beaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that
+had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front
+yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the
+sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung on
+one hinge, and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young
+stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of the front
+door.
+
+The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse,
+was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched
+open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow and
+flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My boy, my boy! And this is
+how you've come home to me!"
+
+As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of unutterable
+repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular, dressed
+entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs. Merrick by the
+shoulders, crying sharply: "Come, come, mother; you mustn't go on like
+this!" Her tone changed to one of obsequious solemnity as she turned to
+the banker: "The parlour is ready, Mr. Phelps."
+
+The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the
+undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large,
+unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish,
+and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass
+prisms and before a "Rogers group" of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed
+with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening
+conviction that there had been a mistake, and that he had somehow arrived
+at the wrong destination. He looked at the clover-green Brussels, the fat
+plush upholstery, among the hand-painted china placques and panels and
+vases, for some mark of identification,--for something that might once
+conceivably have belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he
+recognized his friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts
+and curls, hanging above the piano, that he felt willing to let any of
+these people approach the coffin.
+
+"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face," wailed the
+elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully,
+almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses of
+strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost
+incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about her face--a
+kind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it was scarred and furrowed by
+violence, and so coloured and coarsened by fiercer passions that grief
+seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long nose was
+distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines on either
+side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, her
+teeth were large and square, and set far apart--teeth that could tear.
+She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like
+twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into
+the whirlpool.
+
+The daughter--the tall, raw-boned woman in crêpe, with a mourning comb in
+her hair which curiously lengthened her long face--sat stiffly upon the
+sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her lap,
+her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of the
+coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the
+house, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and
+gentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
+to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavens
+walked over and stood beside her.
+
+Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail,
+odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept grey hair and a dingy beard,
+tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up
+to the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his
+hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that
+he had no consciousness of anything else.
+
+"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered timidly,
+putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned
+and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he tottered a little.
+He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued to look at her
+with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the
+whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable shame.
+When his wife rushed from the room, her daughter strode after her with
+set lips. The servant stole up to the coffin, bent over it for a moment,
+and then slipped away to the kitchen, leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and
+the father to themselves. The old man stood looking down at his dead
+son's face. The sculptor's splendid head seemed even more noble in its
+rigid stillness than in life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wide
+forehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that
+repose we expect to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were so
+drawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin
+was thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life had
+been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once relax the tension
+and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he were still
+guarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him.
+
+The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to the
+lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are comin' back to set
+up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank'ee, Jim, thank'ee." He
+brushed the hair back gently from his son's forehead. "He was a good boy,
+Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of
+'em all--only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him." The tears
+trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.
+
+"Martin, Martin! Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed from the top of
+the stairs. The old man started timorously: "Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He
+turned away, hesitated, stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then
+reached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from the
+room.
+
+"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his eyes
+would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep,"
+remarked the lawyer.
+
+Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been
+in the room, the young man had scarcely seen any one else; but now, from
+the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and blood-shot
+eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not finding
+before--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in some one, even
+here.
+
+The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by
+dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that
+of a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept plucking
+at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by the
+window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling
+pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked
+behind him, staring down into the master's face. He could not help
+wondering what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so
+sooty a lump of potter's clay.
+
+From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door
+opened, the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for
+having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had
+been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in
+the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and
+masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
+been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust the
+lawyer went into the dining-room and closed the door into the kitchen.
+
+"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back. "The
+Merricks took her out of the poor-house years ago; and if her loyalty
+would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would
+curdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here a
+while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there
+never was anybody like her. She made Harvey's life a hell for him when
+he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how he
+kept himself sweet."
+
+"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but until tonight I
+have never known how wonderful."
+
+"That is the eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come even from
+such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried, with a sweeping gesture
+which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within which they
+stood.
+
+"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close I
+am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured Steavens, struggling with
+one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so
+he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came
+over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist and sent the window
+up a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had been
+gradually climbing into his throat for the last half hour left him with
+but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this place
+with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well enough
+now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often on his
+master's lips!
+
+Once when Merrick returned from a visit home, he brought with him a
+singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman,
+sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped,
+full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows,
+stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her attention to
+a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by the tender and delicate
+modelling of the thin, tired face, had asked him if it were his mother.
+He remembered the dull flush that had burned up in the sculptor's face.
+
+The lawyer was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the coffin, his head
+thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,
+puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal a
+feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard.
+Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor's keen glance, Jim Laird
+opened his eyes.
+
+"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly. "He was
+terribly shy as a boy."
+
+"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so," rejoined Stevens. "Although
+he could be very fond of people, he always gave one the impression of
+being detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was reflective, and
+rather distrustful of himself--except, of course, as regarded his work.
+He was sure enough there. He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women
+even more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was determined,
+indeed, to believe the best; but he seemed afraid to investigate."
+
+"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and closed his
+eyes.
+
+Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood. All
+this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose mind was
+to become an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions--so sensitive
+that the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall
+would be etched and held there for ever. Surely, if ever a man had the
+magic word in his finger tips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he
+revealed its holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored
+it to its pristine loveliness. Upon whatever he had come in contact with,
+he had left a beautiful record of the experience--a sort of ethereal
+signature; a scent, a sound, a colour that was his own.
+
+Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's life; neither
+love nor wine, as many had conjectured; but a blow which had fallen
+earlier and cut deeper than anything else could have done--a shame not
+his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very
+boyhood. And without--the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast
+ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that
+is chastened and old, and noble with traditions.
+
+At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black announced that the
+watchers were arriving, and asked them to "step into the dining-room." As
+Steavens rose, the lawyer said dryly: "You go on--it'll be a good
+experience for you. I'm not equal to that crowd tonight; I've had twenty
+years of them."
+
+As Steavens closed the door after him he glanced back at the lawyer,
+sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his
+hand.
+
+The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express car
+shuffled into the dining-room. In the light of the kerosene lamp they
+separated and became individuals. The minister, a pale, feeble-looking
+man with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a small
+side table and placed his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat down
+behind the stove and tilted his chair back comfortably against the wall,
+fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers,
+Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner-table, where they
+could finish their discussion of the new usury law and its effect on
+chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man with a smiling,
+hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal and lumber dealer and the
+cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet
+on the nickel-work. Steavens took a book from his pocket and began to
+read. The talk around him ranged through various topics of local interest
+while the house was quieting down. When it was clear that the members of
+the family were in bed, the Grand Army man hitched his shoulders and,
+untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the rounds of his chair.
+
+"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak falsetto.
+
+The banker laughed disagreeably, and began trimming his nails with a
+pearl-handled pocket-knife.
+
+"There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?" he queried in his
+turn.
+
+The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his knees
+still nearer his chin. "Why, the ole man says Harve's done right well
+lately," he chirped.
+
+The other banker spoke up. "I reckon he means by that Harve ain't asked
+him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his
+education."
+
+"Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve wasn't bein'
+edycated," tittered the Grand Army man.
+
+There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief and
+blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap.
+"It's too bad the old man's sons didn't turn out better," he remarked
+with reflective authority. "They never hung together. He spent money
+enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle-farms, and he might as well have
+poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse
+what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom farm,
+they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust
+everything to tenants and was cheated right and left."
+
+"Harve never could have handled stock none," interposed the cattleman.
+"He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought Sander's
+mules for eight-year olds, when everybody in town knew that Sander's
+father-in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present eighteen years
+before, an' they was full-grown mules then?"
+
+The company laughed discreetly, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees
+with a spasm of childish delight.
+
+"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was
+never fond of work," began the coal and lumber dealer. "I mind the last
+time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn
+helpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was
+patchin' up the fence; Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in
+his lady-like voice: 'Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.'"
+
+"That's Harve for you," approved the Grand Army man. "I kin hear him
+howlin' yet, when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother used
+to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin' the cows git
+foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin' 'em home from pasture. He
+killed a cow of mine that-a-way onct--a pure Jersey and the best milker I
+had, an' the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was watchin' the
+sun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away."
+
+"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to
+school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate,
+judicial tone. "There was where he got his head full of nonsense. What
+Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas
+City business college."
+
+The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it possible that
+these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing
+to them? The very name of their town would have remained for ever buried
+in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world
+in connection with Harvey Merrick's. He remembered what his master had
+said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs
+had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his
+pupil to send his body home. "It's not a pleasant place to be lying while
+the world is moving and doing and bettering," he had said with a feeble
+smile, "but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we
+came from, in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and
+after they have had their say, I shan't have much to fear from the
+judgment of God!"
+
+The cattleman took up the comment. "Forty's young for a Merrick to cash
+in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along with
+whisky."
+
+"His mother's people were not long lived, and Harvey never had a robust
+constitution," said the minister mildly. He would have liked to say more.
+He had been the boy's Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of him;
+but he felt that he was not in a position to speak. His own sons had
+turned out badly, and it was not a year since one of them had made his
+last trip home in the express car, shot in a gambling-house in the
+Black Hills.
+
+"Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently looked upon
+the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommon
+fool of him," moralized the cattleman.
+
+Just then the door leading into the parlour rattled loudly and every one
+started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out.
+The Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his blue,
+blood-shot eye. They were all afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he
+could twist the law to suit his client's needs as no other man in all
+western Kansas could do, and there were many who tried. The lawyer closed
+the door behind him, leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking
+his head a little to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the
+court-room, ears were always pricked up, as it usually foretold a flood
+of withering sarcasm.
+
+"I've been with you gentlemen before," he began in a dry, even tone,
+"when you've sat by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town;
+and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied when
+you checked them up. What's the matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputable
+young men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It might almost
+seem to a stranger that there was some way something the matter with your
+progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young lawyer you
+ever turned out, after he had come home from the university as straight
+as a die, take to drinking and forge a check and shoot himself? Why did
+Bill Merrit's son die of the shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why was Mr.
+Thomas's son, here, shot in a gambling-house? Why did young Adams burn
+his mill to beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?"
+
+The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist quietly
+on the table. "I'll tell you why. Because you drummed nothing but money
+and knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers;
+because you carped away at them as you've been carping here tonight,
+holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their models, as our
+grandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams. But the boys were
+young, and raw at the business you put them to, and how could they match
+coppers with such artists as Phelps and Elder? You wanted them to be
+successful rascals; they were only unsuccessful ones--that's all the
+difference. There was only one boy ever raised in this borderland between
+ruffianism and civilization who didn't come to grief, and you hated
+Harvey Merrick more for winning out than you hated all the other boys who
+got under the wheels. Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is
+fond of saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mind
+to; but he knew Harve wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his bank
+and all his cattlefarms put together; and a lack of appreciation, that
+way, goes hard with Phelps.
+
+"Old Nimrod thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as Nimrod and
+me!
+
+"Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's money--fell
+short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the
+very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in the
+county court; and we all know that the old man came out of that
+partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I'm getting
+personal, and I'd better be driving ahead at what I want to say."
+
+The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on:
+"Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead in
+earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We meant to be
+great men. Even I, and I haven't lost my sense of humour, gentlemen, I
+meant to be a great man. I came back here to practise, and I found you
+didn't in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me to be a
+shrewd lawyer--oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him an increase
+of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new county survey
+that would put the widow Wilson's little bottom farm inside his south
+line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per cent, a month, and get it
+collected; and Stark here wanted to wheedle old women up in Vermont into
+investing their annuities in real-estate mortgages that are not worth the
+paper they are written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough, and you'll go
+on needing me!
+
+"Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me to
+be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you'll stand
+up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul you couldn't dirty and
+whose hands you couldn't tie. Oh, you're a discriminating lot of
+Christians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey's name in some
+Eastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and, again,
+times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away from all
+this hog-wallow, climbing the big, clean up-grade he'd set for himself.
+
+"And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and hated
+as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little Western town
+know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn't
+have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together,
+and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of
+God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and
+bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's
+been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man could
+have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks
+as the here-present financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God have
+mercy!"
+
+The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught up
+his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand Army
+man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck about at
+his fellows.
+
+Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services.
+Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start East
+without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from him
+again, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it,
+he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved
+must have gone under ground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it never
+spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Colorado
+mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons who had got into trouble out
+there by cutting government timber.
+
+
+
+
+"A Death in the Desert"
+
+
+
+
+Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle
+was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a
+conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged
+him to be a travelling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an
+adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool and
+clean under almost any circumstances.
+
+The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called among railroad
+men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous
+country between Holdredge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond man and himself
+the only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls
+who had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly
+discussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado. The four
+uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow
+dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew up
+in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed,
+until they were one colour with the sage-brush and sand-hills. The grey
+and yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns,
+and the little red boxes of station-houses, where the spindling trees
+and sickly vines in the blue-grass yards made little green reserves
+fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.
+
+As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through the
+car-windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies' permission to remove
+his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirtsleeves, with a black silk
+handkerchief tucked about his collar. He had seemed interested in
+Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdredge; kept glancing at
+him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though
+he were trying to recall something. But wherever Everett went, some one
+was almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it had
+ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the stranger, seeming
+satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed his
+eyes, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from _Proserpine_, the
+cantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a
+night. Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins
+at college glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and only
+two weeks ago he had heard it played on sleigh-bells at a variety theatre
+in Denver. There was literally no way of escaping his brother's
+precocity. Adriance could live on the other side of the Atlantic, where
+his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, but
+his brother had never been able to outrun _Proserpine_,--and here he
+found it again, in the Colorado sand-hills. Not that Everett was exactly
+ashamed of _Proserpine_; only a man of genius could have written it, but
+it was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as he can.
+
+Everett unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbour across the aisle.
+Immediately the large man rose and coming over dropped into the seat
+facing Hilgarde, extending his card.
+
+"Dusty ride, isn't it? I don't mind it myself; I'm used to it. Born and
+bred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit. I've been trying to place you
+for a long time; I think I must have met you before."
+
+"Thank you," said Everett, taking the card; "my name is Hilgarde. You've
+probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him."
+
+The travelling-man brought his hand down upon his knee with such
+vehemence that the solitaire blazed.
+
+"So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance Hilgarde you're his
+double. I thought I couldn't be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess! I
+never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played the
+piano score of _Proserpine_ through to us once at the Chicago Press Club.
+I used to be on the _Commercial_ there before I began to travel for the
+publishing department of the concern. So you're Hilgarde's brother, and
+here I've run into you at the jumping-off place. Sounds like a newspaper
+yarn, doesn't it?"
+
+The travelling-man laughed and offering Everett a cigar plied him with
+questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk
+to him about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at a
+Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.
+
+The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a matter of four
+hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness
+except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office over
+time on a summer night. When Everett alighted from the train he walked
+down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what
+direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near the
+crossing and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and her
+figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was too
+dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the
+switch-engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the
+head-light threw a strong glare of light on his face. The woman in the
+phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started forward
+and caught the horse's head, but the animal only lifted its ears and
+whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly still,
+her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to her
+face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaeton,
+crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"
+
+Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hat
+and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most
+impossible places, especially from women.
+
+While he was breakfasting the next morning, the head waiter leaned over
+his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in the
+parlour. Everett finished his coffee, and went in the direction
+indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His
+whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique was
+not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was something
+below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick,
+closely cut hair was beginning to show grey about the ears, and his
+bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind
+him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities,
+yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidence
+in his address.
+
+"Good-morning, Mr. Hilgarde," he said, extending his hand; "I found your
+name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I'm afraid my sister
+startled you at the station last night, and I've come around to explain."
+
+"Ah! the young lady in the phaeton? I'm sure I didn't know whether I had
+anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe an
+apology."
+
+The man coloured a little under the dark brown of his face.
+
+"Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see,
+my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's, and it seems you favour
+him; when the switch-engine threw a light on your face, it startled her."
+
+Everett wheeled about in his chair. "Oh! _Katharine_ Gaylord! Is it
+possible! Why, I used to know her when I was a boy. What on
+earth--"
+
+"Is she doing here?" Gaylord grimly filled out the pause. "You've got at
+the heart of the matter. You know my sister had been in bad health for a
+long time?"
+
+"No. The last I knew of her she was singing in London. My brother and I
+correspond infrequently, and seldom get beyond family matters. I am
+deeply sorry to hear this."
+
+The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little.
+
+"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you.
+She's set on it. We live several miles out of town, but my rig's below,
+and I can take you out any time you can go."
+
+"At once, then. I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment."
+
+When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley
+Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and
+settled back into his own element.
+
+"I think I'd better tell you something about my sister before you see
+her, and I don't know just where to begin. She travelled in Europe with
+your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his concerts; but I don't
+know just how much you know about her."
+
+"Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted
+of his pupils. When I knew her she was very young and very beautiful,
+and quite turned my head for a while."
+
+Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was entirely taken up by his grief.
+"That's the whole thing," he went on, flecking his horses with the whip.
+
+"She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a great
+family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago,
+and then to New York, and then to Europe, and got a taste for it all; and
+now she's dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she
+can't fall back into ours. We've grown apart, some way--miles and miles
+apart--and I'm afraid she's fearfully unhappy."
+
+"It's a tragic story you're telling me, Gaylord," said Everett. They were
+well out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains of
+red grass, with the ragged blue outline of the mountains before them.
+
+"Tragic!" cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, "my God, nobody will
+ever know how tragic! It's a tragedy I live with and eat with and sleep
+with, until I've lost my grip on everything. You see she had made a good
+bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It's her
+lungs. I've got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all
+say it's no use. She hasn't the ghost of a chance. It's just getting
+through the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she came
+to me. She just wrote that she was run down. Now that she's here, I think
+she'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won't leave. She says
+it's easier to let go of life here. There was a time when I
+was a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little
+thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything on
+earth she wanted, and she hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't cover; and
+now, when I've got a little property together, I can't buy her a night's
+sleep!"
+
+Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status in the world
+might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the ladder with him.
+
+The reins slackened in Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a showily
+painted house with many gables and a round tower. "Here we are," he said,
+turning to Everett, "and I guess we understand each other."
+
+They were met at the door by a thin, colourless woman, whom Gaylord
+introduced as "My sister, Maggie." She asked her brother to show Mr.
+Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine would join him.
+
+When Everett entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise,
+feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some
+New York studio that he had always known. He looked incredulously out of
+the window at the grey plain that ended in the great upheaval of the
+Rockies.
+
+The haunting air of familiarity perplexed him. Suddenly his eye fell upon
+a large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all became
+clear enough: this was veritably his brother's room. If it were not an
+exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in
+various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before
+the renovator's varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In
+every detail Adriance's taste was so manifest that the room seemed to
+exhale his personality.
+
+Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord,
+taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her
+eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a
+tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of
+embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth,
+a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The
+_camaraderie_ of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep
+lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and
+cynical. Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward the
+world. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay in
+her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-giving
+quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a perpetual _salutat_
+to the world.
+
+Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and
+his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A tall woman advanced
+toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak she coughed
+slightly, then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky:
+"You see I make the traditional Camille entrance. How good of you to
+come, Mr. Hilgarde."
+
+Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not
+looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming,
+he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not
+reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds of her
+white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp outlines of
+her body, but the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and
+obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. The
+splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her
+gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were
+transparently white, and cold to the touch. The changes in her face were
+less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even
+the delicate flush of colour in her cheeks, all defiantly remained,
+though they were all in a lower key--older, sadder, softer.
+
+She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows.
+"Of course I'm ill, and I look it, but you must be quite frank and
+sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we've no time to
+lose. And if I'm a trifle irritable you won't mind?--for I'm more than
+usually nervous."
+
+"Don't bother with me this morning, if you are tired," urged Everett. "I
+can come quite as well tomorrow."
+
+"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humour
+that he remembered as a part of her. "It's solitude that I'm tired to
+death of--solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister
+called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and
+felt it his duty to stop. The funniest feature of his conversation is
+that he is always excusing my own profession to me. But how we are losing
+time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you're just on from there.
+How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of the
+Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Are the trees
+still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does
+the chaste Diana still keep her vows through all the exasperating changes
+of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided
+aspirants practise their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall?
+What do people go to see at the theatres, and what do they eat and drink
+in the world nowadays? Oh, let me die in Harlem!" she was interrupted by
+a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort,
+plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in town
+during the summer, and the musical outlook for the winter. He was
+diagramming with his pencil some new mechanical device to be used at the
+Metropolitan in the production of the _Rheingold_, when he became
+conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking
+to the four walls.
+
+Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through
+half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his
+explanation vaguely enough and put the pencil back in his pocket. As he
+did so, she said, quietly: "How wonderfully like Adriance you are!"
+
+He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that made
+them seem quite boyish. "Yes, isn't it absurd? It's almost as awkward
+as looking like Napoleon--But, after all, there are some advantages. It
+has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you."
+
+Katharine gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes. "Oh, it
+did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and how
+you used to stare at people, and then blush and look cross. Do you
+remember that night you took me home from a rehearsal, and scarcely spoke
+a word to me?"
+
+"It was the silence of admiration," protested Everett, "very crude and
+boyish, but certainly sincere. Perhaps you suspected something of the
+sort?"
+
+"I believe I suspected a pose; the one that boys often affect with
+singers. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good
+deal of your brother's pupils." Everett shook his head. "I saw my
+brother's pupils come and go. Sometimes I was called on to play
+accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a
+carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they
+never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance
+you speak of."
+
+"Yes," observed Katharine, thoughtfully, "I noticed it then, too; but it
+has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have
+lived such different lives. It's not merely an ordinary family likeness
+of features, you know, but the suggestion of the other man's personality
+in your face--like an air transposed to another key. But I'm not
+attempting to define it; it's beyond me; something altogether unusual and
+a trifle--well, uncanny," she finished, laughing.
+
+Everett sat looking out under the red window-blind which was raised just
+a little. As it swung back and forth in the wind it revealed the glaring
+panorama of the desert--a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in
+dead calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and,
+beyond, the ragged blue outline of the mountains and the peaks of snow,
+white as the white clouds. "I remember, when I was a child I used to be
+very sensitive about it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that
+I would have had it otherwise, but it seemed like a birthmark, or
+something not to be lightly spoken of. It came into even my relations
+with my mother. Ad went abroad to study when he was very young, and
+mother was all broken up over it. She did her whole duty by each of
+us, but it was generally understood among us that she'd have made
+burnt-offerings of us all for him any day. I was a little fellow then,
+and when she sat alone on the porch on summer evenings, she used
+sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that
+streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew she
+was thinking of Adriance."
+
+"Poor little chap," said Katharine, in her husky voice. "How fond people
+have always been of Adriance! Tell me the latest news of him. I haven't
+heard, except through the press, for a year or more. He was in Algiers
+then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback, and he had quite
+made up his mind to adopt the Mahometan faith and become an Arab. How
+many countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder?"
+
+"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett. "He is himself barely long
+enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn't hear
+from him while he was an Arab; I missed that."
+
+"He was writing an Algerian _suite_ for the piano then; it must be in the
+publisher's hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his letter,
+and have lost touch with him."
+
+Everett drew an envelope from his pocket. "This came a month ago. Read it
+at your leisure."
+
+"Thanks. I shall keep it as a hostage. Now I want you to play for me.
+Whatever you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy
+let me hear it."
+
+He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his
+remarkable physical likeness to his brother, and trying to discover in
+just what it consisted. He was of a larger build than Adriance, and much
+heavier. His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, and
+darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same
+inconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; while
+Adriance's were always points of high light, and always meaning another
+thing than the thing they meant yesterday. It was hard to see why this
+earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face, as
+gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder,
+and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of
+twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into
+words. A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and
+of her affections, once said that the shepherd-boys who sang in the Vale
+of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde.
+
+Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night,
+the victim of mournful recollections. His infatuation for Katharine
+Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish
+love-affairs. The fact that it was all so done and dead and far behind
+him, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an
+oppressive sense of age and loss.
+
+He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his
+brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he had
+wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He had sat
+there in the box--while his brother and Katherine were called back again
+and again, and the flowers went up over the footlights until they were
+stacked half as high as the piano--brooding in his sullen boy's heart
+upon the pride those two felt in each other's work--spurring each other
+to their best and beautifully contending in song. The footlights had
+seemed a hard, glittering line drawn sharply between their life and his.
+He walked back to his hotel alone, and sat in his window staring out on
+Madison Square until long after midnight, resolved to beat no more at
+doors that he could never enter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of
+release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of
+the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging him
+to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his business
+engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's ponies, or
+fishing in the mountains. In the afternoon he was usually at his post of
+duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions about
+the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the
+compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played
+the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a
+stop-gap all his life. He remembered going through a looking-glass
+labyrinth when he was a boy, and trying gallery after gallery, only at
+every turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was not
+his own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west, by
+land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
+business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining
+current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his duty
+had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his
+brother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no
+attempt to analyse the situation or to state it in exact terms; but he
+accepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die.
+Day by day he felt her need for him grow more acute and positive; and day
+by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her, his own
+individuality played a smaller part. His power to minister to her comfort
+lay solely in his link with his brother's life. He knew that she sat by
+him always watching for some trick of gesture, some familiar play of
+expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should seem
+wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this, and that in the
+exhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept
+deep and sweet, and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old
+Florentine garden, and not of bitterness and death.
+
+A few days after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled
+his brother to write her. He merely said that she was mortally ill;
+he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part of
+his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but the
+opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. He caught the lyric essence of the
+moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually
+did the right thing,--except, when he did very cruel things--bent upon
+making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted
+that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those
+near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage
+of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near,
+forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.
+
+Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily call
+at the gaily painted ranch-house, he found Katharine laughing like a
+girl. "Have you ever thought," she said, as he entered the music-room,
+"how much these séances of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine Nights,'
+except that I don't give you an opportunity to monopolize the
+conversation?" She held his hand longer than usual as she greeted him.
+"You are the kindest man living, the kindest," she added, softly.
+
+Everett's grey face coloured faintly as he drew his hand away, for he
+felt that this time she was looking at him, and not at a whimsical
+caricature of his brother.
+
+She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a
+book and held it out, smiling. "You got him to write it. Don't say you
+didn't, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was
+a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with
+the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you
+didn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, and
+you are to play it for me directly. But first for the letter; I think you
+would better read it aloud to me."
+
+Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window-seat in which she
+reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter,
+his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that
+it was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who
+was tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier and
+the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.
+
+The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the
+fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy with the warm
+fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running water,
+as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago. The sky
+was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful Moorish
+arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an
+outline of them on the margin of his note-paper. The letter was full of
+confidences about his work, and delicate allusions to their old happy
+days of study and comradeship.
+
+As Everett folded it he felt that Adriance had divined the thing needed
+and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was consistently
+egotistical, and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just
+what she had wanted. A strong realization of his brother's charm and
+intensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind
+of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himself
+even more resolutely than he consumed others. Then he looked down at this
+white, burnt-out brand that lay before him.
+
+"Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly. "I think I can scarcely answer
+his letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me. I want
+you to tell him many things for me, yet they can all be summed up in
+this: I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at
+the cost of what is half his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?"
+
+"I know perfectly well what you mean," answered Everett, thoughtfully.
+"And yet it's difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes,
+so little mars."
+
+Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with
+feverish earnestness. "Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean;
+his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they
+take him at their own estimate."
+
+"Come, come," expostulated Everett, now alarmed at her excitement. "Where
+is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself."
+
+He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was
+indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the most
+ambitious work he had done up to that time, and marked the transition
+from his early lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett played
+intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems
+peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything
+in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.
+
+"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have done for
+him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the
+tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my
+tragedy, as I lie here, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass
+me--ah, God! the swift feet of the runners!"
+
+She turned her face away and covered it with her hands. Everett crossed
+over to her and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her she
+had never before, beyond an occasional ironical jest, given voice to the
+bitterness of her own defeat. Her courage had become a point of pride
+with him.
+
+"Don't do it," he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel it
+too much."
+
+When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave,
+cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed. "No,
+I won't; I will save that for the night, when I have no better company.
+Run over that theme at the beginning again, will you? It was running in
+his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his
+glass at the dinner-table. He had just begun to work it out when the late
+autumn came on, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter. He lost
+touch with his idea, I suppose, during his illness. Do you remember those
+frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enough
+to save him from himself! When I got word from Florence that he had been
+ill, I was singing at Monte Carlo. His wife was hurrying to him from
+Paris, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm.
+They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the
+library--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture
+and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,
+looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, you
+know. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking-jacket
+lent no colour to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill
+he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the
+last strokes to the score of his _'Souvenirs d' Automne,'_ and he was as
+I most like to remember him; calm and happy, and tired with that heavenly
+tiredness that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain
+poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned and sobbed in the garden
+and about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comes
+back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire. It
+glowed on the black walls and floor like the reflection of purgatorial
+flame. Beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. Adriance
+sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes,
+and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one
+such life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into
+the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both
+of us at once--that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life
+and death and God and hope--and we were like two clinging together on a
+spar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything. Then we heard the
+front door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, and
+the servants came running with lights, announcing that Madame had
+returned, '_and in the book we read no more that night_.'"
+
+She gave the old line with a certain bitter humour, and with the hard,
+bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a
+glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn through so many years, had
+gradually changed the lines of her face, and when she looked in the
+mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer
+and satirist of herself.
+
+Everett dropped his head upon his hand. "How much you have cared!" he
+said.
+
+"Ah, yes, I cared," she replied, closing her eyes. "You can't imagine
+what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to
+be able to tell it to some one."
+
+Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. "I was not sure how
+much you wanted me to know," he said.
+
+"Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your
+face, when you came that day with Charley. You are so like him, that it
+is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now that he will
+know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion."
+
+"And has he never known at all?" asked Everett, in a thick voice.
+
+"Oh! never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomed
+to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he doesn't
+find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy. He
+has a genuine fondness for every woman who is not stupid or gloomy, or
+old or preternaturally ugly. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles
+and the gallantries and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a
+Sunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our
+turns. It was his kindness that was hardest."
+
+"Don't; you'll make me hate him," groaned Everett.
+
+Katherine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. "It wasn't in
+the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of it.
+Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to him,
+and I drank my doom greedily enough."
+
+Everett rose and stood hesitating. "I think I must go. You ought to be
+quiet, and I don't think I can hear any more just now."
+
+She put out her hand and took his playfully.
+
+"You've put in three weeks at this sort of thing, haven't you? Well, it
+ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be."
+
+He knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: "I stayed because I wanted to be
+with you, that's all. I have never cared about other women since I
+knew you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and
+I could not leave you if I would."
+
+She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. "No, no; don't
+tell me that. I have seen enough tragedy. It was only a boy's fancy,
+and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a
+moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. Now go, and you will
+come again tomorrow, as long as there are tomorrows." She took his hand
+with a smile that was both courage and despair, and full of infinite
+loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:
+
+_"For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;
+If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
+If not, why then, this parting was well made."_
+
+The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he
+went out.
+
+On the night of Adriance Hilgarde's opening concert in Paris, Everett sat
+by the bed in the ranch-house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle
+that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it for
+ever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left
+already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious
+animal life were left to do battle with death. She laboured under a
+delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the
+Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work. When
+she roused from her stupor, it was only to ask the porter to waken her
+half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate about the delays and
+the roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the nurse were left
+alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a couch outside the
+door. Everett sat looking at the sputtering night-lamp until it made his
+eyes ache. His head dropped forward, and he sank into heavy, distressful
+slumber. He was dreaming of Adriance's concert in Paris, and of
+Adriance, the troubadour. He heard the applause and he saw the flowers
+going up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the
+piano, and the petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the
+floor. Down this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step,
+leading his singer by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish
+eyes.
+
+The nurse touched him on the shoulder, he started and awoke. She screened
+the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake and
+conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm and
+began to fan her. She looked into his face with eyes that seemed never to
+have wept or doubted. "Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear!" she whispered.
+
+Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of
+art was over for Katharine.
+
+Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the
+west-bound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had
+nothing to say to each other. Everett's bags were piled on the truck, and
+his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he gazed
+again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord's
+impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close,
+had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the
+wrench of farewell.
+
+As the train pulled in, Everett wrung Gaylord's hand among the crowd of
+alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, _en route_
+for the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast
+during the stop. Everett heard an exclamation, and a stout woman rushed
+up to him, glowing with joyful surprise and caught his coat-sleeve with
+her tightly gloved hands.
+
+"_Herr Gott_, Adriance, _lieber Freund_," she cried.
+
+Everett lifted his hat, blushing. "Pardon me, madame, I see that you have
+mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother." Turning from the
+crestfallen singer he hurried into the car.
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Youth and the Bright Medusa, by Willa Cather
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Youth and the Bright Medusa
+
+Author: Willa Cather
+
+Release Date: September 30, 2004  [eBook #13555]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Project Gutenberg Beginners
+Projects, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA
+
+by
+
+WILLA CATHER
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"We must not look at Goblin men,
+We must not buy their fruits;
+Who knows upon what soil they fed
+Their hungry, thirsty roots?"
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+COMING, APHRODITE!
+
+THE DIAMOND MINE
+
+A GOLD SLIPPER
+
+SCANDAL
+
+PAUL'S CASE
+
+A WAGNER MATINEE
+
+THE SCULPTOR'S FUNERAL
+
+"A DEATH IN THE DESERT"
+
+
+
+
+The author wishes to thank _McClure's Magazine_, _The Century
+Magazine_ and _Harper's Magazine_ for their courtesy in permitting
+the re-publication of three stories in this collection.
+
+The last four stories in the volume, _Paul's Case_, _A Wagner Matinee_,
+_The Sculptor's Funeral_, "_A Death in the Desert_," are re-printed from
+the author's first book of stories, entitled "The Troll Garden,"
+published in 1905.
+
+
+
+
+
+Coming, Aphrodite!
+
+
+I
+
+Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on
+the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him.
+He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north,
+where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court
+and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very
+cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners
+were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built
+against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day
+and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window,
+was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked
+his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog's bed, and often
+a bone or two for his comfort.
+
+The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surly
+disposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it told
+on his nerves. His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at very
+exclusive dog shows. When he and his master went out to prowl about
+University Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III was
+invariably fresh and shining. His pink skin showed through his mottled
+coat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, and
+he wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler's. Hedger,
+as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with a
+shapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes that
+had become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put on
+gloves unless the day was biting cold.
+
+Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the
+rear apartment--two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west.
+His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors,
+which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy
+of the occupant. The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, by
+a trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture. She went
+to auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored it
+away here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing.
+Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to young
+people who came to New York to "write" or to "paint"--who proposed to
+live by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desired
+artistic surroundings.
+
+When Hedger first moved in, these rooms were occupied by a young man who
+tried to write plays,--and who kept on trying until a week ago, when the
+nurse had put him out for unpaid rent.
+
+A few days after the playwright left, Hedger heard an ominous murmur of
+voices through the bolted double doors: the lady-like intonation of the
+nurse--doubtless exhibiting her treasures--and another voice, also a
+woman's, but very different; young, fresh, unguarded, confident. All the
+same, it would be very annoying to have a woman in there. The only
+bath-room on the floor was at the top of the stairs in the front hall,
+and he would always be running into her as he came or went from his bath.
+He would have to be more careful to see that Caesar didn't leave bones
+about the hall, too; and she might object when he cooked steak and onions
+on his gas burner.
+
+As soon as the talking ceased and the women left, he forgot them. He was
+absorbed in a study of paradise fish at the Aquarium, staring out at
+people through the glass and green water of their tank. It was a highly
+gratifying idea; the incommunicability of one stratum of animal life with
+another,--though Hedger pretended it was only an experiment in unusual
+lighting. When he heard trunks knocking against the sides of the narrow
+hall, then he realized that she was moving in at once. Toward noon,
+groans and deep gasps and the creaking of ropes, made him aware that a
+piano was arriving. After the tramp of the movers died away down the
+stairs, somebody touched off a few scales and chords on the instrument,
+and then there was peace. Presently he heard her lock her door and go
+down the hall humming something; going out to lunch, probably. He stuck
+his brushes in a can of turpentine and put on his hat, not stopping to
+wash his hands. Caesar was smelling along the crack under the bolted
+doors; his bony tail stuck out hard as a hickory withe, and the hair was
+standing up about his elegant collar.
+
+Hedger encouraged him. "Come along, Caesar. You'll soon get used to a new
+smell."
+
+In the hall stood an enormous trunk, behind the ladder that led to the
+roof, just opposite Hedger's door. The dog flew at it with a growl of
+hurt amazement. They went down three flights of stairs and out into the
+brilliant May afternoon.
+
+Behind the Square, Hedger and his dog descended into a basement oyster
+house where there were no tablecloths on the tables and no handles on the
+coffee cups, and the floor was covered with sawdust, and Caesar was
+always welcome,--not that he needed any such precautionary flooring. All
+the carpets of Persia would have been safe for him. Hedger ordered steak
+and onions absentmindedly, not realizing why he had an apprehension that
+this dish might be less readily at hand hereafter. While he ate, Caesar
+sat beside his chair, gravely disturbing the sawdust with his tail.
+
+After lunch Hedger strolled about the Square for the dog's health and
+watched the stages pull out;--that was almost the very last summer of the
+old horse stages on Fifth Avenue. The fountain had but lately begun
+operations for the season and was throwing up a mist of rainbow water
+which now and then blew south and sprayed a bunch of Italian babies that
+were being supported on the outer rim by older, very little older,
+brothers and sisters. Plump robins were hopping about on the soil; the
+grass was newly cut and blindingly green. Looking up the Avenue through
+the Arch, one could see the young poplars with their bright, sticky
+leaves, and the Brevoort glistening in its spring coat of paint, and
+shining horses and carriages,--occasionally an automobile, misshapen and
+sullen, like an ugly threat in a stream of things that were bright and
+beautiful and alive.
+
+While Caesar and his master were standing by the fountain, a girl
+approached them, crossing the Square. Hedger noticed her because she wore
+a lavender cloth suit and carried in her arms a big bunch of fresh
+lilacs. He saw that she was young and handsome,--beautiful, in fact, with
+a splendid figure and good action. She, too, paused by the fountain and
+looked back through the Arch up the Avenue. She smiled rather
+patronizingly as she looked, and at the same time seemed delighted. Her
+slowly curving upper lip and half-closed eyes seemed to say: "You're gay,
+you're exciting, you are quite the right sort of thing; but you're none
+too fine for me!"
+
+In the moment she tarried, Caesar stealthily approached her and sniffed
+at the hem of her lavender skirt, then, when she went south like an
+arrow, he ran back to his master and lifted a face full of emotion and
+alarm, his lower lip twitching under his sharp white teeth and his hazel
+eyes pointed with a very definite discovery. He stood thus, motionless,
+while Hedger watched the lavender girl go up the steps and through the
+door of the house in which he lived.
+
+"You're right, my boy, it's she! She might be worse looking, you know."
+
+When they mounted to the studio, the new lodger's door, at the back of
+the hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs
+just brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the old
+hall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door and
+complained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particular
+flavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never spoken to her since.) He
+was used to the old smell, and he preferred it to that of the lilacs, and
+so did his companion, whose nose was so much more discriminating. Hedger
+shut his door vehemently, and fell to work.
+
+Most young men who dwell in obscure studios in New York have had a
+beginning, come out of something, have somewhere a home town, a family, a
+paternal roof. But Don Hedger had no such background. He was a foundling,
+and had grown up in a school for homeless boys, where book-learning was a
+negligible part of the curriculum. When he was sixteen, a Catholic priest
+took him to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to keep house for him. The priest
+did something to fill in the large gaps in the boy's education,--taught
+him to like "Don Quixote" and "The Golden Legend," and encouraged him to
+mess with paints and crayons in his room up under the slope of the
+mansard. When Don wanted to go to New York to study at the Art League,
+the priest got him a night job as packer in one of the big department
+stores. Since then, Hedger had taken care of himself; that was his only
+responsibility. He was singularly unencumbered; had no family duties, no
+social ties, no obligations toward any one but his landlord. Since he
+travelled light, he had travelled rather far. He had got over a good deal
+of the earth's surface, in spite of the fact that he never in his life
+had more than three hundred dollars ahead at any one time, and he had
+already outlived a succession of convictions and revelations about his
+art.
+
+Though he was now but twenty-six years old, he had twice been on the
+verge of becoming a marketable product; once through some studies of New
+York streets he did for a magazine, and once through a collection of
+pastels he brought home from New Mexico, which Remington, then at the
+height of his popularity, happened to see, and generously tried to push.
+But on both occasions Hedger decided that this was something he didn't
+wish to carry further,--simply the old thing over again and got
+nowhere,--so he took enquiring dealers experiments in a "later manner,"
+that made them put him out of the shop. When he ran short of money, he
+could always get any amount of commercial work; he was an expert
+draughtsman and worked with lightning speed. The rest of his time he
+spent in groping his way from one kind of painting into another, or
+travelling about without luggage, like a tramp, and he was chiefly
+occupied with getting rid of ideas he had once thought very fine.
+
+Hedger's circumstances, since he had moved to Washington Square, were
+affluent compared to anything he had ever known before. He was now able
+to pay advance rent and turn the key on his studio when he went away for
+four months at a stretch. It didn't occur to him to wish to be richer
+than this. To be sure, he did without a great many things other people
+think necessary, but he didn't miss them, because he had never had them.
+He belonged to no clubs, visited no houses, had no studio friends, and he
+ate his dinner alone in some decent little restaurant, even on Christmas
+and New Year's. For days together he talked to nobody but his dog and the
+janitress and the lame oysterman.
+
+After he shut the door and settled down to his paradise fish on that
+first Tuesday in May, Hedger forgot all about his new neighbour. When the
+light failed, he took Caesar out for a walk. On the way home he did his
+marketing on West Houston Street, with a one-eyed Italian woman who
+always cheated him. After he had cooked his beans and scallopini, and
+drunk half a bottle of Chianti, he put his dishes in the sink and went up
+on the roof to smoke. He was the only person in the house who ever went
+to the roof, and he had a secret understanding with the janitress about
+it. He was to have "the privilege of the roof," as she said, if he opened
+the heavy trapdoor on sunny days to air out the upper hall, and was
+watchful to close it when rain threatened. Mrs. Foley was fat and dirty
+and hated to climb stairs,--besides, the roof was reached by a
+perpendicular iron ladder, definitely inaccessible to a woman of her
+bulk, and the iron door at the top of it was too heavy for any but
+Hedger's strong arm to lift. Hedger was not above medium height, but he
+practised with weights and dumb-bells, and in the shoulders he was as
+strong as a gorilla.
+
+So Hedger had the roof to himself. He and Caesar often slept up there on
+hot nights, rolled in blankets he had brought home from Arizona. He
+mounted with Caesar under his left arm. The dog had never learned to
+climb a perpendicular ladder, and never did he feel so much his master's
+greatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his arm
+for this perilous ascent. Up there was even gravel to scratch in, and a
+dog could do whatever he liked, so long as he did not bark. It was a kind
+of Heaven, which no one was strong enough to reach but his great,
+paint-smelling master.
+
+On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon in
+the west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then one
+of them darted away from the group and shot off into the gauzy blue with
+a soft little trail of light, like laughter. Hedger and his dog were
+delighted when a star did this. They were quite lost in watching the
+glittering game, when they were suddenly diverted by a sound,--not
+from the stars, though it was music. It was not the Prologue to
+Pagliacci, which rose ever and anon on hot evenings from an Italian
+tenement on Thompson Street, with the gasps of the corpulent baritone who
+got behind it; nor was it the hurdy-gurdy man, who often played at the
+corner in the balmy twilight. No, this was a woman's voice, singing the
+tempestuous, over-lapping phrases of Signor Puccini, then comparatively
+new in the world, but already so popular that even Hedger recognized his
+unmistakable gusts of breath. He looked about over the roofs; all was
+blue and still, with the well-built chimneys that were never used now
+standing up dark and mournful. He moved softly toward the yellow
+quadrangle where the gas from the hall shone up through the half-lifted
+trapdoor. Oh yes! It came up through the hole like a strong draught, a
+big, beautiful voice, and it sounded rather like a professional's. A
+piano had arrived in the morning, Hedger remembered. This might be a very
+great nuisance. It would be pleasant enough to listen to, if you could
+turn it on and off as you wished; but you couldn't. Caesar, with the gas
+light shining on his collar and his ugly but sensitive face, panted and
+looked up for information. Hedger put down a reassuring hand.
+
+"I don't know. We can't tell yet. It may not be so bad."
+
+He stayed on the roof until all was still below, and finally descended,
+with quite a new feeling about his neighbour. Her voice, like her figure,
+inspired respect,--if one did not choose to call it admiration. Her door
+was shut, the transom was dark; nothing remained of her but the obtrusive
+trunk, unrightfully taking up room in the narrow hall.
+
+
+II
+
+For two days Hedger didn't see her. He was painting eight hours a day
+just then, and only went out to hunt for food. He noticed that she
+practised scales and exercises for about an hour in the morning; then she
+locked her door, went humming down the hall, and left him in peace. He
+heard her getting her coffee ready at about the same time he got his.
+Earlier still, she passed his room on her way to her bath. In the evening
+she sometimes sang, but on the whole she didn't bother him. When he was
+working well he did not notice anything much. The morning paper lay
+before his door until he reached out for his milk bottle, then he kicked
+the sheet inside and it lay on the floor until evening. Sometimes
+he read it and sometimes he did not. He forgot there was anything of
+importance going on in the world outside of his third floor studio.
+Nobody had ever taught him that he ought to be interested in other
+people; in the Pittsburgh steel strike, in the Fresh Air Fund, in the
+scandal about the Babies' Hospital. A grey wolf, living in a Wyoming
+canyon, would hardly have been less concerned about these things than was
+Don Hedger.
+
+One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of the
+hall, having just given Caesar his bath and rubbed him into a glow with a
+heavy towel. Before the door, lying in wait for him, as it were, stood a
+tall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown that fell away from her
+marble arms. In her hands she carried various accessories of the bath.
+
+"I wish," she said distinctly, standing in his way, "I wish you wouldn't
+wash your dog in the tub. I never heard of such a thing! I've found his
+hair in the tub, and I've smelled a doggy smell, and now I've caught you
+at it. It's an outrage!"
+
+Hedger was badly frightened. She was so tall and positive, and was fairly
+blazing with beauty and anger. He stood blinking, holding on to his
+sponge and dog-soap, feeling that he ought to bow very low to her. But
+what he actually said was:
+
+"Nobody has ever objected before. I always wash the tub,--and, anyhow,
+he's cleaner than most people."
+
+"Cleaner than me?" her eyebrows went up, her white arms and neck and her
+fragrant person seemed to scream at him like a band of outraged nymphs.
+Something flashed through his mind about a man who was turned into a dog,
+or was pursued by dogs, because he unwittingly intruded upon the bath of
+beauty.
+
+"No, I didn't mean that," he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluish
+stubble of his muscular jaws. "But I know he's cleaner than I am."
+
+"That I don't doubt!" Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal,
+and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robe
+close about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar was
+frightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door and
+to his own bed in the corner among the bones.
+
+Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs and
+coughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He had
+washed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar's sponge, it was quite
+possible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. The
+playwright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator who
+occupied the front apartment,--but he, as he admitted, "was usually
+pye-eyed, when he wasn't in Buffalo." He went home to Buffalo sometimes
+to rest his nerves.
+
+It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tub
+after Caesar;--but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisoned
+for the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realized
+the unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tub
+that any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and left
+cigarette ends on the moulding.
+
+All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get back
+at her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain. When he
+heard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped quickly into
+the hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her.
+
+"I don't wish to be exigent, Miss,"--he had certain grand words that he
+used upon occasion--"but if this is your trunk, it's rather in the way
+here."
+
+"Oh, very well!" she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into her
+handbag. "I'll have it moved when I can get a man to do it," and she went
+down the hall with her free, roving stride.
+
+Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left on
+the table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower.
+
+
+III
+
+In the closet that was built against the partition separating his room
+from Miss Bower's, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it on
+hooks and hangers, some of it on the floor. When he opened his closet
+door now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing, and
+he suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter overcoat.
+Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy clothes
+and she would give them a beating and hang them in the court. The closet
+was in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one hot afternoon
+he set himself to the task. First he threw out a pile of forgotten
+laundry and tied it up in a sheet. The bundle stood as high as his middle
+when he had knotted the corners. Then he got his shoes and overshoes
+together. When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition,
+a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure,--a knot hole,
+evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west room. He had never
+noticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stooped
+and squinted through it.
+
+Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad,
+doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did not
+happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity was
+not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he
+continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman's body so
+beautiful as this one,--positively glorious in action. As she swung her
+arms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular energy
+seemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips. The soft
+flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her flesh
+together, enveloped her in a luminous mist which, as she turned and
+twisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh, dissolve in pure
+light and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture. Hedger's
+fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing the
+whole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal seemed to explode
+in his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was discharged
+into the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from the
+up-thrust chin or the lifted breasts.
+
+He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen.
+When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair that
+had come down, and examined with solicitude a little reddish mole that
+grew under her left arm-pit. Then, with her hand on her hip, she walked
+unconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into her
+bedchamber.
+
+Disappeared--Don Hedger was crouching on his knees, staring at the golden
+shower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of gold
+sleeping on the faded Turkish carpet. The spot was enchanted; a vision
+out of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself there
+in Helianthine fire.
+
+When he crawled out of his closet, he stood blinking at the grey sheet
+stuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt a
+little sick as he contemplated the bundle. Everything here was different;
+he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoes
+and himself and all his slovenly habits. The black calico curtains that
+ran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were three
+greasy frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself--He felt desperate.
+He couldn't stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winter
+clothes and ran down four flights into the basement.
+
+"Mrs. Foley," he began, "I want my room cleaned this afternoon,
+thoroughly cleaned. Can you get a woman for me right away?"
+
+"Is it company you're having?" the fat, dirty janitress enquired. Mrs.
+Foley was the widow of a useful Tammany man, and she owned real estate in
+Flatbush. She was huge and soft as a feather bed. Her face and arms were
+permanently coated with dust, grained like wood where the sweat had
+trickled.
+
+"Yes, company. That's it."
+
+"Well, this is a queer time of the day to be asking for a cleaning woman.
+It's likely I can get you old Lizzie, if she's not drunk. I'll send Willy
+round to see."
+
+Willy, the son of fourteen, roused from the stupor and stain of his fifth
+box of cigarettes by the gleam of a quarter, went out. In five minutes he
+returned with old Lizzie,--she smelling strong of spirits and wearing
+several jackets which she had put on one over the other, and a number of
+skirts, long and short, which made her resemble an animated dish-clout.
+She had, of course, to borrow her equipment from Mrs. Foley, and toiled
+up the long flights, dragging mop and pail and broom. She told Hedger to
+be of good cheer, for he had got the right woman for the job, and showed
+him a great leather strap she wore about her wrist to prevent dislocation
+of tendons. She swished about the place, scattering dust and splashing
+soapsuds, while he watched her in nervous despair. He stood over Lizzie
+and made her scour the sink, directing her roughly, then paid her and got
+rid of her. Shutting the door on his failure, he hurried off with his dog
+to lose himself among the stevedores and dock labourers on West Street.
+
+A strange chapter began for Don Hedger. Day after day, at that hour in
+the afternoon, the hour before his neighbour dressed for dinner, he
+crouched down in his closet to watch her go through her mysterious
+exercises. It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable; there
+was nothing shy or retreating about this unclad girl,--a bold body,
+studying itself quite coolly and evidently well pleased with itself,
+doing all this for a purpose. Hedger scarcely regarded his action as
+conduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. More than once
+he went out and tried to stay away for the whole afternoon, but at about
+five o'clock he was sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark.
+The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will,--and he had always
+considered his will the strongest thing about him. When she threw herself
+upon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath. His
+nerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and brought out
+the sweat on his forehead. The dog would come and tug at his sleeve,
+knowing that something was wrong with his master. If he attempted a
+mournful whine, those strong hands closed about his throat.
+
+When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge of
+the couch, sat for hours without moving. He was not painting at all now.
+This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes done,
+and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the stupor of
+work. He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had worked from
+models for years, and a woman's body was no mystery to him. Yet now he
+did nothing but sit and think about one. He slept very little, and with
+the first light of morning he awoke as completely possessed by this woman
+as if he had been with her all the night before. The unconscious
+operations of life went on in him only to perpetuate this excitement. His
+brain held but one image now--vibrated, burned with it. It was a
+heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness.
+
+Women had come and gone in Hedger's life. Not having had a mother to
+begin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, had
+been casual. He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with Indians
+and with the peasant women of foreign countries. He had friends among the
+silk-skirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in Washington
+Square, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the country. He felt
+an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out
+of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum,
+he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on
+upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders
+hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard
+them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he
+believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted.
+He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles,
+effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in
+embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough,
+he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, in
+thought, and in the universe.
+
+He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so
+broken up his life,--no curiosity about her every-day personality. He
+shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower's coming and
+going, not to encounter, but to avoid her. He wished that the girl who
+wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of his way,
+that she did not exist. With her he had naught to make. But in a room
+full of sun, before an old mirror, on a little enchanted rug of sleeping
+colours, he had seen a woman who emerged naked through a door, and
+disappeared naked. He thought of that body as never having been clad, or
+as having worn the stuffs and dyes of all the centuries but his own. And
+for him she had no geographical associations; unless with Crete, or
+Alexandria, or Veronese's Venice. She was the immortal conception, the
+perennial theme.
+
+The first break in Hedger's lethargy occurred one afternoon when two
+young men came to take Eden Bower out to dine. They went into her music
+room, laughed and talked for a few minutes, and then took her away with
+them. They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for food
+himself; he waited for them to come back. At last he heard them coming
+down the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left. One of them
+sat down at the piano, and they all began to sing. This Hedger found
+absolutely unendurable. He snatched up his hat and went running down the
+stairs. Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old times were coming back.
+They had supper in the oysterman's basement and then sat down in front of
+their own doorway. The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regal
+glory; but Hedger did not see the moon; he was looking, murderously, for
+men. Presently two, wearing straw hats and white trousers and carrying
+canes, came down the steps from his house. He rose and dogged them across
+the Square. They were laughing and seemed very much elated about
+something. As one stopped to light a cigarette, Hedger caught from the
+other:
+
+"Don't you think she has a beautiful talent?"
+
+His companion threw away his match. "She has a beautiful figure." They
+both ran to catch the stage.
+
+Hedger went back to his studio. The light was shining from her transom.
+For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered through
+that fatal aperture. She was sitting, fully dressed, in the window,
+smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops. He watched her
+until she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty smile, and
+turned out the light.
+
+The next morning, when Miss Bower went out, Hedger followed her. Her
+white skirt gleamed ahead of him as she sauntered about the Square. She
+sat down behind the Garibaldi statue and opened a music book she carried.
+She turned the leaves carelessly, and several times glanced in his
+direction. He was on the point of going over to her, when she rose
+quickly and looked up at the sky. A flock of pigeons had risen from
+somewhere in the crowded Italian quarter to the south, and were wheeling
+rapidly up through the morning air, soaring and dropping, scattering and
+coming together, now grey, now white as silver, as they caught or
+intercepted the sunlight. She put up her hand to shade her eyes and
+followed them with a kind of defiant delight in her face.
+
+Hedger came and stood beside her. "You've surely seen them before?"
+
+"Oh, yes," she replied, still looking up. "I see them every day from my
+windows. They always come home about five o'clock. Where do they live?"
+
+"I don't know. Probably some Italian raises them for the market. They
+were here long before I came, and I've been here four years."
+
+"In that same gloomy room? Why didn't you take mine when it was vacant?"
+
+"It isn't gloomy. That's the best light for painting."
+
+"Oh, is it? I don't know anything about painting. I'd like to see your
+pictures sometime. You have such a lot in there. Don't they get dusty,
+piled up against the wall like that?"
+
+"Not very. I'd be glad to show them to you. Is your name really Eden
+Bower? I've seen your letters on the table."
+
+"Well, it's the name I'm going to sing under. My father's name is Bowers,
+but my friend Mr. Jones, a Chicago newspaper man who writes about music,
+told me to drop the 's.' He's crazy about my voice."
+
+Miss Bower didn't usually tell the whole story,--about anything. Her
+first name, when she lived in Huntington, Illinois, was Edna, but Mr.
+Jones had persuaded her to change it to one which he felt would be worthy
+of her future. She was quick to take suggestions, though she told him she
+"didn't see what was the matter with 'Edna.'"
+
+She explained to Hedger that she was going to Paris to study. She was
+waiting in New York for Chicago friends who were to take her over, but
+who had been detained. "Did you study in Paris?" she asked.
+
+"No, I've never been in Paris. But I was in the south of France all last
+summer, studying with C----. He's the biggest man among the moderns,--at
+least I think so."
+
+Miss Bower sat down and made room for him on the bench. "Do tell me about
+it. I expected to be there by this time, and I can't wait to find out
+what it's like."
+
+Hedger began to relate how he had seen some of this Frenchman's work in
+an exhibition, and deciding at once that this was the man for him, he had
+taken a boat for Marseilles the next week, going over steerage. He
+proceeded at once to the little town on the coast where his painter
+lived, and presented himself. The man never took pupils, but because
+Hedger had come so far, he let him stay. Hedger lived at the master's
+house and every day they went out together to paint, sometimes on the
+blazing rocks down by the sea. They wrapped themselves in light woollen
+blankets and didn't feel the heat. Being there and working with C---- was
+being in Paradise, Hedger concluded; he learned more in three months than
+in all his life before.
+
+Eden Bower laughed. "You're a funny fellow. Didn't you do anything but
+work? Are the women very beautiful? Did you have awfully good things to
+eat and drink?"
+
+Hedger said some of the women were fine looking, especially one girl who
+went about selling fish and lobsters. About the food there was nothing
+remarkable,--except the ripe figs, he liked those. They drank sour wine,
+and used goat-butter, which was strong and full of hair, as it was
+churned in a goat skin.
+
+"But don't they have parties or banquets? Aren't there any fine hotels
+down there?"
+
+"Yes, but they are all closed in summer, and the country people are poor.
+It's a beautiful country, though."
+
+"How, beautiful?" she persisted.
+
+"If you want to go in, I'll show you some sketches, and you'll see."
+
+Miss Bower rose. "All right. I won't go to my fencing lesson this
+morning. Do you fence? Here comes your dog. You can't move but he's after
+you. He always makes a face at me when I meet him in the hall, and shows
+his nasty little teeth as if he wanted to bite me."
+
+In the studio Hedger got out his sketches, but to Miss Bower, whose
+favourite pictures were Christ Before Pilate and a redhaired Magdalen of
+Henner, these landscapes were not at all beautiful, and they gave her no
+idea of any country whatsoever. She was careful not to commit herself,
+however. Her vocal teacher had already convinced her that she had a great
+deal to learn about many things.
+
+"Why don't we go out to lunch somewhere?" Hedger asked, and began to dust
+his fingers with a handkerchief--which he got out of sight as swiftly as
+possible.
+
+"All right, the Brevoort," she said carelessly. "I think that's a good
+place, and they have good wine. I don't care for cocktails."
+
+Hedger felt his chin uneasily. "I'm afraid I haven't shaved this morning.
+If you could wait for me in the Square? It won't take me ten minutes."
+
+Left alone, he found a clean collar and handkerchief, brushed his coat
+and blacked his shoes, and last of all dug up ten dollars from the bottom
+of an old copper kettle he had brought from Spain. His winter hat was of
+such a complexion that the Brevoort hall boy winked at the porter as he
+took it and placed it on the rack in a row of fresh straw ones.
+
+
+IV
+
+That afternoon Eden Bower was lying on the couch in her music room, her
+face turned to the window, watching the pigeons. Reclining thus she could
+see none of the neighbouring roofs, only the sky itself and the birds
+that crossed and recrossed her field of vision, white as scraps of paper
+blowing in the wind. She was thinking that she was young and handsome and
+had had a good lunch, that a very easy-going, light-hearted city lay in
+the streets below her; and she was wondering why she found this queer
+painter chap, with his lean, bluish cheeks and heavy black eyebrows, more
+interesting than the smart young men she met at her teacher's studio.
+
+Eden Bower was, at twenty, very much the same person that we all know her
+to be at forty, except that she knew a great deal less. But one thing she
+knew: that she was to be Eden Bower. She was like some one standing
+before a great show window full of beautiful and costly things, deciding
+which she will order. She understands that they will not all be delivered
+immediately, but one by one they will arrive at her door. She already
+knew some of the many things that were to happen to her; for instance,
+that the Chicago millionaire who was going to take her abroad with his
+sister as chaperone, would eventually press his claim in quite another
+manner. He was the most circumspect of bachelors, afraid of everything
+obvious, even of women who were too flagrantly handsome. He was a nervous
+collector of pictures and furniture, a nervous patron of music, and a
+nervous host; very cautious about his health, and about any course of
+conduct that might make him ridiculous. But she knew that he would at
+last throw all his precautions to the winds.
+
+People like Eden Bower are inexplicable. Her father sold farming
+machinery in Huntington, Illinois, and she had grown up with no
+acquaintances or experiences outside of that prairie town. Yet from her
+earliest childhood she had not one conviction or opinion in common with
+the people about her,--the only people she knew. Before she was out of
+short dresses she had made up her mind that she was going to be an
+actress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would be
+much admired by men and would have everything she wanted. When she was
+thirteen, and was already singing and reciting for church entertainments,
+she read in some illustrated magazine a long article about the late Czar
+of Russia, then just come to the throne or about to come to it. After
+that, lying in the hammock on the front porch on summer evenings, or
+sitting through a long sermon in the family pew, she amused herself by
+trying to make up her mind whether she would or would not be the Czar's
+mistress when she played in his Capital. Now Edna had met this
+fascinating word only in the novels of Ouida,--her hard-worked little
+mother kept a long row of them in the upstairs storeroom, behind the
+linen chest. In Huntington, women who bore that relation to men were
+called by a very different name, and their lot was not an enviable one;
+of all the shabby and poor, they were the shabbiest. But then, Edna had
+never lived in Huntington, not even before she began to find books like
+"Sapho" and "Mademoiselle de Maupin," secretly sold in paper covers
+throughout Illinois. It was as if she had come into Huntington, into the
+Bowers family, on one of the trains that puffed over the marshes behind
+their back fence all day long, and was waiting for another train to take
+her out.
+
+As she grew older and handsomer, she had many beaux, but these small-town
+boys didn't interest her. If a lad kissed her when he brought her home
+from a dance, she was indulgent and she rather liked it. But if he
+pressed her further, she slipped away from him, laughing. After she began
+to sing in Chicago, she was consistently discreet. She stayed as a guest
+in rich people's houses, and she knew that she was being watched like a
+rabbit in a laboratory. Covered up in bed, with the lights out, she
+thought her own thoughts, and laughed.
+
+This summer in New York was her first taste of freedom. The Chicago
+capitalist, after all his arrangements were made for sailing, had been
+compelled to go to Mexico to look after oil interests. His sister knew
+an excellent singing master in New York. Why should not a discreet,
+well-balanced girl like Miss Bower spend the summer there, studying
+quietly? The capitalist suggested that his sister might enjoy a summer on
+Long Island; he would rent the Griffith's place for her, with all the
+servants, and Eden could stay there. But his sister met this proposal
+with a cold stare. So it fell out, that between selfishness and greed,
+Eden got a summer all her own,--which really did a great deal toward
+making her an artist and whatever else she was afterward to become. She
+had time to look about, to watch without being watched; to select
+diamonds in one window and furs in another, to select shoulders and
+moustaches in the big hotels where she went to lunch. She had the easy
+freedom of obscurity and the consciousness of power. She enjoyed both.
+She was in no hurry.
+
+While Eden Bower watched the pigeons, Don Hedger sat on the other side of
+the bolted doors, looking into a pool of dark turpentine, at his idle
+brushes, wondering why a woman could do this to him. He, too, was sure of
+his future and knew that he was a chosen man. He could not know, of
+course, that he was merely the first to fall under a fascination which
+was to be disastrous to a few men and pleasantly stimulating to many
+thousands. Each of these two young people sensed the future, but not
+completely. Don Hedger knew that nothing much would ever happen to him.
+Eden Bower understood that to her a great deal would happen. But she did
+not guess that her neighbour would have more tempestuous adventures
+sitting in his dark studio than she would find in all the capitals of
+Europe, or in all the latitude of conduct she was prepared to permit
+herself.
+
+
+V
+
+One Sunday morning Eden was crossing the Square with a spruce young man
+in a white flannel suit and a panama hat. They had been breakfasting at
+the Brevoort and he was coaxing her to let him come up to her rooms and
+sing for an hour.
+
+"No, I've got to write letters. You must run along now. I see a friend of
+mine over there, and I want to ask him about something before I go up."
+
+"That fellow with the dog? Where did you pick him up?" the young man
+glanced toward the seat under a sycamore where Hedger was reading the
+morning paper.
+
+"Oh, he's an old friend from the West," said Eden easily. "I won't
+introduce you, because he doesn't like people. He's a recluse. Good-bye.
+I can't be sure about Tuesday. I'll go with you if I have time after my
+lesson." She nodded, left him, and went over to the seat littered with
+newspapers. The young man went up the Avenue without looking back.
+
+"Well, what are you going to do today? Shampoo this animal all morning?"
+Eden enquired teasingly.
+
+Hedger made room for her on the seat. "No, at twelve o'clock I'm going
+out to Coney Island. One of my models is going up in a balloon this
+afternoon. I've often promised to go and see her, and now I'm going."
+
+Eden asked if models usually did such stunts. No, Hedger told her, but
+Molly Welch added to her earnings in that way. "I believe," he added,
+"she likes the excitement of it. She's got a good deal of spirit. That's
+why I like to paint her. So many models have flaccid bodies."
+
+"And she hasn't, eh? Is she the one who comes to see you? I can't help
+hearing her, she talks so loud."
+
+"Yes, she has a rough voice, but she's a fine girl. I don't suppose you'd
+be interested in going?"
+
+"I don't know," Eden sat tracing patterns on the asphalt with the end of
+her parasol. "Is it any fun? I got up feeling I'd like to do something
+different today. It's the first Sunday I've not had to sing in church. I
+had that engagement for breakfast at the Brevoort, but it wasn't very
+exciting. That chap can't talk about anything but himself."
+
+Hedger warmed a little. "If you've never been to Coney Island, you ought
+to go. It's nice to see all the people; tailors and bar-tenders and
+prize-fighters with their best girls, and all sorts of folks taking a
+holiday."
+
+Eden looked sidewise at him. So one ought to be interested in people of
+that kind, ought one? He was certainly a funny fellow. Yet he was never,
+somehow, tiresome. She had seen a good deal of him lately, but she kept
+wanting to know him better, to find out what made him different from men
+like the one she had just left--whether he really was as different as he
+seemed. "I'll go with you," she said at last, "if you'll leave that at
+home." She pointed to Caesar's flickering ears with her sunshade.
+
+"But he's half the fun. You'd like to hear him bark at the waves when
+they come in."
+
+"No, I wouldn't. He's jealous and disagreeable if he sees you talking to
+any one else. Look at him now."
+
+"Of course, if you make a face at him. He knows what that means, and he
+makes a worse face. He likes Molly Welch, and she'll be disappointed if I
+don't bring him."
+
+Eden said decidedly that he couldn't take both of them. So at twelve
+o'clock when she and Hedger got on the boat at Desbrosses street, Caesar
+was lying on his pallet, with a bone.
+
+Eden enjoyed the boat-ride. It was the first time she had been on the
+water, and she felt as if she were embarking for France. The light warm
+breeze and the plunge of the waves made her very wide awake, and she
+liked crowds of any kind. They went to the balcony of a big, noisy
+restaurant and had a shore dinner, with tall steins of beer. Hedger had
+got a big advance from his advertising firm since he first lunched with
+Miss Bower ten days ago, and he was ready for anything.
+
+After dinner they went to the tent behind the bathing beach, where the
+tops of two balloons bulged out over the canvas. A red-faced man in a
+linen suit stood in front of the tent, shouting in a hoarse voice and
+telling the people that if the crowd was good for five dollars more, a
+beautiful young woman would risk her life for their entertainment. Four
+little boys in dirty red uniforms ran about taking contributions in their
+pillbox hats. One of the balloons was bobbing up and down in its tether
+and people were shoving forward to get nearer the tent.
+
+"Is it dangerous, as he pretends?" Eden asked.
+
+"Molly says it's simple enough if nothing goes wrong with the balloon.
+Then it would be all over, I suppose."
+
+"Wouldn't you like to go up with her?"
+
+"I? Of course not. I'm not fond of taking foolish risks."
+
+Eden sniffed. "I shouldn't think sensible risks would be very much fun."
+
+Hedger did not answer, for just then every one began to shove the other
+way and shout, "Look out. There she goes!" and a band of six pieces
+commenced playing furiously.
+
+As the balloon rose from its tent enclosure, they saw a girl in green
+tights standing in the basket, holding carelessly to one of the ropes
+with one hand and with the other waving to the spectators. A long rope
+trailed behind to keep the balloon from blowing out to sea.
+
+As it soared, the figure in green tights in the basket diminished to a
+mere spot, and the balloon itself, in the brilliant light, looked like a
+big silver-grey bat, with its wings folded. When it began to sink, the
+girl stepped through the hole in the basket to a trapeze that hung below,
+and gracefully descended through the air, holding to the rod with both
+hands, keeping her body taut and her feet close together. The crowd,
+which had grown very large by this time, cheered vociferously. The men
+took off their hats and waved, little boys shouted, and fat old women,
+shining with the heat and a beer lunch, murmured admiring comments upon
+the balloonist's figure. "Beautiful legs, she has!"
+
+"That's so," Hedger whispered. "Not many girls would look well in that
+position." Then, for some reason, he blushed a slow, dark, painful
+crimson.
+
+The balloon descended slowly, a little way from the tent, and the
+red-faced man in the linen suit caught Molly Welch before her feet
+touched the ground, and pulled her to one side. The band struck up "Blue
+Bell" by way of welcome, and one of the sweaty pages ran forward and
+presented the balloonist with a large bouquet of artificial flowers. She
+smiled and thanked him, and ran back across the sand to the tent.
+
+"Can't we go inside and see her?" Eden asked. "You can explain to the
+door man. I want to meet her." Edging forward, she herself addressed the
+man in the linen suit and slipped something from her purse into his hand.
+
+They found Molly seated before a trunk that had a mirror in the lid and a
+"make-up" outfit spread upon the tray. She was wiping the cold cream and
+powder from her neck with a discarded chemise.
+
+"Hello, Don," she said cordially. "Brought a friend?"
+
+Eden liked her. She had an easy, friendly manner, and there was something
+boyish and devil-may-care about her.
+
+"Yes, it's fun. I'm mad about it," she said in reply to Eden's questions.
+"I always want to let go, when I come down on the bar. You don't feel
+your weight at all, as you would on a stationary trapeze."
+
+The big drum boomed outside, and the publicity man began shouting to
+newly arrived boatloads. Miss Welch took a last pull at her cigarette.
+"Now you'll have to get out, Don. I change for the next act. This time I
+go up in a black evening dress, and lose the skirt in the basket before I
+start down."
+
+"Yes, go along," said Eden. "Wait for me outside the door. I'll stay and
+help her dress."
+
+Hedger waited and waited, while women of every build bumped into him and
+begged his pardon, and the red pages ran about holding out their caps for
+coins, and the people ate and perspired and shifted parasols against the
+sun. When the band began to play a two-step, all the bathers ran up out
+of the surf to watch the ascent. The second balloon bumped and rose, and
+the crowd began shouting to the girl in a black evening dress who stood
+leaning against the ropes and smiling. "It's a new girl," they called.
+"It ain't the Countess this time. You're a peach, girlie!"
+
+The balloonist acknowledged these compliments, bowing and looking down
+over the sea of upturned faces,--but Hedger was determined she should not
+see him, and he darted behind the tent-fly. He was suddenly dripping with
+cold sweat, his mouth was full of the bitter taste of anger and his
+tongue felt stiff behind his teeth. Molly Welch, in a shirt-waist and a
+white tam-o'-shanter cap, slipped out from the tent under his arm and
+laughed up in his face. "She's a crazy one you brought along. She'll get
+what she wants!"
+
+"Oh, I'll settle with you, all right!" Hedger brought out with
+difficulty.
+
+"It's not my fault, Donnie. I couldn't do anything with her. She bought
+me off. What's the matter with you? Are you soft on her? She's safe
+enough. It's as easy as rolling off a log, if you keep cool." Molly Welch
+was rather excited herself, and she was chewing gum at a high speed as
+she stood beside him, looking up at the floating silver cone. "Now
+watch," she exclaimed suddenly. "She's coming down on the bar. I advised
+her to cut that out, but you see she does it first-rate. And she got rid
+of the skirt, too. Those black tights show off her legs very well. She
+keeps her feet together like I told her, and makes a good line along the
+back. See the light on those silver slippers,--that was a good idea I
+had. Come along to meet her. Don't be a grouch; she's done it fine!"
+
+Molly tweaked his elbow, and then left him standing like a stump, while
+she ran down the beach with the crowd.
+
+Though Hedger was sulking, his eye could not help seeing the low blue
+welter of the sea, the arrested bathers, standing in the surf, their arms
+and legs stained red by the dropping sun, all shading their eyes and
+gazing upward at the slowly falling silver star.
+
+Molly Welch and the manager caught Eden under the arms and lifted her
+aside, a red page dashed up with a bouquet, and the band struck up "Blue
+Bell." Eden laughed and bowed, took Molly's arm, and ran up the sand in
+her black tights and silver slippers, dodging the friendly old women, and
+the gallant sports who wanted to offer their homage on the spot.
+
+When she emerged from the tent, dressed in her own clothes, that part of
+the beach was almost deserted. She stepped to her companion's side and
+said carelessly: "Hadn't we better try to catch this boat? I hope you're
+not sore at me. Really, it was lots of fun."
+
+Hedger looked at his watch. "Yes, we have fifteen minutes to get to the
+boat," he said politely.
+
+As they walked toward the pier, one of the pages ran up panting. "Lady,
+you're carrying off the bouquet," he said, aggrievedly.
+
+Eden stopped and looked at the bunch of spotty cotton roses in her hand.
+"Of course. I want them for a souvenir. You gave them to me yourself."
+
+"I give 'em to you for looks, but you can't take 'em away. They belong to
+the show."
+
+"Oh, you always use the same bunch?"
+
+"Sure we do. There ain't too much money in this business."
+
+She laughed and tossed them back to him. "Why are you angry?" she asked
+Hedger. "I wouldn't have done it if I'd been with some fellows, but I
+thought you were the sort who wouldn't mind. Molly didn't for a minute
+think you would."
+
+"What possessed you to do such a fool thing?" he asked roughly.
+
+"I don't know. When I saw her coming down, I wanted to try it. It looked
+exciting. Didn't I hold myself as well as she did?"
+
+Hedger shrugged his shoulders, but in his heart he forgave her.
+
+The return boat was not crowded, though the boats that passed them, going
+out, were packed to the rails. The sun was setting. Boys and girls sat on
+the long benches with their arms about each other, singing. Eden felt a
+strong wish to propitiate her companion, to be alone with him. She had
+been curiously wrought up by her balloon trip; it was a lark, but not
+very satisfying unless one came back to something after the flight. She
+wanted to be admired and adored. Though Eden said nothing, and sat with
+her arms limp on the rail in front of her, looking languidly at the
+rising silhouette of the city and the bright path of the sun, Hedger felt
+a strange drawing near to her. If he but brushed her white skirt with his
+knee, there was an instant communication between them, such as there had
+never been before. They did not talk at all, but when they went over the
+gang-plank she took his arm and kept her shoulder close to his. He felt
+as if they were enveloped in a highly charged atmosphere, an invisible
+network of subtle, almost painful sensibility. They had somehow taken
+hold of each other.
+
+An hour later, they were dining in the back garden of a little French
+hotel on Ninth Street, long since passed away. It was cool and leafy
+there, and the mosquitoes were not very numerous. A party of South
+Americans at another table were drinking champagne, and Eden murmured
+that she thought she would like some, if it were not too expensive.
+"Perhaps it will make me think I am in the balloon again. That was a very
+nice feeling. You've forgiven me, haven't you?"
+
+Hedger gave her a quick straight look from under his black eyebrows, and
+something went over her that was like a chill, except that it was warm
+and feathery. She drank most of the wine; her companion was indifferent
+to it. He was talking more to her tonight than he had ever done before.
+She asked him about a new picture she had seen in his room; a queer thing
+full of stiff, supplicating female figures. "It's Indian, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes. I call it Rain Spirits, or maybe, Indian Rain. In the Southwest,
+where I've been a good deal, the Indian traditions make women have to do
+with the rain-fall. They were supposed to control it, somehow, and to be
+able to find springs, and make moisture come out of the earth. You see
+I'm trying to learn to paint what people think and feel; to get away from
+all that photographic stuff. When I look at you, I don't see what a
+camera would see, do I?"
+
+"How can I tell?"
+
+"Well, if I should paint you, I could make you understand what I see."
+For the second time that day Hedger crimsoned unexpectedly, and his eyes
+fell and steadily contemplated a dish of little radishes. "That
+particular picture I got from a story a Mexican priest told me; he said
+he found it in an old manuscript book in a monastery down there, written
+by some Spanish Missionary, who got his stories from the Aztecs. This one
+he called 'The Forty Lovers of the Queen,' and it was more or less about
+rain-making."
+
+"Aren't you going to tell it to me?" Eden asked.
+
+Hedger fumbled among the radishes. "I don't know if it's the proper kind
+of story to tell a girl."
+
+She smiled; "Oh, forget about that! I've been balloon riding today. I
+like to hear you talk."
+
+Her low voice was flattering. She had seemed like clay in his hands ever
+since they got on the boat to come home. He leaned back in his chair,
+forgot his food, and, looking at her intently, began to tell his story,
+the theme of which he somehow felt was dangerous tonight.
+
+The tale began, he said, somewhere in Ancient Mexico, and concerned the
+daughter of a king. The birth of this Princess was preceded by unusual
+portents. Three times her mother dreamed that she was delivered of
+serpents, which betokened that the child she carried would have power
+with the rain gods. The serpent was the symbol of water. The Princess
+grew up dedicated to the gods, and wise men taught her the rain-making
+mysteries. She was with difficulty restrained from men and was guarded at
+all times, for it was the law of the Thunder that she be maiden until
+her marriage. In the years of her adolescence, rain was abundant with her
+people. The oldest man could not remember such fertility. When the
+Princess had counted eighteen summers, her father went to drive out a war
+party that harried his borders on the north and troubled his prosperity.
+The King destroyed the invaders and brought home many prisoners. Among
+the prisoners was a young chief, taller than any of his captors, of such
+strength and ferocity that the King's people came a day's journey to look
+at him. When the Princess beheld his great stature, and saw that his arms
+and breast were covered with the figures of wild animals, bitten into the
+skin and coloured, she begged his life from her father. She desired that
+he should practise his art upon her, and prick upon her skin the signs of
+Rain and Lightning and Thunder, and stain the wounds with herb-juices, as
+they were upon his own body. For many days, upon the roof of the King's
+house, the Princess submitted herself to the bone needle, and the women
+with her marvelled at her fortitude. But the Princess was without shame
+before the Captive, and it came about that he threw from him his needles
+and his stains, and fell upon the Princess to violate her honour; and her
+women ran down from the roof screaming, to call the guard which stood at
+the gateway of the King's house, and none stayed to protect their
+mistress.
+
+When the guard came, the Captive was thrown into bonds, and he was
+gelded, and his tongue was torn out, and he was given for a slave to the
+Rain Princess.
+
+The country of the Aztecs to the east was tormented by thirst, and their
+king, hearing much of the rain-making arts of the Princess, sent an
+embassy to her father, with presents and an offer of marriage. So the
+Princess went from her father to be the Queen of the Aztecs, and she took
+with her the Captive, who served her in everything with entire fidelity
+and slept upon a mat before her door.
+
+The King gave his bride a fortress on the outskirts of the city, whither
+she retired to entreat the rain gods. This fortress was called the
+Queen's House, and on the night of the new moon the Queen came to it from
+the palace. But when the moon waxed and grew toward the round, because
+the god of Thunder had had his will of her, then the Queen returned to
+the King. Drought abated in the country and rain fell abundantly by
+reason of the Queen's power with the stars.
+
+When the Queen went to her own house she took with her no servant but the
+Captive, and he slept outside her door and brought her food after she had
+fasted. The Queen had a jewel of great value, a turquoise that had fallen
+from the sun, and had the image of the sun upon it. And when she desired
+a young man whom she had seen in the army or among the slaves, she sent
+the Captive to him with the jewel, for a sign that he should come to her
+secretly at the Queen's House upon business concerning the welfare of
+all. And some, after she had talked with them, she sent away with
+rewards; and some she took into her chamber and kept them by her for one
+night or two. Afterward she called the Captive and bade him conduct the
+youth by the secret way he had come, underneath the chambers of the
+fortress. But for the going away of the Queen's lovers the Captive took
+out the bar that was beneath a stone in the floor of the passage, and put
+in its stead a rush-reed, and the youth stepped upon it and fell through
+into a cavern that was the bed of an underground river, and whatever was
+thrown into it was not seen again. In this service nor in any other did
+the Captive fail the Queen.
+
+But when the Queen sent for the Captain of the Archers, she detained him
+four days in her chamber, calling often for food and wine, and was
+greatly content with him. On the fourth day she went to the Captive
+outside her door and said: "Tomorrow take this man up by the sure way, by
+which the King comes, and let him live."
+
+In the Queen's door were arrows, purple and white. When she desired the
+King to come to her publicly, with his guard, she sent him a white arrow;
+but when she sent the purple, he came secretly, and covered himself with
+his mantle to be hidden from the stone gods at the gate. On the fifth
+night that the Queen was with her lover, the Captive took a purple arrow
+to the King, and the King came secretly and found them together. He
+killed the Captain with his own hand, but the Queen he brought to public
+trial. The Captive, when he was put to the question, told on his fingers
+forty men that he had let through the underground passage into the river.
+The Captive and the Queen were put to death by fire, both on the same
+day, and afterward there was scarcity of rain.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Eden Bower sat shivering a little as she listened. Hedger was not trying
+to please her, she thought, but to antagonize and frighten her by his
+brutal story. She had often told herself that his lean, big-boned lower
+jaw was like his bull-dog's, but tonight his face made Caesar's most
+savage and determined expression seem an affectation. Now she was looking
+at the man he really was. Nobody's eyes had ever defied her like this.
+They were searching her and seeing everything; all she had concealed from
+Livingston, and from the millionaire and his friends, and from the
+newspaper men. He was testing her, trying her out, and she was more ill
+at ease than she wished to show.
+
+"That's quite a thrilling story," she said at last, rising and winding
+her scarf about her throat. "It must be getting late. Almost every one
+has gone."
+
+They walked down the Avenue like people who have quarrelled, or who wish
+to get rid of each other. Hedger did not take her arm at the street
+crossings, and they did not linger in the Square. At her door he tried
+none of the old devices of the Livingston boys. He stood like a post,
+having forgotten to take off his hat, gave her a harsh, threatening
+glance, muttered "goodnight," and shut his own door noisily.
+
+There was no question of sleep for Eden Bower. Her brain was working like
+a machine that would never stop. After she undressed, she tried to calm
+her nerves by smoking a cigarette, lying on the divan by the open window.
+But she grew wider and wider awake, combating the challenge that had
+flamed all evening in Hedger's eyes. The balloon had been one kind of
+excitement, the wine another; but the thing that had roused her, as a
+blow rouses a proud man, was the doubt, the contempt, the sneering
+hostility with which the painter had looked at her when he told his
+savage story. Crowds and balloons were all very well, she reflected, but
+woman's chief adventure is man. With a mind over active and a sense of
+life over strong, she wanted to walk across the roofs in the starlight,
+to sail over the sea and face at once a world of which she had never been
+afraid.
+
+Hedger must be asleep; his dog had stopped sniffing under the double
+doors. Eden put on her wrapper and slippers and stole softly down the
+hall over the old carpet; one loose board creaked just as she reached the
+ladder. The trap-door was open, as always on hot nights. When she stepped
+out on the roof she drew a long breath and walked across it, looking up
+at the sky. Her foot touched something soft; she heard a low growl, and
+on the instant Caesar's sharp little teeth caught her ankle and waited.
+His breath was like steam on her leg. Nobody had ever intruded upon his
+roof before, and he panted for the movement or the word that would let
+him spring his jaw. Instead, Hedger's hand seized his throat.
+
+"Wait a minute. I'll settle with him," he said grimly. He dragged the dog
+toward the manhole and disappeared. When he came back, he found Eden
+standing over by the dark chimney, looking away in an offended attitude.
+
+"I caned him unmercifully," he panted. "Of course you didn't hear
+anything; he never whines when I beat him. He didn't nip you, did he?"
+
+"I don't know whether he broke the skin or not," she answered
+aggrievedly, still looking off into the west.
+
+"If I were one of your friends in white pants, I'd strike a match to find
+whether you were hurt, though I know you are not, and then I'd see your
+ankle, wouldn't I?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+He shook his head and stood with his hands in the pockets of his old
+painting jacket. "I'm not up to such boy-tricks. If you want the place
+to yourself, I'll clear out. There are plenty of places where I can spend
+the night, what's left of it. But if you stay here and I stay here--" He
+shrugged his shoulders.
+
+Eden did not stir, and she made no reply. Her head drooped slightly, as
+if she were considering. But the moment he put his arms about her they
+began to talk, both at once, as people do in an opera. The instant avowal
+brought out a flood of trivial admissions. Hedger confessed his crime,
+was reproached and forgiven, and now Eden knew what it was in his look
+that she had found so disturbing of late.
+
+Standing against the black chimney, with the sky behind and blue shadows
+before, they looked like one of Hedger's own paintings of that period;
+two figures, one white and one dark, and nothing whatever distinguishable
+about them but that they were male and female. The faces were lost, the
+contours blurred in shadow, but the figures were a man and a woman, and
+that was their whole concern and their mysterious beauty,--it was the
+rhythm in which they moved, at last, along the roof and down into the
+dark hole; he first, drawing her gently after him. She came down very
+slowly. The excitement and bravado and uncertainty of that long day and
+night seemed all at once to tell upon her. When his feet were on the
+carpet and he reached up to lift her down, she twined her arms about his
+neck as after a long separation, and turned her face to him, and her
+lips, with their perfume of youth and passion.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One Saturday afternoon Hedger was sitting in the window of Eden's music
+room. They had been watching the pigeons come wheeling over the roofs
+from their unknown feeding grounds.
+
+"Why," said Eden suddenly, "don't we fix those big doors into your studio
+so they will open? Then, if I want you, I won't have to go through the
+hall. That illustrator is loafing about a good deal of late."
+
+"I'll open them, if you wish. The bolt is on your side."
+
+"Isn't there one on yours, too?"
+
+"No. I believe a man lived there for years before I came in, and the
+nurse used to have these rooms herself. Naturally, the lock was on
+the lady's side."
+
+Eden laughed and began to examine the bolt. "It's all stuck up with
+paint." Looking about, her eye lighted upon a bronze Buddah which was
+one of the nurse's treasures. Taking him by his head, she struck the bolt
+a blow with his squatting posteriors. The two doors creaked, sagged, and
+swung weakly inward a little way, as if they were too old for such
+escapades. Eden tossed the heavy idol into a stuffed chair. "That's
+better," she exclaimed exultantly. "So the bolts are always on the lady's
+side? What a lot society takes for granted!"
+
+Hedger laughed, sprang up and caught her arms roughly. "Whoever takes you
+for granted--Did anybody, ever?"
+
+"Everybody does. That's why I'm here. You are the only one who knows
+anything about me. Now I'll have to dress if we're going out for dinner."
+
+He lingered, keeping his hold on her. "But I won't always be the only
+one, Eden Bower. I won't be the last."
+
+"No, I suppose not," she said carelessly. "But what does that matter? You
+are the first."
+
+As a long, despairing whine broke in the warm stillness, they drew apart.
+Caesar, lying on his bed in the dark corner, had lifted his head at this
+invasion of sunlight, and realized that the side of his room was broken
+open, and his whole world shattered by change. There stood his master and
+this woman, laughing at him! The woman was pulling the long black hair of
+this mightiest of men, who bowed his head and permitted it.
+
+
+VI
+
+In time they quarrelled, of course, and about an abstraction,--as young
+people often do, as mature people almost never do. Eden came in late one
+afternoon. She had been with some of her musical friends to lunch at
+Burton Ives' studio, and she began telling Hedger about its splendours.
+He listened a moment and then threw down his brushes. "I know exactly
+what it's like," he said impatiently. "A very good department-store
+conception of a studio. It's one of the show places."
+
+"Well, it's gorgeous, and he said I could bring you to see him. The boys
+tell me he's awfully kind about giving people a lift, and you might get
+something out of it."
+
+Hedger started up and pushed his canvas out of the way. "What could I
+possibly get from Burton Ives? He's almost the worst painter in the
+world; the stupidest, I mean."
+
+Eden was annoyed. Burton Ives had been very nice to her and had begged
+her to sit for him. "You must admit that he's a very successful one,"
+she said coldly.
+
+"Of course he is! Anybody can be successful who will do that sort of
+thing. I wouldn't paint his pictures for all the money in New York."
+
+"Well, I saw a lot of them, and I think they are beautiful."
+
+Hedger bowed stiffly.
+
+"What's the use of being a great painter if nobody knows about you?" Eden
+went on persuasively. "Why don't you paint the kind of pictures people
+can understand, and then, after you're successful, do whatever you like?"
+
+"As I look at it," said Hedger brusquely, "I am successful."
+
+Eden glanced about. "Well, I don't see any evidences of it," she said,
+biting her lip. "He has a Japanese servant and a wine cellar, and keeps a
+riding horse."
+
+Hedger melted a little. "My dear, I have the most expensive luxury in the
+world, and I am much more extravagant than Burton Ives, for I work to
+please nobody but myself."
+
+"You mean you could make money and don't? That you don't try to get a
+public?"
+
+"Exactly. A public only wants what has been done over and over. I'm
+painting for painters,--who haven't been born."
+
+"What would you do if I brought Mr. Ives down here to see your things?"
+
+"Well, for God's sake, don't! Before he left I'd probably tell him what I
+thought of him."
+
+Eden rose. "I give you up. You know very well there's only one kind of
+success that's real."
+
+"Yes, but it's not the kind you mean. So you've been thinking me a scrub
+painter, who needs a helping hand from some fashionable studio man? What
+the devil have you had anything to do with me for, then?"
+
+"There's no use talking to you," said Eden walking slowly toward the
+door. "I've been trying to pull wires for you all afternoon, and this is
+what it comes to." She had expected that the tidings of a prospective
+call from the great man would be received very differently, and had been
+thinking as she came home in the stage how, as with a magic wand, she
+might gild Hedger's future, float him out of his dark hole on a tide of
+prosperity, see his name in the papers and his pictures in the windows on
+Fifth Avenue.
+
+Hedger mechanically snapped the midsummer leash on Caesar's collar and
+they ran downstairs and hurried through Sullivan Street off toward the
+river. He wanted to be among rough, honest people, to get down where the
+big drays bumped over stone paving blocks and the men wore corduroy
+trowsers and kept their shirts open at the neck. He stopped for a drink
+in one of the sagging bar-rooms on the water front. He had never in his
+life been so deeply wounded; he did not know he could be so hurt. He had
+told this girl all his secrets. On the roof, in these warm, heavy summer
+nights, with her hands locked in his, he had been able to explain all his
+misty ideas about an unborn art the world was waiting for; had been able
+to explain them better than he had ever done to himself. And she had
+looked away to the chattels of this uptown studio and coveted them for
+him! To her he was only an unsuccessful Burton Ives.
+
+Then why, as he had put it to her, did she take up with him? Young,
+beautiful, talented as she was, why had she wasted herself on a scrub?
+Pity? Hardly; she wasn't sentimental. There was no explaining her. But in
+this passion that had seemed so fearless and so fated to be, his own
+position now looked to him ridiculous; a poor dauber without money or
+fame,--it was her caprice to load him with favours. Hedger ground his
+teeth so loud that his dog, trotting beside him, heard him and looked up.
+
+While they were having supper at the oyster-man's, he planned his escape.
+Whenever he saw her again, everything he had told her, that he should
+never have told any one, would come back to him; ideas he had never
+whispered even to the painter whom he worshipped and had gone all the way
+to France to see. To her they must seem his apology for not having horses
+and a valet, or merely the puerile boastfulness of a weak man. Yet if she
+slipped the bolt tonight and came through the doors and said, "Oh, weak
+man, I belong to you!" what could he do? That was the danger. He would
+catch the train out to Long Beach tonight, and tomorrow he would go on to
+the north end of Long Island, where an old friend of his had a summer
+studio among the sand dunes. He would stay until things came right in his
+mind. And she could find a smart painter, or take her punishment.
+
+When he went home, Eden's room was dark; she was dining out somewhere. He
+threw his things into a hold-all he had carried about the world with him,
+strapped up some colours and canvases, and ran downstairs.
+
+
+VII
+
+Five days later Hedger was a restless passenger on a dirty, crowded
+Sunday train, coming back to town. Of course he saw now how unreasonable
+he had been in expecting a Huntington girl to know anything about
+pictures; here was a whole continent full of people who knew nothing
+about pictures and he didn't hold it against them. What had such things
+to do with him and Eden Bower? When he lay out on the dunes, watching the
+moon come up out of the sea, it had seemed to him that there was no
+wonder in the world like the wonder of Eden Bower. He was going back to
+her because she was older than art, because she was the most overwhelming
+thing that had ever come into his life.
+
+He had written her yesterday, begging her to be at home this evening,
+telling her that he was contrite, and wretched enough.
+
+Now that he was on his way to her, his stronger feeling unaccountably
+changed to a mood that was playful and tender. He wanted to share
+everything with her, even the most trivial things. He wanted to tell her
+about the people on the train, coming back tired from their holiday with
+bunches of wilted flowers and dirty daisies; to tell her that the
+fish-man, to whom she had often sent him for lobsters, was among the
+passengers, disguised in a silk shirt and a spotted tie, and how his wife
+looked exactly like a fish, even to her eyes, on which cataracts were
+forming. He could tell her, too, that he hadn't as much as unstrapped his
+canvases,--that ought to convince her.
+
+In those days passengers from Long Island came into New York by ferry.
+Hedger had to be quick about getting his dog out of the express car in
+order to catch the first boat. The East River, and the bridges, and the
+city to the west, were burning in the conflagration of the sunset; there
+was that great home-coming reach of evening in the air.
+
+The car changes from Thirty-fourth Street were too many and too
+perplexing; for the first time in his life Hedger took a hansom cab for
+Washington Square. Caesar sat bolt upright on the worn leather cushion
+beside him, and they jogged off, looking down on the rest of the world.
+
+It was twilight when they drove down lower Fifth Avenue into the Square,
+and through the Arch behind them were the two long rows of pale violet
+lights that used to bloom so beautifully against the grey stone and
+asphalt. Here and yonder about the Square hung globes that shed a
+radiance not unlike the blue mists of evening, emerging softly when
+daylight died, as the stars emerged in the thin blue sky. Under them the
+sharp shadows of the trees fell on the cracked pavement and the sleeping
+grass. The first stars and the first lights were growing silver against
+the gradual darkening, when Hedger paid his driver and went into the
+house,--which, thank God, was still there! On the hall table lay his
+letter of yesterday, unopened.
+
+He went upstairs with every sort of fear and every sort of hope clutching
+at his heart; it was as if tigers were tearing him. Why was there no gas
+burning in the top hall? He found matches and the gas bracket. He
+knocked, but got no answer; nobody was there. Before his own door were
+exactly five bottles of milk, standing in a row. The milk-boy had taken
+spiteful pleasure in thus reminding him that he forgot to stop his order.
+
+Hedger went down to the basement; it, too, was dark. The janitress was
+taking her evening airing on the basement steps. She sat waving a
+palm-leaf fan majestically, her dirty calico dress open at the neck. She
+told him at once that there had been "changes." Miss Bower's room was to
+let again, and the piano would go tomorrow. Yes, she left yesterday, she
+sailed for Europe with friends from Chicago. They arrived on Friday,
+heralded by many telegrams. Very rich people they were said to be,
+though the man had refused to pay the nurse a month's rent in lieu of
+notice,--which would have been only right, as the young lady had agreed
+to take the rooms until October. Mrs. Foley had observed, too, that he
+didn't overpay her or Willy for their trouble, and a great deal of
+trouble they had been put to, certainly. Yes, the young lady was very
+pleasant, but the nurse said there were rings on the mahogany table where
+she had put tumblers and wine glasses. It was just as well she was gone.
+The Chicago man was uppish in his ways, but not much to look at. She
+supposed he had poor health, for there was nothing to him inside his
+clothes.
+
+Hedger went slowly up the stairs--never had they seemed so long, or his
+legs so heavy. The upper floor was emptiness and silence. He unlocked
+his room, lit the gas, and opened the windows. When he went to put his
+coat in the closet, he found, hanging among his clothes, a pale,
+flesh-tinted dressing gown he had liked to see her wear, with a
+perfume--oh, a perfume that was still Eden Bower! He shut the door behind
+him and there, in the dark, for a moment he lost his manliness. It was
+when he held this garment to him that he found a letter in the pocket.
+
+The note was written with a lead pencil, in haste: She was sorry that he
+was angry, but she still didn't know just what she had done. She had
+thought Mr. Ives would be useful to him; she guessed he was too proud.
+She wanted awfully to see him again, but Fate came knocking at her door
+after he had left her. She believed in Fate. She would never forget him,
+and she knew he would become the greatest painter in the world. Now she
+must pack. She hoped he wouldn't mind her leaving the dressing gown;
+somehow, she could never wear it again.
+
+After Hedger read this, standing under the gas, he went back into the
+closet and knelt down before the wall; the knot hole had been plugged up
+with a ball of wet paper,--the same blue note-paper on which her letter
+was written.
+
+He was hard hit. Tonight he had to bear the loneliness of a whole
+lifetime. Knowing himself so well, he could hardly believe that such a
+thing had ever happened to him, that such a woman had lain happy and
+contented in his arms. And now it was over. He turned out the light and
+sat down on his painter's stool before the big window. Caesar, on the
+floor beside him, rested his head on his master's knee. We must leave
+Hedger thus, sitting in his tank with his dog, looking up at the stars.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+COMING, APHRODITE! This legend, in electric lights over the Lexington
+Opera House, had long announced the return of Eden Bower to New York
+after years of spectacular success in Paris. She came at last, under the
+management of an American Opera Company, but bringing her own _chef
+d'orchestre_.
+
+One bright December afternoon Eden Bower was going down Fifth Avenue in
+her car, on the way to her broker, in Williams Street. Her thoughts were
+entirely upon stocks,--Cerro de Pasco, and how much she should buy of
+it,--when she suddenly looked up and realized that she was skirting
+Washington Square. She had not seen the place since she rolled out of it
+in an old-fashioned four-wheeler to seek her fortune, eighteen years ago.
+
+"_Arretez, Alphonse. Attendez moi_," she called, and opened the door
+before he could reach it. The children who were streaking over the
+asphalt on roller skates saw a lady in a long fur coat, and short,
+high-heeled shoes, alight from a French car and pace slowly about the
+Square, holding her muff to her chin. This spot, at least, had changed
+very little, she reflected; the same trees, the same fountain, the white
+arch, and over yonder, Garibaldi, drawing the sword for freedom. There,
+just opposite her, was the old red brick house.
+
+"Yes, that is the place," she was thinking. "I can smell the carpets now,
+and the dog,--what was his name? That grubby bathroom at the end of the
+hall, and that dreadful Hedger--still, there was something about him, you
+know--" She glanced up and blinked against the sun. From somewhere in the
+crowded quarter south of the Square a flock of pigeons rose, wheeling
+quickly upward into the brilliant blue sky. She threw back her head,
+pressed her muff closer to her chin, and watched them with a smile of
+amazement and delight. So they still rose, out of all that dirt and noise
+and squalor, fleet and silvery, just as they used to rise that summer
+when she was twenty and went up in a balloon on Coney Island!
+
+Alphonse opened the door and tucked her robes about her. All the way down
+town her mind wandered from Cerro de Pasco, and she kept smiling and
+looking up at the sky.
+
+When she had finished her business with the broker, she asked him to look
+in the telephone book for the address of M. Gaston Jules, the picture
+dealer, and slipped the paper on which he wrote it into her glove. It was
+five o'clock when she reached the French Galleries, as they were called.
+On entering she gave the attendant her card, asking him to take it to M.
+Jules. The dealer appeared very promptly and begged her to come into his
+private office, where he pushed a great chair toward his desk for her and
+signalled his secretary to leave the room.
+
+"How good your lighting is in here," she observed, glancing about. "I met
+you at Simon's studio, didn't I? Oh, no! I never forget anybody who
+interests me." She threw her muff on his writing table and sank into the
+deep chair. "I have come to you for some information that's not in my
+line. Do you know anything about an American painter named Hedger?"
+
+He took the seat opposite her. "Don Hedger? But, certainly! There are
+some very interesting things of his in an exhibition at V----'s. If you
+would care to--"
+
+She held up her hand. "No, no. I've no time to go to exhibitions. Is he a
+man of any importance?"
+
+"Certainly. He is one of the first men among the moderns. That is to say,
+among the very moderns. He is always coming up with something different.
+He often exhibits in Paris, you must have seen--"
+
+"No, I tell you I don't go to exhibitions. Has he had great success? That
+is what I want to know."
+
+M. Jules pulled at his short grey moustache. "But, Madame, there are many
+kinds of success," he began cautiously.
+
+Madame gave a dry laugh. "Yes, so he used to say. We once quarrelled on
+that issue. And how would you define his particular kind?"
+
+M. Jules grew thoughtful. "He is a great name with all the young men, and
+he is decidedly an influence in art. But one can't definitely place a man
+who is original, erratic, and who is changing all the time."
+
+She cut him short. "Is he much talked about at home? In Paris, I mean?
+Thanks. That's all I want to know." She rose and began buttoning her
+coat. "One doesn't like to have been an utter fool, even at twenty."
+
+"_Mais, non_!" M. Jules handed her her muff with a quick, sympathetic
+glance. He followed her out through the carpeted show-room, now closed to
+the public and draped in cheesecloth, and put her into her car with words
+appreciative of the honour she had done him in calling.
+
+Leaning back in the cushions, Eden Bower closed her eyes, and her face,
+as the street lamps flashed their ugly orange light upon it, became
+hard and settled, like a plaster cast; so a sail, that has been filled by
+a strong breeze, behaves when the wind suddenly dies. Tomorrow night the
+wind would blow again, and this mask would be the golden face of
+Aphrodite. But a "big" career takes its toll, even with the best of luck.
+
+
+
+
+The Diamond Mine
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I first became aware that Cressida Garnet was on board when I saw young
+men with cameras going up to the boat deck. In that exposed spot she was
+good-naturedly posing for them--amid fluttering lavender scarfs--wearing
+a most unseaworthy hat, her broad, vigorous face wreathed in smiles. She
+was too much an American not to believe in publicity. All advertising
+was good. If it was good for breakfast foods, it was good for prime
+donna,--especially for a prima donna who would never be any younger and
+who had just announced her intention of marrying a fourth time.
+
+Only a few days before, when I was lunching with some friends at
+Sherry's, I had seen Jerome Brown come in with several younger men,
+looking so pleased and prosperous that I exclaimed upon it.
+
+"His affairs," some one explained, "are looking up. He's going to marry
+Cressida Garnet. Nobody believed it at first, but since she confirms it
+he's getting all sorts of credit. That woman's a diamond mine."
+
+If there was ever a man who needed a diamond mine at hand, immediately
+convenient, it was Jerome Brown. But as an old friend of Cressida Garnet,
+I was sorry to hear that mining operations were to be begun again.
+
+I had been away from New York and had not seen Cressida for a year; now I
+paused on the gangplank to note how very like herself she still was, and
+with what undiminished zeal she went about even the most trifling things
+that pertained to her profession. From that distance I could recognize
+her "carrying" smile, and even what, in Columbus, we used to call "the
+Garnet look."
+
+At the foot of the stairway leading up to the boat deck stood two of the
+factors in Cressida's destiny. One of them was her sister, Miss Julia; a
+woman of fifty with a relaxed, mournful face, an ageing skin that browned
+slowly, like meerchaum, and the unmistakable "look" by which one knew a
+Garnet. Beside her, pointedly ignoring her, smoking a cigarette while he
+ran over the passenger list with supercilious almond eyes, stood a youth
+in a pink shirt and a green plush hat, holding a French bull-dog on the
+leash. This was "Horace," Cressida's only son. He, at any rate, had not
+the Garnet look. He was rich and ruddy, indolent and insolent, with soft
+oval cheeks and the blooming complexion of twenty-two. There was the
+beginning of a silky shadow on his upper lip. He seemed like a ripe fruit
+grown out of a rich soil; "oriental," his mother called his peculiar
+lusciousness. His aunt's restless and aggrieved glance kept flecking him
+from the side, but the two were as motionless as the _bouledogue_,
+standing there on his bench legs and surveying his travelling basket with
+loathing. They were waiting, in constrained immobility, for Cressida to
+descend and reanimate them,--will them to do or to be something. Forward,
+by the rail, I saw the stooped, eager back for which I was unconsciously
+looking: Miletus Poppas, the Greek Jew, Cressida's accompanist and
+shadow. We were all there, I thought with a smile, except Jerome Brown.
+
+The first member of Cressida's party with whom I had speech was Mr.
+Poppas. When we were two hours out I came upon him in the act of dropping
+overboard a steamer cushion made of American flags. Cressida never
+sailed, I think, that one of these vivid comforts of travel did not reach
+her at the dock. Poppas recognized me just as the striped object left his
+hand. He was standing with his arm still extended over the rail, his
+fingers contemptuously sprung back. "Lest we forget!" he said with a
+shrug. "Does Madame Cressida know we are to have the pleasure of your
+company for this voyage?" He spoke deliberate, grammatical English--he
+despised the American rendering of the language--but there was an
+indescribably foreign quality in his voice,--a something muted; and
+though he aspirated his "th's" with such conscientious thoroughness,
+there was always the thud of a "d" in them. Poppas stood before me in a
+short, tightly buttoned grey coat and cap, exactly the colour of his
+greyish skin and hair and waxed moustache; a monocle on a very wide black
+ribbon dangled over his chest. As to his age, I could not offer a
+conjecture. In the twelve years I had known his thin lupine face behind
+Cressida's shoulder, it had not changed. I was used to his cold,
+supercilious manner, to his alarming, deep-set eyes,--very close
+together, in colour a yellowish green, and always gleaming with something
+like defeated fury, as if he were actually on the point of having it out
+with you, or with the world, at last.
+
+I asked him if Cressida had engagements in London.
+
+"Quite so; the Manchester Festival, some concerts at Queen's Hall, and
+the Opera at Covent Garden; a rather special production of the operas
+of Mozart. That she can still do quite well,--which is not at all, of
+course, what we might have expected, and only goes to show that our
+Madame Cressida is now, as always, a charming exception to rules."
+Poppas' tone about his client was consistently patronizing, and he was
+always trying to draw one into a conspiracy of two, based on a mutual
+understanding of her shortcomings.
+
+I approached him on the one subject I could think of which was more
+personal than his usefulness to Cressida, and asked him whether he still
+suffered from facial neuralgia as much as he had done in former years,
+and whether he was therefore dreading London, where the climate used to
+be so bad for him.
+
+"And is still," he caught me up, "And is still! For me to go to London is
+martyrdom, _chere Madame_. In New York it is bad enough, but in London it
+is the _auto da fe_, nothing less. My nervous system is exotic in any
+country washed by the Atlantic ocean, and it shivers like a little
+hairless dog from Mexico. It never relaxes. I think I have told you about
+my favourite city in the middle of Asia, _la sainte Asie_, where the
+rainfall is absolutely nil, and you are protected on every side by
+hundreds of metres of warm, dry sand. I was there when I was a child
+once, and it is still my intention to retire there when I have finished
+with all this. I would be there now, n-ow-ow," his voice rose
+querulously, "if Madame Cressida did not imagine that she needs me,--and
+her fancies, you know," he flourished his hands, "one gives in to them.
+In humouring her caprices you and I have already played some together."
+
+We were approaching Cressida's deck chairs, ranged under the open windows
+of her stateroom. She was already recumbent, swathed in lavender scarfs
+and wearing purple orchids--doubtless from Jerome Brown. At her left,
+Horace had settled down to a French novel, and Julia Garnet, at her
+right, was complainingly regarding the grey horizon. On seeing me,
+Cressida struggled under her fur-lined robes and got to her feet,--which
+was more than Horace or Miss Julia managed to do. Miss Julia, as I could
+have foretold, was not pleased. All the Garnets had an awkward manner
+with me. Whether it was that I reminded them of things they wished to
+forget, or whether they thought I esteemed Cressida too highly and the
+rest of them too lightly, I do not know; but my appearance upon their
+scene always put them greatly on their dignity. After Horace had offered
+me his chair and Miss Julia had said doubtfully that she thought I was
+looking rather better than when she last saw me, Cressida took my arm and
+walked me off toward the stern.
+
+"Do you know, Carrie, I half wondered whether I shouldn't find you here,
+or in London, because you always turn up at critical moments in my life."
+She pressed my arm confidentially, and I felt that she was once more
+wrought up to a new purpose. I told her that I had heard some rumour of
+her engagement.
+
+"It's quite true, and it's all that it should be," she reassured me.
+"I'll tell you about it later, and you'll see that it's a real solution.
+They are against me, of course,--all except Horace. He has been such a
+comfort."
+
+Horace's support, such as it was, could always be had in exchange for his
+mother's signature, I suspected. The pale May day had turned bleak and
+chilly, and we sat down by an open hatchway which emitted warm air from
+somewhere below. At this close range I studied Cressida's face, and felt
+reassured of her unabated vitality; the old force of will was still
+there, and with it her characteristic optimism, the old hope of a
+"solution."
+
+"You have been in Columbus lately?" she was saying. "No, you needn't tell
+me about it," with a sigh. "Why is it, Caroline, that there is so little
+of my life I would be willing to live over again? So little that I can
+even think of without depression. Yet I've really not such a bad
+conscience. It may mean that I still belong to the future more than to
+the past, do you think?"
+
+My assent was not warm enough to fix her attention, and she went on
+thoughtfully: "Of course, it was a bleak country and a bleak period. But
+I've sometimes wondered whether the bleakness may not have been in me,
+too; for it has certainly followed me. There, that is no way to talk!"
+she drew herself up from a momentary attitude of dejection. "Sea air
+always lets me down at first. That's why it's so good for me in the end."
+
+"I think Julia always lets you down, too," I said bluntly. "But perhaps
+that depression works out in the same way."
+
+Cressida laughed. "Julia is rather more depressing than Georgie, isn't
+she? But it was Julia's turn. I can't come alone, and they've grown to
+expect it. They haven't, either of them, much else to expect."
+
+At this point the deck steward approached us with a blue envelope. "A
+wireless for you, Madame Garnet."
+
+Cressida put out her hand with impatience, thanked him graciously, and
+with every indication of pleasure tore open the blue envelope. "It's
+from Jerome Brown," she said with some confusion, as she folded the paper
+small and tucked it between the buttons of her close-fitting gown,
+"Something he forgot to tell me. How long shall you be in London? Good; I
+want you to meet him. We shall probably be married there as soon as my
+engagements are over." She rose. "Now I must write some letters. Keep two
+places at your table, so that I can slip away from my party and dine with
+you sometimes."
+
+I walked with her toward her chair, in which Mr. Poppas was now
+reclining. He indicated his readiness to rise, but she shook her head and
+entered the door of her deck suite. As she passed him, his eye went over
+her with assurance until it rested upon the folded bit of blue paper in
+her corsage. He must have seen the original rectangle in the steward's
+hand; having found it again, he dropped back between Horace and Miss
+Julia, whom I think he disliked no more than he did the rest of the
+world. He liked Julia quite as well as he liked me, and he liked me quite
+as well as he liked any of the women to whom he would be fitfully
+agreeable upon the voyage. Once or twice, during each crossing, he did
+his best and made himself very charming indeed, to keep his hand in,--for
+the same reason that he kept a dummy keyboard in his stateroom, somewhere
+down in the bowels of the boat. He practised all the small economies;
+paid the minimum rate, and never took a deck chair, because, as Horace
+was usually in the cardroom, he could sit in Horace's.
+
+The three of them lay staring at the swell which was steadily growing
+heavier. Both men had covered themselves with rugs, after dutifully
+bundling up Miss Julia. As I walked back and forth on the deck, I was
+struck by their various degrees of in-expressiveness. Opaque brown eyes,
+almond-shaped and only half open; wolfish green eyes, close-set and
+always doing something, with a crooked gleam boring in this direction or
+in that; watery grey eyes, like the thick edges of broken skylight glass:
+I would have given a great deal to know what was going on behind each
+pair of them.
+
+These three were sitting there in a row because they were all woven into
+the pattern of one large and rather splendid life. Each had a bond, and
+each had a grievance. If they could have their will, what would they do
+with the generous, credulous creature who nourished them, I wondered? How
+deep a humiliation would each egotism exact? They would scarcely have
+harmed her in fortune or in person (though I think Miss Julia looked
+forward to the day when Cressida would "break" and could be mourned
+over),--but the fire at which she warmed herself, the little secret
+hope,--the illusion, ridiculous or sublime, which kept her going,--that
+they would have stamped out on the instant, with the whole Garnet pack
+behind them to make extinction sure. All, except, perhaps, Miletus
+Poppas. He was a vulture of the vulture race, and he had the beak of one.
+But I always felt that if ever he had her thus at his mercy,--if ever he
+came upon the softness that was hidden under so much hardness, the warm
+credulity under a life so dated and scheduled and "reported" and
+generally exposed,--he would hold his hand and spare.
+
+The weather grew steadily rougher. Miss Julia at last plucked Poppas by
+the sleeve and indicated that she wished to be released from her
+wrappings. When she disappeared, there seemed to be every reason to hope
+that she might be off the scene for awhile. As Cressida said, if she had
+not brought Julia, she would have had to bring Georgie, or some other
+Garnet. Cressida's family was like that of the unpopular Prince of
+Wales, of whom, when he died, some wag wrote:
+
+_If it had been his brother,
+Better him than another.
+If it had been his sister,
+No one would have missed her._
+
+Miss Julia was dampening enough, but Miss Georgie was aggressive and
+intrusive. She was out to prove to the world, and more especially to
+Ohio, that all the Garnets were as like Cressida as two peas. Both
+sisters were club-women, social service workers, and directors in musical
+societies, and they were continually travelling up and down the Middle
+West to preside at meetings or to deliver addresses. They reminded one of
+two sombre, bumping electrics, rolling about with no visible means of
+locomotion, always running out of power and lying beached in some
+inconvenient spot until they received a check or a suggestion from
+Cressy. I was only too well acquainted with the strained, anxious
+expression that the sight of their handwriting brought to Cressida's face
+when she ran over her morning mail at breakfast. She usually put their
+letters by to read "when she was feeling up to it" and hastened to open
+others which might possibly contain something gracious or pleasant.
+Sometimes these family unburdenings lay about unread for several days.
+Any other letters would have got themselves lost, but these bulky
+epistles, never properly fitted to their envelopes, seemed immune to
+mischance and unfailingly disgorged to Cressida long explanations as to
+why her sisters had to do and to have certain things precisely upon her
+account and because she was so much a public personage.
+
+The truth was that all the Garnets, and particularly her two sisters,
+were consumed by an habitual, bilious, unenterprising envy of Cressy.
+They never forgot that, no matter what she did for them or how far she
+dragged them about the world with her, she would never take one of them
+to live with her in her Tenth Street house in New York. They thought that
+was the thing they most wanted. But what they wanted, in the last
+analysis, was to _be_ Cressida. For twenty years she had been plunged in
+struggle; fighting for her life at first, then for a beginning, for
+growth, and at last for eminence and perfection; fighting in the dark,
+and afterward in the light,--which, with her bad preparation, and with
+her uninspired youth already behind her, took even more courage. During
+those twenty years the Garnets had been comfortable and indolent and
+vastly self-satisfied; and now they expected Cressida to make them equal
+sharers in the finer rewards of her struggle. When her brother Buchanan
+told me he thought Cressida ought "to make herself one of them," he
+stated the converse of what he meant. They coveted the qualities which
+had made her success, as well as the benefits which came from it. More
+than her furs or her fame or her fortune, they wanted her personal
+effectiveness, her brighter glow and stronger will to live.
+
+"Sometimes," I have heard Cressida say, looking up from a bunch of those
+sloppily written letters, "sometimes I get discouraged."
+
+For several days the rough weather kept Miss Julia cloistered in
+Cressida's deck suite with the maid, Luisa, who confided to me that the
+Signorina Garnet was "_dificile_." After dinner I usually found Cressida
+unincumbered, as Horace was always in the cardroom and Mr. Poppas either
+nursed his neuralgia or went through the exercise of making himself
+interesting to some one of the young women on board. One evening, the
+third night out, when the sea was comparatively quiet and the sky was
+full of broken black clouds, silvered by the moon at their ragged edges,
+Cressida talked to me about Jerome Brown.
+
+I had known each of her former husbands. The first one, Charley Wilton,
+Horace's father, was my cousin. He was organist in a church in Columbus,
+and Cressida married him when she was nineteen. He died of tuberculosis
+two years after Horace was born. Cressida nursed him through a long
+illness and made the living besides. Her courage during the three years
+of her first marriage was fine enough to foreshadow her future to any
+discerning eye, and it had made me feel that she deserved any number of
+chances at marital happiness. There had, of course, been a particular
+reason for each subsequent experiment, and a sufficiently alluring
+promise of success. Her motives, in the case of Jerome Brown, seemed to
+me more vague and less convincing than those which she had explained to
+me on former occasions.
+
+"It's nothing hasty," she assured me. "It's been coming on for several
+years. He has never pushed me, but he was always there--some one to count
+on. Even when I used to meet him at the Whitings, while I was still
+singing at the Metropolitan, I always felt that he was different from the
+others; that if I were in straits of any kind, I could call on him. You
+can't know what that feeling means to me, Carrie. If you look back,
+you'll see it's something I've never had."
+
+I admitted that, in so far as I knew, she had never been much addicted to
+leaning on people.
+
+"I've never had any one to lean on," she said with a short laugh. Then
+she went on, quite seriously: "Somehow, my relations with people always
+become business relations in the end. I suppose it's because,--except for
+a sort of professional personality, which I've had to get, just as I've
+had to get so many other things,--I've not very much that's personal to
+give people. I've had to give too much else. I've had to try too hard for
+people who wouldn't try at all."
+
+"Which," I put in firmly, "has done them no good, and has robbed the
+people who really cared about you."
+
+"By making me grubby, you mean?"
+
+"By making you anxious and distracted so much of the time; empty."
+
+She nodded mournfully. "Yes, I know. You used to warn me. Well,
+there's not one of my brothers and sisters who does not feel that I
+carried off the family success, just as I might have carried off the
+family silver,--if there'd been any! They take the view that there were
+just so many prizes in the bag; I reached in and took them, so there were
+none left for the others. At my age, that's a dismal truth to waken up
+to."
+
+Cressida reached for my hand and held it a moment, as if she needed
+courage to face the facts in her case. "When one remembers one's first
+success; how one hoped to go home like a Christmas tree full of
+presents--How much one learns in a life-time! That year when Horace was a
+baby and Charley was dying, and I was touring the West with the Williams
+band, it was my feeling about my own people that made me go at all. Why I
+didn't drop myself into one of those muddy rivers, or turn on the gas in
+one of those dirty hotel rooms, I don't know to this day. At twenty-two
+you must hope for something more than to be able to bury your husband
+decently, and what I hoped for was to make my family happy. It was the
+same afterward in Germany. A young woman must live for human people.
+Horace wasn't enough. I might have had lovers, of course. I suppose you
+will say it would have been better if I had."
+
+Though there seemed no need for me to say anything, I murmured that I
+thought there were more likely to be limits to the rapacity of a lover
+than to that of a discontented and envious family.
+
+"Well," Cressida gathered herself up, "once I got out from under it all,
+didn't I? And perhaps, in a milder way, such a release can come again.
+You were the first person I told when I ran away with Charley, and for a
+long while you were the only one who knew about Blasius Bouchalka. That
+time, at least, I shook the Garnets. I wasn't distracted or empty. That
+time I was all there!"
+
+"Yes," I echoed her, "that time you were all there. It's the greatest
+possible satisfaction to remember it."
+
+"But even that," she sighed, "was nothing but lawyers and accounts in the
+end--and a hurt. A hurt that has lasted. I wonder what is the matter with
+me?"
+
+The matter with Cressida was, that more than any woman I have ever known,
+she appealed to the acquisitive instinct in men; but this was not easily
+said, even in the brutal frankness of a long friendship.
+
+We would probably have gone further into the Bouchalka chapter of her
+life, had not Horace appeared and nervously asked us if we did not wish
+to take a turn before we went inside. I pleaded indolence, but Cressida
+rose and disappeared with him. Later I came upon them, standing at the
+stern above the huddled steerage deck, which was by this time bathed in
+moonlight, under an almost clear sky. Down there on the silvery floor,
+little hillocks were scattered about under quilts and shawls; family
+units, presumably,--male, female, and young. Here and there a black shawl
+sat alone, nodding. They crouched submissively under the moonlight as if
+it were a spell. In one of those hillocks a baby was crying, but the
+sound was faint and thin, a slender protest which aroused no response.
+Everything was so still that I could hear snatches of the low talk
+between my friends. Cressida's voice was deep and entreating. She was
+remonstrating with Horace about his losses at bridge, begging him to keep
+away from the cardroom.
+
+"But what else is there to do on a trip like this, my Lady?" he
+expostulated, tossing his spark of a cigarette-end overboard. "What is
+there, now, to do?"
+
+"Oh, Horace!" she murmured, "how can you be so? If I were twenty-two, and
+a boy, with some one to back me--"
+
+Horace drew his shoulders together and buttoned his top-coat. "Oh, I've
+not your energy, Mother dear. We make no secret of that. I am as I am. I
+didn't ask to be born into this charming world."
+
+To this gallant speech Cressida made no answer. She stood with her hand
+on the rail and her head bent forward, as if she had lost herself in
+thought. The ends of her scarf, lifted by the breeze, fluttered upward,
+almost transparent in the argent light. Presently she turned away,--as
+if she had been alone and were leaving only the night sea behind
+her,--and walked slowly forward; a strong, solitary figure on the white
+deck, the smoke-like scarf twisting and climbing and falling back upon
+itself in the light over her head. She reached the door of her stateroom
+and disappeared. Yes, she was a Garnet, but she was also Cressida; and
+she had done what she had done.
+
+
+II
+
+My first recollections of Cressida Garnet have to do with the Columbus
+Public Schools; a little girl with sunny brown hair and eager bright
+eyes, looking anxiously at the teacher and reciting the names and
+dates of the Presidents: "James Buchanan, 1857-1861; Abraham Lincoln,
+1861-1865"; etc. Her family came from North Carolina, and they had that
+to feel superior about before they had Cressy. The Garnet "look," indeed,
+though based upon a strong family resemblance, was nothing more than the
+restless, preoccupied expression of an inflamed sense of importance. The
+father was a Democrat, in the sense that other men were doctors or
+lawyers. He scratched up some sort of poor living for his family behind
+office windows inscribed with the words "Real Estate. Insurance.
+Investments." But it was his political faith that, in a Republican
+community, gave him his feeling of eminence and originality. The Garnet
+children were all in school then, scattered along from the first grade
+to the ninth. In almost any room of our school building you might chance
+to enter, you saw the self-conscious little face of one or another of
+them. They were restrained, uncomfortable children, not frankly boastful,
+but insinuating, and somehow forever demanding special consideration and
+holding grudges against teachers and classmates who did not show it them;
+all but Cressida, who was naturally as sunny and open as a May morning.
+
+It was no wonder that Cressy ran away with young Charley Wilton, who
+hadn't a shabby thing about him except his health. He was her first
+music teacher, the choir-master of the church in which she sang. Charley
+was very handsome; the "romantic" son of an old, impoverished family. He
+had refused to go into a good business with his uncles and had gone
+abroad to study music when that was an extravagant and picturesque thing
+for an Ohio boy to do. His letters home were handed round among the
+members of his own family and of other families equally conservative.
+Indeed, Charley and what his mother called "his music" were the romantic
+expression of a considerable group of people; young cousins and old aunts
+and quiet-dwelling neighbours, allied by the amity of several
+generations. Nobody was properly married in our part of Columbus unless
+Charley Wilton, and no other, played the wedding march. The old ladies of
+the First Church used to say that he "hovered over the keys like a
+spirit." At nineteen Cressida was beautiful enough to turn a much harder
+head than the pale, ethereal one Charley Wilton bent above the organ.
+
+That the chapter which began so gracefully ran on into such a stretch of
+grim, hard prose, was simply Cressida's relentless bad luck. In her
+undertakings, in whatever she could lay hold of with her two hands, she
+was successful; but whatever happened to her was almost sure to be bad.
+Her family, her husbands, her son, would have crushed any other woman I
+have ever known. Cressida lived, more than most of us, "for others"; and
+what she seemed to promote among her beneficiaries was indolence and envy
+and discord--even dishonesty and turpitude.
+
+Her sisters were fond of saying--at club luncheons--that Cressida had
+remained "untouched by the breath of scandal," which was not strictly
+true. There were captious people who objected to her long and close
+association with Miletus Poppas. Her second husband, Ransome McChord, the
+foreign representative of the great McChord Harvester Company, whom she
+married in Germany, had so persistently objected to Poppas that she was
+eventually forced to choose between them. Any one who knew her well could
+easily understand why she chose Poppas.
+
+While her actual self was the least changed, the least modified by
+experience that it would be possible to imagine, there had been,
+professionally, two Cressida Garnets; the big handsome girl, already
+a "popular favourite" of the concert stage, who took with her to Germany
+the raw material of a great voice;--and the accomplished artist who came
+back. The singer that returned was largely the work of Miletus Poppas.
+Cressida had at least known what she needed, hunted for it, found it, and
+held fast to it. After experimenting with a score of teachers and
+accompanists, she settled down to work her problem out with Poppas. Other
+coaches came and went--she was always trying new ones--but Poppas
+survived them all. Cressida was not musically intelligent; she never
+became so. Who does not remember the countless rehearsals which were
+necessary before she first sang _Isolde_ in Berlin; the disgust of the
+conductor, the sullenness of the tenor, the rages of the blonde
+_teufelin_, boiling with the impatience of youth and genius, who sang her
+_Brangaena_? Everything but her driving power Cressida had to get from
+the outside.
+
+Poppas was, in his way, quite as incomplete as his pupil. He possessed a
+great many valuable things for which there is no market; intuitions,
+discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions and
+shadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida. I remember that when
+"Trilby" was published she fell into a fright and said such books ought
+to be prohibited by law; which gave me an intimation of what their
+relationship had actually become.
+
+Poppas was indispensable to her. He was like a book in which she had
+written down more about herself than she could possibly remember--and
+it was information that she might need at any moment. He was the one
+person who knew her absolutely and who saw into the bottom of her grief.
+An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
+Poppas knew all the simple things that were so desperately hard for
+Cressida, all the difficult things in which she could count on herself;
+her stupidities and inconsistencies, the chiaroscuro of the voice itself
+and what could be expected from the mind somewhat mismated with it. He
+knew where she was sound and where she was mended. With him she could
+share the depressing knowledge of what a wretchedly faulty thing any
+productive faculty is.
+
+But if Poppas was necessary to her career, she was his career. By the
+time Cressida left the Metropolitan Opera Company, Poppas was a rich
+man. He had always received a retaining fee and a percentage of her
+salary,--and he was a man of simple habits. Her liberality with Poppas
+was one of the weapons that Horace and the Garnets used against Cressida,
+and it was a point in the argument by which they justified to themselves
+their rapacity. Whatever they didn't get, they told themselves, Poppas
+would. What they got, therefore, they were only saving from Poppas. The
+Greek ached a good deal at the general pillage, and Cressida's
+conciliatory methods with her family made him sarcastic and spiteful. But
+he had to make terms, somehow, with the Garnets and Horace, and with the
+husband, if there happened to be one. He sometimes reminded them, when
+they fell to wrangling, that they must not, after all, overturn the boat
+under them, and that it would be better to stop just before they drove
+her wild than just after. As he was the only one among them who
+understood the sources of her fortune,--and they knew it,--he was able,
+when it came to a general set-to, to proclaim sanctuary for the goose
+that laid the golden eggs.
+
+That Poppas had caused the break between Cressida and McChord was another
+stick her sisters held over her. They pretended to understand perfectly,
+and were always explaining what they termed her "separation"; but they
+let Cressida know that it cast a shadow over her family and took a good
+deal of living down.
+
+A beautiful soundness of body, a seemingly exhaustless vitality, and a
+certain "squareness" of character as well as of mind, gave Cressida
+Garnet earning powers that were exceptional even in her lavishly rewarded
+profession. Managers chose her over the heads of singers much more
+gifted, because she was so sane, so conscientious, and above all, because
+she was so sure. Her efficiency was like a beacon to lightly anchored
+men, and in the intervals between her marriages she had as many suitors
+as Penelope. Whatever else they saw in her at first, her competency so
+impressed and delighted them that they gradually lost sight of everything
+else. Her sterling character was the subject of her story. Once, as she
+said, she very nearly escaped her destiny. With Blasius Bouchalka she
+became almost another woman, but not quite. Her "principles," or his lack
+of them, drove those two apart in the end. It was of Bouchalka that we
+talked upon that last voyage I ever made with Cressida Garnet, and not of
+Jerome Brown. She remembered the Bohemian kindly, and since it was the
+passage in her life to which she most often reverted, it is the one I
+shall relate here.
+
+
+III
+
+Late one afternoon in the winter of 189-, Cressida and I were walking in
+Central Park after the first heavy storm of the year. The snow had been
+falling thickly all the night before, and all day, until about four
+o'clock. Then the air grew much warmer and the sky cleared. Overhead it
+was a soft, rainy blue, and to the west a smoky gold. All around the
+horizon everything became misty and silvery; even the big, brutal
+buildings looked like pale violet water-colours on a silver ground. Under
+the elm trees along the Mall the air was purple as wisterias. The
+sheep-field, toward Broadway, was smooth and white, with a thin gold wash
+over it. At five o'clock the carriage came for us, but Cressida sent the
+driver home to the Tenth Street house with the message that she would
+dine uptown, and that Horace and Mr. Poppas were not to wait for her.
+As the horses trotted away we turned up the Mall.
+
+"I won't go indoors this evening for any one," Cressida declared. "Not
+while the sky is like that. Now we will go back to the laurel wood.
+They are so black, over the snow, that I could cry for joy. I don't know
+when I've felt so care-free as I feel tonight. Country winter, country
+stars--they always make me think of Charley Wilton."
+
+She was singing twice a week, sometimes oftener, at the Metropolitan that
+season, quite at the flood-tide of her powers, and so enmeshed in
+operatic routine that to be walking in the park at an unaccustomed hour,
+unattended by one of the men of her entourage, seemed adventurous. As we
+strolled along the little paths among the snow banks and the bronze
+laurel bushes, she kept going back to my poor young cousin, dead so long.
+"Things happen out of season. That's the worst of living. It was untimely
+for both of us, and yet," she sighed softly, "since he had to die, I'm
+not sorry. There was one beautifully happy year, though we were so poor,
+and it gave him--something! It would have been too hard if he'd had to
+miss everything." (I remember her simplicity, which never changed any
+more than winter or Ohio change.) "Yes," she went on, "I always feel very
+tenderly about Charley. I believe I'd do the same thing right over again,
+even knowing all that had to come after. If I were nineteen tonight, I'd
+rather go sleigh-riding with Charley Wilton than anything else I've ever
+done."
+
+We walked until the procession of carriages on the driveway, getting
+people home to dinner, grew thin, and then we went slowly toward the
+Seventh Avenue gate, still talking of Charley Wilton. We decided to dine
+at a place not far away, where the only access from the street was a
+narrow door, like a hole in the wall, between a tobacconist's and a
+flower shop. Cressida deluded herself into believing that her incognito
+was more successful in such non-descript places. She was wearing a long
+sable coat, and a deep fur hat, hung with red cherries, which she had
+brought from Russia. Her walk had given her a fine colour, and she
+looked so much a personage that no disguise could have been wholly
+effective.
+
+The dining-rooms, frescoed with conventional Italian scenes, were built
+round a court. The orchestra was playing as we entered and selected
+our table. It was not a bad orchestra, and we were no sooner seated than
+the first violin began to speak, to assert itself, as if it were suddenly
+done with mediocrity.
+
+"We have been recognized," Cressida said complacently. "What a good tone
+he has, quite unusual. What does he look like?" She sat with her back to
+the musicians.
+
+The violinist was standing, directing his men with his head and with the
+beak of his violin. He was a tall, gaunt young man, big-boned and rugged,
+in skin-tight clothes. His high forehead had a kind of luminous pallour,
+and his hair was jet black and somewhat stringy. His manner was excited
+and dramatic. At the end of the number he acknowledged the applause, and
+Cressida looked at him graciously over her shoulder. He swept her with a
+brilliant glance and bowed again. Then I noticed his red lips and thick
+black eyebrows.
+
+"He looks as if he were poor or in trouble," Cressida said. "See how
+short his sleeves are, and how he mops his face as if the least thing
+upset him. This is a hard winter for musicians."
+
+The violinist rummaged among some music piled on a chair, turning over
+the sheets with flurried rapidity, as if he were searching for a lost
+article of which he was in desperate need. Presently he placed some
+sheets upon the piano and began vehemently to explain something to the
+pianist. The pianist stared at the music doubtfully--he was a plump old
+man with a rosy, bald crown, and his shiny linen and neat tie made him
+look as if he were on his way to a party. The violinist bent over him,
+suggesting rhythms with his shoulders and running his bony finger up and
+down the pages. When he stepped back to his place, I noticed that the
+other players sat at ease, without raising their instruments.
+
+"He is going to try something unusual," I commented. "It looks as if it
+might be manuscript."
+
+It was something, at all events, that neither of us had heard before,
+though it was very much in the manner of the later Russian composers who
+were just beginning to be heard in New York. The young man made a
+brilliant dash of it, despite a lagging, scrambling accompaniment by the
+conservative pianist. This time we both applauded him vigorously and
+again, as he bowed, he swept us with his eye.
+
+The usual repertory of restaurant music followed, varied by a charming
+bit from Massenet's "Manon," then little known in this country. After we
+paid our check, Cressida took out one of her visiting cards and wrote
+across the top of it: _"We thank you for the unusual music and the
+pleasure your playing has given us."_ She folded the card in the middle,
+and asked the waiter to give it to the director of the orchestra. Pausing
+at the door, while the porter dashed out to call a cab, we saw, in the
+wall mirror, a pair of wild black eyes following us quite despairingly
+from behind the palms at the other end of the room. Cressida observed as
+we went out that the young man was probably having a hard struggle. "He
+never got those clothes here, surely. They were probably made by a
+country tailor in some little town in Austria. He seemed wild enough to
+grab at anything, and was trying to make himself heard above the dishes,
+poor fellow. There are so many like him. I wish I could help them all! I
+didn't quite have the courage to send him money. His smile, when he bowed
+to us, was not that of one who would take it, do you think?"
+
+"No," I admitted, "it wasn't. He seemed to be pleading for recognition. I
+don't think it was money he wanted."
+
+A week later I came upon some curious-looking manuscript songs on the
+piano in Cressida's music room. The text was in some Slavic tongue with
+a French translation written underneath. Both the handwriting and the
+musical script were done in a manner experienced, even distinguished. I
+was looking at them when Cressida came in.
+
+"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed. "I meant to ask you to try them over. Poppas
+thinks they are very interesting. They are from that young violinist,
+you remember,--the one we noticed in the restaurant that evening. He sent
+them with such a nice letter. His name is Blasius Bouchalka (Bou-kal-ka),
+a Bohemian."
+
+I sat down at the piano and busied myself with the manuscript, while
+Cressida dashed off necessary notes and wrote checks in a large square
+checkbook, six to a page. I supposed her immersed in sumptuary
+preoccupations when she suddenly looked over her shoulder and said,
+"Yes, that legend, _Sarka_, is the most interesting. Run it through a few
+times and I'll try it over with you."
+
+There was another, "_Dans les ombres des forets tristes_", which I
+thought quite as beautiful. They were fine songs; very individual, and
+each had that spontaneity which makes a song seem inevitable and, once
+for all, "done." The accompaniments were difficult, but not unnecessarily
+so; they were free from fatuous ingenuity and fine writing.
+
+"I wish he'd indicated his tempi a little more clearly," I remarked as I
+finished Sarka for the third time. "It matters, because he really has
+something to say. An orchestral accompaniment would be better, I should
+think."
+
+"Yes, he sent the orchestral arrangement. Poppas has it. It works out
+beautifully,--so much colour in the instrumentation. The English horn
+comes in so effectively there," she rose and indicated the passage, "just
+right with the voice. I've asked him to come next Sunday, so please be
+here if you can. I want to know what you think of him."
+
+Cressida was always at home to her friends on Sunday afternoon unless she
+was billed for the evening concert at the Opera House, in which case we
+were sufficiently advised by the daily press. Bouchalka must have been
+told to come early, for when I arrived on Sunday, at four, he and
+Cressida had the music-room quite to themselves and were standing by the
+piano in earnest conversation. In a few moments they were separated by
+other early comers, and I led Bouchalka across the hall to the
+drawing-room. The guests, as they came in, glanced at him curiously. He
+wore a dark blue suit, soft and rather baggy, with a short coat, and a
+high double-breasted vest with two rows of buttons coming up to the loops
+of his black tie. This costume was even more foreign-looking than his
+skin-tight dress clothes, but it was more becoming. He spoke hurried,
+elliptical English, and very good French. All his sympathies were French
+rather than German--the Czecks lean to the one culture or to the other. I
+found him a fierce, a transfixing talker. His brilliant eyes, his gaunt
+hands, his white, deeply-lined forehead, all entered into his speech.
+
+I asked him whether he had not recognized Madame Garnet at once when we
+entered the restaurant that evening more than a week ago.
+
+"_Mais, certainement!_ I hear her twice when she sings in the afternoon,
+and sometimes at night for the last act. I have a friend who buys a
+ticket for the first part, and he comes out and gives to me his pass-back
+check, and I return for the last act. That is convenient if I am broke."
+He explained the trick with amusement but without embarrassment, as if it
+were a shift that we might any of us be put to.
+
+I told him that I admired his skill with the violin, but his songs much
+more.
+
+He threw out his red under-lip and frowned. "Oh, I have no instrument!
+The violin I play from necessity; the flute, the piano, as it happens.
+For three years now I write all the time, and it spoils the hand for
+violin."
+
+When the maid brought him his tea, he took both muffins and cakes and
+told me that he was very hungry. He had to lunch and dine at the place
+where he played, and he got very tired of the food. "But since," his
+black eyebrows nearly met in an acute angle, "but since, before, I eat
+at a bakery, with the slender brown roach on the pie, I guess I better
+let alone well enough." He paused to drink his tea; as he tasted one of
+the cakes his face lit with sudden animation and he gazed across the hall
+after the maid with the tray--she was now holding it before the aged and
+ossified 'cellist of the Hempfstangle Quartette. "_Des gateaux_" he
+murmured feelingly, "_ou est-ce qu'elle peut trouver de tels gateaux ici
+a_ New York?"
+
+I explained to him that Madame Garnet had an accomplished cook who made
+them,--an Austrian, I thought.
+
+He shook his head. "_Austrichienne? Je ne pense pas._"
+
+Cressida was approaching with the new Spanish soprano, Mme. Bartolas, who
+was all black velvet and long black feathers, with a lace veil over her
+rich pallour and even a little black patch on her chin. I beckoned them.
+"Tell me, Cressida, isn't Ruzenka an Austrian?"
+
+She looked surprised. "No, a Bohemian, though I got her in Vienna."
+Bouchalka's expression, and the remnant of a cake in his long fingers,
+gave her the connection. She laughed. "You like them? Of course, they are
+of your own country. You shall have more of them." She nodded and went
+away to greet a guest who had just come in.
+
+A few moments later, Horace, then a beautiful lad in Eton clothes,
+brought another cup of tea and a plate of cakes for Bouchalka. We sat
+down in a corner, and talked about his songs. He was neither boastful nor
+deprecatory. He knew exactly in what respects they were excellent. I
+decided as I watched his face, that he must be under thirty. The deep
+lines in his forehead probably came there from his habit of frowning
+densely when he struggled to express himself, and suddenly elevating his
+coal-black eyebrows when his ideas cleared. His teeth were white, very
+irregular and interesting. The corrective methods of modern dentistry
+would have taken away half his good looks. His mouth would have been
+much less attractive for any re-arranging of those long, narrow,
+over-crowded teeth. Along with his frown and his way of thrusting out his
+lip, they contributed, somehow, to the engaging impetuousness of his
+conversation. As we talked about his songs, his manner changed. Before
+that he had seemed responsive and easily pleased. Now he grew abstracted,
+as if I had taken away his pleasant afternoon and wakened him to his
+miseries. He moved restlessly in his clothes. When I mentioned Puccini,
+he held his head in his hands.
+
+"Why is it they like that always and always? A little, oh yes, very nice.
+But so much, always the same thing! Why?" He pierced me with the
+despairing glance which had followed us out of the restaurant.
+
+I asked him whether he had sent any of his songs to the publishers and
+named one whom I knew to be discriminating. He shrugged his shoulders.
+"They not want Bohemian songs. They not want my music. Even the street
+cars will not stop for me here, like for other people. Every time, I wait
+on the corner until somebody else make a signal to the car, and then it
+stop,--but not for me."
+
+Most people cannot become utterly poor; whatever happens, they can right
+themselves a little. But one felt that Bouchalka was the sort of person
+who might actually starve or blow his brains out. Something very
+important had been left out either of his make-up or of his education;
+something that we are not accustomed to miss in people.
+
+Gradually the parlour was filled with little groups of friends, and I
+took Bouchalka back to the music-room where Cressida was surrounded by
+her guests; feathered women, with large sleeves and hats, young men of no
+importance, in frock coats, with shining hair, and the smile which is
+intended to say so many flattering things but which really expresses
+little more than a desire to get on. The older men were standing about
+waiting for a word _a deux_ with the hostess. To these people Bouchalka
+had nothing to say. He stood stiffly at the outer edge of the circle,
+watching Cressida with intent, impatient eyes, until, under the pretext
+of showing him a score, she drew him into the alcove at the back end of
+the long room, where she kept her musical library. The bookcases ran from
+the floor to the ceiling. There was a table and a reading-lamp, and a
+window seat looking upon the little walled garden. Two persons could be
+quite withdrawn there, and yet be a part of the general friendly scene.
+Cressida took a score from the shelf, and sat down with Bouchalka upon
+the window seat, the book open between them, though neither of them
+looked at it again. They fell to talking with great earnestness. At last
+the Bohemian pulled out a large, yellowing silver watch, held it up
+before him, and stared at it a moment as if it were an object of horror.
+He sprang up, bent over Cressida's hand and murmured something, dashed
+into the hall and out of the front door without waiting for the maid to
+open it. He had worn no overcoat, apparently. It was then seven o'clock;
+he would surely be late at his post in the up-town restaurant. I hoped he
+would have wit enough to take the elevated.
+
+After supper Cressida told me his story. His parents, both poor
+musicians,--the mother a singer--died while he was yet a baby, and he
+was left to the care of an arbitrary uncle who resolved to make a priest
+of him. He was put into a monastery school and kept there. The organist
+and choir-director, fortunately for Blasius, was an excellent musician, a
+man who had begun his career brilliantly, but who had met with crushing
+sorrows and disappointments in the world. He devoted himself to his
+talented pupil, and was the only teacher the young man ever had. At
+twenty-one, when he was ready for the novitiate, Blasius felt that the
+call of life was too strong for him, and he ran away out into a world
+of which he knew nothing. He tramped southward to Vienna, begging and
+playing his fiddle from town to town. In Vienna he fell in with a gipsy
+band which was being recruited for a Paris restaurant and went with them
+to Paris. He played in cafes and in cheap theatres, did transcribing for
+a music publisher, tried to get pupils. For four years he was the mouse,
+and hunger was the cat. She kept him on the jump. When he got work he
+did not understand why; when he lost a job he did not understand why.
+During the time when most of us acquire a practical sense, get a
+half-unconscious knowledge of hard facts and market values, he had been
+shut away from the world, fed like the pigeons in the bell-tower of his
+monastery. Bouchalka had now been in New York a year, and for all he knew
+about it, Cressida said, he might have landed the day before yesterday.
+
+Several weeks went by, and as Bouchalka did not reappear on Tenth Street,
+Cressida and I went once more to the place where he had played, only to
+find another violinist leading the orchestra. We summoned the proprietor,
+a Swiss-Italian, polite and solicitous. He told us the gentleman was not
+playing there any more,--was playing somewhere else, but he had forgotten
+where. We insisted upon talking to the old pianist, who at last
+reluctantly admitted that the Bohemian had been dismissed. He had arrived
+very late one Sunday night three weeks ago, and had hot words with the
+proprietor. He had been late before, and had been warned. He was a very
+talented fellow, but wild and not to be depended upon. The old man gave
+us the address of a French boarding-house on Seventh Avenue where
+Bouchalka used to room. We drove there at once, but the woman who kept
+the place said that he had gone away two weeks before, leaving no
+address, as he never got letters. Another Bohemian, who did engraving
+on glass, had a room with her, and when he came home perhaps he could
+tell where Bouchalka was, for they were friends.
+
+It took us several days to run Bouchalka down, but when we did find him
+Cressida promptly busied herself in his behalf. She sang his _"Sarka"_
+with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra at a Sunday night concert, she got
+him a position with the Symphony Orchestra, and persuaded the
+conservative Hempfstangle Quartette to play one of his chamber
+compositions from manuscript. She aroused the interest of a publisher in
+his work, and introduced him to people who were helpful to him.
+
+By the new year Bouchalka was fairly on his feet. He had proper clothes
+now, and Cressida's friends found him attractive. He was usually at her
+house on Sunday afternoons; so usually, indeed, that Poppas began
+pointedly to absent himself. When other guests arrived, the Bohemian and
+his patroness were always found at the critical point of discussion,--at
+the piano, by the fire, in the alcove at the end of the room--both of
+them interested and animated. He was invariably respectful and admiring,
+deferring to her in every tone and gesture, and she was perceptibly
+pleased and flattered,--as if all this were new to her and she were
+tasting the sweetness of a first success.
+
+One wild day in March Cressida burst tempestuously into my apartment and
+threw herself down, declaring that she had just come from the most trying
+rehearsal she had ever lived through. When I tried to question her about
+it, she replied absently and continued to shiver and crouch by the fire.
+Suddenly she rose, walked to the window, and stood looking out over the
+Square, glittering with ice and rain and strewn with the wrecks of
+umbrellas. When she turned again, she approached me with determination.
+
+"I shall have to ask you to go with me," she said firmly. "That crazy
+Bouchalka has gone and got a pleurisy or something. It may be pneumonia;
+there is an epidemic of it just now. I've sent Dr. Brooks to him, but I
+can never tell anything from what a doctor says. I've got to see
+Bouchalka and his nurse, and what sort of place he's in. I've been
+rehearsing all day and I'm singing tomorrow night; I can't have so much
+on my mind. Can you come with me? It will save time in the end."
+
+I put on my furs, and we went down to Cressida's carriage, waiting below.
+She gave the driver a number on Seventh Avenue, and then began feeling
+her throat with the alarmed expression which meant that she was not going
+to talk. We drove in silence to the address, and by this time it was
+growing dark. The French landlady was a cordial, comfortable person who
+took Cressida in at a glance and seemed much impressed. Cressida's
+incognito was never successful. Her black gown was inconspicuous enough,
+but over it she wore a dark purple velvet carriage coat, lined with fur
+and furred at the cuffs and collar. The Frenchwoman's eye ran over it
+delightedly and scrutinized the veil which only half-concealed the
+well-known face behind it. She insisted upon conducting us up to the
+fourth floor herself, running ahead of us and turning up the gas jets in
+the dark, musty-smelling halls. I suspect that she tarried outside the
+door after we sent the nurse for her walk.
+
+We found the sick man in a great walnut bed, a relic of the better days
+which this lodging house must have seen. The grimy red plush carpet, the
+red velvet chairs with broken springs, the double gilt-framed mirror
+above the mantel, had all been respectable, substantial contributions to
+comfort in their time. The fireplace was now empty and grateless, and an
+ill-smelling gas stove burned in its sooty recess under the cracked
+marble. The huge arched windows were hung with heavy red curtains, pinned
+together and lightly stirred by the wind which rattled the loose frames.
+
+I was examining these things while Cressida bent over Bouchalka. Her
+carriage cloak she threw over the foot of his bed, either from a
+protective impulse, or because there was no place else to put it. After
+she had greeted him and seated herself, the sick man reached down and
+drew the cloak up over him, looking at it with weak, childish pleasure
+and stroking the velvet with his long fingers. "_Couleur de gloire,
+couleur des reines!_" I heard him murmur. He thrust the sleeve under his
+chin and closed his eyes. His loud, rapid breathing was the only sound in
+the room. If Cressida brushed back his hair or touched his hand, he
+looked up long enough to give her a smile of utter adoration, naive and
+uninquiring, as if he were smiling at a dream or a miracle.
+
+The nurse was gone for an hour, and we sat quietly, Cressida with her
+eyes fixed on Bouchalka, and I absorbed in the strange atmosphere of the
+house, which seemed to seep in under the door and through the walls.
+Occasionally we heard a call for "_de l'eau chaude_!" and the heavy trot
+of a serving woman on the stairs. On the floor below somebody was
+struggling with Schubert's Marche Militaire on a coarse-toned upright
+piano. Sometimes, when a door was opened, one could hear a parrot
+screaming, "_Voila, voila, tonnerre!_" The house was built before 1870,
+as one could tell from windows and mouldings, and the walls were thick.
+The sounds were not disturbing and Bouchalka was probably used to them.
+
+When the nurse returned and we rose to go, Bouchalka still lay with his
+cheek on her cloak, and Cressida left it. "It seems to please him," she
+murmured as we went down the stairs. "I can go home without a wrap. It's
+not far." I had, of course, to give her my furs, as I was not singing
+_Donna Anna_ tomorrow evening and she was.
+
+After this I was not surprised by any devout attitude in which I happened
+to find the Bohemian when I entered Cressida's music-room unannounced,
+or by any radiance on her face when she rose from the window-seat in the
+alcove and came down the room to greet me.
+
+Bouchalka was, of course, very often at the Opera now. On almost any
+night when Cressida sang, one could see his narrow black head--high
+above the temples and rather constrained behind the ears--peering from
+some part of the house. I used to wonder what he thought of Cressida as
+an artist, but probably he did not think seriously at all. A great voice,
+a handsome woman, a great prestige, all added together made a "great
+artist," the common synonym for success. Her success, and the material
+evidences of it, quite blinded him. I could never draw from him anything
+adequate about Anna Straka, Cressida's Slavic rival, and this perhaps
+meant that he considered comparison disloyal. All the while that Cressida
+was singing reliably, and satisfying the management, Straka was singing
+uncertainly and making history. Her voice was primarily defective, and
+her immediate vocal method was bad. Cressida was always living up to her
+contract, delivering the whole order in good condition; while the Slav
+was sometimes almost voiceless, sometimes inspired. She put you off with
+a hope, a promise, time after time. But she was quite as likely to put
+you off with a revelation,--with an interpretation that was inimitable,
+unrepeatable.
+
+Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a
+great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme.
+Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he
+managed to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to see
+herself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her that he
+carried somewhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quite
+beyond herself. Things that had been chilled under the grind came to life
+in her that winter, with the breath of Bouchalka's adoration. Then, if
+ever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside her
+window; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer. She wished
+there were no Poppas, no Horace, no Garnets. She longed to be only the
+bewitching creature Bouchalka imagined her.
+
+One April day when we were driving in the Park, Cressida, superb in a
+green-and-primrose costume hurried over from Paris, turned to me smiling
+and said: "Do you know, this is the first spring I haven't dreaded. It's
+the first one I've ever really had. Perhaps people never have more than
+one, whether it comes early or late." She told me that she was
+overwhelmingly in love.
+
+Our visit to Bouchalka when he was ill had, of course, been reported, and
+the men about the Opera House had made of it the only story they have the
+wit to invent. They could no more change the pattern of that story than
+the spider could change the design of its web. But being, as she said,
+"in love" suggested to Cressida only one plan of action; to have the
+Tenth Street house done over, to put more money into her brothers'
+business, send Horace to school, raise Poppas' percentage, and then with
+a clear conscience be married in the Church of the Ascension. She went
+through this program with her usual thoroughness. She was married in June
+and sailed immediately with her husband. Poppas was to join them in
+Vienna in August, when she would begin to work again. From her letters I
+gathered that all was going well, even beyond her hopes.
+
+When they returned in October, both Cressida and Blasius seemed changed
+for the better. She was perceptibly freshened and renewed. She attacked
+her work at once with more vigour and more ease; did not drive herself so
+relentlessly. A little carelessness became her wonderfully. Bouchalka was
+less gaunt, and much less flighty and perverse. His frank pleasure in the
+comfort and order of his wife's establishment was ingratiating, even if
+it was a little amusing. Cressida had the sewing-room at the top of the
+house made over into a study for him. When I went up there to see him, I
+usually found him sitting before the fire or walking about with his hands
+in his coat pockets, admiring his new possessions. He explained the
+ingenious arrangement of his study to me a dozen times.
+
+With Cressida's friends and guests, Bouchalka assumed nothing for
+himself. His deportment amounted to a quiet, unobtrusive appreciation of
+her and of his good fortune. He was proud to owe his wife so much.
+Cressida's Sunday afternoons were more popular than ever, since she
+herself had so much more heart for them. Bouchalka's picturesque presence
+stimulated her graciousness and charm. One still found them conversing
+together as eagerly as in the days when they saw each other but seldom.
+Consequently their guests were never bored. We felt as if the Tenth
+Street house had a pleasant climate quite its own. In the spring, when
+the Metropolitan company went on tour, Cressida's husband accompanied
+her, and afterward they again sailed for Genoa.
+
+During the second winter people began to say that Bouchalka was becoming
+too thoroughly domesticated, and that since he was growing heavier in
+body he was less attractive. I noticed his increasing reluctance to stir
+abroad. Nobody could say that he was "wild" now. He seemed to dread
+leaving the house, even for an evening. Why should he go out, he said,
+when he had everything he wanted at home? He published very little. One
+was given to understand that he was writing an opera. He lived in the
+Tenth Street house like a tropical plant under glass. Nowhere in New York
+could he get such cookery as Ruzenka's. Ruzenka ("little Rose") had,
+like her mistress, bloomed afresh, now that she had a man and a
+compatriot to cook for. Her invention was tireless, and she took things
+with a high hand in the kitchen, confident of a perfect appreciation. She
+was a plump, fair, blue-eyed girl, giggly and easily flattered, with
+teeth like cream. She was passionately domestic, and her mind was full of
+homely stories and proverbs and superstitions which she somehow worked
+into her cookery. She and Bouchalka had between them a whole literature
+of traditions about sauces and fish and pastry. The cellar was full of
+the wines he liked, and Ruzenka always knew what wines to serve with the
+dinner. Blasius' monastery had been famous for good living.
+
+That winter was a very cold one, and I think the even temperature of the
+house enslaved Bouchalka. "Imagine it," he once said to me when I dropped
+in during a blinding snowstorm and found him reading before the fire. "To
+be warm all the time, every day! It is like Aladdin. In Paris I have had
+weeks together when I was not warm once, when I did not have a bath once,
+like the cats in the street. The nights were a misery. People have
+terrible dreams when they are so cold. Here I waken up in the night so
+warm I do not know what it means. Her door is open, and I turn on my
+light. I cannot believe in myself until I see that she is there."
+
+I began to think that Bouchalka's wildness had been the desperation which
+the tamest animals exhibit when they are tortured or terrorized.
+Naturally luxurious, he had suffered more than most men under the pinch
+of penury. Those first beautiful compositions, full of the folk-music of
+his own country, had been wrung out of him by home-sickness and
+heart-ache. I wondered whether he could compose only under the spur of
+hunger and loneliness, and whether his talent might not subside with his
+despair. Some such apprehension must have troubled Cressida, though his
+gratitude would have been propitiatory to a more exacting task-master.
+She had always liked to make people happy, and he was the first one who
+had accepted her bounty without sourness. When he did not accompany her
+upon her spring tour, Cressida said it was because travelling interfered
+with composition; but I felt that she was deeply disappointed. Blasius,
+or Bla[vz]ej, as his wife had with difficulty learned to call him, was
+not showy or extravagant. He hated hotels, even the best of them.
+Cressida had always fought for the hearthstone and the fireside, and the
+humour of Destiny is sometimes to give us too much of what we desire. I
+believe she would have preferred even enthusiasm about other women to his
+utter _oisivete_. It was his old fire, not his docility, that had won
+her.
+
+During the third season after her marriage Cressida had only twenty-five
+performances at the Metropolitan, and she was singing out of town a great
+deal. Her husband did not bestir himself to accompany her, but he
+attended, very faithfully, to her correspondence and to her business at
+home. He had no ambitious schemes to increase her fortune, and he carried
+out her directions exactly. Nevertheless, Cressida faced her concert
+tours somewhat grimly, and she seldom talked now about their plans for
+the future.
+
+The crisis in this growing estrangement came about by accident,--one of
+those chance occurrences that affect our lives more than years of ordered
+effort,--and it came in an inverted form of a situation old to comedy.
+Cressida had been on the road for several weeks; singing in Minneapolis,
+Cleveland, St. Paul, then up into Canada and back to Boston. From Boston
+she was to go directly to Chicago, coming down on the five o'clock train
+and taking the eleven, over the Lake Shore, for the West. By her schedule
+she would have time to change cars comfortably at the Grand Central
+station.
+
+On the journey down from Boston she was seized with a great desire to see
+Blasius. She decided, against her custom, one might say against her
+principles, to risk a performance with the Chicago orchestra without
+rehearsal, to stay the night in New York and go west by the afternoon
+train the next day. She telegraphed Chicago, but she did not telegraph
+Blasius, because she wished--the old fallacy of affection!--to "surprise"
+him. She could take it for granted that, at eleven on a cold winter
+night, he would be in the Tenth Street house and nowhere else in New
+York. She sent Poppas--paler than usual with accusing scorn--and her
+trunks on to Chicago, and with only her travelling bag and a sense of
+being very audacious in her behaviour and still very much in love, she
+took a cab for Tenth Street.
+
+Since it was her intention to disturb Blasius as little as possible and
+to delight him as much as possible, she let herself in with her latch-key
+and went directly to his room. She did not find him there. Indeed, she
+found him where he should not have been at all. There must have been a
+trying scene.
+
+Ruzenka was sent away in the morning, and the other two maids as well. By
+eight o'clock Cressida and Bouchalka had the house to themselves. Nobody
+had any breakfast. Cressida took the afternoon train to keep her
+engagement with Theodore Thomas, and to think over the situation. Blasius
+was left in the Tenth Street house with only the furnace man's wife to
+look after him. His explanation of his conduct was that he had been
+drinking too much. His digression, he swore, was casual. It had never
+occurred before, and he could only appeal to his wife's magnanimity. But
+it was, on the whole, easier for Cressida to be firm than to be yielding,
+and she knew herself too well to attempt a readjustment. She had never
+made shabby compromises, and it was too late for her to begin. When she
+returned to New York she went to a hotel, and she never saw Bouchalka
+alone again. Since he admitted her charge, the legal formalities were
+conducted so quietly that the granting of her divorce was announced in
+the morning papers before her friends knew that there was the least
+likelihood of one. Cressida's concert tours had interrupted the
+hospitalities of the house.
+
+While the lawyers were arranging matters, Bouchalka came to see me. He
+was remorseful and miserable enough, and I think his perplexity was quite
+sincere. If there had been an intrigue with a woman of her own class, an
+infatuation, an affair, he said, he could understand. But anything so
+venial and accidental--He shook his head slowly back and forth. He
+assured me that he was not at all himself on that fateful evening, and
+that when he recovered himself he would have sent Ruzenka away, making
+proper provision for her, of course. It was an ugly thing, but ugly
+things sometimes happened in one's life, and one had to put them away and
+forget them. He could have overlooked any accident that might have
+occurred when his wife was on the road, with Poppas, for example. I cut
+him short, and he bent his head to my reproof.
+
+"I know," he said, "such things are different with her. But when have I
+said that I am noble as she is? Never. But I have appreciated and I have
+adored. About me, say what you like. But if you say that in this there
+was any _meprise_ to my wife, that is not true. I have lost all my place
+here. I came in from the streets; but I understand her, and all the fine
+things in her, better than any of you here. If that accident had not
+been, she would have lived happy with me for years. As for me, I have
+never believed in this happiness. I was not born under a good star.
+How did it come? By accident. It goes by accident. She tried to give good
+fortune to an unfortunate man, _un miserable_; that was her mistake. It
+cannot be done in this world. The lucky should marry the lucky."
+Bouchalka stopped and lit a cigarette. He sat sunk in my chair as if he
+never meant to get up again. His large hands, now so much plumper than
+when I first knew him, hung limp. When he had consumed his cigarette he
+turned to me again.
+
+"I, too, have tried. Have I so much as written one note to a lady since
+she first put out her hand to help me? Some of the artists who sing my
+compositions have been quite willing to plague my wife a little if I make
+the least sign. With the Espanola, for instance, I have had to be very
+stern, _farouche_; she is so very playful. I have never given my wife the
+slightest annoyance of this kind. Since I married her, I have not kissed
+the cheek of one lady! Then one night I am bored and drink too much
+champagne and I become a fool. What does it matter? Did my wife marry the
+fool of me? No, she married me, with my mind and my feelings all here, as
+I am today. But she is getting a divorce from the fool of me, which she
+would never see _anyhow_! The stupidity which excuse me is the thing she
+will not overlook. Even in her memory of me she will be harsh."
+
+His view of his conduct and its consequences was fatalistic: he was meant
+to have just so much misery every day of his life; for three years it had
+been withheld, had been piling up somewhere, underground, overhead; now
+the accumulation burst over him. He had come to pay his respects to me,
+he said, to declare his undying gratitude to Madame Garnet, and to bid
+me farewell. He took up his hat and cane and kissed my hand. I have never
+seen him since. Cressida made a settlement upon him, but even Poppas,
+tortured by envy and curiosity, never discovered how much it was. It was
+very little, she told me. "_Pour des gateaux,_" she added with a smile
+that was not unforgiving. She could not bear to think of his being in
+want when so little could make him comfortable.
+
+He went back to his own village in Bohemia. He wrote her that the old
+monk, his teacher, was still alive, and that from the windows of his room
+in the town he could see the pigeons flying forth from and back to the
+monastery bell-tower all day long. He sent her a song, with his own
+words, about those pigeons,--quite a lovely thing. He was the bell tower,
+and _les colombes_ were his memories of her.
+
+
+IV
+
+Jerome Brown proved, on the whole, the worst of Cressida's husbands, and,
+with the possible exception of her eldest brother, Buchanan Garnet, he
+was the most rapacious of the men with whom she had had to do. It was one
+thing to gratify every wish of a cake-loving fellow like Bouchalka, but
+quite another to stand behind a financier. And Brown would be a financier
+or nothing. After her marriage with him, Cressida grew rapidly older. For
+the first time in her life she wanted to go abroad and live--to get
+Jerome Brown away from the scene of his unsuccessful but undiscouraged
+activities. But Brown was not a man who could be amused and kept out of
+mischief in Continental hotels. He had to be a figure, if only a "mark,"
+in Wall street. Nothing else would gratify his peculiar vanity. The
+deeper he went in, the more affectionately he told Cressida that now all
+her cares and anxieties were over. To try to get related facts out of his
+optimism was like trying to find framework in a feather bed. All Cressida
+knew was that she was perpetually "investing" to save investments. When
+she told me she had put a mortgage on the Tenth Street house, her eyes
+filled with tears. "Why is it? I have never cared about money, except to
+make people happy with it, and it has been the curse of my life. It has
+spoiled all my relations with people. Fortunately," she added
+irrelevantly, drying her eyes, "Jerome and Poppas get along well." Jerome
+could have got along with anybody; that is a promoter's business. His
+warm hand, his flushed face, his bright eye, and his newest funny
+story,--Poppas had no weapons that could do execution with a man like
+that.
+
+Though Brown's ventures never came home, there was nothing openly
+disastrous until the outbreak of the revolution in Mexico jeopardized
+his interests there. Then Cressida went to England--where she could
+always raise money from a faithful public--for a winter concert tour.
+When she sailed, her friends knew that her husband's affairs were in a
+bad way; but we did not know how bad until after Cressida's death.
+
+Cressida Garnet, as all the world knows, was lost on the _Titanic_.
+Poppas and Horace, who had been travelling with her, were sent on a week
+earlier and came as safely to port as if they had never stepped out of
+their London hotel. But Cressida had waited for the first trip of the sea
+monster--she still believed that all advertising was good--and she went
+down on the road between the old world and the new. She had been ill, and
+when the collision occurred she was in her stateroom, a modest one
+somewhere down in the boat, for she was travelling economically.
+Apparently she never left her cabin. She was not seen on the decks, and
+none of the survivors brought any word of her.
+
+On Monday, when the wireless messages were coming from the _Carpathia_
+with the names of the passengers who had been saved, I went, with so
+many hundred others, down to the White Star offices. There I saw
+Cressida's motor, her redoubtable initials on the door, with four men
+sitting in the limousine. Jerome Brown, stripped of the promoter's
+joviality and looking flabby and old, sat behind with Buchanan Garnet,
+who had come on from Ohio. I had not seen him for years. He was now an
+old man, but he was still conscious of being in the public eye, and sat
+turning a cigar about in his face with that foolish look of importance
+which Cressida's achievement had stamped upon all the Garnets. Poppas was
+in front, with Horace. He was gnawing the finger of his chamois glove as
+it rested on the top of his cane. His head was sunk, his shoulders drawn
+together; he looked as old as Jewry. I watched them, wondering whether
+Cressida would come back to them if she could. After the last names were
+posted, the four men settled back into the powerful car--one of the best
+made--and the chauffeur backed off. I saw him dash away the tears from
+his face with the back of his driving glove. He was an Irish boy, and had
+been devoted to Cressida.
+
+When the will was read, Henry Gilbert, the lawyer, an old friend of her
+early youth, and I, were named executors. A nice job we had of it. Most
+of her large fortune had been converted into stocks that were almost
+worthless. The marketable property realized only a hundred and fifty
+thousand dollars. To defeat the bequest of fifty thousand dollars to
+Poppas, Jerome Brown and her family contested the will. They brought
+Cressida's letters into court to prove that the will did not represent
+her intentions, often expressed in writing through many years, to
+"provide well" for them.
+
+Such letters they were! The writing of a tired, overdriven woman;
+promising money, sending money herewith, asking for an acknowledgment
+of the draft sent last month, etc. In the letters to Jerome Brown she
+begged for information about his affairs and entreated him to go with her
+to some foreign city where they could live quietly and where she could
+rest; if they were careful, there would "be enough for all." Neither
+Brown nor her brothers and sisters had any sense of shame about these
+letters. It seemed never to occur to them that this golden stream,
+whether it rushed or whether it trickled, came out of the industry, out
+of the mortal body of a woman. They regarded her as a natural source
+of wealth; a copper vein, a diamond mine.
+
+Henry Gilbert is a good lawyer himself, and he employed an able man to
+defend the will. We determined that in this crisis we would stand by
+Poppas, believing it would be Cressida's wish. Out of the lot of them, he
+was the only one who had helped her to make one penny of the money that
+had brought her so much misery. He was at least more deserving than the
+others. We saw to it that Poppas got his fifty thousand, and he actually
+departed, at last, for his city in la sainte Asie, where it never rains
+and where he will never again have to hold a hot water bottle to his
+face.
+
+The rest of the property was fought for to a finish. Poppas out of the
+way, Horace and Brown and the Garnets quarrelled over her personal
+effects. They went from floor to floor of the Tenth Street house. The
+will provided that Cressida's jewels and furs and gowns were to go to her
+sisters. Georgie and Julia wrangled over them down to the last moleskin.
+They were deeply disappointed that some of the muffs and stoles which
+they remembered as very large, proved, when exhumed from storage and
+exhibited beside furs of a modern cut, to be ridiculously scant. A year
+ago the sisters were still reasoning with each other about pearls and
+opals and emeralds.
+
+I wrote Poppas some account of these horrors, as during the court
+proceedings we had become rather better friends than of old. His reply
+arrived only a few days ago; a photograph of himself upon a camel, under
+which is written:
+
+    Traulich und Treu
+    ist's nur in der Tiefe:
+    falsch und feig
+ist was dort oben sich freut!
+
+His reply, and the memories it awakens--memories which have followed
+Poppas into the middle of Asia, seemingly,--prompted this informal
+narration.
+
+
+
+
+A Gold Slipper
+
+
+
+
+Marshall McKann followed his wife and her friend Mrs. Post down the
+aisle and up the steps to the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall with an
+ill-concealed feeling of grievance. Heaven knew he never went to
+concerts, and to be mounted upon the stage in this fashion, as if he were
+a "highbrow" from Sewickley, or some unfortunate with a musical wife, was
+ludicrous. A man went to concerts when he was courting, while he was a
+junior partner. When he became a person of substance he stopped that sort
+of nonsense. His wife, too, was a sensible person, the daughter of an old
+Pittsburgh family as solid and well-rooted as the McKanns. She would
+never have bothered him about this concert had not the meddlesome Mrs.
+Post arrived to pay her a visit. Mrs. Post was an old school friend of
+Mrs. McKann, and because she lived in Cincinnati she was always keeping
+up with the world and talking about things in which no one else was
+interested, music among them. She was an aggressive lady, with weighty
+opinions, and a deep voice like a jovial bassoon. She had arrived only
+last night, and at dinner she brought it out that she could on no account
+miss Kitty Ayrshire's recital; it was, she said, the sort of thing no one
+could afford to miss.
+
+When McKann went into town in the morning he found that every seat in the
+music-hall was sold. He telephoned his wife to that effect, and, thinking
+he had settled the matter, made his reservation on the 11.25 train for
+New York. He was unable to get a drawing-room because this same Kitty
+Ayrshire had taken the last one. He had not intended going to New York
+until the following week, but he preferred to be absent during Mrs.
+Post's incumbency.
+
+In the middle of the morning, when he was deep in his correspondence,
+his wife called him up to say the enterprising Mrs. Post had telephoned
+some musical friends in Sewickley and had found that two hundred
+folding-chairs were to be placed on the stage of the concert-hall, behind
+the piano, and that they would be on sale at noon. Would he please get
+seats in the front row? McKann asked if they would not excuse him, since
+he was going over to New York on the late train, would be tired, and
+would not have time to dress, etc. No, not at all. It would be foolish
+for two women to trail up to the stage unattended. Mrs. Post's husband
+always accompanied her to concerts, and she expected that much attention
+from her host. He needn't dress, and he could take a taxi from the
+concert-hall to the East Liberty station.
+
+The outcome of it all was that, though his bag was at the station, here
+was McKann, in the worst possible humour, facing the large audience to
+which he was well known, and sitting among a lot of music students and
+excitable old maids. Only the desperately zealous or the morbidly curious
+would endure two hours in those wooden chairs, and he sat in the front
+row of this hectic body, somehow made a party to a transaction for which
+he had the utmost contempt.
+
+When McKann had been in Paris, Kitty Ayrshire was singing at the Comique,
+and he wouldn't go to hear her--even there, where one found so little
+that was better to do. She was too much talked about, too much
+advertised; always being thrust in an American's face as if she were
+something to be proud of. Perfumes and petticoats and cutlets were named
+for her. Some one had pointed Kitty out to him one afternoon when she was
+driving in the Bois with a French composer--old enough, he judged, to be
+her father--who was said to be infatuated, carried away by her. McKann
+was told that this was one of the historic passions of old age. He had
+looked at her on that occasion, but she was so befrilled and befeathered
+that he caught nothing but a graceful outline and a small, dark head
+above a white ostrich boa. He had noted with disgust, however, the
+stooped shoulders and white imperial of the silk-hatted man beside her,
+and the senescent line of his back. McKann described to his wife this
+unpleasing picture only last night, while he was undressing, when he was
+making every possible effort to avert this concert party. But Bessie
+only looked superior and said she wished to hear Kitty Ayrshire sing, and
+that her "private life" was something in which she had no interest.
+
+Well, here he was; hot and uncomfortable, in a chair much too small for
+him, with a row of blinding footlights glaring in his eyes. Suddenly the
+door at his right elbow opened. Their seats were at one end of the front
+row; he had thought they would be less conspicuous there than in the
+centre, and he had not foreseen that the singer would walk over him every
+time she came upon the stage. Her velvet train brushed against his
+trousers as she passed him. The applause which greeted her was neither
+overwhelming nor prolonged. Her conservative audience did not know
+exactly how to accept her toilette. They were accustomed to dignified
+concert gowns, like those which Pittsburgh matrons (in those days!) wore
+at their daughters' coming-out teas.
+
+Kitty's gown that evening was really quite outrageous--the repartee of a
+conscienceless Parisian designer who took her hint that she wished
+something that would be entirely novel in the States. Today, after we
+have all of us, even in the uttermost provinces, been educated by Baskt
+and the various Ballets Russes, we would accept such a gown without
+distrust; but then it was a little disconcerting, even to the
+well-disposed. It was constructed of a yard or two of green velvet--a
+reviling, shrieking green which would have made a fright of any woman
+who had not inextinguishable beauty--and it was made without armholes, a
+device to which we were then so unaccustomed that it was nothing less
+than alarming. The velvet skirt split back from a transparent gold-lace
+petticoat, gold stockings, gold slippers. The narrow train was,
+apparently, looped to both ankles, and it kept curling about her feet
+like a serpent's tail, turning up its gold lining as if it were squirming
+over on its back. It was not, we felt, a costume in which to sing Mozart
+and Handel and Beethoven.
+
+Kitty sensed the chill in the air, and it amused her. She liked to be
+thought a brilliant artist by other artists, but by the world at large
+she liked to be thought a daring creature. She had every reason to
+believe, from experience and from example, that to shock the great crowd
+was the surest way to get its money and to make her name a household
+word. Nobody ever became a household word of being an artist, surely; and
+you were not a thoroughly paying proposition until your name meant
+something on the sidewalk and in the barber-shop. Kitty studied her
+audience with an appraising eye. She liked the stimulus of this
+disapprobation. As she faced this hard-shelled public she felt keen and
+interested; she knew that she would give such a recital as cannot often
+be heard for money. She nodded gaily to the young man at the piano, fell
+into an attitude of seriousness, and began the group of Beethoven and
+Mozart songs.
+
+Though McKann would not have admitted it, there were really a great many
+people in the concert-hall who knew what the prodigal daughter of their
+country was singing, and how well she was doing it. They thawed gradually
+under the beauty of her voice and the subtlety of her interpretation.
+She had sung seldom in concert then, and they had supposed her very
+dependent upon the accessories of the opera. Clean singing, finished
+artistry, were not what they expected from her. They began to feel, even,
+the wayward charm of her personality.
+
+McKann, who stared coldly up at the balconies during her first song,
+during the second glanced cautiously at the green apparition before him.
+He was vexed with her for having retained a debutante figure. He
+comfortably classed all singers--especially operatic singers--as "fat
+Dutchwomen" or "shifty Sadies," and Kitty would not fit into his clever
+generalization. She displayed, under his nose, the only kind of figure
+he considered worth looking at--that of a very young girl, supple and
+sinuous and quicksilverish; thin, eager shoulders, polished white
+arms that were nowhere too fat and nowhere too thin. McKann found it
+agreeable to look at Kitty, but when he saw that the authoritative
+Mrs. Post, red as a turkey-cock with opinions she was bursting to impart,
+was studying and appraising the singer through her lorgnette, he gazed
+indifferently out into the house again. He felt for his watch, but his
+wife touched him warningly with her elbow--which, he noticed, was not at
+all like Kitty's.
+
+When Miss Ayrshire finished her first group of songs, her audience
+expressed its approval positively, but guardedly. She smiled bewitchingly
+upon the people in front, glanced up at the balconies, and then turned to
+the company huddled on the stage behind her. After her gay and careless
+bows, she retreated toward the stage door. As she passed McKann, she
+again brushed lightly against him, and this time she paused long enough
+to glance down at him and murmur, "Pardon!"
+
+In the moment her bright, curious eyes rested upon him, McKann seemed to
+see himself as if she were holding a mirror up before him. He beheld
+himself a heavy, solid figure, unsuitably clad for the time and place,
+with a florid, square face, well-visored with good living and sane
+opinions--an inexpressive countenance. Not a rock face, exactly, but a
+kind of pressed-brick-and-cement face, a "business" face upon which years
+and feelings had made no mark--in which cocktails might eventually blast
+out a few hollows. He had never seen himself so distinctly in his
+shaving-glass as he did in that instant when Kitty Ayrshire's liquid eye
+held him, when her bright, inquiring glance roamed over his person. After
+her prehensile train curled over his boot and she was gone, his wife
+turned to him and said in the tone of approbation one uses when an infant
+manifests its groping intelligence, "Very gracious of her, I'm sure!"
+Mrs. Post nodded oracularly. McKann grunted.
+
+Kitty began her second number, a group of romantic German songs which
+were altogether more her affair than her first number. When she turned
+once to acknowledge the applause behind her, she caught McKann in the act
+of yawning behind his hand--he of course wore no gloves--and he thought
+she frowned a little. This did not embarrass him; it somehow made him
+feel important. When she retired after the second part of the program,
+she again looked him over curiously as she passed, and she took marked
+precaution that her dress did not touch him. Mrs. Post and his wife again
+commented upon her consideration.
+
+The final number was made up of modern French songs which Kitty sang
+enchantingly, and at last her frigid public was thoroughly aroused.
+While she was coming back again and again to smile and curtsy, McKann
+whispered to his wife that if there were to be encores he had better make
+a dash for his train.
+
+"Not at all," put in Mrs. Post. "Kitty is going on the same train. She
+sings in _Faust_ at the opera tomorrow night, so she'll take no chances."
+
+McKann once more told himself how sorry he felt for Post. At last Miss
+Ayrshire returned, escorted by her accompanist, and gave the people what
+she of course knew they wanted: the most popular aria from the French
+opera of which the title-role had become synonymous with her name--an
+opera written for her and to her and round about her, by the veteran
+French composer who adored her,--the last and not the palest flash of his
+creative fire. This brought her audience all the way. They clamoured for
+more of it, but she was not to be coerced. She had been unyielding
+through storms to which this was a summer breeze. She came on once more,
+shrugged her shoulders, blew them a kiss, and was gone. Her last smile
+was for that uncomfortable part of her audience seated behind her, and
+she looked with recognition at McKann and his ladies as she nodded good
+night to the wooden chairs.
+
+McKann hurried his charges into the foyer by the nearest exit and put
+them into his motor. Then he went over to the Schenley to have a glass
+of beer and a rarebit before train-time. He had not, he admitted to
+himself, been so much bored as he pretended. The minx herself was well
+enough, but it was absurd in his fellow-townsmen to look owlish and
+uplifted about her. He had no rooted dislike for pretty women; he even
+didn't deny that gay girls had their place in the world, but they ought
+to be kept in their place. He was born a Presbyterian, just as he was
+born a McKann. He sat in his pew in the First Church every Sunday, and he
+never missed a presbytery meeting when he was in town. His religion was
+not very spiritual, certainly, but it was substantial and concrete, made
+up of good, hard convictions and opinions. It had something to do with
+citizenship, with whom one ought to marry, with the coal business (in
+which his own name was powerful), with the Republican party, and with all
+majorities and established precedents. He was hostile to fads, to
+enthusiasms, to individualism, to all changes except in mining machinery
+and in methods of transportation.
+
+His equanimity restored by his lunch at the Schenley, McKann lit a big
+cigar, got into his taxi, and bowled off through the sleet.
+
+There was not a sound to be heard or a light to be seen. The ice
+glittered on the pavement and on the naked trees. No restless feet were
+abroad. At eleven o'clock the rows of small, comfortable houses looked as
+empty of the troublesome bubble of life as the Allegheny cemetery itself.
+Suddenly the cab stopped, and McKann thrust his head out of the window. A
+woman was standing in the middle of the street addressing his driver in
+a tone of excitement. Over against the curb a lone electric stood
+despondent in the storm. The young woman, her cloak blowing about her,
+turned from the driver to McKann himself, speaking rapidly and somewhat
+incoherently.
+
+"Could you not be so kind as to help us? It is Mees Ayrshire, the singer.
+The juice is gone out and we cannot move. We must get to the station.
+Mademoiselle cannot miss the train; she sings tomorrow night in New York.
+It is very important. Could you not take us to the station at East
+Liberty?"
+
+McKann opened the door. "That's all right, but you'll have to hurry. It's
+eleven-ten now. You've only got fifteen minutes to make the train. Tell
+her to come along."
+
+The maid drew back and looked up at him in amazement. "But, the
+hand-luggage to carry, and Mademoiselle to walk! The street is like
+glass!"
+
+McKann threw away his cigar and followed her. He stood silent by the door
+of the derelict, while the maid explained that she had found help. The
+driver had gone off somewhere to telephone for a car. Miss Ayrshire
+seemed not at all apprehensive; she had not doubted that a rescuer would
+be forthcoming. She moved deliberately; out of a whirl of skirts she
+thrust one fur-topped shoe--McKann saw the flash of the gold stocking
+above it--and alighted.
+
+"So kind of you! So fortunate for us!" she murmured. One hand she placed
+upon his sleeve, and in the other she carried an armful of roses that had
+been sent up to the concert stage. The petals showered upon the sooty,
+sleety pavement as she picked her way along. They would be lying there
+tomorrow morning, and the children in those houses would wonder if there
+had been a funeral. The maid followed with two leather bags. As soon as
+he had lifted Kitty into his cab she exclaimed:
+
+"My jewel-case! I have forgotten it. It is on the back seat, please. I am
+so careless!"
+
+He dashed back, ran his hand along the cushions, and discovered a small
+leather bag. When he returned he found the maid and the luggage bestowed
+on the front seat, and a place left for him on the back seat beside Kitty
+and her flowers.
+
+"Shall we be taking you far out of your way?" she asked sweetly. "I
+haven't an idea where the station is. I'm not even sure about the name.
+Celine thinks it is East Liberty, but I think it is West Liberty. An odd
+name, anyway. It is a Bohemian quarter, perhaps? A district where the law
+relaxes a trifle?"
+
+McKann replied grimly that he didn't think the name referred to that kind
+of liberty.
+
+"So much the better," sighed Kitty. "I am a Californian; that's the only
+part of America I know very well, and out there, when we called a place
+Liberty Hill or Liberty Hollow--well, we meant it. You will excuse me if
+I'm uncommunicative, won't you? I must not talk in this raw air. My
+throat is sensitive after a long program." She lay back in her corner and
+closed her eyes.
+
+When the cab rolled down the incline at East Liberty station, the New
+York express was whistling in. A porter opened the door. McKann sprang
+out, gave him a claim check and his Pullman ticket, and told him to get
+his bag at the check-stand and rush it on that train.
+
+Miss Ayrshire, having gathered up her flowers, put out her hand to take
+his arm. "Why, it's you!" she exclaimed, as she saw his face in the
+light. "What a coincidence!" She made no further move to alight, but sat
+smiling as if she had just seated herself in a drawing-room and were
+ready for talk and a cup of tea.
+
+McKann caught her arm. "You must hurry, Miss Ayrshire, if you mean to
+catch that train. It stops here only a moment. Can you run?"
+
+"Can I run!" she laughed. "Try me!"
+
+As they raced through the tunnel and up the inside stairway, McKann
+admitted that he had never before made a dash with feet so quick and sure
+stepping out beside him. The white-furred boots chased each other like
+lambs at play, the gold stockings flashed like the spokes of a bicycle
+wheel in the sun. They reached the door of Miss Ayrshire's state-room
+just as the train began to pull out. McKann was ashamed of the way he was
+panting, for Kitty's breathing was as soft and regular as when she was
+reclining on the back seat of his taxi. It had somehow run in his head
+that all these stage women were a poor lot physically--unsound, overfed
+creatures, like canaries that are kept in a cage and stuffed with
+song-restorer. He retreated to escape her thanks. "Good night! Pleasant
+journey! Pleasant dreams!" With a friendly nod in Kitty's direction he
+closed the door behind him.
+
+He was somewhat surprised to find his own bag, his Pullman ticket in the
+strap, on the seat just outside Kitty's door. But there was nothing
+strange about it. He had got the last section left on the train, No. 13,
+next the drawing-room. Every other berth in the car was made up. He was
+just starting to look for the porter when the door of the state-room
+opened and Kitty Ayrshire came out. She seated herself carelessly in the
+front seat beside his bag.
+
+"Please talk to me a little," she said coaxingly. "I'm always wakeful
+after I sing, and I have to hunt some one to talk to. Celine and I get so
+tired of each other. We can speak very low, and we shall not disturb any
+one." She crossed her feet and rested her elbow on his Gladstone. Though
+she still wore her gold slippers and stockings, she did not, he thanked
+Heaven, have on her concert gown, but a very demure black velvet with
+some sort of pearl trimming about the neck. "Wasn't it funny," she
+proceeded, "that it happened to be you who picked me up? I wanted a
+word with you, anyway."
+
+McKann smiled in a way that meant he wasn't being taken in. "Did you? We
+are not very old acquaintances."
+
+"No, perhaps not. But you disapproved tonight, and I thought I was
+singing very well. You are very critical in such matters?"
+
+He had been standing, but now he sat down. "My dear young lady, I am not
+critical at all. I know nothing about 'such matters.'"
+
+"And care less?" she said for him, "Well, then we know where we are, in
+so far as that is concerned. What did displease you? My gown, perhaps? It
+may seem a little _outre_ here, but it's the sort of thing all the
+imaginative designers abroad are doing. You like the English sort of
+concert gown better?"
+
+"About gowns," said McKann, "I know even less than about music. If I
+looked uncomfortable, it was probably because I was uncomfortable. The
+seats were bad and the lights were annoying."
+
+Kitty looked up with solicitude. "I was sorry they sold those seats. I
+don't like to make people uncomfortable in any way. Did the lights give
+you a headache? They are very trying. They burn one's eyes out in the
+end, I believe." She paused and waved the porter away with a smile as
+he came toward them. Half-clad Pittsburghers were tramping up and down
+the aisle, casting sidelong glances at McKann and his companion. "How
+much better they look with all their clothes on," she murmured. Then,
+turning directly to McKann again: "I saw you were not well seated, but I
+felt something quite hostile and personal. You were displeased with me.
+Doubtless many people are, but I seldom get an opportunity to question
+them. It would be nice if you took the trouble to tell me why you were
+displeased."
+
+She spoke frankly, pleasantly, without a shadow of challenge or hauteur.
+She did not seem to be angling for compliments. McKann settled himself
+in his seat. He thought he would try her out. She had come for it, and he
+would let her have it. He found, however, that it was harder to formulate
+the grounds of his disapproval than he would have supposed. Now that he
+sat face to face with her, now that she was leaning against his bag, he
+had no wish to hurt her.
+
+"I'm a hard-headed business man," he said evasively, "and I don't much
+believe in any of you fluffy-ruffles people. I have a sort of natural
+distrust of them all, the men more than the women."
+
+She looked thoughtful. "Artists, you mean?" drawing her words slowly.
+"What is your business?"
+
+"Coal."
+
+"I don't feel any natural distrust of business men, and I know ever so
+many. I don't know any coal-men, but I think I could become very much
+interested in coal. Am I larger-minded than you?"
+
+McKann laughed. "I don't think you know when you are interested or when
+you are not. I don't believe you know what it feels like to be really
+interested. There is so much fake about your profession. It's an
+affectation on both sides. I know a great many of the people who went to
+hear you tonight, and I know that most of them neither know nor care
+anything about music. They imagine they do, because it's supposed to be
+the proper thing."
+
+Kitty sat upright and looked interested. She was certainly a lovely
+creature--the only one of her tribe he had ever seen that he would cross
+the street to see again. Those were remarkable eyes she had--curious,
+penetrating, restless, somewhat impudent, but not at all dulled by
+self-conceit.
+
+"But isn't that so in everything?" she cried. "How many of your clerks
+are honest because of a fine, individual sense of honour? They are
+honest because it is the accepted rule of good conduct in business. Do
+you know"--she looked at him squarely--"I thought you would have
+something quite definite to say to me; but this is funny-paper stuff,
+the sort of objection I'd expect from your office-boy."
+
+"Then you don't think it silly for a lot of people to get together and
+pretend to enjoy something they know nothing about?"
+
+"Of course I think it silly, but that's the way God made audiences.
+Don't people go to church in exactly the same way? If there were a
+spiritual-pressure test-machine at the door, I suspect not many of you
+would get to your pews."
+
+"How do you know I go to church?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, people with these old, ready-made
+opinions usually go to church. But you can't evade me like that." She
+tapped the edge of his seat with the toe of her gold slipper. "You sat
+there all evening, glaring at me as if you could eat me alive. Now I give
+you a chance to state your objections, and you merely criticize my
+audience. What is it? Is it merely that you happen to dislike my
+personality? In that case, of course, I won't press you."
+
+"No," McKann frowned, "I perhaps dislike your professional personality.
+As I told you, I have a natural distrust of your variety."
+
+"Natural, I wonder?" Kitty murmured. "I don't see why you should
+naturally dislike singers any more than I naturally dislike coal-men. I
+don't classify people by their occupations. Doubtless I should find some
+coal-men repulsive, and you may find some singers so. But I have reason
+to believe that, at least, I'm one of the less repellent."
+
+"I don't doubt it," McKann laughed, "and you're a shrewd woman to boot.
+But you are, all of you, according to my standards, light people. You're
+brilliant, some of you, but you've no depth."
+
+Kitty seemed to assent, with a dive of her girlish head. "Well, it's a
+merit in some things to be heavy, and in others to be light. Some things
+are meant to go deep, and others to go high. Do you want all the women in
+the world to be profound?"
+
+"You are all," he went on steadily, watching her with indulgence, "fed on
+hectic emotions. You are pampered. You don't help to carry the burdens of
+the world. You are self-indulgent and appetent."
+
+"Yes, I am," she assented, with a candour which he did not expect. "Not
+all artists are, but I am. Why not? If I could once get a convincing
+statement as to why I should not be self-indulgent, I might change my
+ways. As for the burdens of the world--" Kitty rested her chin on her
+clasped hands and looked thoughtful. "One should give pleasure to others.
+My dear sir, granting that the great majority of people can't enjoy
+anything very keenly, you'll admit that I give pleasure to many more
+people than you do. One should help others who are less fortunate; at
+present I am supporting just eight people, besides those I hire. There
+was never another family in California that had so many cripples and
+hard-luckers as that into which I had the honour to be born. The only
+ones who could take care of themselves were ruined by the San Francisco
+earthquake some time ago. One should make personal sacrifices. I do; I
+give money and time and effort to talented students. Oh, I give something
+much more than that! something that you probably have never given to any
+one. I give, to the really gifted ones, my _wish,_ my desire, my light,
+if I have any; and that, Mr. Worldly Wiseman, is like giving one's blood!
+It's the kind of thing you prudent people never give. That is what was
+in the box of precious ointment." Kitty threw off her fervour with a
+slight gesture, as if it were a scarf, and leaned back, tucking her
+slipper up on the edge of his seat. "If you saw the houses I keep up,"
+she sighed, "and the people I employ, and the motor-cars I run--And,
+after all, I've only this to do it with." She indicated her slender
+person, which Marshall could almost have broken in two with his bare
+hands.
+
+She was, he thought, very much like any other charming woman, except that
+she was more so. Her familiarity was natural and simple. She was at ease
+because she was not afraid of him or of herself, or of certain half-clad
+acquaintances of his who had been wandering up and down the car oftener
+than was necessary. Well, he was not afraid, either.
+
+Kitty put her arms over her head and sighed again, feeling the smooth
+part in her black hair. Her head was small--capable of great agitation,
+like a bird's; or of great resignation, like a nun's. "I can't see why I
+shouldn't be self-indulgent, when I indulge others. I can't understand
+your equivocal scheme of ethics. Now I can understand Count Tolstoy's,
+perfectly. I had a long talk with him once, about his book 'What is Art?'
+As nearly as I could get it, he believes that we are a race who can exist
+only by gratifying appetites; the appetites are evil, and the existence
+they carry on is evil. We were always sad, he says, without knowing why;
+even in the Stone Age. In some miraculous way a divine ideal was
+disclosed to us, directly at variance with our appetites. It gave us a
+new craving, which we could only satisfy by starving all the other
+hungers in us. Happiness lies in ceasing to be and to cause being,
+because the thing revealed to us is dearer than any existence our
+appetites can ever get for us. I can understand that. It's something one
+often feels in art. It is even the subject of the greatest of all operas,
+which, because I can never hope to sing it, I love more than all the
+others." Kitty pulled herself up. "Perhaps you agree with Tolstoy?" she
+added languidly.
+
+"No; I think he's a crank," said McKann, cheerfully.
+
+"What do you mean by a crank?"
+
+"I mean an extremist."
+
+Kitty laughed. "Weighty word! You'll always have a world full of people
+who keep to the golden mean. Why bother yourself about me and Tolstoy?"
+
+"I don't, except when you bother me."
+
+"Poor man! It's true this isn't your fault. Still, you did provoke it by
+glaring at me. Why did you go to the concert?"
+
+"I was dragged."
+
+"I might have known!" she chuckled, and shook her head. "No, you don't
+give me any good reasons. Your morality seems to me the compromise of
+cowardice, apologetic and sneaking. When righteousness becomes alive and
+burning, you hate it as much as you do beauty. You want a little of each
+in your life, perhaps--adulterated, sterilized, with the sting taken out.
+It's true enough they are both fearsome things when they get loose in the
+world; they don't, often."
+
+McKann hated tall talk. "My views on women," he said slowly, "are
+simple."
+
+"Doubtless," Kitty responded dryly, "but are they consistent? Do you
+apply them to your stenographers as well as to me? I take it for
+granted you have unmarried stenographers. Their position, economically,
+is the same as mine."
+
+McKann studied the toe of her shoe. "With a woman, everything comes back
+to one thing." His manner was judicial.
+
+She laughed indulgently. "So we are getting down to brass tacks, eh? I
+have beaten you in argument, and now you are leading trumps."
+
+She put her hands behind her head and her lips parted in a half-yawn.
+"Does everything come back to one thing? I wish I knew! It's more than
+likely that, under the same conditions, I should have been very like your
+stenographers--if they are good ones. Whatever I was, I would have been a
+good one. I think people are very much alike. You are more different than
+any one I have met for some time, but I know that there are a great many
+more at home like you. And even you--I believe there is a real creature
+down under these custom-made prejudices that save you the trouble of
+thinking. If you and I were shipwrecked on a desert island, I have no
+doubt that we would come to a simple and natural understanding. I'm
+neither a coward nor a shirk. You would find, if you had to undertake any
+enterprise of danger or difficulty with a woman, that there are several
+qualifications quite as important as the one to which you doubtless
+refer."
+
+McKann felt nervously for his watch-chain. "Of course," he brought out,
+"I am not laying down any generalizations--" His brows wrinkled.
+
+"Oh, aren't you?" murmured Kitty. "Then I totally misunderstood. But
+remember"--holding up a finger--"it is you, not I, who are afraid to
+pursue this subject further. Now, I'll tell you something." She leaned
+forward and clasped her slim, white hands about her velvet knee. "I am
+as much a victim of these ineradicable prejudices as you. Your
+stenographer seems to you a better sort. Well, she does to me. Just
+because her life is, presumably, greyer than mine, she seems better. My
+mind tells me that dulness, and a mediocre order of ability, and poverty,
+are not in themselves admirable things. Yet in my heart I always feel
+that the sales-women in shops and the working girls in factories are more
+meritorious than I. Many of them, with my opportunities, would be more
+selfish than I am. Some of them, with their own opportunities, are more
+selfish. Yet I make this sentimental genuflection before the nun and the
+charwoman. Tell me, haven't you any weakness? Isn't there any foolish
+natural thing that unbends you a trifle and makes you feel gay?"
+
+"I like to go fishing."
+
+"To see how many fish you can catch?"
+
+"No, I like the woods and the weather. I like to play a fish and work
+hard for him. I like the pussy-willows and the cold; and the sky,
+whether it's blue or grey--night coming on, every thing about it."
+
+He spoke devoutly, and Kitty watched him through half-closed eyes. "And
+you like to feel that there are light-minded girls like me, who only care
+about the inside of shops and theatres and hotels, eh? You amuse me, you
+and your fish! But I mustn't keep you any longer. Haven't I given you
+every opportunity to state your case against me? I thought you would have
+more to say for yourself. Do you know, I believe it's not a case you have
+at all, but a grudge. I believe you are envious; that you'd like to be a
+tenor, and a perfect lady-killer!" She rose, smiling, and paused with her
+hand on the door of her stateroom. "Anyhow, thank you for a pleasant
+evening. And, by the way, dream of me tonight, and not of either of those
+ladies who sat beside you. It does not matter much whom we live with in
+this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of." She noticed
+his bricky flush. "You are very naive, after all, but, oh, so cautious!
+You are naturally afraid of everything new, just as I naturally want to
+try everything: new people, new religions--new miseries, even. If only
+there were more new things--If only you were really new! I might learn
+something. I'm like the Queen of Sheba--I'm not above learning. But you,
+my friend, would be afraid to try a new shaving soap. It isn't
+gravitation that holds the world in place; it's the lazy, obese cowardice
+of the people on it. All the same"--taking his hand and smiling
+encouragingly--"I'm going to haunt you a little. _Adios!_"
+
+When Kitty entered her state-room, Celine, in her dressing-gown, was
+nodding by the window.
+
+"Mademoiselle found the fat gentleman interesting?" she asked. "It is
+nearly one."
+
+"Negatively interesting. His kind always say the same thing. If I could
+find one really intelligent man who held his views, I should adopt them."
+
+"Monsieur did not look like an original," murmured Celine, as she began
+to take down her lady's hair.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McKann slept heavily, as usual, and the porter had to shake him in
+the morning. He sat up in his berth, and, after composing his hair with
+his fingers, began to hunt about for his clothes. As he put up the
+window-blind some bright object in the little hammock over his bed caught
+the sunlight and glittered. He stared and picked up a delicately turned
+gold slipper.
+
+"Minx! hussy!" he ejaculated. "All that tall talk--! Probably got it from
+some man who hangs about; learned it off like a parrot. Did she poke this
+in here herself last night, or did she send that sneak-faced Frenchwoman?
+I like her nerve!" He wondered whether he might have been breathing
+audibly when the intruder thrust her head between his curtains. He was
+conscious that he did not look a Prince Charming in his sleep. He dressed
+as fast as he could, and, when he was ready to go to the wash-room,
+glared at the slipper. If the porter should start to make up his berth in
+his absence--He caught the slipper, wrapped it in his pajama jacket, and
+thrust it into his bag. He escaped from the train without seeing his
+tormentor again.
+
+Later McKann threw the slipper into the waste-basket in his room at the
+Knickerbocker, but the chambermaid, seeing that it was new and mateless,
+thought there must be a mistake, and placed it in his clothes-closet. He
+found it there when he returned from the theatre that evening.
+Considerably mellowed by food and drink and cheerful company, he took the
+slipper in his hand and decided to keep it as a reminder that absurd
+things could happen to people of the most clocklike deportment. When he
+got back to Pittsburgh, he stuck it in a lock-box in his vault, safe from
+prying clerks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+McKann has been ill for five years now, poor fellow! He still goes to the
+office, because it is the only place that interests him, but his partners
+do most of the work, and his clerks find him sadly changed--"morbid,"
+they call his state of mind. He has had the pine-trees in his yard cut
+down because they remind him of cemeteries. On Sundays or holidays, when
+the office is empty, and he takes his will or his insurance-policies
+out of his lock-box, he often puts the tarnished gold slipper on his
+desk and looks at it. Somehow it suggests life to his tired mind, as his
+pine-trees suggested death--life and youth. When he drops over some day,
+his executors will be puzzled by the slipper.
+
+As for Kitty Ayrshire, she has played so many jokes, practical and
+impractical, since then, that she has long ago forgotten the night when
+she threw away a slipper to be a thorn in the side of a just man.
+
+
+
+
+Scandal
+
+
+
+
+Kitty Ayrshire had a cold, a persistent inflammation of the vocal cords
+which defied the throat specialist. Week after week her name was posted
+at the Opera, and week after week it was canceled, and the name of one
+of her rivals was substituted. For nearly two months she had been
+deprived of everything she liked, even of the people she liked, and had
+been shut up until she had come to hate the glass windows between her and
+the world, and the wintry stretch of the Park they looked out upon. She
+was losing a great deal of money, and, what was worse, she was losing
+life; days of which she wanted to make the utmost were slipping by, and
+nights which were to have crowned the days, nights of incalculable
+possibilities, were being stolen from her by women for whom she had no
+great affection. At first she had been courageous, but the strain of
+prolonged uncertainty was telling on her, and her nervous condition did
+not improve her larynx. Every morning Miles Creedon looked down her
+throat, only to put her off with evasions, to pronounce improvement that
+apparently never got her anywhere, to say that tomorrow he might be able
+to promise something definite.
+
+Her illness, of course, gave rise to rumours--rumours that she had lost
+her voice, that at some time last summer she must have lost her
+discretion. Kitty herself was frightened by the way in which this cold
+hung on. She had had many sharp illnesses in her life, but always,
+before this, she had rallied quickly. Was she beginning to lose her
+resiliency? Was she, by any cursed chance, facing a bleak time when she
+would have to cherish herself? She protested, as she wandered about her
+sunny, many-windowed rooms on the tenth floor, that if she was going to
+have to live frugally, she wouldn't live at all. She wouldn't live on any
+terms but the very generous ones she had always known. She wasn't going
+to hoard her vitality. It must be there when she wanted it, be ready for
+any strain she chose to put upon it, let her play fast and loose with it;
+and then, if necessary, she would be ill for a while and pay the piper.
+But be systematically prudent and parsimonious she would not.
+
+When she attempted to deliver all this to Doctor Creedon, he merely put
+his finger on her lips and said they would discuss these things when she
+could talk without injuring her throat. He allowed her to see no one
+except the Director of the Opera, who did not shine in conversation and
+was not apt to set Kitty going. The Director was a glum fellow, indeed,
+but during this calamitous time he had tried to be soothing, and he
+agreed with Creedon that she must not risk a premature appearance. Kitty
+was tormented by a suspicion that he was secretly backing the little
+Spanish woman who had sung many of her parts since she had been ill. He
+furthered the girl's interests because his wife had a very special
+consideration for her, and Madame had that consideration because--But
+that was too long and too dreary a story to follow out in one's mind.
+Kitty felt a tonsilitis disgust for opera-house politics, which, when she
+was in health, she rather enjoyed, being no mean strategist herself. The
+worst of being ill was that it made so many things and people look base.
+
+She was always afraid of being disillusioned. She wished to believe that
+everything for sale in Vanity Fair was worth the advertised price. When
+she ceased to believe in these delights, she told herself, her pulling
+power would decline and she would go to pieces. In some way the chill of
+her disillusionment would quiver through the long, black line which
+reached from the box-office down to Seventh Avenue on nights when she
+sang. They shivered there in the rain and cold, all those people, because
+they loved to believe in her inextinguishable zest. She was no prouder of
+what she drew in the boxes than she was of that long, oscillating tail;
+little fellows in thin coats, Italians, Frenchmen, South-Americans,
+Japanese.
+
+When she had been cloistered like a Trappist for six weeks, with nothing
+from the outside world but notes and flowers and disquieting morning
+papers, Kitty told Miles Creedon that she could not endure complete
+isolation any longer.
+
+"I simply cannot live through the evenings. They have become horrors to
+me. Every night is the last night of a condemned man. I do nothing but
+cry, and that makes my throat worse."
+
+Miles Creedon, handsomest of his profession, was better looking with some
+invalids than with others. His athletic figure, his red cheeks, and
+splendid teeth always had a cheering effect upon this particular patient,
+who hated anything weak or broken.
+
+"What can I do, my dear? What do you wish? Shall I come and hold your
+lovely hand from eight to ten? You have only to suggest it."
+
+"Would you do that, even? No, _caro mio_, I take far too much of your
+time as it is. For an age now you have been the only man in the world
+to me, and you have been charming! But the world is big, and I am missing
+it. Let some one come tonight, some one interesting, but not too
+interesting. Pierce Tevis, for instance. He is just back from Paris. Tell
+the nurse I may see him for an hour tonight," Kitty finished pleadingly,
+and put her fingers on the doctor's sleeve. He looked down at them and
+smiled whimsically.
+
+Like other people, he was weak to Kitty Ayrshire. He would do for her
+things that he would do for no one else; would break any engagement,
+desert a dinner-table, leaving an empty place and an offended hostess, to
+sit all evening in Kitty's dressing-room, spraying her throat and calming
+her nerves, using every expedient to get her through a performance. He
+had studied her voice like a singing master; knew all of its
+idiosyncracies and the emotional and nervous perturbations which affected
+it. When it was permissible, sometimes when it was not permissible, he
+indulged her caprices. On this sunny morning her wan, disconsolate face
+moved him.
+
+"Yes, you may see Tevis this evening if you will assure me that you will
+not shed one tear for twenty-four hours. I may depend on your word?" He
+rose, and stood before the deep couch on which his patient reclined. Her
+arch look seemed to say, "On what could you depend more?" Creedon smiled,
+and shook his head. "If I find you worse tomorrow--"
+
+He crossed to the writing-table and began to separate a bunch of tiny
+flame-coloured rosebuds. "May I?" Selecting one, he sat down on the
+chair from which he had lately risen, and leaned forward while Kitty
+pinched the thorns from the stem and arranged the flower in his
+buttonhole.
+
+"Thank you. I like to wear one of yours. Now I must be off to the
+hospital. I've a nasty little operation to do this morning. I'm glad it's
+not you. Shall I telephone Tevis about this evening?"
+
+Kitty hesitated. Her eyes ran rapidly about, seeking a likely pretext.
+Creedon laughed.
+
+"Oh, I see. You've already asked him to come. You were so sure of me! Two
+hours in bed after lunch, with all the windows open, remember. Read
+something diverting, but not exciting; some homely British author;
+nothing _abandonne_. And don't make faces at me. Until to-morrow!"
+
+When her charming doctor had disappeared through the doorway, Kitty fell
+back on her cushions and closed her eyes. Her mocking-bird, excited by
+the sunlight, was singing in his big gilt cage, and a white lilac-tree
+that had come that morning was giving out its faint sweetness in the
+warm room. But Kitty looked paler and wearier than when the doctor was
+with her. Even with him she rose to her part just a little; couldn't help
+it. And he took his share of her vivacity and sparkle, like every one
+else. He believed that his presence was soothing to her. But he admired;
+and whoever admired, blew on the flame, however lightly.
+
+The mocking-bird was in great form this morning. He had the best
+bird-voice she had ever heard, and Kitty wished there were some way to
+note down his improvisations; but his intervals were not expressible in
+any scale she knew. Parker White had brought him to her, from Ojo
+Caliente, in New Mexico, where he had been trained in the pine forests by
+an old Mexican and an ill-tempered, lame master-bird, half thrush, that
+taught young birds to sing. This morning, in his song there were flashes
+of silvery Southern springtime; they opened inviting roads of memory. In
+half an hour he had sung his disconsolate mistress to sleep.
+
+That evening Kitty sat curled up on the deep couch before the fire,
+awaiting Pierce Tevis. Her costume was folds upon folds of diaphanous
+white over equally diaphanous rose, with a line of white fur about her
+neck. Her beautiful arms were bare. Her tiny Chinese slippers were
+embroidered so richly that they resembled the painted porcelain of old
+vases. She looked like a sultan's youngest, newest bride; a beautiful
+little toy-woman, sitting at one end of the long room which composed
+about her,--which, in the soft light, seemed happily arranged for her.
+There were flowers everywhere: rose-trees; camellia-bushes, red and
+white; the first forced hyacinths of the season; a feathery mimosa-tree,
+tall enough to stand under.
+
+The long front of Kitty's study was all windows. At one end was the
+fireplace, before which she sat. At the other end, back in a lighted
+alcove, hung a big, warm, sympathetic interior by Lucien Simon,--a group
+of Kitty's friends having tea in the painter's salon in Paris. The room
+in the picture was flooded with early lamp-light, and one could feel the
+grey, chill winter twilight in the Paris streets outside. There stood the
+cavalier-like old composer, who had done much for Kitty, in his most
+characteristic attitude, before the hearth. Mme. Simon sat at the
+tea-table. B----, the historian, and H----, the philologist, stood in
+animated discussion behind the piano, while Mme. H---- was tying on the
+bonnet of her lovely little daughter. Marcel Durand, the physicist, sat
+alone in a corner, his startling black-and-white profile lowered
+broodingly, his cold hands locked over his sharp knee. A genial,
+red-bearded sculptor stood over him, about to touch him on the shoulder
+and waken him from his dream.
+
+This painting made, as it were, another room; so that Kitty's study on
+Central Park West seemed to open into that charming French interior, into
+one of the most highly harmonized and richly associated rooms in Paris.
+There her friends sat or stood about, men distinguished, women at once
+plain and beautiful, with their furs and bonnets, their clothes that were
+so distinctly not smart--all held together by the warm lamp-light, by an
+indescribable atmosphere of graceful and gracious human living.
+
+Pierce Tevis, after he had entered noiselessly and greeted Kitty, stood
+before her fire and looked over her shoulder at this picture.
+
+"It's nice that you have them there together, now that they are
+scattered, God knows where, fighting to preserve just that. But your own
+room, too, is charming," he added at last, taking his eyes from the
+canvas.
+
+Kitty shrugged her shoulders.
+
+"Bah! I can help to feed the lamp, but I can't supply the dear things it
+shines upon."
+
+"Well, tonight it shines upon you and me, and we aren't so bad." Tevis
+stepped forward and took her hand affectionately. "You've been over a
+rough bit of road. I'm so sorry. It's left you looking very lovely,
+though. Has it been very hard to get on?"
+
+She brushed his hand gratefully against her cheek and nodded.
+
+"Awfully dismal. Everything has been shut out from me but--gossip. That
+always gets in. Often I don't mind, but this time I have. People do tell
+such lies about me."
+
+"Of course we do. That's part of our fun, one of the many pleasures you
+give us. It only shows how hard up we are for interesting public
+personages; for a royal family, for romantic fiction, if you will. But I
+never hear any stories that wound me, and I'm very sensitive about you."
+
+"I'm gossiped about rather more than the others, am I not?"
+
+"I believe! Heaven send that the day when you are not gossiped about is
+far distant! Do you want to bite off your nose to spite your pretty face?
+You are the sort of person who makes myths. You can't turn around without
+making one. That's your singular good luck. A whole staff of publicity
+men, working day and night, couldn't do for you what you do for yourself.
+There is an affinity between you and the popular imagination."
+
+"I suppose so," said Kitty, and sighed. "All the same, I'm getting almost
+as tired of the person I'm supposed to be as of the person I really am. I
+wish you would invent a new Kitty Ayrshire for me, Pierce. Can't I do
+something revolutionary? Marry, for instance?"
+
+Tevis rose in alarm.
+
+"Whatever you do, don't try to change your legend. You have now the one
+that gives the greatest satisfaction to the greatest number of people.
+Don't disappoint your public. The popular imagination, to which you make
+such a direct appeal, for some reason wished you to have a son, so it has
+given you one. I've heard a dozen versions of the story, but it is always
+a son, never by any chance a daughter. Your public gives you what is best
+for you. Let well enough alone."
+
+Kitty yawned and dropped back on her cushions.
+
+"He still persists, does he, in spite of never being visible?"
+
+"Oh, but he has been seen by ever so many people. Let me think a moment."
+He sank into an attitude of meditative ease. "The best description I ever
+had of him was from a friend of my mother, an elderly woman, thoroughly
+truthful and matter-of-fact. She has seen him often. He is kept in
+Russia, in St. Petersburg, that was. He is about eight years old and of
+marvellous beauty. He is always that in every version. My old friend has
+seen him being driven in his sledge on the Nevskii Prospekt on winter
+afternoons; black horses with silver bells and a giant in uniform on the
+seat beside the driver. He is always attended by this giant, who is
+responsible to the Grand Duke Paul for the boy. This lady can produce no
+evidence beyond his beauty and his splendid furs and the fact that all
+the Americans in Petrograd know he is your son."
+
+Kitty laughed mournfully.
+
+"If the Grand Duke Paul had a son, any old rag of a son, the province of
+Moscow couldn't contain him! He may, for aught I know, actually pretend
+to have a son. It would be very like him." She looked at her finger-tips
+and her rings disapprovingly for a moment. "Do you know, I've been
+thinking that I would rather like to lay hands on that youngster. I
+believe he'd be interesting. I'm bored with the world."
+
+Tevis looked up and said quickly:
+
+"Would you like him, really?"
+
+"Of course I should," she said indignantly. "But, then, I like other
+things, too; and one has to choose. When one has only two or three things
+to choose from, life is hard; when one has many, it is harder still. No,
+on the whole, I don't mind that story. It's rather pretty, except for the
+Grand Duke. But not all of them are pretty."
+
+"Well, none of them are very ugly; at least I never heard but one that
+troubled me, and that was long ago."
+
+She looked interested.
+
+"That is what I want to know; how do the ugly ones get started? How did
+that one get going and what was it about? Is it too dreadful to repeat?"
+
+"No, it's not especially dreadful; merely rather shabby. If you really
+wish to know, and won't be vexed, I can tell you exactly how it got
+going, for I took the trouble to find out. But it's a long story, and you
+really had nothing whatever to do with it."
+
+"Then who did have to do with it? Tell me; I should like to know exactly
+how even one of them originated."
+
+"Will you be comfortable and quiet and not get into a rage, and let me
+look at you as much as I please?"
+
+Kitty nodded, and Tevis sat watching her indolently while he debated how
+much of his story he ought not to tell her. Kitty liked being looked at
+by intelligent persons. She knew exactly how good looking she was; and
+she knew, too, that, pretty as she was, some of those rather sallow
+women in the Simon painting had a kind of beauty which she would never
+have. This knowledge, Tevis was thinking, this important realization,
+contributed more to her loveliness than any other thing about her; more
+than her smooth, ivory skin or her changing grey eyes, the delicate
+forehead above them, or even the dazzling smile, which was gradually
+becoming too bright and too intentional,--out in the world, at least.
+Here by her own fire she still had for her friends a smile less electric
+than the one she flashed from stages. She could still be, in short,
+_intime_, a quality which few artists keep, which few ever had.
+
+Kitty broke in on her friend's meditations.
+
+"You may smoke. I had rather you did. I hate to deprive people of things
+they like."
+
+"No, thanks. May I have those chocolates on the tea-table? They are quite
+as bad for me. May you? No, I suppose not." He settled himself by the
+fire, with the candy beside him, and began in the agreeable voice which
+always soothed his listener.
+
+"As I said, it was a long while ago, when you first came back to this
+country and were singing at the Manhattan. I dropped in at the
+Metropolitan one evening to hear something new they were trying out. It
+was an off night, no pullers in the cast, and nobody in the boxes but
+governesses and poor relations. At the end of the first act two people
+entered one of the boxes in the second tier. The man was Siegmund Stein,
+the department-store millionaire, and the girl, so the men about me in
+the omnibus box began to whisper, was Kitty Ayrshire. I didn't know you
+then, but I was unwilling to believe that you were with Stein. I could
+not contradict them at that time, however, for the resemblance, if it was
+merely a resemblance, was absolute, and all the world knew that you were
+not singing at the Manhattan that night. The girl's hair was dressed just
+as you then wore yours. Moreover, her head was small and restless like
+yours, and she had your colouring, your eyes, your chin. She carried
+herself with the critical indifference one might expect in an artist who
+had come for a look at a new production that was clearly doomed to
+failure. She applauded lightly. She made comments to Stein when comments
+were natural enough. I thought, as I studied her face with the glass,
+that her nose was a trifle thinner than yours, a prettier nose, my dear
+Kitty, but stupider and more inflexible. All the same, I was troubled
+until I saw her laugh,--and then I knew she was a counterfeit. I had
+never seen you laugh, but I knew that you would not laugh like that. It
+was not boisterous; indeed, it was consciously refined,--mirthless,
+meaningless. In short, it was not the laugh of one whom our friends in
+there"--pointing to the Simon painting--"would honour with their
+affection and admiration."
+
+Kitty rose on her elbow and burst out indignantly:
+
+"So you would really have been hood-winked except for that! You may be
+sure that no woman, no intelligent woman, would have been. Why do we ever
+take the trouble to look like anything for any of you? I could count on
+my four fingers"--she held them up and shook them at him--"the men I've
+known who had the least perception of what any woman really looked like,
+and they were all dressmakers. Even painters"--glancing back in the
+direction of the Simon picture--"never get more than one type through
+their thick heads; they try to make all women look like some wife or
+mistress. You are all the same; you never see our real faces. What you do
+see, is some cheap conception of prettiness you got from a coloured
+supplement when you were adolescents. It's too discouraging. I'd rather
+take vows and veil my face for ever from such abominable eyes. In the
+kingdom of the blind any petticoat is a queen." Kitty thumped the cushion
+with her elbow. "Well, I can't do anything about it. Go on with your
+story."
+
+"Aren't you furious, Kitty! And I thought I was so shrewd. I've quite
+forgotten where I was. Anyhow, I was not the only man fooled. After the
+last curtain I met Villard, the press man of that management, in the
+lobby, and asked him whether Kitty Ayrshire was in the house. He said he
+thought so. Stein had telephoned for a box, and said he was bringing one
+of the artists from the other company. Villard had been too busy about
+the new production to go to the box, but he was quite sure the woman was
+Ayrshire, whom he had met in Paris.
+
+"Not long after that I met Dan Leland, a classmate of mine, at the
+Harvard Club. He's a journalist, and he used to keep such eccentric hours
+that I had not run across him for a long time. We got to talking about
+modern French music, and discovered that we both had a very lively
+interest in Kitty Ayrshire.
+
+"'Could you tell me,' Dan asked abruptly, 'why, with pretty much all the
+known world to choose her friends from, this young woman should flit
+about with Siegmund Stein? It prejudices people against her. He's a most
+objectionable person.'
+
+"'Have you,' I asked, 'seen her with him, yourself?'
+
+"Yes, he had seen her driving with Stein, and some of the men on his
+paper had seen her dining with him at rather queer places down town.
+Stein was always hanging about the Manhattan on nights when Kitty sang. I
+told Dan that I suspected a masquerade. That interested him, and
+he said he thought he would look into the matter. In short, we both
+agreed to look into it. Finally, we got the story, though Dan could never
+use it, could never even hint at it, because Stein carries heavy
+advertising in his paper.
+
+"To make you see the point, I must give you a little history of Siegmund
+Stein. Any one who has seen him never forgets him. He is one of the most
+hideous men in New York, but it's not at all the common sort of ugliness
+that comes from over-eating and automobiles. He isn't one of the fat
+horrors. He has one of those rigid, horselike faces that never tell
+anything; a long nose, flattened as if it had been tied down; a scornful
+chin; long, white teeth; flat cheeks, yellow as a Mongolian's; tiny,
+black eyes, with puffy lids and no lashes; dingy, dead-looking
+hair--looks as if it were glued on.
+
+"Stein came here a beggar from somewhere in Austria. He began by working
+on the machines in old Rosenthal's garment factory. He became a speeder,
+a foreman, a salesman; worked his way ahead steadily until the hour when
+he rented an old dwelling-house on Seventh Avenue and began to make
+misses' and juniors' coats. I believe he was the first manufacturer to
+specialize in those particular articles. Dozens of garment manufacturers
+have come along the same road, but Stein is like none of the rest of
+them. He is, and always was, a personality. While he was still at the
+machine, a hideous, underfed little whippersnapper, he was already a
+youth of many-coloured ambitions, deeply concerned about his dress, his
+associates, his recreations. He haunted the old Astor Library and the
+Metropolitan Museum, learned something about pictures and porcelains,
+took singing lessons, though he had a voice like a crow's. When he sat
+down to his baked apple and doughnut in a basement lunch-room, he would
+prop a book up before him and address his food with as much leisure and
+ceremony as if he were dining at his club. He held himself at a distance
+from his fellow-workmen and somehow always managed to impress them with
+his superiority. He had inordinate vanity, and there are many stories
+about his foppishness. After his first promotion in Rosenthal's factory,
+he bought a new overcoat. A few days later, one of the men at the
+machines, which Stein had just quitted, appeared in a coat exactly like
+it. Stein could not discharge him, but he gave his own coat to a newly
+arrived Russian boy and got another. He was already magnificent.
+
+"After he began to make headway with misses' and juniors' cloaks, he
+became a collector--etchings, china, old musical instruments. He had a
+dancing master, and engaged a beautiful Brazilian widow--she was said to
+be a secret agent for some South American republic--to teach him
+Spanish. He cultivated the society of the unknown great: poets, actors,
+musicians. He entertained them sumptuously, and they regarded him
+as a deep, mysterious Jew who had the secret of gold, which they had not.
+His business associates thought him a man of taste and culture, a patron
+of the arts, a credit to the garment trade.
+
+"One of Stein's many ambitions was to be thought a success with women. He
+got considerable notoriety in the garment world by his attentions to an
+emotional actress who is now quite forgotten, but who had her little hour
+of expectation. Then there was a dancer; then, just after Gorky's visit
+here, a Russian anarchist woman. After that the coat-makers and
+shirtwaist-makers began to whisper that Stein's great success was
+with Kitty Ayrshire.
+
+"It is the hardest thing in the world to disprove such a story, as Dan
+Leland and I discovered. We managed to worry down the girl's address
+through a taxi-cab driver who got next to Stein's chauffeur. She had an
+apartment in a decent-enough house on Waverly Place. Nobody ever came to
+see her but Stein, her sisters, and a little Italian girl from whom we
+got the story.
+
+"The counterfeit's name was Ruby Mohr. She worked in a shirtwaist
+factory, and this Italian girl, Margarita, was her chum. Stein came to
+the factory when he was hunting for living models for his new department
+store. He looked the girls over, and picked Ruby out from several
+hundred. He had her call at his office after business hours, tried her
+out in cloaks and evening gowns, and offered her a position. She never,
+however, appeared as a model in the Sixth Avenue store. Her likeness to
+the newly arrived prima donna suggested to Stein another act in the play
+he was always putting on. He gave two of her sisters positions as
+saleswomen, but Ruby he established in an apartment on Waverly Place.
+
+"To the outside world Stein became more mysterious in his behaviour
+than ever. He dropped his Bohemian friends. No more suppers and
+theatre-parties. Whenever Kitty sang, he was in his box at the Manhattan,
+usually alone, but not always. Sometimes he took two or three good
+customers, large buyers from St. Louis or Kansas City. His coat factory
+is still the biggest earner of his properties. I've seen him there with
+these buyers, and they carried themselves as if they were being let in on
+something; took possession of the box with a proprietory air, smiled and
+applauded and looked wise as if each and every one of them were friends
+of Kitty Ayrshire. While they buzzed and trained their field-glasses
+on the prima donna, Stein was impassive and silent. I don't imagine he
+even told many lies. He is the most insinuating cuss, anyhow. He probably
+dropped his voice or lifted his eyebrows when he invited them, and let
+their own eager imaginations do the rest. But what tales they took back
+to their provincial capitals!
+
+"Sometimes, before they left New York, they were lucky enough to see
+Kitty dining with their clever garment man at some restaurant, her back
+to the curious crowd, her face half concealed by a veil or a fur collar.
+Those people are like children; nothing that is true or probable
+interests them. They want the old, gaudy lies, told always in the same
+way. Siegmund Stein and Kitty Ayrshire--a story like that, once launched,
+is repeated unchallenged for years among New York factory sports. In St.
+Paul, St. Jo, Sioux City, Council Bluffs, there used to be clothing
+stores where a photograph of Kitty Ayrshire hung in the fitting-room or
+over the proprietor's desk.
+
+"This girl impersonated you successfully to the lower manufacturing world
+of New York for two seasons. I doubt if it could have been put across
+anywhere else in the world except in this city, which pays you so
+magnificently and believes of you what it likes. Then you went over to
+the Metropolitan, stopped living in hotels, took this apartment, and
+began to know people. Stein discontinued his pantomime at the right
+moment, withdrew his patronage. Ruby, of course, did not go back to
+shirtwaists. A business friend of Stein's took her over, and she dropped
+out of sight. Last winter, one cold, snowy night, I saw her once again.
+She was going into a saloon hotel with a tough-looking young fellow. She
+had been drinking, she was shabby, and her blue shoes left stains in the
+slush. But she still looked amazingly, convincingly like a battered,
+hardened Kitty Ayrshire. As I saw her going up the brass-edged stairs, I
+said to myself--"
+
+"Never mind that." Kitty rose quickly, took an impatient step to the
+hearth, and thrust one shining porcelain slipper out to the fire. "The
+girl doesn't interest me. There is nothing I can do about her, and of
+course she never looked like me at all. But what did Stein do without
+me?"
+
+"Stein? Oh, he chose a new role. He married with great
+magnificence--married a Miss Mandelbaum, a California heiress. Her
+people have a line of department stores along the Pacific Coast. The
+Steins now inhabit a great house on Fifth Avenue that used to belong to
+people of a very different sort. To old New-Yorkers, it's an historic
+house."
+
+Kitty laughed, and sat down on the end of her couch nearest her guest;
+sat upright, without cushions.
+
+"I imagine I know more about that house than you do. Let me tell you how
+I made the sequel to your story.
+
+"It has to do with Peppo Amoretti. You may remember that I brought Peppo
+to this country, and brought him in, too, the year the war broke out,
+when it wasn't easy to get boys who hadn't done military service out of
+Italy. I had taken him to Munich to have some singing lessons. After the
+war came on we had to get from Munich to Naples in order to sail at all.
+We were told that we could take only hand luggage on the railways, but I
+took nine trunks and Peppo. I dressed Peppo in knickerbockers, made him
+brush his curls down over his ears like doughnuts, and carry a little
+violin-case. It took us eleven days to reach Naples. I got my trunks
+through purely by personal persuasion. Once at Naples, I had a frightful
+time getting Peppo on the boat. I declared him as hand-luggage; he was so
+travel-worn and so crushed by his absurd appearance that he did not look
+like much else. One inspector had a sense of humour, and passed him at
+that, but the other was inflexible. I had to be very dramatic. Peppo was
+frightened, and there is no fight in him, anyhow.
+
+"_'Per me tutto e indifferente, Signorina,'_ he kept whimpering. 'Why
+should I go without it? I have lost it.'
+
+"'Which?' I screamed. '_Not_ the hat-trunk?'
+
+"'_No, no; mia voce._ It is gone since Ravenna.'
+
+"He thought he had lost his voice somewhere along the way. At last I told
+the inspector that I couldn't live without Peppo, and that I would throw
+myself into the bay. I took him into my confidence. Of course, when I
+found I had to play on that string, I wished I hadn't made the
+boy such a spectacle. But ridiculous as he was, I managed to make the
+inspector believe that I had kidnapped him, and that he was indispensable
+to my happiness. I found that incorruptible official, like most people,
+willing to aid one so utterly depraved. I could never have got that boy
+out for any proper, reasonable purpose, such as giving him a job or
+sending him to school. Well, it's a queer world! But I must cut all that
+and get to the Steins.
+
+"That first winter Peppo had no chance at the Opera. There was an iron
+ring about him, and my interest in him only made it all the more
+difficult. We've become a nest of intrigues down there; worse than the
+Scala. Peppo had to scratch along just any way. One evening he came to me
+and said he could get an engagement to sing for the grand rich Steins,
+but the condition was that I should sing with him. They would pay, oh,
+anything! And the fact that I had sung a private engagement with him
+would give him other engagements of the same sort. As you know, I
+never sing private engagements; but to help the boy along, I consented.
+
+"On the night of the party, Peppo and I went to the house together in a
+taxi. My car was ailing. At the hour when the music was about to begin,
+the host and hostess appeared at my dressing-room, up-stairs. Isn't he
+wonderful? Your description was most inadequate. I never encountered
+such restrained, frozen, sculptured vanity. My hostess struck me as
+extremely good natured and jolly, though somewhat intimate in her manner.
+Her reassuring pats and smiles puzzled me at the time, I remember, when I
+didn't know that she had anything in particular to be large-minded and
+charitable about. Her husband made known his willingness to conduct me
+to the music-room, and we ceremoniously descended a staircase blooming
+like the hanging-gardens of Babylon. From there I had my first glimpse
+of the company. They _were_ strange people. The women glittered like
+Christmas-trees. When we were half-way down the stairs, the buzz of
+conversation stopped so suddenly that some foolish remark I happened to
+be making rang out like oratory. Every face was lifted toward us. My
+host and I completed our descent and went the length of the drawing-room
+through a silence which somewhat awed me. I couldn't help wishing that
+one could ever get that kind of attention in a concert-hall. In the
+music-room Stein insisted upon arranging things for me. I must say that
+he was neither awkward nor stupid, not so wooden as most rich men who
+rent singers. I was properly affable. One has, under such circumstances,
+to be either gracious or pouty. Either you have to stand and sulk, like
+an old-fashioned German singer who wants the piano moved about for her
+like a tea-wagon, and the lights turned up and the lights turned
+down,--or you have to be a trifle forced, like a debutante trying to make
+good. The fixed attention of my audience affected me. I was aware of
+unusual interest, of a thoroughly enlisted public. When, however, my host
+at last left me, I felt the tension relax to such an extent that I
+wondered whether by any chance he, and not I, was the object of so much
+curiosity. But, at any rate, their cordiality pleased me so well that
+after Peppo and I had finished our numbers I sang an encore or two, and
+I stayed through Peppo's performance because I felt that they liked to
+look at me.
+
+"I had asked not to be presented to people, but Mrs. Stein, of course,
+brought up a few friends. The throng began closing in upon me, glowing
+faces bore down from every direction, and I realized that, among people
+of such unscrupulous cordiality, I must look out for myself. I ran
+through the drawing-room and fled up the stairway, which was thronged
+with Old Testament characters. As I passed them, they all looked at me
+with delighted, cherishing eyes, as if I had at last come back to my
+native hamlet. At the top of the stairway a young man, who looked like a
+camel with its hair parted on the side, stopped me, seized my hands and
+said he must present himself, as he was such an old friend of Siegmund's
+bachelor days. I said, 'Yes, how interesting!' The atmosphere was somehow
+so thick and personal that I felt uncomfortable.
+
+"When I reached my dressing-room Mrs. Stein followed me to say that I
+would, of course, come down to supper, as a special table had been
+prepared for me. I replied that it was not my custom.
+
+"'But here it is different. With us you must feel perfect freedom.
+Siegmund will never forgive me if you do not stay. After supper our car
+will take you home.' She was overpowering. She had the manner of an
+intimate and indulgent friend of long standing. She seemed to have come
+to make me a visit. I could only get rid of her by telling her that I
+must see Peppo at once, if she would be good enough to send him to me.
+She did not come back, and I began to fear that I would actually be
+dragged down to supper. It was as if I had been kidnapped. I felt like
+_Gulliver_ among the giants. These people were all too--well, too much
+what they were. No chill of manner could hold them off. I was
+defenseless. I must get away. I ran to the top of the staircase and
+looked down. There was that fool Peppo, beleaguered by a bevy of fair
+women. They were simply looting him, and he was grinning like an idiot. I
+gathered up my train, ran down, and made a dash at him, yanked him out of
+that circle of rich contours, and dragged him by a limp cuff up the
+stairs after me. I told him that I must escape from that house at once.
+If he could get to the telephone, well and good; but if he couldn't get
+past so many deep-breathing ladies, then he must break out of the front
+door and hunt me a cab on foot. I felt as if I were about to be immured
+within a harem.
+
+"He had scarcely dashed off when the host called my name several times
+outside the door. Then he knocked and walked in, uninvited. I told him
+that I would be inflexible about supper. He must make my excuses to his
+charming friends; any pretext he chose. He did not insist. He took up his
+stand by the fireplace and began to talk; said rather intelligent things.
+I did not drive him out; it was his own house, and he made himself
+agreeable. After a time a deputation of his friends came down the hall,
+somewhat boisterously, to say that supper could not be served until we
+came down. Stein was still standing by the mantel, I remember. He
+scattered them, without moving or speaking to them, by a portentous
+look. There is something hideously forceful about him. He took a very
+profound leave of me, and said he would order his car at once. In a
+moment Peppo arrived, splashed to the ankles, and we made our escape
+together.
+
+"A week later Peppo came to me in a rage, with a paper called _The
+American Gentleman_, and showed me a page devoted to three photographs:
+Mr. and Mrs. Siegmund Stein, lately married in New York City, and Kitty
+Ayrshire, operatic soprano, who sang at their house-warming. Mrs. Stein
+and I were grinning our best, looked frantic with delight, and Siegmund
+frowned inscrutably between us. Poor Peppo wasn't mentioned. Stein has a
+publicity sense."
+
+Tevis rose.
+
+"And you have enormous publicity value and no discretion. It was just
+like you to fall for such a plot, Kitty. You'd be sure to."
+
+"What's the use of discretion?" She murmured behind her hand. "If the
+Steins want to adopt you into their family circle, they'll get you in the
+end. That's why I don't feel compassionate about your Ruby. She and I are
+in the same boat. We are both the victims of circumstance, and in New
+York so many of the circumstances are Steins."
+
+
+
+
+Paul's Case
+
+
+
+
+It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh
+High School to account for his various misdemeanours. He had been
+suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal's office
+and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the faculty room
+suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle out-grown, and the tan
+velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn; but for
+all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal
+pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his
+button-hole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow felt was not
+properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy under the ban
+of suspension.
+
+Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders and
+a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical
+brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort
+of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large,
+as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter
+about them which that drug does not produce.
+
+When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there, Paul stated,
+politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie,
+but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensable
+for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their
+respective charges against him, which they did with such a rancour and
+aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case. Disorder and
+impertinence were among the offences named, yet each of his instructors
+felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of
+the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the
+boy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which he
+seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had been
+making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English teacher
+had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul had started
+back with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind him. The
+astonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt and embarrassed had
+he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and definitely personal
+as to be unforgettable. In one way and another, he had made all his
+teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same feeling of physical
+aversion. In one class he habitually sat with his hand shading his eyes;
+in another he always looked out of the window during the recitation; in
+another he made a running commentary on the lecture, with humorous
+intent.
+
+His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized
+by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon
+him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He stood through
+it smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips were
+continually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows that
+was contemptuous and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys than
+Paul had broken down and shed tears under that ordeal, but his set smile
+did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort was the nervous
+trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of his overcoat, and
+an occasional jerking of the other hand which held his hat. Paul was
+always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel that people
+might be watching him and trying to detect something. This conscious
+expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish mirthfulness, was
+usually attributed to insolence or "smartness."
+
+As the inquisition proceeded, one of his instructors repeated an
+impertinent remark of the boy's, and the Principal asked him whether he
+thought that a courteous speech to make to a woman. Paul shrugged his
+shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.
+
+"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or impolite,
+either. I guess it's a sort of way I have, of saying things regardless."
+
+The Principal asked him whether he didn't think that a way it would be
+well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said he guessed so. When he was told
+that he could go, he bowed gracefully and went out. His bow was like a
+repetition of the scandalous red carnation.
+
+His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling
+of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which
+none of them understood. He added: "I don't really believe that smile of
+his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of haunted
+about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. There is something wrong
+about the fellow."
+
+The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one saw
+only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm
+afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing-board, and his master
+had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn and
+wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even in his
+sleep.
+
+His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to
+have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling
+in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the
+grewsome game of intemperate reproach. One of them remembered having seen
+a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors.
+
+As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the Soldiers' Chorus from
+_Faust_, looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some of
+his teachers were not there to witness his lightheartedness. As it was
+now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher at
+Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper.
+
+When he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open. It was
+chilly outside, and he decided to go up into the picture gallery--always
+deserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli's gay studies of
+Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two that always
+exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the
+old guard, who sat in the corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch
+over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the place
+and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a
+while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought
+him to look at his watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with a
+start and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus Caesar, peering out
+from the cast-room, and an evil gesture at the Venus of Milo as he passed
+her on the stairway.
+
+When Paul reached the ushers' dressing-room half-a-dozen boys were there
+already, and he began excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one of
+the few that at all approached fitting, and Paul thought it very
+becoming--though he knew the tight, straight coat accentuated his narrow
+chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always excited
+while he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning of the strings and the
+preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music-room; but tonight he
+seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and plagued the boys until,
+telling him that he was crazy, they put him down on the floor and sat on
+him.
+
+Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of the
+house to seat the early comers. He was a model usher. Gracious and
+smiling he ran up and down the aisles. Nothing was too much trouble for
+him; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were his
+greatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought him
+a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As the house
+filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the colour came
+to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were a great
+reception and Paul were the host. Just as the musicians came out to take
+their places, his English teacher arrived with checks for the seats which
+a prominent manufacturer had taken for the season. She betrayed some
+embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a _hauteur_ which
+subsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was startled for a moment,
+and had the feeling of wanting to put her out; what business had she here
+among all these fine people and gay colours? He looked her over and
+decided that she was not appropriately dressed and must be a fool to sit
+downstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably been sent her out of
+kindness, he reflected, as he put down a seat for her, and she had about
+as much right to sit there as he had.
+
+When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long
+sigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done before the Rico. It was
+not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but
+the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious spirit
+within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle
+found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights
+danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable
+splendour. When the soprano soloist came on, Paul forgot even the
+nastiness of his teacher's being there, and gave himself up to the
+peculiar intoxication such personages always had for him. The soloist
+chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the
+mother of many children; but she wore a satin gown and a tiara, and she
+had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine upon her, which
+always blinded Paul to any possible defects.
+
+After a concert was over, Paul was often irritable and wretched until he
+got to sleep,--and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He had
+the feeling of not being able to let down; of its being impossible to
+give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could
+be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew and, after
+hastily changing his clothes in the dressing-room, slipped out to the
+side door where the singer's carriage stood. Here he began pacing rapidly
+up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.
+
+Over yonder the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square
+through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like
+those of a lighted card-board house under a Christmas tree. All the
+actors and singers of any importance stayed there when they were in the
+city, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived there in
+the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people go
+in and out, longing to enter and leave school-masters and dull care
+behind him for ever.
+
+At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who helped
+her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial _auf
+wiedersehen_,--which set Paul to wondering whether she were
+not an old sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to the
+hotel, walking so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the
+singer alighted and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors which
+were opened by a negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that
+the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to
+feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building,
+into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and
+basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought
+into the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen
+them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday supplement. A quick gust
+of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was
+startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel
+driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty
+overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the
+concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between
+him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what he
+wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
+pantomime; as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were
+destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.
+
+He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to
+come sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs,
+explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that were
+forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow
+wallpaper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collar-box, and over
+his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John Calvin,
+and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in red
+worsted by his mother, whom Paul could not remember.
+
+Half an hour later, Paul alighted from the Negley Avenue car and went
+slowly down one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a
+highly respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and
+where business men of moderate means begot and reared large families
+of children, all of whom went to Sabbath-school and learned the shorter
+catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as exactly
+alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which they
+lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing.
+His home was next the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it
+tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of
+sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had
+when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the
+waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, he
+experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the
+loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house permeated by
+kitchen odours; a shuddering repulsion for the flavourless, colourless
+mass of every-day existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft
+lights and fresh flowers.
+
+The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul felt
+to the sight of it all; his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold bath-room
+with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping spiggots; his
+father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking out from his
+nightshirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was so much later
+than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and reproaches. Paul
+stopped short before the door. He felt that he could not be accosted by
+his father tonight; that he could not toss again on that miserable bed.
+He would not go in. He would tell his father that he had no car fare, and
+it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of the boys and stayed
+all night.
+
+Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the house
+and tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised it
+cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There he
+stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made; but the
+floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. He
+found a soap-box, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that
+streamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of
+rats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the
+dark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such
+reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out of
+the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened, Paul's
+head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard him
+getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar?
+Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had
+cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been horrified to
+think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should
+come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been
+no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paul
+entertained himself until daybreak.
+
+The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by
+the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to
+church and Sabbath-school, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons the
+burghers of Cordelia Street usually sat out on their front "stoops," and
+talked to their neighbours on the next stoop, or called to those across
+the street in neighbourly fashion. The men sat placidly on gay cushions
+placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in
+their Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
+to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; there
+were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of a
+kindergarten. The men on the steps--all in their shirt sleeves, their
+vests unbuttoned--sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs
+comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told
+anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They
+occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
+affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their
+own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their
+legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress at
+school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in
+their toy banks.
+
+On this last Sunday of November, Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest
+step of his "stoop," staring into the street, while his sisters, in their
+rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about how
+many shirt-waists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles
+some one had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm,
+and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls made
+lemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher, ornamented
+with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought very fine, and
+the neighbours joked about the suspicious colour of the pitcher.
+
+Today Paul's father, on the top step, was talking to a young man who
+shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young
+man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his
+father's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a
+ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, near-sighted
+eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved
+about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel
+corporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young
+man with a future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he was
+now barely twenty-six--he had been a trifle 'dissipated,' but in order to
+curb his appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing
+of wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oft
+reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first
+woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to be an
+angular school-mistress, much older than he, who also wore thick glasses,
+and who had now borne him four children, all near-sighted, like herself.
+
+The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the
+Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business,
+arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home,
+and "knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy." His father
+told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of putting in an
+electric railway plant at Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth; he had an awful
+apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got there. Yet he
+rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings, that were told and
+retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces in Venice,
+yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo appealed to his
+fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of cash boys who had become
+famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy stage.
+
+After supper was over, and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul
+nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's to get some
+help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for car-fare. This
+latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not
+like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul
+whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that
+he ought not to leave his school work until Sunday; but he gave him the
+dime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up in
+the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that he thought
+a boy ought to be earning a little.
+
+Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odour of the dish-water from
+his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over
+his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in
+his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his
+arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown
+car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and began to live
+again.
+
+The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one
+of the downtown theatres was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the
+boy had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever
+he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment
+loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing-room. He had won a place among
+Edwards's following not only because the young actor, who could not
+afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he
+recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term "vocation."
+
+It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the
+rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale, and
+it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he inhaled
+the gassy, painty, dusty odour behind the scenes, he breathed like a
+prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing or saying
+splendid, brilliant things. The moment the cracked orchestra beat out the
+overture from _Martha_, or jerked at the serenade from _Rigoletto_, all
+stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his senses were deliciously,
+yet delicately fired.
+
+Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore
+the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to
+him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of life
+elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies,
+wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the unescapable odours
+of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly-clad
+men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
+orchards that bloomed perennially under the lime-light.
+
+It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the
+stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance.
+Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all Charley
+Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float about London
+of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls, with palms, and
+fountains, and soft lamps and richly apparelled women who never saw the
+disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of that smoke-palled
+city, enamoured of figures and grimy toil, Paul had his secret temple,
+his wishing-carpet, his bit of blue-and-white Mediterranean shore bathed
+in perpetual sunshine.
+
+Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been
+perverted by garish fiction; but the truth was, he scarcely ever read at
+all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or corrupt a
+youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his friends
+urged upon him--well, he got what he wanted much more quickly from music;
+any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ. He needed only
+the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of
+his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own. It
+was equally true that he was not stage-struck--not, at any rate, in the
+usual acceptation of that expression. He had no desire to become an
+actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He felt no necessity to
+do any of these things; what he wanted was to see, to be in the
+atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out, blue league after
+blue league, away from everything.
+
+After a night behind the scenes, Paul found the school-room more than
+ever repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the prosy men who never
+wore frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes; the women with their
+dull gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositions
+that govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think,
+for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to
+them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a
+joke, anyway. He had autograph pictures of all the members of the stock
+company which he showed his classmates, telling them the most incredible
+stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with
+the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the
+flowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and his
+audience grew listless, he would bid all the boys good-bye, announcing
+that he was going to travel for awhile; going to Naples, to California,
+to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back, conscious and nervously
+smiling; his sister was ill, and he would have to defer his voyage until
+spring.
+
+Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his
+instructors know how heartily he despised them, and how thoroughly he was
+appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice that he had no time to
+fool with theorems; adding--with a twitch of the eyebrows and a touch of
+that nervous bravado which so perplexed them--that he was helping the
+people down at the stock company; they were old friends of his.
+
+The upshot of the matter was, that the Principal went to Paul's father,
+and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at Carnegie
+Hall was told to get another usher in his stead; the doorkeeper at the
+theatre was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley Edwards
+remorsefully promised the boy's father not to see him again.
+
+The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's
+stories reached them--especially the women. They were hard-working women,
+most of them supporting indolent husbands or brothers, and they laughed
+rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid
+inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father, that Paul's
+was a bad case.
+
+The east-bound train was ploughing through a January snow-storm; the dull
+dawn was beginning to show grey when the engine whistled a mile out of
+Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy
+slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window glass with his hand, and peered
+out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom
+lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the
+fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks
+protruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and
+a gang of labourers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.
+
+Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He had
+made the all-night journey in a day coach because he was afraid if he
+took a Pullman he might be seen by some Pittsburgh business man who had
+noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle woke him, he
+clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an
+uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still
+sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed
+oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled.
+Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.
+
+When he arrived at the Jersey City station, he hurried through his
+breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him.
+After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman,
+and had himself driven to a men's furnishing establishment which was just
+opening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying with
+endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put on in
+the fitting-room; the frock coat and dress clothes he had bundled into
+the cab with his new shirts. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe
+house. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected silver mounted
+brushes and a scarf-pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked, he
+said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway, and had his
+purchases packed into various travelling bags.
+
+It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and,
+after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from
+Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he had
+come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story
+plausibly and had no trouble, since he offered to pay for them in
+advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping-room, sitting-room and bath.
+
+Not once, but a hundred times Paul had planned this entry into New York.
+He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in his
+scrap book at home there were pages of description about New York hotels,
+cut from the Sunday papers.
+
+When he was shown to his sitting-room on the eighth floor, he saw at a
+glance that everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in
+his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the
+bell boy and sent him down for flowers. He moved about nervously until
+the boy returned, putting away his new linen and fingering it delightedly
+as he did so. When the flowers came, he put them hastily into water, and
+then tumbled into a hot bath. Presently he came out of his white
+bath-room, resplendent in his new silk underwear, and playing with the
+tassels of his red robe. The snow was whirling so fiercely outside his
+windows that he could scarcely see across the street; but within, the air
+was deliciously soft and fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the
+tabouret beside the couch, and threw himself down with a long sigh,
+covering himself with a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he
+had been in such haste, he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much
+ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had
+all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the
+cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.
+
+It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the theatre
+and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was
+virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of opportunity. The only
+thing that at all surprised him was his own courage--for he realized well
+enough that he had always been tormented by fear, a sort of apprehensive
+dread that, of late years, as the meshes of the lies he had told closed
+about him, had been pulling the muscles of his body tighter and tighter.
+Until now, he could not remember a time when he had not been dreading
+something. Even when he was a little boy, it was always there--behind
+him, or before, or on either side. There had always been the shadowed
+corner, the dark place into which he dared not look, but from which
+something seemed always to be watching him--and Paul had done things that
+were not pretty to watch, he knew.
+
+But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last thrown
+down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.
+
+Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but
+yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny &
+Carson's deposit, as usual--but this time he was instructed to leave the
+book to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and
+nearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book and
+quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a new
+deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his
+returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for a
+full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable
+pretext. The bank book, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or
+Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From the
+time he slipped the bank notes into his pocket until he boarded the night
+train for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation.
+
+How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done; and
+this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the
+stairs. He watched the snow flakes whirling by his window until he fell
+asleep.
+
+When he awoke, it was four o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with a
+start; one of his precious days gone already! He spent nearly an hour in
+dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully in the mirror.
+Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had
+always wanted to be.
+
+When he went downstairs, Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth avenue
+toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen's
+wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the winter twilight; boys
+in woollen mufflers were shovelling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages
+made fine spots of colour against the white street. Here and there on the
+corners whole flower gardens blooming behind glass windows, against which
+the snow flakes stuck and melted; violets, roses, carnations, lilies of
+the valley--somehow vastly more lovely and alluring that they blossomed
+thus unnaturally in the snow. The Park itself was a wonderful stage
+winter-piece.
+
+When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased, and the tune of
+the streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed
+from the hotels that reared their many stories fearlessly up into the
+storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream of
+carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by other
+streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the
+entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were
+running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk, up and
+down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above,
+about, within it all, was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of
+thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every
+side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of wealth.
+
+The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of
+realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances, the
+nervestuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the snow flakes.
+He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.
+
+When Paul came down to dinner, the music of the orchestra floated up the
+elevator shaft to greet him. As he stepped into the thronged corridor, he
+sank back into one of the chairs against the wall to get his breath. The
+lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the bewildering medley of colour--he
+had, for a moment, the feeling of not being able to stand it. But only
+for a moment; these were his own people, he told himself. He went slowly
+about the corridors, through the writing-rooms, smoking-rooms,
+reception-rooms, as though he were exploring the chambers of an enchanted
+palace, built and peopled for him alone.
+
+When he reached the dining-room he sat down at a table near a window. The
+flowers, the white linen, the many-coloured wine glasses, the gay
+toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulating
+repetitions of the _Blue Danube_ from the orchestra, all flooded Paul's
+dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne
+was added--that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed in
+his glass--Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at all.
+This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this was
+what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his past. Had
+he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where fagged
+looking business men boarded the early car? Mere rivets in a machine they
+seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with combings of children's hair always
+hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their clothes.
+Cordelia Street--Ah, that belonged to another time and country! Had
+he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as
+far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such
+shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this
+one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.
+
+He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to
+meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to
+look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage properties
+were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in
+his loge at the Opera. He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of
+his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself
+different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings
+explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to wear it
+passively. He had only to glance down at his dress coat to reassure
+himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.
+
+He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting-room to go to bed that
+night, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window.
+When he went to sleep, it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom;
+partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should
+wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no
+horrible suspicion of yellow wall-paper, or of Washington and Calvin
+above his bed.
+
+On Sunday morning the city was practically snow-bound. Paul breakfasted
+late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy,
+a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" over
+Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town,
+and the two boys went off together after dinner, not returning to the
+hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the
+confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the
+elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to
+make his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in the
+afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for ice-water, coffee, and
+the Pittsburgh papers.
+
+On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There was
+this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in
+no way made himself conspicuous. His chief greediness lay in his ears and
+eyes, and his excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures
+were the grey winter twilights in his sitting-room; his quiet enjoyment
+of his flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette and his sense
+of power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with
+himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every
+day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for
+pleasure, even at school; but to make himself noticed and admired, to
+assert his difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good
+deal more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful
+pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, "dress
+the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His
+golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he
+could.
+
+On the eighth day after his arrival in New York, he found the whole
+affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth of
+detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a
+low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy's father
+had refunded the full amount of his theft, and that they had no intention
+of prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and
+expressed his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and Paul's
+Sabbath-school teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that
+end. The rumour had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a
+New York hotel, and his father had gone East to find him and bring
+him home.
+
+Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair,
+weak in the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse
+than jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over
+him finally and forever. The grey monotony stretched before him in
+hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath-school, Young People's Meeting, the
+yellow-papered room, the damp dish-towels; it all rushed back upon him
+with sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra had
+suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The sweat
+broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him with
+his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror. With
+something of the childish belief in miracles with which he had so often
+gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and dashed
+whistling down the corridor to the elevator.
+
+He had no sooner entered the dining-room and caught the measure of the
+music, than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of
+claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all sufficient. The
+glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again, and
+for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he was
+game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than ever,
+the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank his
+wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of these fortunate beings?
+Was he not still himself, and in his own place? He drummed a nervous
+accompaniment to the music and looked about him, telling himself over and
+over that it had paid.
+
+He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the violin and the chill sweetness
+of his wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have caught
+an outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches before now. But
+the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too uncertain
+then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been too sharp. If he
+had to choose over again, he would do the same thing tomorrow. He looked
+affectionately about the dining-room, now gilded with a soft mist. Ah, it
+had paid indeed!
+
+Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and
+feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had
+slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his
+tongue and throat were parched. There came upon him one of those fateful
+attacks of clear-headedness that never occurred except when he was
+physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still and closed
+his eyes and let the tide of realities wash over him.
+
+His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told
+himself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon
+him like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and
+he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that
+stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding
+itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York,
+and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his
+dressing-table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up
+from dinner,--but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the look
+of it, anyway.
+
+He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again
+to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the
+world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid of
+anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the
+dark corner at last, and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there; but
+somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything
+clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he
+had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he
+sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way, so
+he went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry.
+
+When Paul arrived at Newark, he got off the train and took another cab,
+directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town.
+The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the open
+fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks
+projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul
+dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his mind
+a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an actual
+picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered every
+feature of both his drivers, the toothless old woman from whom he had
+bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had got his
+ticket, and all of his fellow-passengers on the ferry. His mind, unable
+to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and deftly
+at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part of the
+ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter burning on
+his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his mouth as he
+walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little hillside,
+where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him, he stopped
+and sat down.
+
+The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed; all
+their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen
+in the show windows that first night must have gone the same way, long
+before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their
+brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game in
+the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world
+is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat and scooped
+a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he dozed a
+while, from his weak condition, seeming insensible to the cold.
+
+The sound of an approaching train woke him, and he started to his feet,
+remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late.
+He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering, his
+lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he glanced
+nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When the right
+moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste occurred to
+him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone.
+There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before, the blue of
+Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.
+
+He felt something strike his chest,--his body was being thrown swiftly
+through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs
+gently relaxed. Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed,
+the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the
+immense design of things.
+
+
+
+
+A Wagner Matinee
+
+
+
+
+I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy,
+blue-lined note-paper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska
+village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as if it had been
+carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was from
+my uncle Howard, and informed me that his wife had been left a small
+legacy by a bachelor relative, and that it would be necessary for her to
+go to Boston to attend to the settling of the estate. He requested me to
+meet her at the station and render her whatever services might be
+necessary. On examining the date indicated as that of her arrival, I
+found it to be no later than tomorrow. He had characteristically delayed
+writing until, had I been away from home for a day, I must have missed my
+aunt altogether.
+
+The name of my Aunt Georgiana opened before me a gulf of recollection so
+wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a
+stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at
+ease and out of place amid the familiar surroundings of my study. I
+became, in short, the gangling farmer-boy my aunt had known, scourged
+with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and sore from the corn
+husking. I sat again before her parlour organ, fumbling the scales with
+my stiff, red fingers, while she, beside me, made canvas mittens for the
+huskers.
+
+The next morning, after preparing my landlady for a visitor, I set out
+for the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding
+my aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was not
+until I got her into the carriage that she seemed really to recognize me.
+She had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become
+black with soot and her black bonnet grey with dust during the journey.
+When we arrived at my boarding-house the landlady put her to bed at once
+and I did not see her again until the next morning.
+
+Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance, she
+considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's battered figure
+with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who
+have left their ears and fingers north of Franz-Joseph-Land, or their
+health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a
+music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter
+sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the Green
+Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she had kindled
+the callow fancy of my uncle, Howard Carpenter, then an idle, shiftless
+boy of twenty-one. When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard
+followed her, and the upshot of this infatuation was that she eloped with
+him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticism of her
+friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of
+course, had no money, took up a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty
+miles from the railroad. There they had measured off their land
+themselves, driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which
+they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting its revolutions.
+They built a dug-out in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings
+whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they
+got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of
+provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty
+years my aunt had not been farther than fifty miles from the homestead.
+
+I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my
+boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years
+when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three
+meals--the first of which was ready at six o'clock in the morning--and
+putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her
+ironing-board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite
+Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head
+sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing
+or mending, that I read my first Shakspere, and her old text-book on
+mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me
+my scales and exercises on the little parlour organ which her husband had
+bought her after fifteen years during which she had not so much as seen a
+musical instrument. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and
+counting, while I struggled with the "Joyous Farmer." She seldom talked
+to me about music, and I understood why. Once when I had been doggedly
+beating out some easy passages from an old score of _Euryanthe_ I had
+found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands
+over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying
+tremulously, "Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you."
+
+When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival in Boston, she was
+still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she
+was in the city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for
+hungrily half a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick
+throughout the journey that she had no recollection of anything but her
+discomfort, and, to all intents and purposes, there were but a few hours
+of nightmare between the farm in Red Willow County and my study on
+Newbury Street. I had planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon,
+to repay her for some of the glorious moments she had given me when we
+used to milk together in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because I
+was more than usually tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to
+me, would tell me of the splendid performance of the _Huguenots_ she
+had seen in Paris, in her youth.
+
+At two o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I
+intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her, I grew
+doubtful about her enjoyment of it. I suggested our visiting the
+Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too
+timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about various
+changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten
+to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain
+weakling calf, "old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she explained,
+evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was further
+troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about the
+freshly-opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if it
+were not used directly.
+
+I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas, and
+found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their
+respective situations, and had once possessed the piano score of _The
+Flying Dutchman_. I began to think it would be best to get her back to
+Red Willow County without waking her, and regretted having suggested the
+concert.
+
+From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle less
+passive and inert, and for the first time seemed to perceive her
+surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware of
+her queer, country clothes, or might experience some painful
+embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been
+dead for a quarter of a century. But, again, I found how superficially I
+had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost
+as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the
+froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal. I have seen this
+same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown hotel at Denver,
+their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard faces
+unshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as solitary as though they
+were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon.
+
+The matinee audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour
+of faces and figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there was
+only the colour of bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft and
+firm, silky and sheer; red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose,
+yellow, cream, and white, all the colours that an impressionist finds in
+a sunlit landscape, with here and there the dead shadow of a frock coat.
+My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though they had been so many daubs of
+tube-paint on a palette.
+
+When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir
+of anticipation, and looked with quickening interest down over the rail
+at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that
+had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling
+calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul, for I had
+not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh from
+ploughing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as in
+a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving a
+shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of their
+linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the
+instruments, the patches of yellow light on the smooth, varnished
+bellies of the 'cellos and the bass viols in the rear, the restless,
+wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows--I recalled how, in the first
+orchestra I ever heard, those long bow-strokes seemed to draw the heart
+out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out yards of paper ribbon from
+a hat.
+
+The first number was the Tannhauser overture. When the horns drew out the
+first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus, Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat
+sleeve. Then it was I first realized that for her this broke a silence of
+thirty years. With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of
+the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an
+overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat;
+and I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a
+wooden fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin
+pitted with sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain gullied clay banks about
+the naked house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dish-cloths were
+always hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flat
+world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to
+daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the
+conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.
+
+The overture closed, my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said
+nothing. She sat staring dully at the orchestra. What, I wondered, did
+she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day, I knew, and her
+musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of a
+quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and
+Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain
+melodies of Verdi. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house she
+used to sit by my cot in the evening--when the cool, night wind blew in
+through the faded mosquito netting tacked over the window and I lay
+watching a certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield--and
+sing "Home to our mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break the
+heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.
+
+I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying
+vainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and winds
+might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows that
+drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a summer
+shower. Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left to at all
+comprehend this power which had kindled the world since she had left it?
+I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat silent upon her
+peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility throughout
+the number from The Flying Dutchman, though her fingers worked
+mechanically upon her black dress, as if, of themselves, they were
+recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor hands! They had been
+stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead
+with;--on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a wedding
+ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands, I
+remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days.
+
+Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song," I heard a quick drawn breath
+and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were
+glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in my
+eyes as well. It never really died, then--the soul which can suffer so
+excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only;
+like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and
+yet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout the
+development and elaboration of the melody.
+
+During the intermission before the second half, I questioned my aunt and
+found that the "Prize Song" was not new to her. Some years before there
+had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp
+cow-puncher, who had sung in the chorus at Bayreuth when he was a boy,
+along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he used
+to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands' bedroom which opened off
+the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots and saddle, singing the
+"Prize Song," while my aunt went about her work in the kitchen. She had
+hovered over him until she had prevailed upon him to join the country
+church, though his sole fitness for this step, in so far as I could
+gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of this divine melody.
+Shortly afterward, he had gone to town on the Fourth of July, been drunk
+for several days, lost his money at a faro table, ridden a saddled Texas
+steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collar-bone. All this
+my aunt told me huskily, wanderingly, as though she were talking in the
+weak lapses of illness.
+
+"Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate,
+Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with a well meant effort at jocularity.
+
+Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth.
+From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever since
+you left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest of
+reproaches.
+
+The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the _Ring,_
+and closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but
+almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rain-storm. From
+time to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights, burning softly under
+their dull glass globes.
+
+The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the
+shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what
+happy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that
+before the last number she had been carried out where the myriad graves
+are, into the grey, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some
+world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope
+has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.
+
+The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and
+laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman
+made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped the green felt cover over his
+instrument; the flute-players shook the water from their mouthpieces;
+the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the
+chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.
+
+I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. "I don't
+want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"
+
+I understood. For her, just outside the concert hall, lay the black pond
+with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with
+weather-curled boards, naked as a tower; the crook-backed ash seedlings
+where the dish-cloths hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking
+up refuse about the kitchen door.
+
+
+
+
+The Sculptor's Funeral
+
+
+
+
+A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little Kansas
+town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already twenty
+minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over everything; in the pale
+starlight the line of bluffs across the wide, white meadows south of the
+town made soft, smoke-coloured curves against the clear sky. The men
+on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other, their hands
+thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats open, their
+shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from time to time
+toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along the river
+shore. They conversed in low tones and moved about restlessly,
+seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them. There was but one of
+the company who looked as if he knew exactly why he was there, and he
+kept conspicuously apart; walking to the far end of the platform,
+returning to the station door, then pacing up the track again, his chin
+sunk in the high collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping
+forward, his gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by a
+tall, spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled
+out from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning his
+neck forward until his back made the angle of a jack-knife three-quarters
+open.
+
+"I reckon she's a-goin' to be pretty late agin to-night, Jim," he
+remarked in a squeaky falsetto. "S'pose it's the snow?"
+
+"I don't know," responded the other man with a shade of annoyance,
+speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew fiercely
+and thickly in all directions.
+
+The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the other
+side of his mouth. "It ain't likely that anybody from the East will come
+with the corpse, I s'pose," he went on reflectively.
+
+"I don't know," responded the other, more curtly than before.
+
+"It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other. I like an order
+funeral myself. They seem more appropriate for people of some
+repytation," the spare man continued, with an ingratiating concession in
+his shrill voice, as he carefully placed his toothpick in his vest
+pocket. He always carried the flag at the G.A.R. funerals in the town.
+
+The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up the
+siding. The spare man rejoined the uneasy group. "Jim's ez full ez a
+tick, ez ushel," he commented commiseratingly.
+
+Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet on
+the platform. A number of lanky boys, of all ages, appeared as, suddenly
+and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from the
+waiting-room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove, or
+half asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from baggage
+trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from the
+driver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding. They
+straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and a flash
+of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold, vibrant
+scream, the worldwide call for men. It stirred them like the note of a
+trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming home
+tonight, in his boyhood.
+
+The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh
+lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of shivering
+poplars that sentinelled the meadows, the escaping steam hanging in grey
+masses against the pale sky and blotting out the Milky Way. In a moment
+the red glare from the headlight streamed up the snow-covered track
+before the siding and glittered on the wet, black rails. The burly man
+with the dishevelled red beard walked swiftly up the platform toward the
+approaching train, uncovering his head as he went. The group of men
+behind him hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and awkwardly
+followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up to
+the express car just as the door was thrown open, the man in the G.A.R.
+suit thrusting his head forward with curiosity. The express messenger
+appeared in the doorway, accompanied by a young man in a long ulster and
+travelling cap.
+
+"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man.
+
+The group on the platform swayed uneasily. Philip Phelps, the banker,
+responded with dignity: "We have come to take charge of the body. Mr.
+Merrick's father is very feeble and can't be about."
+
+"Send the agent out here," growled the express messenger, "and tell the
+operator to lend a hand."
+
+The coffin was got out of its rough-box and down on the snowy platform.
+The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed a
+close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which lay
+across the black cover. No one said anything. The baggage man stood by
+his truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and
+the fireman dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and
+long oil-can, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of the
+dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked about him
+helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of that black, uneasy,
+stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of an individual to be
+addressed.
+
+"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.
+
+The man with the red beard for the first time stepped up and joined the
+others. "No, they have not come yet; the family is scattered. The body
+will be taken directly to the house." He stooped and took hold of one of
+the handles of the coffin.
+
+"Take the long hill road up, Thompson, it will be easier on the horses,"
+called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of the hearse
+and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.
+
+Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: "We didn't
+know whether there would be any one with him or not," he explained. "It's
+a long walk, so you'd better go up in the hack." He pointed to a single
+battered conveyance, but the young man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but I
+think I will go up with the hearse. If you don't object," turning to the
+undertaker, "I'll ride with you."
+
+They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight up the
+long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village were
+shining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on every
+side, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide as the
+soft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence.
+
+When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,
+weather-beaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that
+had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front
+yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the
+sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung on
+one hinge, and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young
+stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of the front
+door.
+
+The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse,
+was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched
+open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow and
+flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My boy, my boy! And this is
+how you've come home to me!"
+
+As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of unutterable
+repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular, dressed
+entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs. Merrick by the
+shoulders, crying sharply: "Come, come, mother; you mustn't go on like
+this!" Her tone changed to one of obsequious solemnity as she turned to
+the banker: "The parlour is ready, Mr. Phelps."
+
+The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the
+undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large,
+unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish,
+and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass
+prisms and before a "Rogers group" of John Alden and Priscilla, wreathed
+with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening
+conviction that there had been a mistake, and that he had somehow arrived
+at the wrong destination. He looked at the clover-green Brussels, the fat
+plush upholstery, among the hand-painted china placques and panels and
+vases, for some mark of identification,--for something that might once
+conceivably have belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he
+recognized his friend in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts
+and curls, hanging above the piano, that he felt willing to let any of
+these people approach the coffin.
+
+"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face," wailed the
+elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully,
+almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses of
+strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then, almost
+incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about her face--a
+kind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it was scarred and furrowed by
+violence, and so coloured and coarsened by fiercer passions that grief
+seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long nose was
+distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines on either
+side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her forehead, her
+teeth were large and square, and set far apart--teeth that could tear.
+She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed about like
+twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into
+the whirlpool.
+
+The daughter--the tall, raw-boned woman in crepe, with a mourning comb in
+her hair which curiously lengthened her long face--sat stiffly upon the
+sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her lap,
+her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of the
+coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in the
+house, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and
+gentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
+to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavens
+walked over and stood beside her.
+
+Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail,
+odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept grey hair and a dingy beard,
+tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up
+to the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his
+hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief that
+he had no consciousness of anything else.
+
+"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered timidly,
+putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned
+and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he tottered a little.
+He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued to look at her
+with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a spaniel looks at the
+whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and burned with miserable shame.
+When his wife rushed from the room, her daughter strode after her with
+set lips. The servant stole up to the coffin, bent over it for a moment,
+and then slipped away to the kitchen, leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and
+the father to themselves. The old man stood looking down at his dead
+son's face. The sculptor's splendid head seemed even more noble in its
+rigid stillness than in life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wide
+forehead; the face seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that
+repose we expect to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were so
+drawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin
+was thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life had
+been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once relax the tension
+and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he were still
+guarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him.
+
+The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to the
+lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are comin' back to set
+up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank'ee, Jim, thank'ee." He
+brushed the hair back gently from his son's forehead. "He was a good boy,
+Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest of
+'em all--only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him." The tears
+trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.
+
+"Martin, Martin! Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed from the top of
+the stairs. The old man started timorously: "Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He
+turned away, hesitated, stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then
+reached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from the
+room.
+
+"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his eyes
+would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep,"
+remarked the lawyer.
+
+Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been
+in the room, the young man had scarcely seen any one else; but now, from
+the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and blood-shot
+eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not finding
+before--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in some one, even
+here.
+
+The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by
+dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that
+of a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept plucking
+at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by the
+window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling
+pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked
+behind him, staring down into the master's face. He could not help
+wondering what link there had been between the porcelain vessel and so
+sooty a lump of potter's clay.
+
+From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door
+opened, the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for
+having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had
+been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in
+the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and
+masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
+been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust the
+lawyer went into the dining-room and closed the door into the kitchen.
+
+"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back. "The
+Merricks took her out of the poor-house years ago; and if her loyalty
+would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would
+curdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here a
+while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there
+never was anybody like her. She made Harvey's life a hell for him when
+he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how he
+kept himself sweet."
+
+"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but until tonight I
+have never known how wonderful."
+
+"That is the eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come even from
+such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried, with a sweeping gesture
+which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within which they
+stood.
+
+"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close I
+am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured Steavens, struggling with
+one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so
+he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came
+over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist and sent the window
+up a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had been
+gradually climbing into his throat for the last half hour left him with
+but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this place
+with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well enough
+now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often on his
+master's lips!
+
+Once when Merrick returned from a visit home, he brought with him a
+singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman,
+sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped,
+full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows,
+stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her attention to
+a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by the tender and delicate
+modelling of the thin, tired face, had asked him if it were his mother.
+He remembered the dull flush that had burned up in the sculptor's face.
+
+The lawyer was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the coffin, his head
+thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,
+puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal a
+feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard.
+Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor's keen glance, Jim Laird
+opened his eyes.
+
+"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly. "He was
+terribly shy as a boy."
+
+"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so," rejoined Stevens. "Although
+he could be very fond of people, he always gave one the impression of
+being detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was reflective, and
+rather distrustful of himself--except, of course, as regarded his work.
+He was sure enough there. He distrusted men pretty thoroughly and women
+even more, yet somehow without believing ill of them. He was determined,
+indeed, to believe the best; but he seemed afraid to investigate."
+
+"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and closed his
+eyes.
+
+Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood. All
+this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose mind was
+to become an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions--so sensitive
+that the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall
+would be etched and held there for ever. Surely, if ever a man had the
+magic word in his finger tips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he
+revealed its holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored
+it to its pristine loveliness. Upon whatever he had come in contact with,
+he had left a beautiful record of the experience--a sort of ethereal
+signature; a scent, a sound, a colour that was his own.
+
+Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's life; neither
+love nor wine, as many had conjectured; but a blow which had fallen
+earlier and cut deeper than anything else could have done--a shame not
+his, and yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very
+boyhood. And without--the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast
+ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that
+is chastened and old, and noble with traditions.
+
+At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black announced that the
+watchers were arriving, and asked them to "step into the dining-room." As
+Steavens rose, the lawyer said dryly: "You go on--it'll be a good
+experience for you. I'm not equal to that crowd tonight; I've had twenty
+years of them."
+
+As Steavens closed the door after him he glanced back at the lawyer,
+sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his
+hand.
+
+The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express car
+shuffled into the dining-room. In the light of the kerosene lamp they
+separated and became individuals. The minister, a pale, feeble-looking
+man with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a small
+side table and placed his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat down
+behind the stove and tilted his chair back comfortably against the wall,
+fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers,
+Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner-table, where they
+could finish their discussion of the new usury law and its effect on
+chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man with a smiling,
+hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal and lumber dealer and the
+cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet
+on the nickel-work. Steavens took a book from his pocket and began to
+read. The talk around him ranged through various topics of local interest
+while the house was quieting down. When it was clear that the members of
+the family were in bed, the Grand Army man hitched his shoulders and,
+untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the rounds of his chair.
+
+"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak falsetto.
+
+The banker laughed disagreeably, and began trimming his nails with a
+pearl-handled pocket-knife.
+
+"There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?" he queried in his
+turn.
+
+The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his knees
+still nearer his chin. "Why, the ole man says Harve's done right well
+lately," he chirped.
+
+The other banker spoke up. "I reckon he means by that Harve ain't asked
+him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his
+education."
+
+"Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve wasn't bein'
+edycated," tittered the Grand Army man.
+
+There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief and
+blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap.
+"It's too bad the old man's sons didn't turn out better," he remarked
+with reflective authority. "They never hung together. He spent money
+enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle-farms, and he might as well have
+poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse
+what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom farm,
+they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust
+everything to tenants and was cheated right and left."
+
+"Harve never could have handled stock none," interposed the cattleman.
+"He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought Sander's
+mules for eight-year olds, when everybody in town knew that Sander's
+father-in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present eighteen years
+before, an' they was full-grown mules then?"
+
+The company laughed discreetly, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees
+with a spasm of childish delight.
+
+"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was
+never fond of work," began the coal and lumber dealer. "I mind the last
+time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn
+helpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was
+patchin' up the fence; Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in
+his lady-like voice: 'Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.'"
+
+"That's Harve for you," approved the Grand Army man. "I kin hear him
+howlin' yet, when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother used
+to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin' the cows git
+foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin' 'em home from pasture. He
+killed a cow of mine that-a-way onct--a pure Jersey and the best milker I
+had, an' the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was watchin' the
+sun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away."
+
+"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to
+school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate,
+judicial tone. "There was where he got his head full of nonsense. What
+Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some first-class Kansas
+City business college."
+
+The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it possible that
+these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing
+to them? The very name of their town would have remained for ever buried
+in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world
+in connection with Harvey Merrick's. He remembered what his master had
+said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs
+had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked his
+pupil to send his body home. "It's not a pleasant place to be lying while
+the world is moving and doing and bettering," he had said with a feeble
+smile, "but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we
+came from, in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and
+after they have had their say, I shan't have much to fear from the
+judgment of God!"
+
+The cattleman took up the comment. "Forty's young for a Merrick to cash
+in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along with
+whisky."
+
+"His mother's people were not long lived, and Harvey never had a robust
+constitution," said the minister mildly. He would have liked to say more.
+He had been the boy's Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of him;
+but he felt that he was not in a position to speak. His own sons had
+turned out badly, and it was not a year since one of them had made his
+last trip home in the express car, shot in a gambling-house in the
+Black Hills.
+
+"Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently looked upon
+the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommon
+fool of him," moralized the cattleman.
+
+Just then the door leading into the parlour rattled loudly and every one
+started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out.
+The Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his blue,
+blood-shot eye. They were all afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he
+could twist the law to suit his client's needs as no other man in all
+western Kansas could do, and there were many who tried. The lawyer closed
+the door behind him, leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking
+his head a little to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the
+court-room, ears were always pricked up, as it usually foretold a flood
+of withering sarcasm.
+
+"I've been with you gentlemen before," he began in a dry, even tone,
+"when you've sat by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town;
+and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied when
+you checked them up. What's the matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputable
+young men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It might almost
+seem to a stranger that there was some way something the matter with your
+progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young lawyer you
+ever turned out, after he had come home from the university as straight
+as a die, take to drinking and forge a check and shoot himself? Why did
+Bill Merrit's son die of the shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why was Mr.
+Thomas's son, here, shot in a gambling-house? Why did young Adams burn
+his mill to beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?"
+
+The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist quietly
+on the table. "I'll tell you why. Because you drummed nothing but money
+and knavery into their ears from the time they wore knickerbockers;
+because you carped away at them as you've been carping here tonight,
+holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their models, as our
+grandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams. But the boys were
+young, and raw at the business you put them to, and how could they match
+coppers with such artists as Phelps and Elder? You wanted them to be
+successful rascals; they were only unsuccessful ones--that's all the
+difference. There was only one boy ever raised in this borderland between
+ruffianism and civilization who didn't come to grief, and you hated
+Harvey Merrick more for winning out than you hated all the other boys who
+got under the wheels. Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is
+fond of saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he's a mind
+to; but he knew Harve wouldn't have given a tinker's damn for his bank
+and all his cattlefarms put together; and a lack of appreciation, that
+way, goes hard with Phelps.
+
+"Old Nimrod thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as Nimrod and
+me!
+
+"Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's money--fell
+short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the
+very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in the
+county court; and we all know that the old man came out of that
+partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I'm getting
+personal, and I'd better be driving ahead at what I want to say."
+
+The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on:
+"Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead in
+earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We meant to be
+great men. Even I, and I haven't lost my sense of humour, gentlemen, I
+meant to be a great man. I came back here to practise, and I found you
+didn't in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me to be a
+shrewd lawyer--oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him an increase
+of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new county survey
+that would put the widow Wilson's little bottom farm inside his south
+line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per cent, a month, and get it
+collected; and Stark here wanted to wheedle old women up in Vermont into
+investing their annuities in real-estate mortgages that are not worth the
+paper they are written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough, and you'll go
+on needing me!
+
+"Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me to
+be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you'll stand
+up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul you couldn't dirty and
+whose hands you couldn't tie. Oh, you're a discriminating lot of
+Christians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey's name in some
+Eastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and, again,
+times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away from all
+this hog-wallow, climbing the big, clean up-grade he'd set for himself.
+
+"And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and hated
+as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little Western town
+know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn't
+have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together,
+and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of
+God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and
+bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's
+been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man could
+have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks
+as the here-present financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God have
+mercy!"
+
+The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught up
+his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand Army
+man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck about at
+his fellows.
+
+Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services.
+Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start East
+without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from him
+again, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it,
+he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved
+must have gone under ground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it never
+spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Colorado
+mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons who had got into trouble out
+there by cutting government timber.
+
+
+
+
+"A Death in the Desert"
+
+
+
+
+Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle
+was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a
+conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged
+him to be a travelling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an
+adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool and
+clean under almost any circumstances.
+
+The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called among railroad
+men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous
+country between Holdredge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond man and himself
+the only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls
+who had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly
+discussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado. The four
+uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow
+dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew up
+in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed,
+until they were one colour with the sage-brush and sand-hills. The grey
+and yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns,
+and the little red boxes of station-houses, where the spindling trees
+and sickly vines in the blue-grass yards made little green reserves
+fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.
+
+As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through the
+car-windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies' permission to remove
+his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirtsleeves, with a black silk
+handkerchief tucked about his collar. He had seemed interested in
+Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdredge; kept glancing at
+him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though
+he were trying to recall something. But wherever Everett went, some one
+was almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it had
+ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the stranger, seeming
+satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed his
+eyes, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from _Proserpine_, the
+cantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a
+night. Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins
+at college glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and only
+two weeks ago he had heard it played on sleigh-bells at a variety theatre
+in Denver. There was literally no way of escaping his brother's
+precocity. Adriance could live on the other side of the Atlantic, where
+his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, but
+his brother had never been able to outrun _Proserpine_,--and here he
+found it again, in the Colorado sand-hills. Not that Everett was exactly
+ashamed of _Proserpine_; only a man of genius could have written it, but
+it was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as he can.
+
+Everett unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbour across the aisle.
+Immediately the large man rose and coming over dropped into the seat
+facing Hilgarde, extending his card.
+
+"Dusty ride, isn't it? I don't mind it myself; I'm used to it. Born and
+bred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit. I've been trying to place you
+for a long time; I think I must have met you before."
+
+"Thank you," said Everett, taking the card; "my name is Hilgarde. You've
+probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him."
+
+The travelling-man brought his hand down upon his knee with such
+vehemence that the solitaire blazed.
+
+"So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance Hilgarde you're his
+double. I thought I couldn't be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess! I
+never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played the
+piano score of _Proserpine_ through to us once at the Chicago Press Club.
+I used to be on the _Commercial_ there before I began to travel for the
+publishing department of the concern. So you're Hilgarde's brother, and
+here I've run into you at the jumping-off place. Sounds like a newspaper
+yarn, doesn't it?"
+
+The travelling-man laughed and offering Everett a cigar plied him with
+questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk
+to him about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at a
+Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.
+
+The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a matter of four
+hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness
+except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office over
+time on a summer night. When Everett alighted from the train he walked
+down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what
+direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near the
+crossing and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and her
+figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was too
+dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the
+switch-engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the
+head-light threw a strong glare of light on his face. The woman in the
+phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started forward
+and caught the horse's head, but the animal only lifted its ears and
+whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly still,
+her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to her
+face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaeton,
+crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"
+
+Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hat
+and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most
+impossible places, especially from women.
+
+While he was breakfasting the next morning, the head waiter leaned over
+his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in the
+parlour. Everett finished his coffee, and went in the direction
+indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His
+whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique was
+not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was something
+below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick,
+closely cut hair was beginning to show grey about the ears, and his
+bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind
+him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities,
+yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidence
+in his address.
+
+"Good-morning, Mr. Hilgarde," he said, extending his hand; "I found your
+name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I'm afraid my sister
+startled you at the station last night, and I've come around to explain."
+
+"Ah! the young lady in the phaeton? I'm sure I didn't know whether I had
+anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe an
+apology."
+
+The man coloured a little under the dark brown of his face.
+
+"Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see,
+my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's, and it seems you favour
+him; when the switch-engine threw a light on your face, it startled her."
+
+Everett wheeled about in his chair. "Oh! _Katharine_ Gaylord! Is it
+possible! Why, I used to know her when I was a boy. What on
+earth--"
+
+"Is she doing here?" Gaylord grimly filled out the pause. "You've got at
+the heart of the matter. You know my sister had been in bad health for a
+long time?"
+
+"No. The last I knew of her she was singing in London. My brother and I
+correspond infrequently, and seldom get beyond family matters. I am
+deeply sorry to hear this."
+
+The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little.
+
+"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you.
+She's set on it. We live several miles out of town, but my rig's below,
+and I can take you out any time you can go."
+
+"At once, then. I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment."
+
+When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley
+Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and
+settled back into his own element.
+
+"I think I'd better tell you something about my sister before you see
+her, and I don't know just where to begin. She travelled in Europe with
+your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his concerts; but I don't
+know just how much you know about her."
+
+"Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted
+of his pupils. When I knew her she was very young and very beautiful,
+and quite turned my head for a while."
+
+Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was entirely taken up by his grief.
+"That's the whole thing," he went on, flecking his horses with the whip.
+
+"She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a great
+family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago,
+and then to New York, and then to Europe, and got a taste for it all; and
+now she's dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she
+can't fall back into ours. We've grown apart, some way--miles and miles
+apart--and I'm afraid she's fearfully unhappy."
+
+"It's a tragic story you're telling me, Gaylord," said Everett. They were
+well out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains of
+red grass, with the ragged blue outline of the mountains before them.
+
+"Tragic!" cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, "my God, nobody will
+ever know how tragic! It's a tragedy I live with and eat with and sleep
+with, until I've lost my grip on everything. You see she had made a good
+bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It's her
+lungs. I've got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all
+say it's no use. She hasn't the ghost of a chance. It's just getting
+through the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she came
+to me. She just wrote that she was run down. Now that she's here, I think
+she'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won't leave. She says
+it's easier to let go of life here. There was a time when I
+was a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little
+thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything on
+earth she wanted, and she hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't cover; and
+now, when I've got a little property together, I can't buy her a night's
+sleep!"
+
+Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status in the world
+might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the ladder with him.
+
+The reins slackened in Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a showily
+painted house with many gables and a round tower. "Here we are," he said,
+turning to Everett, "and I guess we understand each other."
+
+They were met at the door by a thin, colourless woman, whom Gaylord
+introduced as "My sister, Maggie." She asked her brother to show Mr.
+Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine would join him.
+
+When Everett entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise,
+feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some
+New York studio that he had always known. He looked incredulously out of
+the window at the grey plain that ended in the great upheaval of the
+Rockies.
+
+The haunting air of familiarity perplexed him. Suddenly his eye fell upon
+a large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all became
+clear enough: this was veritably his brother's room. If it were not an
+exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in
+various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before
+the renovator's varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In
+every detail Adriance's taste was so manifest that the room seemed to
+exhale his personality.
+
+Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord,
+taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her
+eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a
+tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of
+embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth,
+a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The
+_camaraderie_ of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep
+lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and
+cynical. Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward the
+world. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay in
+her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-giving
+quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a perpetual _salutat_
+to the world.
+
+Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and
+his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A tall woman advanced
+toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak she coughed
+slightly, then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky:
+"You see I make the traditional Camille entrance. How good of you to
+come, Mr. Hilgarde."
+
+Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not
+looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming,
+he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not
+reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds of her
+white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp outlines of
+her body, but the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and
+obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. The
+splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her
+gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were
+transparently white, and cold to the touch. The changes in her face were
+less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even
+the delicate flush of colour in her cheeks, all defiantly remained,
+though they were all in a lower key--older, sadder, softer.
+
+She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows.
+"Of course I'm ill, and I look it, but you must be quite frank and
+sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we've no time to
+lose. And if I'm a trifle irritable you won't mind?--for I'm more than
+usually nervous."
+
+"Don't bother with me this morning, if you are tired," urged Everett. "I
+can come quite as well tomorrow."
+
+"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humour
+that he remembered as a part of her. "It's solitude that I'm tired to
+death of--solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister
+called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and
+felt it his duty to stop. The funniest feature of his conversation is
+that he is always excusing my own profession to me. But how we are losing
+time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you're just on from there.
+How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of the
+Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Are the trees
+still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? Does
+the chaste Diana still keep her vows through all the exasperating changes
+of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided
+aspirants practise their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall?
+What do people go to see at the theatres, and what do they eat and drink
+in the world nowadays? Oh, let me die in Harlem!" she was interrupted by
+a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort,
+plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in town
+during the summer, and the musical outlook for the winter. He was
+diagramming with his pencil some new mechanical device to be used at the
+Metropolitan in the production of the _Rheingold_, when he became
+conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking
+to the four walls.
+
+Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through
+half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his
+explanation vaguely enough and put the pencil back in his pocket. As he
+did so, she said, quietly: "How wonderfully like Adriance you are!"
+
+He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that made
+them seem quite boyish. "Yes, isn't it absurd? It's almost as awkward
+as looking like Napoleon--But, after all, there are some advantages. It
+has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you."
+
+Katharine gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes. "Oh, it
+did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and how
+you used to stare at people, and then blush and look cross. Do you
+remember that night you took me home from a rehearsal, and scarcely spoke
+a word to me?"
+
+"It was the silence of admiration," protested Everett, "very crude and
+boyish, but certainly sincere. Perhaps you suspected something of the
+sort?"
+
+"I believe I suspected a pose; the one that boys often affect with
+singers. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good
+deal of your brother's pupils." Everett shook his head. "I saw my
+brother's pupils come and go. Sometimes I was called on to play
+accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a
+carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they
+never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance
+you speak of."
+
+"Yes," observed Katharine, thoughtfully, "I noticed it then, too; but it
+has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have
+lived such different lives. It's not merely an ordinary family likeness
+of features, you know, but the suggestion of the other man's personality
+in your face--like an air transposed to another key. But I'm not
+attempting to define it; it's beyond me; something altogether unusual and
+a trifle--well, uncanny," she finished, laughing.
+
+Everett sat looking out under the red window-blind which was raised just
+a little. As it swung back and forth in the wind it revealed the glaring
+panorama of the desert--a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in
+dead calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and,
+beyond, the ragged blue outline of the mountains and the peaks of snow,
+white as the white clouds. "I remember, when I was a child I used to be
+very sensitive about it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that
+I would have had it otherwise, but it seemed like a birthmark, or
+something not to be lightly spoken of. It came into even my relations
+with my mother. Ad went abroad to study when he was very young, and
+mother was all broken up over it. She did her whole duty by each of
+us, but it was generally understood among us that she'd have made
+burnt-offerings of us all for him any day. I was a little fellow then,
+and when she sat alone on the porch on summer evenings, she used
+sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that
+streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew she
+was thinking of Adriance."
+
+"Poor little chap," said Katharine, in her husky voice. "How fond people
+have always been of Adriance! Tell me the latest news of him. I haven't
+heard, except through the press, for a year or more. He was in Algiers
+then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback, and he had quite
+made up his mind to adopt the Mahometan faith and become an Arab. How
+many countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder?"
+
+"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett. "He is himself barely long
+enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn't hear
+from him while he was an Arab; I missed that."
+
+"He was writing an Algerian _suite_ for the piano then; it must be in the
+publisher's hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his letter,
+and have lost touch with him."
+
+Everett drew an envelope from his pocket. "This came a month ago. Read it
+at your leisure."
+
+"Thanks. I shall keep it as a hostage. Now I want you to play for me.
+Whatever you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy
+let me hear it."
+
+He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his
+remarkable physical likeness to his brother, and trying to discover in
+just what it consisted. He was of a larger build than Adriance, and much
+heavier. His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, and
+darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same
+inconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; while
+Adriance's were always points of high light, and always meaning another
+thing than the thing they meant yesterday. It was hard to see why this
+earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face, as
+gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder,
+and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of
+twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into
+words. A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and
+of her affections, once said that the shepherd-boys who sang in the Vale
+of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde.
+
+Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night,
+the victim of mournful recollections. His infatuation for Katharine
+Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish
+love-affairs. The fact that it was all so done and dead and far behind
+him, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an
+oppressive sense of age and loss.
+
+He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his
+brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he had
+wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He had sat
+there in the box--while his brother and Katherine were called back again
+and again, and the flowers went up over the footlights until they were
+stacked half as high as the piano--brooding in his sullen boy's heart
+upon the pride those two felt in each other's work--spurring each other
+to their best and beautifully contending in song. The footlights had
+seemed a hard, glittering line drawn sharply between their life and his.
+He walked back to his hotel alone, and sat in his window staring out on
+Madison Square until long after midnight, resolved to beat no more at
+doors that he could never enter.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of
+release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of
+the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging him
+to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his business
+engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's ponies, or
+fishing in the mountains. In the afternoon he was usually at his post of
+duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions about
+the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the
+compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played
+the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a
+stop-gap all his life. He remembered going through a looking-glass
+labyrinth when he was a boy, and trying gallery after gallery, only at
+every turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was not
+his own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west, by
+land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
+business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining
+current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his duty
+had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his
+brother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no
+attempt to analyse the situation or to state it in exact terms; but he
+accepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die.
+Day by day he felt her need for him grow more acute and positive; and day
+by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her, his own
+individuality played a smaller part. His power to minister to her comfort
+lay solely in his link with his brother's life. He knew that she sat by
+him always watching for some trick of gesture, some familiar play of
+expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should seem
+wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this, and that in the
+exhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept
+deep and sweet, and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old
+Florentine garden, and not of bitterness and death.
+
+A few days after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled
+his brother to write her. He merely said that she was mortally ill;
+he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing--that was a part of
+his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but the
+opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. He caught the lyric essence of the
+moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually
+did the right thing,--except, when he did very cruel things--bent upon
+making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted
+that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those
+near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage
+of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near,
+forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.
+
+Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily call
+at the gaily painted ranch-house, he found Katharine laughing like a
+girl. "Have you ever thought," she said, as he entered the music-room,
+"how much these seances of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine Nights,'
+except that I don't give you an opportunity to monopolize the
+conversation?" She held his hand longer than usual as she greeted him.
+"You are the kindest man living, the kindest," she added, softly.
+
+Everett's grey face coloured faintly as he drew his hand away, for he
+felt that this time she was looking at him, and not at a whimsical
+caricature of his brother.
+
+She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a
+book and held it out, smiling. "You got him to write it. Don't say you
+didn't, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was
+a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with
+the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you
+didn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, and
+you are to play it for me directly. But first for the letter; I think you
+would better read it aloud to me."
+
+Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window-seat in which she
+reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter,
+his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that
+it was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who
+was tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier and
+the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.
+
+The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the
+fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy with the warm
+fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running water,
+as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago. The sky
+was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful Moorish
+arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an
+outline of them on the margin of his note-paper. The letter was full of
+confidences about his work, and delicate allusions to their old happy
+days of study and comradeship.
+
+As Everett folded it he felt that Adriance had divined the thing needed
+and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was consistently
+egotistical, and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just
+what she had wanted. A strong realization of his brother's charm and
+intensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind
+of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himself
+even more resolutely than he consumed others. Then he looked down at this
+white, burnt-out brand that lay before him.
+
+"Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly. "I think I can scarcely answer
+his letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me. I want
+you to tell him many things for me, yet they can all be summed up in
+this: I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at
+the cost of what is half his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?"
+
+"I know perfectly well what you mean," answered Everett, thoughtfully.
+"And yet it's difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes,
+so little mars."
+
+Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with
+feverish earnestness. "Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean;
+his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they
+take him at their own estimate."
+
+"Come, come," expostulated Everett, now alarmed at her excitement. "Where
+is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself."
+
+He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was
+indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the most
+ambitious work he had done up to that time, and marked the transition
+from his early lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett played
+intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems
+peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything
+in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.
+
+"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have done for
+him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the
+tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my
+tragedy, as I lie here, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass
+me--ah, God! the swift feet of the runners!"
+
+She turned her face away and covered it with her hands. Everett crossed
+over to her and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her she
+had never before, beyond an occasional ironical jest, given voice to the
+bitterness of her own defeat. Her courage had become a point of pride
+with him.
+
+"Don't do it," he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel it
+too much."
+
+When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave,
+cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed. "No,
+I won't; I will save that for the night, when I have no better company.
+Run over that theme at the beginning again, will you? It was running in
+his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his
+glass at the dinner-table. He had just begun to work it out when the late
+autumn came on, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter. He lost
+touch with his idea, I suppose, during his illness. Do you remember those
+frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enough
+to save him from himself! When I got word from Florence that he had been
+ill, I was singing at Monte Carlo. His wife was hurrying to him from
+Paris, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm.
+They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the
+library--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture
+and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,
+looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, you
+know. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking-jacket
+lent no colour to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill
+he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the
+last strokes to the score of his _'Souvenirs d' Automne,'_ and he was as
+I most like to remember him; calm and happy, and tired with that heavenly
+tiredness that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain
+poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned and sobbed in the garden
+and about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comes
+back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire. It
+glowed on the black walls and floor like the reflection of purgatorial
+flame. Beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. Adriance
+sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes,
+and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one
+such life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into
+the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both
+of us at once--that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life
+and death and God and hope--and we were like two clinging together on a
+spar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything. Then we heard the
+front door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, and
+the servants came running with lights, announcing that Madame had
+returned, '_and in the book we read no more that night_.'"
+
+She gave the old line with a certain bitter humour, and with the hard,
+bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a
+glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn through so many years, had
+gradually changed the lines of her face, and when she looked in the
+mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer
+and satirist of herself.
+
+Everett dropped his head upon his hand. "How much you have cared!" he
+said.
+
+"Ah, yes, I cared," she replied, closing her eyes. "You can't imagine
+what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to
+be able to tell it to some one."
+
+Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. "I was not sure how
+much you wanted me to know," he said.
+
+"Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your
+face, when you came that day with Charley. You are so like him, that it
+is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now that he will
+know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion."
+
+"And has he never known at all?" asked Everett, in a thick voice.
+
+"Oh! never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomed
+to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he doesn't
+find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy. He
+has a genuine fondness for every woman who is not stupid or gloomy, or
+old or preternaturally ugly. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles
+and the gallantries and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a
+Sunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our
+turns. It was his kindness that was hardest."
+
+"Don't; you'll make me hate him," groaned Everett.
+
+Katherine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. "It wasn't in
+the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of it.
+Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to him,
+and I drank my doom greedily enough."
+
+Everett rose and stood hesitating. "I think I must go. You ought to be
+quiet, and I don't think I can hear any more just now."
+
+She put out her hand and took his playfully.
+
+"You've put in three weeks at this sort of thing, haven't you? Well, it
+ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be."
+
+He knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: "I stayed because I wanted to be
+with you, that's all. I have never cared about other women since I
+knew you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and
+I could not leave you if I would."
+
+She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. "No, no; don't
+tell me that. I have seen enough tragedy. It was only a boy's fancy,
+and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a
+moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. Now go, and you will
+come again tomorrow, as long as there are tomorrows." She took his hand
+with a smile that was both courage and despair, and full of infinite
+loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:
+
+_"For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;
+If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
+If not, why then, this parting was well made."_
+
+The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he
+went out.
+
+On the night of Adriance Hilgarde's opening concert in Paris, Everett sat
+by the bed in the ranch-house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle
+that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it for
+ever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left
+already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious
+animal life were left to do battle with death. She laboured under a
+delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the
+Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work. When
+she roused from her stupor, it was only to ask the porter to waken her
+half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate about the delays and
+the roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the nurse were left
+alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a couch outside the
+door. Everett sat looking at the sputtering night-lamp until it made his
+eyes ache. His head dropped forward, and he sank into heavy, distressful
+slumber. He was dreaming of Adriance's concert in Paris, and of
+Adriance, the troubadour. He heard the applause and he saw the flowers
+going up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the
+piano, and the petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the
+floor. Down this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step,
+leading his singer by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish
+eyes.
+
+The nurse touched him on the shoulder, he started and awoke. She screened
+the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake and
+conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm and
+began to fan her. She looked into his face with eyes that seemed never to
+have wept or doubted. "Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear!" she whispered.
+
+Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of
+art was over for Katharine.
+
+Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the
+west-bound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had
+nothing to say to each other. Everett's bags were piled on the truck, and
+his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he gazed
+again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord's
+impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close,
+had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the
+wrench of farewell.
+
+As the train pulled in, Everett wrung Gaylord's hand among the crowd of
+alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, _en route_
+for the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast
+during the stop. Everett heard an exclamation, and a stout woman rushed
+up to him, glowing with joyful surprise and caught his coat-sleeve with
+her tightly gloved hands.
+
+"_Herr Gott_, Adriance, _lieber Freund_," she cried.
+
+Everett lifted his hat, blushing. "Pardon me, madame, I see that you have
+mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother." Turning from the
+crestfallen singer he hurried into the car.
+
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