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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays, 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: A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays
+
+Author: Willa Cather
+
+Release Date: May 24, 2008 [EBook #25586]
+Last updated: January 31, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COLLECTION OF STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Barbara Tozier and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+A Collection of
+
+Stories, Reviews and Essays
+
+by
+
+Willa Cather
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  PART I: STORIES
+
+    Peter
+    On the Divide
+    Eric Hermannson's Soul
+    The Sentimentality of William Tavener
+    The Namesake
+    The Enchanted Bluff
+    The Joy of Nelly Deane
+    The Bohemian Girl
+    Consequences
+    The Bookkeeper's Wife
+    Ardessa
+    Her Boss
+
+
+  PART II: REVIEWS AND ESSAYS
+
+    Mark Twain
+    William Dean Howells
+    Edgar Allan Poe
+    Walt Whitman
+    Henry James
+    Harold Frederic
+    Kate Chopin
+    Stephen Crane
+    Frank Norris
+    When I Knew Stephen Crane
+    On the Art of Fiction
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+STORIES
+
+
+
+
+_Peter_
+
+
+"No, Antone, I have told thee many times, no, thou shalt not sell it
+until I am gone."
+
+"But I need money; what good is that old fiddle to thee? The very
+crows laugh at thee when thou art trying to play. Thy hand trembles
+so thou canst scarce hold the bow. Thou shalt go with me to the Blue
+to cut wood to-morrow. See to it thou art up early."
+
+"What, on the Sabbath, Antone, when it is so cold? I get so very
+cold, my son, let us not go to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow, thou lazy old man. Do not I cut wood upon the
+Sabbath? Care I how cold it is? Wood thou shalt cut, and haul it
+too, and as for the fiddle, I tell thee I will sell it yet." Antone
+pulled his ragged cap down over his low heavy brow, and went out.
+The old man drew his stool up nearer the fire, and sat stroking his
+violin with trembling fingers and muttering, "Not while I live, not
+while I live."
+
+Five years ago they had come here, Peter Sadelack, and his wife, and
+oldest son Antone, and countless smaller Sadelacks, here to the
+dreariest part of south-western Nebraska, and had taken up a
+homestead. Antone was the acknowledged master of the premises, and
+people said he was a likely youth, and would do well. That he was
+mean and untrustworthy every one knew, but that made little
+difference. His corn was better tended than any in the county, and
+his wheat always yielded more than other men's.
+
+Of Peter no one knew much, nor had any one a good word to say for
+him. He drank whenever he could get out of Antone's sight long
+enough to pawn his hat or coat for whiskey. Indeed there were but
+two things he would not pawn, his pipe and his violin. He was a
+lazy, absent minded old fellow, who liked to fiddle better than to
+plow, though Antone surely got work enough out of them all, for that
+matter. In the house of which Antone was master there was no one,
+from the little boy three years old, to the old man of sixty, who
+did not earn his bread. Still people said that Peter was worthless,
+and was a great drag on Antone, his son, who never drank, and was a
+much better man than his father had ever been. Peter did not care
+what people said. He did not like the country, nor the people, least
+of all he liked the plowing. He was very homesick for Bohemia. Long
+ago, only eight years ago by the calendar, but it seemed eight
+centuries to Peter, he had been a second violinist in the great
+theatre at Prague. He had gone into the theatre very young, and had
+been there all his life, until he had a stroke of paralysis, which
+made his arm so weak that his bowing was uncertain. Then they told
+him he could go. Those were great days at the theatre. He had plenty
+to drink then, and wore a dress coat every evening, and there were
+always parties after the play. He could play in those days, ay, that
+he could! He could never read the notes well, so he did not play
+first; but his touch, he had a touch indeed, so Herr Mikilsdoff, who
+led the orchestra, had said. Sometimes now Peter thought he could
+plow better if he could only bow as he used to. He had seen all the
+lovely women in the world there, all the great singers and the great
+players. He was in the orchestra when Rachel played, and he heard
+Liszt play when the Countess d'Agoult sat in the stage box and threw
+the master white lilies. Once, a French woman came and played for
+weeks, he did not remember her name now. He did not remember her
+face very well either, for it changed so, it was never twice the
+same. But the beauty of it, and the great hunger men felt at the
+sight of it, that he remembered. Most of all he remembered her
+voice. He did not know French, and could not understand a word she
+said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of
+Chopin. And her voice, he thought he should know that in the other
+world. The last night she played a play in which a man touched her
+arm, and she stabbed him. As Peter sat among the smoking gas jets
+down below the footlights with his fiddle on his knee, and looked up
+at her, he thought he would like to die too, if he could touch her
+arm once, and have her stab him so. Peter went home to his wife very
+drunk that night. Even in those days he was a foolish fellow, who
+cared for nothing but music and pretty faces.
+
+It was all different now. He had nothing to drink and little to eat,
+and here, there was nothing but sun, and grass, and sky. He had
+forgotten almost everything, but some things he remembered well
+enough. He loved his violin and the holy Mary, and above all else he
+feared the Evil One, and his son Antone.
+
+The fire was low, and it grew cold. Still Peter sat by the fire
+remembering. He dared not throw more cobs on the fire; Antone would
+be angry. He did not want to cut wood tomorrow, it would be Sunday,
+and he wanted to go to mass. Antone might let him do that. He held
+his violin under his wrinkled chin, his white hair fell over it, and
+he began to play "Ave Maria." His hand shook more than ever before,
+and at last refused to work the bow at all. He sat stupefied for a
+while, then arose, and taking his violin with him, stole out into
+the old sod stable. He took Antone's shot-gun down from its peg, and
+loaded it by the moonlight which streamed in through the door. He
+sat down on the dirt floor, and leaned back against the dirt wall.
+He heard the wolves howling in the distance, and the night wind
+screaming as it swept over the snow. Near him he heard the regular
+breathing of the horses in the dark. He put his crucifix above his
+heart, and folding his hands said brokenly all the Latin he had ever
+known, "_Pater noster, qui in cælum est._" Then he raised his head
+and sighed, "Not one kreutzer will Antone pay them to pray for my
+soul, not one kreutzer, he is so careful of his money, is Antone, he
+does not waste it in drink, he is a better man than I, but hard
+sometimes. He works the girls too hard, women were not made to work
+so. But he shall not sell thee, my fiddle, I can play thee no more,
+but they shall not part us. We have seen it all together, and we
+will forget it together, the French woman and all." He held his
+fiddle under his chin a moment, where it had lain so often, then put
+it across his knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off
+his old boot, held the gun between his knees with the muzzle against
+his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe.
+
+In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a pool of
+blood. They could not straighten him out enough to fit a coffin, so
+they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral Antone carried to
+town the fiddle-bow which Peter had forgotten to break. Antone was
+very thrifty, and a better man than his father had been.
+
+                               _The Mahogany Tree_, May 21, 1892
+
+
+
+
+_On the Divide_
+
+
+Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute's
+shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of
+long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the
+west the ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber
+wound along the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely
+ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been
+for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks,
+Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians are a
+timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond with a few
+plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn toward it.
+
+As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any
+kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake
+Creek there was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built
+of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster.
+The roof was covered with earth and was supported by one gigantic
+beam curved in the shape of a round arch. It was almost impossible
+that any tree had ever grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to
+say that Canute had taken the log across his knee and bent it into
+the shape he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one
+room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and bound
+together like big straw basket work. In one corner there was a cook
+stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks
+and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of
+dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal
+proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few
+cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
+wash-basin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
+some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
+incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some
+ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth,
+apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk
+handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and
+a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty
+snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time it
+opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide
+window-sills. At first glance they looked as though they had been
+ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer
+inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
+shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a
+rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as
+though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward
+instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps sitting
+on their shoulders and on their horses' heads. There were men
+praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons
+behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with
+big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these
+pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this
+world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always
+the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a
+serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had
+felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of
+them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude
+and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had
+trembled. It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men
+from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave
+and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were always
+smiling and dancing. Several of these boards had been split for
+kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his work
+highly.
+
+It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into
+his shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove,
+sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire,
+staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by
+heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red
+shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all
+the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter
+barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues
+of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain,
+beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he
+had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have
+left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and
+miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.
+
+He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily
+as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into
+the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw
+before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill
+themselves, and the snowflakes were settling down over the white
+leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the
+sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his
+ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he
+knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child
+fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of
+the polar twilight.
+
+His eyes fell upon his gun, and he took it down from the wall and
+looked it over. He sat down on the edge of his bed and held the
+barrel towards his face, letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid
+his finger on the trigger. He was perfectly calm, there was neither
+passion nor despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man
+who is considering. Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching
+into the cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol.
+Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily. He washed his face in the
+tin basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he
+stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on
+the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and tried
+to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper collar that was
+pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it under his
+rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the cracked,
+splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he threw
+it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
+striking off across the level.
+
+It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once
+in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and
+sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the
+frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things
+on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season.
+Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas
+seem to dry up the blood in men's veins as they do the sap in the
+corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender
+inside leaves about the ear, then the coroners prepare for active
+duty; for the oil of the country is burned out and it does not take
+long for the flame to eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation
+there when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and
+most of the Poles after they have become too careless and
+discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their
+throats with.
+
+It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy,
+but the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men
+that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years
+to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and as naked as the
+sea. It is not easy for men that have spent their youths fishing in
+the Northern seas to be content with following a plow, and men that
+have served in the Austrian army hate hard work and coarse clothing
+and the loneliness of the plains, and long for marches and
+excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids. After a man has
+passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him to change the
+habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring with them to the
+Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have squandered in
+other lands and among other peoples.
+
+Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
+take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always
+taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his
+first year of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He
+exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol, because its
+effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man with a terrible
+amount of resistant force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even
+to move him. After nine years of drinking, the quantities he could
+take would seem fabulous to an ordinary drinking man. He never let
+it interfere with his work, he generally drank at night and on
+Sundays. Every night, as soon as his chores were done, he began to
+drink. While he was able to sit up he would play on his mouth harp
+or hack away at his window sills with his jack knife. When the
+liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out
+of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude
+not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness
+and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put
+mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
+mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains
+that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad
+caprice of their vice, were cursed of God.
+
+Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness
+is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a
+bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these,
+but he was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the
+hells of Dante. As he lay on his giant's bed all the horrors of this
+world and every other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a
+man who knew no joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The
+skull and the serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal
+futileness and of eternal hate.
+
+When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
+Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he
+was not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out
+the social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him
+because of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering
+brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal
+treachery of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle
+with the promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear
+water and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before
+autumn the lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and
+hard until it blisters and cracks open.
+
+So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
+about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful
+stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank. They
+said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
+before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
+of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young
+stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous
+horse began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood
+trickling down in his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused
+himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical
+courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms about the
+horse's hind legs and held them against his breast with crushing
+embrace. All through the darkness and cold of the night he lay
+there, matching strength against strength. When little Jim Peterson
+went over the next morning at four o'clock to go with him to the
+Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was on its fore
+knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story the
+Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they
+feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.
+
+One spring there moved to the next "eighty" a family that made a
+great change in Canute's life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of the
+time to be afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too garrulous to
+be afraid of any one who listened to her talk, and Lena, their
+pretty daughter, was not afraid of man nor devil. So it came about
+that Canute went over to take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he
+took it alone. After a while the report spread that he was going to
+marry Yensen's daughter, and the Norwegian girls began to tease Lena
+about the great bear she was going to keep house for. No one could
+quite see how the affair had come about, for Canute's tactics of
+courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently never spoke to her
+at all: he would sit for hours with Mary chattering on one side of
+him and Ole drinking on the other and watch Lena at her work. She
+teased him, and threw flour in his face and put vinegar in his
+coffee, but he took her rough jokes with silent wonder, never even
+smiling. He took her to church occasionally, but the most watchful
+and curious people never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring
+at her while she giggled and flirted with the other men.
+
+Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. She
+came home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to startle
+Lena with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen's dances, and all
+the other esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few weeks
+Lena's head was completely turned, and she gave her father no rest
+until he let her go to town to seek her fortune at the ironing
+board. From the time she came home on her first visit she began to
+treat Canute with contempt. She had bought a plush cloak and kid
+gloves, had her clothes made by the dress-maker, and assumed airs
+and graces that made the other women of the neighborhood cordially
+detest her. She generally brought with her a young man from town who
+waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and she did not even
+introduce him to Canute.
+
+The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one of them
+down. He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except that he
+drank more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully than
+ever. He lay around in his den and no one knew what he felt or
+thought, but little Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at Lena
+in church one Sunday when she was there with the town man, said that
+he would not give an acre of his wheat for Lena's life or the town
+chap's either; and Jim's wheat was so wondrously worthless that the
+statement was an exceedingly strong one.
+
+Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly like
+the town man's as possible. They had cost him half a millet crop;
+for tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they charge for
+it. He had hung those clothes in his shanty two months ago and had
+never put them on, partly from fear of ridicule, partly from
+discouragement, and partly because there was something in his own
+soul that revolted at the littleness of the device.
+
+Lena was at home just at this time. Work was slack in the laundry
+and Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home, glad enough to
+get an opportunity to torment Canute once more.
+
+She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as she worked.
+Mary was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding violently
+about the young man who was coming out from town that night. The
+young man had committed the fatal error of laughing at Mary's
+ceaseless babble and had never been forgiven.
+
+"He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running with him!
+I do not see why a daughter of mine should act so. I do not see why
+the Lord should visit such a punishment upon me as to give me such a
+daughter. There are plenty of good men you can marry."
+
+Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, "I don't happen to want to
+marry any man right away, and so long as Dick dresses nice and has
+plenty of money to spend, there is no harm in my going with him."
+
+"Money to spend? Yes, and that is all he does with it I'll be bound.
+You think it very fine now, but you will change your tune when you
+have been married five years and see your children running naked and
+your cupboard empty. Did Anne Hermanson come to any good end by
+marrying a town man?"
+
+"I don't know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I know any of the
+laundry girls would have Dick quick enough if they could get him."
+
+"Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too. Now there
+is Canuteson who has an 'eighty' proved up and fifty head of cattle
+and----"
+
+"And hair that ain't been cut since he was a baby, and a big dirty
+beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like a pig.
+Besides he will keep. I can have all the fun I want, and when I am
+old and ugly like you he can have me and take care of me. The Lord
+knows there ain't nobody else going to marry him."
+
+Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it were red hot.
+He was not the kind of a man to make a good eavesdropper, and he
+wished he had knocked sooner. He pulled himself together and struck
+the door like a battering ram. Mary jumped and opened it with a
+screech.
+
+"God! Canute, how you scared us! I thought it was crazy Lou,--he has
+been tearing around the neighborhood trying to convert folks. I am
+afraid as death of him. He ought to be sent off, I think. He is just
+as liable as not to kill us all, or burn the barn, or poison the
+dogs. He has been worrying even the poor minister to death, and he
+laid up with the rheumatism, too! Did you notice that he was too
+sick to preach last Sunday? But don't stand there in the cold,--come
+in. Yensen isn't here, but he just went over to Sorenson's for the
+mail; he won't be gone long. Walk right in the other room and sit
+down."
+
+Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and not
+noticing Lena as he passed her. But Lena's vanity would not allow
+him to pass unmolested. She took the wet sheet she was wringing out
+and cracked him across the face with it, and ran giggling to the
+other side of the room. The blow stung his cheeks and the soapy
+water flew in his eyes, and he involuntarily began rubbing them with
+his hands. Lena giggled with delight at his discomfiture, and the
+wrath in Canute's face grew blacker than ever. A big man humiliated
+is vastly more undignified than a little one. He forgot the sting of
+his face in the bitter consciousness that he had made a fool of
+himself. He stumbled blindly into the living room, knocking his head
+against the door jamb because he forgot to stoop. He dropped into a
+chair behind the stove, thrusting his big feet back helplessly on
+either side of him.
+
+Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still and
+silent, with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin of his
+face seemed to have shriveled up into little wrinkles that trembled
+when he lowered his brows. His life had been one long lethargy of
+solitude and alcohol, but now he was awakening, and it was as when
+the dumb stagnant heat of summer breaks out into thunder.
+
+When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute rose at once.
+
+"Yensen," he said quietly, "I have come to see if you will let me
+marry your daughter today."
+
+"Today!" gasped Ole.
+
+"Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow. I am tired of living alone."
+
+Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and stammered
+eloquently: "Do you think I will marry my daughter to a drunkard? a
+man who drinks raw alcohol? a man who sleeps with rattle snakes? Get
+out of my house or I will kick you out for your impudence." And Ole
+began looking anxiously for his feet.
+
+Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and went out into
+the kitchen. He went up to Lena and said without looking at her,
+"Get your things on and come with me!"
+
+The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily, dropping
+the soap, "Are you drunk?"
+
+"If you do not come with me, I will take you,--you had better come,"
+said Canute quietly.
+
+She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm roughly and
+wrenched the sheet from her. He turned to the wall and took down a
+hood and shawl that hung there, and began wrapping her up. Lena
+scratched and fought like a wild thing. Ole stood in the door,
+cursing, and Mary howled and screeched at the top of her voice. As
+for Canute, he lifted the girl in his arms and went out of the
+house. She kicked and struggled, but the helpless wailing of Mary
+and Ole soon died away in the distance, and her face was held down
+tightly on Canute's shoulder so that she could not see whither he
+was taking her. She was conscious only of the north wind whistling
+in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and of a great breast that
+heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths. The harder she
+struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held the heels of
+horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they would crush the
+breath from her, and lay still with fear. Canute was striding across
+the level fields at a pace at which man never went before, drawing
+the stinging north wind into his lungs in great gulps. He walked
+with his eyes half closed and looking straight in front of him, only
+lowering them when he bent his head to blow away the snow flakes
+that settled on her hair. So it was that Canute took her to his
+home, even as his bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair
+frivolous women of the South in their hairy arms and bore them down
+to their war ships. For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the
+conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters
+the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong
+arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
+
+When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a chair,
+where she sat sobbing. He stayed only a few minutes. He filled the
+stove with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge swallow of alcohol
+and put the bottle in his pocket. He paused a moment, staring
+heavily at the weeping girl, then he went off and locked the door
+and disappeared in the gathering gloom of the night.
+
+Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little Norwegian
+preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a thundering knock at
+his door, and Canute entered, covered with snow and with his beard
+frozen fast to his coat.
+
+"Come in, Canute, you must be frozen," said the little man, shoving
+a chair towards his visitor.
+
+Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly, "I want
+you to come over to my house tonight to marry me to Lena Yensen."
+
+"Have you got a license, Canute?"
+
+"No, I don't want a license. I want to be married."
+
+"But I can't marry you without a license, man. It would not be
+legal."
+
+A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian's eye. "I want you to
+come over to my house to marry me to Lena Yensen."
+
+"No, I can't, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like this,
+and my rheumatism is bad tonight."
+
+"Then if you will not go I must take you," said Canute with a sigh.
+
+He took down the preacher's bearskin coat and bade him put it on
+while he hitched up his buggy. He went out and closed the door
+softly after him. Presently he returned and found the frightened
+minister crouching before the fire with his coat lying beside him.
+Canute helped him put it on and gently wrapped his head in his big
+muffler. Then he picked him up and carried him out and placed him in
+his buggy. As he tucked the buffalo robes around him he said: "Your
+horse is old, he might flounder or lose his way in this storm. I
+will lead him."
+
+The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering
+with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could
+see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding
+steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him
+altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they
+were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the
+heart of the storm, and he said all the prayers he knew. But at last
+the long four miles were over, and Canute set him down in the snow
+while he unlocked the door. He saw the bride sitting by the fire
+with her eyes red and swollen as though she had been weeping. Canute
+placed a huge chair for him, and said roughly,--
+
+"Warm yourself."
+
+Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to take her
+home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute said simply,--
+
+"If you are warm now, you can marry us."
+
+"My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?" asked
+the minister in a trembling voice.
+
+"No sir, I don't, and it is disgraceful he should force me into it!
+I won't marry him."
+
+"Then, Canute, I cannot marry you," said the minister, standing as
+straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.
+
+"Are you ready to marry us now, sir?" said Canute, laying one iron
+hand on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher was a good man,
+but like most men of weak body he was a coward and had a horror of
+physical suffering, although he had known so much of it. So with
+many qualms of conscience he began to repeat the marriage service.
+Lena sat sullenly in her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood
+beside her, listening with his head bent reverently and his hands
+folded on his breast. When the little man had prayed and said amen,
+Canute began bundling him up again.
+
+"I will take you home, now," he said as he carried him out and
+placed him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury
+of the storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even
+the giant himself to his knees.
+
+After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a
+particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that
+of vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt
+nothing more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had
+no inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes
+that was final and all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about
+a license, but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled
+herself by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute
+some day, any way.
+
+She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got up
+and began to look about her. She had heard queer tales about the
+inside of Canute's shanty, and her curiosity soon got the better of
+her rage. One of the first things she noticed was the new black suit
+of clothes hanging on the wall. She was dull, but it did not take a
+vain woman long to interpret anything so decidedly flattering, and
+she was pleased in spite of herself. As she looked through the
+cupboard, the general air of neglect and discomfort made her pity
+the man who lived there.
+
+"Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get somebody to
+wash up his dishes. Batchin's pretty hard on a man."
+
+It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled. She
+looked at the window sill and gave a little shudder and wondered if
+the man were crazy. Then she sat down again and sat a long time
+wondering what her Dick and Ole would do.
+
+"It is queer Dick didn't come right over after me. He surely came,
+for he would have left town before the storm began and he might just
+as well come right on as go back. If he'd hurried he would have
+gotten here before the preacher came. I suppose he was afraid to
+come, for he knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the coward!"
+Her eyes flashed angrily.
+
+The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly lonesome. It
+was an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to be in. She
+could hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin,
+and more terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm.
+She remembered the tales they told of the big log overhead and she
+was afraid of those snaky things on the window sills. She remembered
+the man who had been killed in the draw, and she wondered what she
+would do if she saw crazy Lou's white face glaring into the window.
+The rattling of the door became unbearable, she thought the latch
+must be loose and took the lamp to look at it. Then for the first
+time she saw the ugly brown snake skins whose death rattle sounded
+every time the wind jarred the door.
+
+"Canute, Canute!" she screamed in terror.
+
+Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog getting up
+and shaking himself. The door opened and Canute stood before her,
+white as a snow drift.
+
+"What is it?" he asked kindly.
+
+"I am cold," she faltered.
+
+He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and
+filled the stove. Then he went out and lay in the snow before the
+door. Presently he heard her calling again.
+
+"What is it?" he said, sitting up.
+
+"I'm so lonesome, I'm afraid to stay in here all alone."
+
+"I will go over and get your mother." And he got up.
+
+"She won't come."
+
+"I'll bring her," said Canute grimly.
+
+"No, no. I don't want her, she will scold all the time."
+
+"Well, I will bring your father."
+
+She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up to
+the key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak
+before, so low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear
+her.
+
+"I don't want him either, Canute,--I'd rather have you."
+
+For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a groan.
+With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute stretched in
+the snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the door
+step.
+
+                                _Overland Monthly_, January 1896
+
+
+
+
+_Eric Hermannson's Soul_
+
+
+I.
+
+It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse--a night when the
+Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So
+it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free Gospeller. The
+schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men
+and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some
+mysterious psychic force. Here and there among this cowering,
+sweating multitude crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs
+of an awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete
+divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind,
+which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed "the
+Light." On the floor, before the mourners' bench, lay the
+unconscious figure of a man in whom outraged nature had sought her
+last resort. This "trance" state is the highest evidence of grace
+among the Free Gospellers, and indicates a close walking with God.
+
+Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and
+vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an
+almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used
+to run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes
+of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the most
+ascetic. His was a bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of
+Nature's eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over
+the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then
+brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, the
+nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely except in
+his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like a steel
+trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep, rugged
+furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the weakness
+of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
+lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
+cheeks there was a certain pallor, a grayness caught from many a
+vigil. It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that
+face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost
+transfiguring it. To-night, as his muscles twitched with emotion,
+and the perspiration dropped from his hair and chin, there was a
+certain convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man
+possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which
+all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which
+seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have
+become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the
+founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he
+stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.
+
+It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner's
+God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for
+those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star
+schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations; men from the
+south and the north, peasants from almost every country of Europe,
+most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of Norway.
+Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world had dealt
+hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by toil and
+saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the dominion of
+an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
+advance-guard of a mighty civilization to be.
+
+Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
+the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. To-night Eric
+Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience
+with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to
+play for some dance. The violin is an object of particular
+abhorrence to the Free Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church
+organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a very
+incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly pleasures
+and inseparably associated with all forbidden things.
+
+Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
+revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago,
+and special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son.
+But Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which
+are short enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide. He
+slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in
+Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at
+Chevalier's dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went
+across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play
+the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all
+the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and too
+busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue. On such
+occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and
+tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a
+battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and
+experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big
+cities and knew the ways of town-folk, who had never worked in the
+fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair and
+tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who
+knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.
+
+Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were
+not altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been
+fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his
+pleasures had fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that
+dogged his steps. The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more
+was he conscious that this phantom was gaining upon him, that in
+time it would track him down. One Sunday afternoon, late in the
+fall, when he had been drinking beer with Lena Hanson and listening
+to a song which made his cheeks burn, a rattlesnake had crawled out
+of the side of the sod house and thrust its ugly head in under the
+screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he knew enough of
+Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying coiled
+there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena
+good-by, and he went there no more.
+
+The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his
+violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his
+dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than all his
+strength. In the great world beauty comes to men in many guises, and
+art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there was only his violin. It
+stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his only
+bridge into the kingdom of the soul.
+
+It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his
+impassioned pleading that night.
+
+"_Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_ Is there a Saul here
+to-night who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has
+thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you
+are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth
+not and the fire which will not be quenched. What right have you to
+lose one of God's precious souls? _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
+me?_"
+
+A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner's pale face, for he saw that Eric
+Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell
+upon his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.
+
+"O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I
+tell you the Spirit is coming! Just a little more prayer, brothers,
+a little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing
+upon my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!"
+
+The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual
+panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure
+fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners' bench rose a chant
+of terror and rapture:
+
+  "Eating honey and drinking wine,
+    _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_
+  I am my Lord's and he is mine,
+    _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_"
+
+The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague
+yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all
+the passions so long, only to fall victims to the basest of them
+all, fear.
+
+A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson's bowed head,
+and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in
+the forest.
+
+The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head,
+crying in a loud voice:
+
+"_Lazarus, come forth!_ Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at
+sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the
+life-line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!" The minister
+threw his arms out and lifted his quivering face.
+
+Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the
+lightning was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and
+crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the
+sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.
+
+
+II.
+
+For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to
+which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came
+to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other
+manners and conditions, and there were greater distances between her
+life and Eric's than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek
+from New York city. Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at
+all; but ah! across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable
+chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!
+
+It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
+Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had
+spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was
+still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons
+to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to
+consign them to a living death in the sage-brush of the Black Hills.
+These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life.
+But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a
+cow-punchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by
+a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a
+girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the
+days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that
+never come true. On this, his first visit to his father's ranch
+since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had
+been laid up half the winter from a sprain received while skating,
+and had had too much time for reflection during those months. She
+was restless and filled with a desire to see something of the wild
+country of which her brother had told her so much. She was to be
+married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged
+him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
+continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to
+all women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which
+allures and terrifies, to run one's whole soul's length out to the
+wind--just once.
+
+It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that
+strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her.
+They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the
+acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the
+train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the
+world's end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on
+horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple
+Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their
+besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to
+thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the windy crest
+of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming sunsets, a
+scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
+sunlight.
+
+Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in
+this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful,
+talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four.
+For the moment the life and people of the Divide interested her. She
+was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable
+ennui which travels faster even than the Vestibule Limited would
+have overtaken her. The week she tarried there was the week that
+Eric Hermannson was helping Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or
+a week later, and there would have been no story to write.
+
+It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and
+his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse,
+staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the
+gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy river-bottom twenty
+miles to the southward.
+
+The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
+
+"This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else. You
+remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
+Kansas. It's the key-note of this country."
+
+Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued
+gently:
+
+"I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it
+takes the taste out of things."
+
+She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
+own.
+
+"Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were children
+and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do
+you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the
+world go on its own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain
+we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as though one
+could never give one's strength out to such petty things any more."
+
+Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
+that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the
+sky-line.
+
+"No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't
+shake the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time
+when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and
+burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too
+complex now. You see we've made our dissipations so dainty and
+respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and taken
+hold of the ego proper. You couldn't rest, even here. The war-cry
+would follow you."
+
+"You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
+than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the
+art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent
+men."
+
+"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most
+brilliant talker you know."
+
+Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot
+wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.
+
+"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
+interesting as Eric Hermannson?"
+
+"Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
+youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has
+retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
+fancy."
+
+"Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
+dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the
+others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."
+
+"Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget as much as
+my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but I fancy
+it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion
+that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul
+somewhere. Nicht wahr?"
+
+"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except that
+it's more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and
+he makes it known, somehow, without speaking."
+
+"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis remarked,
+with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.
+
+Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. "I knew it from the
+first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the
+Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will
+in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes,
+unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him I was doubly sure.
+Oh, I haven't told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again.
+You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at
+that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It's her household
+fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and
+sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate
+manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I sang
+just the old things, of course. It's queer to sing familiar things
+here at the world's end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
+have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and
+the jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one
+lived here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and
+would read only the great books that we never get time to read in
+the world, and would remember only the great music, and the things
+that are really worth while would stand out clearly against that
+horizon over there. And of course I played the intermezzo from
+'Cavalleria Rusticana' for him; it goes rather better on an organ
+than most things do. He shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands
+up into knots and blurted out that he didn't know there was any
+music like that in the world. Why, there were tears in his voice,
+Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I _heard_ his tears. Then it dawned upon
+me that it was probably the first good music he had ever heard in
+all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does and never to
+hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long for it as we
+long for other perfect experiences that never come. I can't tell you
+what music means to that man. I never saw any one so susceptible to
+it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had finished the
+intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled brother who
+died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his arms. He
+did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told it
+slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
+to answer Mascagni's. It overcame me."
+
+"Poor devil," said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, "and
+so you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on wanting Grieg and
+Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That's a
+girl's philanthropy for you!"
+
+Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the
+unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon
+as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house.
+Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at
+Margaret.
+
+"Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson
+will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she
+isn't lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will
+bring his fiddle--though the French don't mix with the Norwegians
+much."
+
+"Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our
+trip, and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see the
+Norwegians in character at last," cried Margaret, cordially.
+
+"See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in this
+scheme," said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe.
+"She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing
+all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage
+at four to catch the six o'clock train out of Riverton--well, it's
+tommy-rot, that's what it is!"
+
+"Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide
+whether it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up at three
+in the morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir,
+I prefer to keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper."
+
+"But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired
+of dancing."
+
+"So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and
+I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really
+wants to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to
+go to a party before. It will be something to remember next month at
+Newport, when we have to and don't want to. Remember your own theory
+that contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable.
+This is my party and Mr. Lockhart's; your whole duty to-morrow night
+will consist in being nice to the Norwegian girls. I'll warrant you
+were adept enough at it once. And you'd better be very nice indeed,
+for if there are many such young valkyrs as Eric's sister among
+them, they would simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you
+were guying them."
+
+Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate,
+while his sister went on.
+
+"And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"
+
+Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of
+his plowshoe.
+
+"Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty hard
+to get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone over to
+the Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in the fire
+than shake 'em to a fiddle."
+
+Margaret made a gesture of impatience.
+
+"Those Free Gospellers have just cast an evil spell over this
+country, haven't they?"
+
+"Well," said Lockhart, cautiously, "I don't just like to pass
+judgment on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by
+their works, the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an'
+that's a fact. They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've
+sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I don't
+see as they've made the rest of us much better than we were before.
+I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little Dane as I
+want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of him and
+sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his knees out
+on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the
+corn, an' I had to fire him. That's about the way it goes. Now
+there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer
+in all this section--called all the dances. Now he's got no ambition
+and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we can even get him to
+come in to-morrow night."
+
+"Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off," said Margaret,
+quickly. "Why, I intend to dance with him myself!"
+
+"I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd help us
+out and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,'" said Lockhart,
+imitating the labored English of the Norwegian.
+
+"'The Miller of Hoffbau, the Miller of Hoffbau, O my Princess!'"
+chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.
+
+The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
+mischievously. "We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit that I am
+beaten until I have asked him myself."
+
+Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the
+heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay
+through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several
+occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him.
+To-night Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with
+Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had
+broken to the side-saddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as
+she did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides at
+home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She was occupied
+with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling with more
+thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before. He rode
+with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as though he
+wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in his
+brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
+worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
+girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he
+knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first
+appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.
+
+Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
+was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
+self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not
+afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects
+before him when his father went down off the North Cape in the long
+Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent horror of
+seafaring life, had followed her brother to America. Eric was
+eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with
+a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's; hair as yellow
+as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce,
+burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women. He had in
+those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
+approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even
+said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to
+levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of
+those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a
+scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation
+had sobered him, and he grew more and more like the clods among
+which he labored. It was as though some red-hot instrument had
+touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which
+respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of
+exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away. It is a painful
+thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen,
+leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite
+hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes
+almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with others
+it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man's
+heart to die.
+
+Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year
+before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy
+hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.
+
+The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his
+people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that
+night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin
+across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down
+upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work. "_If thine
+eye offend thee, pluck it out_," et cetera. The pagan smile that
+once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
+Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when
+it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of
+the cross has been, joy will not come again. This man understood
+things literally: one must live without pleasure to die without
+fear; to save the soul it was necessary to starve the soul.
+
+The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier
+left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that
+runs for some three miles through the French settlement, where the
+prairie is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of
+flax and wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender,
+tapering Lombard poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot
+saw under the wide light of the setting sun.
+
+The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It will be
+safe to run the horses here, won't it?"
+
+"Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his pony's
+flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West
+that new-comers always ride a horse or two to death before they get
+broken in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces
+and try to outride the horizon, to get to the end of something.
+Margaret galloped over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw
+her long veil fluttering in the wind. It had fluttered just so in
+his dreams last night and the night before. With a sudden
+inspiration of courage he overtook her and rode beside her, looking
+intently at her half-averted face. Before, he had only stolen
+occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes, always with
+more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let every line
+of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said that it
+was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant lines
+that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a
+historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long
+asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle
+together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left
+their unconscious memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in
+these details. To him this beauty was something more than color and
+line; it was as a flash of white light, in which one cannot
+distinguish color because all colors are there. To him it was a
+complete revelation, an embodiment of those dreams of impossible
+loveliness that linger by a young man's pillow on midsummer nights;
+yet, because it held something more than the attraction of health
+and youth and shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he
+felt as the Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not
+knowing whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like
+uncovering his head before it, again the fury seized him to break
+and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon
+it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take
+and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his
+hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
+questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he
+admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.
+To-night, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched
+her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a
+star.
+
+Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in
+her saddle.
+
+"This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast," she
+said.
+
+Eric turned his eyes away.
+
+"I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear
+music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work,"
+he asked, timidly.
+
+Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the
+outline of his face, pityingly.
+
+"Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't like
+you to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of atmosphere, some
+way," she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: "There he would
+be altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one's
+trunks upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather
+picturesque; why is it?" "No," she added aloud, "I shouldn't like
+that."
+
+"Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.
+
+Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused
+and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.
+
+"But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to
+dance with us to-morrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian
+dances; they say you know them all. Won't you?"
+
+Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they
+had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin
+across his knee.
+
+"Yes, I will," he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered
+his soul to hell as he said it.
+
+They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound
+through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a
+beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies
+start and Eric rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of
+them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies,
+nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive
+east from the plains of Montana to sell in the farming country.
+Margaret's pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that was almost a
+scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild
+blood of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret called to
+Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her
+pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was kicking
+and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all
+about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with
+their fore feet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty
+of the range that the little beast fought for.
+
+"Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!" Eric called, throwing all
+his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic fore feet
+that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs
+that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the
+pony's head toward him and crowding her withers against the clay
+bank, so that she could not roll.
+
+"Hold tight, tight!" he shouted again, launching a kick at a
+snorting animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she
+should lose her courage and fall now, under those hoofs----He struck
+out again and again, kicking right and left with all his might.
+Already the negligent drivers had galloped into the cut, and their
+long quirts were whistling over the heads of the herd. As suddenly
+as it had come, the struggling, frantic wave of wild life swept up
+out of the gulch and on across the open prairie, and with a long
+despairing whinny of farewell the pony dropped her head and stood
+trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from her bit.
+
+Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her
+saddle. "You are not hurt?" he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his
+face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and
+that his lips were working nervously.
+
+"No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!"
+she cried in sharp alarm.
+
+He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.
+
+"No, it is not that," he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched
+at his side. "But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains
+out with my hands, I would kill them all. I was never afraid before.
+You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You
+came like an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing,
+you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played
+when I was a little boy. You are like all that I wanted once and
+never had, you are all that they have killed in me. I die for you
+to-night, to-morrow, for all eternity. I am not a coward; I was
+afraid because I love you more than Christ who died for me, more
+than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid
+before. If you had fallen--oh, my God!" he threw his arms out
+blindly and dropped his head upon the pony's mane, leaning limply
+against the animal like a man struck by some sickness. His shoulders
+rose and fell perceptibly with his labored breathing. The horse
+stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her
+hand on Eric's head and said gently:
+
+"You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?"
+
+"No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe.
+I will not frighten you again." His voice was still husky, but it
+was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.
+
+When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's head
+until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.
+
+"The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty
+thoroughly scared myself," she said as she took her brother's arm
+and went slowly up the hill toward the house. "No, I'm not hurt,
+thanks to Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me.
+He's a mighty fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the
+morning, dear. I was pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to
+bed now. Good-night."
+
+When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the
+bed in her riding-dress face downward.
+
+"Oh, I pity him! I pity him!" she murmured, with a long sigh of
+exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again, she
+took from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at the
+village post-office. It was closely written in a long, angular hand,
+covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and began:--
+
+"My Dearest Margaret: If I should attempt to say _how like a winter
+hath thine absence been_, I should incur the risk of being tedious.
+Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having nothing
+better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in particular without
+you, I remained in the city until Jack Courtwell noted my general
+despondency and brought me down here to his place on the sound to
+manage some open-air theatricals he is getting up. 'As You Like It'
+is of course the piece selected. Miss Harrison plays Rosalind. I
+wish you had been here to take the part. Miss Harrison reads her
+lines well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy;
+insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings and
+highly colored suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral
+setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the
+emotional element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile
+wit and really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando,
+but rumor says he is épris of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith,
+and his memory is treacherous and his interest fitful.
+
+"My new pictures arrived last week on the 'Gascogne.' The Puvis de
+Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in Paris. A pale
+dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow, and a stream of anemic water
+flows at her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because
+you admired it. It is here in all its florid splendor, the whole
+dominated by a glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure
+is as wonderful as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold,
+painted with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white,
+gleaming line of African coast in the background recalls memories of
+you very precious to me. But it is useless to deny that Constant
+irritates me. Though I cannot prove the charge against him, his
+brilliancy always makes me suspect him of cheapness."
+
+Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of this
+strange love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with
+discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid
+them by.
+
+She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went to open
+the window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated, feeling
+suddenly as though some danger were lurking outside, some inordinate
+desire waiting to spring upon her in the darkness. She stood there
+for a long time, gazing at the infinite sweep of the sky.
+
+"Oh, it is all so little, so little there," she murmured. "When
+everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be
+great? Why should one try to read highly colored suggestions into a
+life like that? If only I could find one thing in it all that
+mattered greatly, one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will
+life never give me that one great moment?"
+
+As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum-bushes
+outside. It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but
+Margaret started violently and trembled so that she caught the foot
+of the bed for support. Again she felt herself pursued by some
+overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity for herself, like the
+outstretching of helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air
+seemed heavy with sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the
+words, "I love you more than Christ, who died for me!" ringing in
+her ears.
+
+
+III.
+
+About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height. Even the
+old men who had come to "look on" caught the spirit of revelry and
+stamped the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric took the
+violin from the Frenchman, and Minna Oleson sat at the organ, and
+the music grew more and more characteristic--rude, half-mournful
+music, made up of the folk-songs of the North, that the villagers
+sing through the long night in hamlets by the sea, when they are
+thinking of the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so long away.
+To Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg's Peer Gynt music. She
+found something irresistibly infectious in the mirth of these people
+who were so seldom merry, and she felt almost one of them. Something
+seemed struggling for freedom in them to-night, something of the
+joyous childhood of the nations which exile had not killed. The
+girls were all boisterous with delight. Pleasure came to them but
+rarely, and when it came, they caught at it wildly and crushed its
+fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life
+enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labor and
+drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short
+wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless
+sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood.
+But what matter? To-night there was hot liquor in the glass and hot
+blood in the heart; to-night they danced.
+
+To-night Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no longer the
+big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and looked
+hopelessly into her eyes. To-night he was a man, with a man's rights
+and a man's power. To-night he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was
+yellow as the heavy wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes
+flashed like the blue water between the ice-packs in the North Seas.
+He was not afraid of Margaret to-night, and when he danced with her
+he held her firmly. She was tired and dragged on his arm a little,
+but the strength of the man was like an all-pervading fluid,
+stealing through her veins, awakening under her heart some nameless,
+unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all these years and
+that went out through her throbbing fingertips to his that answered.
+She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some lawless ancestor, long
+asleep, were calling out in her to-night, some drop of a hotter
+fluid that the centuries had failed to cool, and why, if this curse
+were in her, it had not spoken before. But was it a curse, this
+awakening, this wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For
+the first time in her life her heart held something stronger than
+herself, was not this worth while? Then she ceased to wonder. She
+lost sight of the lights and the faces, and the music was drowned by
+the beating of her own arteries. She saw only the blue eyes that
+flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that throbbing hand which
+held hers and which the blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a
+dream, she saw the drooping shoulders, high white forehead and
+tight, cynical mouth of the man she was to marry in December. For an
+hour she had been crowding back the memory of that face with all her
+strength.
+
+"Let us stop, this is enough," she whispered. His only answer was to
+tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that masterful
+strength bear her where it would. She forgot that this man was
+little more than a savage, that they would part at dawn. The blood
+has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past, no
+consideration of the future.
+
+"Let us go out where it is cooler," she said when the music stopped;
+thinking, "I am growing faint here, I shall be all right in the open
+air." They stepped out into the cool, blue air of the night.
+
+Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians had
+been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into the
+cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.
+
+"You like to go up?" asked Eric, close to her ear.
+
+She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. "How high is
+it?"
+
+"Forty feet, about. I not let you fall." There was a note of
+irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he
+tremendously wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of
+the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an
+unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the
+Vestibule Limited and the world.
+
+"Well, if you'll take good care of me. I used to be able to climb,
+when I was a little girl."
+
+Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent.
+Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her
+life, through all the routine of the days to come. Above them
+stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night,
+with its big, burning stars, never so cold and dead and far away as
+in denser atmospheres. The moon would not be up for twenty minutes
+yet, and all about the horizon, that wide horizon, which seemed to
+reach around the world, lingered a pale, white light, as of a
+universal dawn. The weary wind brought up to them the heavy odors of
+the cornfields. The music of the dance sounded faintly from below.
+Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs swinging down on the
+ladder. His great shoulders looked more than ever like those of the
+stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful strength in
+the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men died forever
+with the youth of Greece.
+
+"How sweet the corn smells at night," said Margaret nervously.
+
+"Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think."
+
+She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled when this
+taciturn man spoke again.
+
+"You go away to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now."
+
+"You not come back any more?"
+
+"No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip; half-way across the
+continent."
+
+"You soon forget about this country, I guess." It seemed to him now
+a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that she should
+utterly forget this night into which he threw all his life and all
+his eternity, that was a bitter thought.
+
+"No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to me for
+that. And you won't be sorry you danced this one night, will you?"
+
+"I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be so
+happy again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I only this
+one. I will dream sometimes, maybe."
+
+The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her. It was
+as when some great animal composes itself for death, as when a great
+ship goes down at sea.
+
+She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and
+looked into her eyes.
+
+"You are not always happy, too?" he asked.
+
+"No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think."
+
+"You have a trouble?"
+
+"Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I
+could cure it."
+
+He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when
+they pray, and said falteringly, "If I own all the world, I give him
+you."
+
+Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on
+his.
+
+"Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I
+should not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already."
+
+She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat
+still and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed
+to speak and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an
+ultra-refined civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant
+sophistries. Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps
+two, but the third---- Can we ever rise above nature or sink below
+her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony
+in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not always cry
+in brutal triumph: "I am here still, at the bottom of things,
+warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor
+thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its destiny."
+
+This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a giant
+barbarian, heard that cry to-night, and she was afraid! Ah! the
+terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves!
+Until then we have not lived.
+
+"Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has begun
+again," she said.
+
+He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his arm
+about her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's hammer out
+in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her, and his hand
+trembled as it had done in the dance. His face was level with hers
+now and the moonlight fell sharply upon it. All her life she had
+searched the faces of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She
+knew that that look had never shone for her before, would never
+shine for her on earth again, that such love comes to one only in
+dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable always. This
+was Love's self, in a moment it would die. Stung by the agonized
+appeal that emanated from the man's whole being, she leaned forward
+and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and again she heard the deep
+respirations rattle in his throat while she held them there, and the
+riotous force under her heart became an engulfing weakness. He drew
+her up to him until he felt all the resistance go out of her body,
+until every nerve relaxed and yielded. When she drew her face back
+from his, it was white with fear.
+
+"Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!" she muttered. And the
+drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed doom as she
+clung to the rounds of the ladder. All that she was to know of love
+she had left upon his lips.
+
+"The devil is loose again," whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric
+dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.
+
+But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the time
+when he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no quailing then! If
+ever a soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates infernal, his
+should go. For a moment he fancied he was there already, treading
+down the tempest of flame, hugging the fiery hurricane to his
+breast. He wondered whether in ages gone, all the countless years of
+sinning in which men had sold and lost and flung their souls away,
+any man had ever so cheated Satan, had ever bartered his soul for so
+great a price.
+
+It seemed but a little while till dawn.
+
+The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his
+sister said good-by. She could not meet Eric's eyes as she gave him
+her hand, but as he stood by the horse's head, just as the carriage
+moved off, she gave him one swift glance that said, "I will not
+forget." In a moment the carriage was gone.
+
+Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the watertank and
+went to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his horses to the
+door, a shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising in
+his stirrups. His rugged face was pale and worn with looking after
+his wayward flock, with dragging men into the way of salvation.
+
+"Good-morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?" he asked,
+sternly.
+
+"A dance? Oh, yes, a dance," replied Eric, cheerfully.
+
+"Certainly you did not dance, Eric?"
+
+"Yes, I danced. I danced all the time."
+
+The minister's shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound
+discouragement settled over his haggard face. There was almost
+anguish in the yearning he felt for this soul.
+
+"Eric, I didn't look for this from you. I thought God had set his
+mark on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like
+this that you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O
+foolish and perverse generation!"
+
+Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to where the
+new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with
+light. As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the
+morning, something from the only poetry he had ever read flashed
+across his mind, and he murmured, half to himself, with dreamy
+exultation:
+
+"'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
+day.'"
+
+                                      _Cosmopolitan_, April 1900
+
+
+
+
+_The Sentimentality of William Tavener_
+
+
+It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success of living in the
+West, and Hester undoubtedly was that. When people spoke of William
+Tavener as the most prosperous farmer in McPherson County, they
+usually added that his wife was a "good manager." She was an
+executive woman, quick of tongue and something of an imperatrix. The
+only reason her husband did not consult her about his business was
+that she did not wait to be consulted.
+
+It would have been quite impossible for one man, within the limited
+sphere of human action, to follow all Hester's advice, but in the
+end William usually acted upon some of her suggestions. When she
+incessantly denounced the "shiftlessness" of letting a new threshing
+machine stand unprotected in the open, he eventually built a shed
+for it. When she sniffed contemptuously at his notion of fencing a
+hog corral with sod walls, he made a spiritless beginning on the
+structure--merely to "show his temper," as she put it--but in the
+end he went off quietly to town and bought enough barbed wire to
+complete the fence. When the first heavy rains came on, and the pigs
+rooted down the sod wall and made little paths all over it to
+facilitate their ascent, he heard his wife relate with relish the
+story of the little pig that built a mud house, to the minister at
+the dinner table, and William's gravity never relaxed for an
+instant. Silence, indeed, was William's refuge and his strength.
+
+William set his boys a wholesome example to respect their mother.
+People who knew him very well suspected that he even admired her. He
+was a hard man towards his neighbors, and even towards his sons;
+grasping, determined and ambitious.
+
+There was an occasional blue day about the house when William went
+over the store bills, but he never objected to items relating to his
+wife's gowns or bonnets. So it came about that many of the foolish,
+unnecessary little things that Hester bought for boys, she had
+charged to her personal account.
+
+One spring night Hester sat in a rocking chair by the sitting room
+window, darning socks. She rocked violently and sent her long needle
+vigorously back and forth over her gourd, and it took only a very
+casual glance to see that she was wrought up over something. William
+sat on the other side of the table reading his farm paper. If he had
+noticed his wife's agitation, his calm, clean-shaven face betrayed
+no sign of concern. He must have noticed the sarcastic turn of her
+remarks at the supper table, and he must have noticed the moody
+silence of the older boys as they ate. When supper was but half over
+little Billy, the youngest, had suddenly pushed back his plate and
+slipped away from the table, manfully trying to swallow a sob. But
+William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic
+horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
+
+After supper the boys had gone to the pond under the willows in the
+big cattle corral, to get rid of the dust of plowing. Hester could
+hear an occasional splash and a laugh ringing clear through the
+stillness of the night, as she sat by the open window. She sat
+silent for almost an hour reviewing in her mind many plans of
+attack. But she was too vigorous a woman to be much of a strategist,
+and she usually came to her point with directness. At last she cut
+her thread and suddenly put her darning down, saying emphatically:
+
+"William, I don't think it would hurt you to let the boys go to that
+circus in town to-morrow."
+
+William continued to read his farm paper, but it was not Hester's
+custom to wait for an answer. She usually divined his arguments and
+assailed them one by one before he uttered them.
+
+"You've been short of hands all summer, and you've worked the boys
+hard, and a man ought use his own flesh and blood as well as he does
+his hired hands. We're plenty able to afford it, and it's little
+enough our boys ever spend. I don't see how you can expect 'em to be
+steady and hard workin', unless you encourage 'em a little. I never
+could see much harm in circuses, and our boys have never been to
+one. Oh, I know Jim Howley's boys get drunk an' carry on when they
+go, but our boys ain't that sort, an' you know it, William. The
+animals are real instructive, an' our boys don't get to see much out
+here on the prairie. It was different where we were raised, but the
+boys have got no advantages here, an' if you don't take care,
+they'll grow up to be greenhorns."
+
+Hester paused a moment, and William folded up his paper, but
+vouchsafed no remark. His sisters in Virginia had often said that
+only a quiet man like William could ever have lived with Hester
+Perkins. Secretly, William was rather proud of his wife's "gift of
+speech," and of the fact that she could talk in prayer meeting as
+fluently as a man. He confined his own efforts in that line to a
+brief prayer at Covenant meetings.
+
+Hester shook out another sock and went on.
+
+"Nobody was ever hurt by goin' to a circus. Why, law me! I remember
+I went to one myself once, when I was little. I had most forgot
+about it. It was over at Pewtown, an' I remember how I had set my
+heart on going. I don't think I'd ever forgiven my father if he
+hadn't taken me, though that red clay road was in a frightful way
+after the rain. I mind they had an elephant and six poll parrots,
+an' a Rocky Mountain lion, an' a cage of monkeys, an' two camels.
+My! but they were a sight to me then!"
+
+Hester dropped the black sock and shook her head and smiled at the
+recollection. She was not expecting anything from William yet, and
+she was fairly startled when he said gravely, in much the same tone
+in which he announced the hymns in prayer meeting:
+
+"No, there was only one camel. The other was a dromedary."
+
+She peered around the lamp and looked at him keenly.
+
+"Why, William, how come you to know?"
+
+William folded his paper and answered with some hesitation, "I was
+there, too."
+
+Hester's interest flashed up.--"Well, I never, William! To think of
+my finding it out after all these years! Why, you couldn't have been
+much bigger'n our Billy then. It seems queer I never saw you when
+you was little, to remember about you. But then you Back Creek folks
+never have anything to do with us Gap people. But how come you to
+go? Your father was stricter with you than you are with your boys."
+
+"I reckon I shouldn't 'a gone," he said slowly, "but boys will do
+foolish things. I had done a good deal of fox hunting the winter
+before, and father let me keep the bounty money. I hired Tom Smith's
+Tap to weed the corn for me, an' I slipped off unbeknownst to father
+an' went to the show."
+
+Hester spoke up warmly: "Nonsense, William! It didn't do you no
+harm, I guess. You was always worked hard enough. It must have been
+a big sight for a little fellow. That clown must have just tickled
+you to death."
+
+William crossed his knees and leaned back in his chair.
+
+"I reckon I could tell all that fool's jokes now. Sometimes I can't
+help thinkin' about 'em in meetin' when the sermon's long. I mind I
+had on a pair of new boots that hurt me like the mischief, but I
+forgot all about 'em when that fellow rode the donkey. I recall I
+had to take them boots off as soon as I got out of sight o' town,
+and walked home in the mud barefoot."
+
+"O poor little fellow!" Hester ejaculated, drawing her chair nearer
+and leaning her elbows on the table. "What cruel shoes they did use
+to make for children. I remember I went up to Back Creek to see the
+circus wagons go by. They came down from Romney, you know. The
+circus men stopped at the creek to water the animals, an' the
+elephant got stubborn an' broke a big limb off the yellow willow
+tree that grew there by the toll house porch, an' the Scribners were
+'fraid as death he'd pull the house down. But this much I saw him
+do; he waded in the creek an' filled his trunk with water, and
+squirted it in at the window and nearly ruined Ellen Scribner's pink
+lawn dress that she had just ironed an' laid out on the bed ready to
+wear to the circus."
+
+"I reckon that must have been a trial to Ellen," chuckled William,
+"for she was mighty prim in them days."
+
+Hester drew her chair still nearer William's. Since the children had
+begun growing up, her conversation with her husband had been almost
+wholly confined to questions of economy and expense. Their
+relationship had become purely a business one, like that between
+landlord and tenant. In her desire to indulge her boys she had
+unconsciously assumed a defensive and almost hostile attitude
+towards her husband. No debtor ever haggled with his usurer more
+doggedly than did Hester with her husband in behalf of her sons. The
+strategic contest had gone on so long that it had almost crowded out
+the memory of a closer relationship. This exchange of confidences
+to-night, when common recollections took them unawares and opened
+their hearts, had all the miracle of romance. They talked on and on;
+of old neighbors, of old familiar faces in the valley where they had
+grown up, of long forgotten incidents of their youth--weddings,
+picnics, sleighing parties and baptizings. For years they had talked
+of nothing else but butter and eggs and the prices of things, and
+now they had as much to say to each other as people who meet after a
+long separation.
+
+When the clock struck ten, William rose and went over to his walnut
+secretary and unlocked it. From his red leather wallet he took out a
+ten dollar bill and laid it on the table beside Hester.
+
+"Tell the boys not to stay late, an' not to drive the horses hard,"
+he said quietly, and went off to bed.
+
+Hester blew out the lamp and sat still in the dark a long time. She
+left the bill lying on the table where William had placed it. She
+had a painful sense of having missed something, or lost something;
+she felt that somehow the years had cheated her.
+
+The little locust trees that grew by the fence were white with
+blossoms. Their heavy odor floated in to her on the night wind and
+recalled a night long ago, when the first whip-poor-Will of the
+Spring was heard, and the rough, buxom girls of Hawkins Gap had held
+her laughing and struggling under the locust trees, and searched in
+her bosom for a lock of her sweetheart's hair, which is supposed to
+be on every girl's breast when the first whip-poor-Will sings. Two
+of those same girls had been her bridesmaids. Hester had been a very
+happy bride. She rose and went softly into the room where William
+lay. He was sleeping heavily, but occasionally moved his hand before
+his face to ward off the flies. Hester went into the parlor and took
+the piece of mosquito net from the basket of wax apples and pears
+that her sister had made before she died. One of the boys had
+brought it all the way from Virginia, packed in a tin pail, since
+Hester would not risk shipping so precious an ornament by freight.
+She went back to the bed room and spread the net over William's
+head.
+
+Then she sat down by the bed and listened to his deep, regular
+breathing until she heard the boys returning. She went out to meet
+them and warn them not to waken their father.
+
+"I'll be up early to get your breakfast, boys. Your father says you
+can go to the show." As she handed the money to the eldest, she felt
+a sudden throb of allegiance to her husband and said sharply, "And
+you be careful of that, an' don't waste it. Your father works hard
+for his money."
+
+The boys looked at each other in astonishment and felt that they had
+lost a powerful ally.
+
+                                         _Library_, May 12, 1900
+
+
+
+
+_The Namesake_
+
+
+Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Hartwell's studio on the
+Boulevard St. Michel. We were all fellow-countrymen; one from New
+Hampshire, one from Colorado, another from Nevada, several from the
+farm lands of the Middle West, and I myself from California. Lyon
+Hartwell, though born abroad, was simply, as every one knew, "from
+America." He seemed, almost more than any other one living man, to
+mean all of it--from ocean to ocean. When he was in Paris, his
+studio was always open to the seven of us who were there that
+evening, and we intruded upon his leisure as often as we thought
+permissible.
+
+Although we were within the terms of the easiest of all intimacies,
+and although the great sculptor, even when he was more than usually
+silent, was at all times the most gravely cordial of hosts, yet, on
+that long remembered evening, as the sunlight died on the burnished
+brown of the horse-chestnuts below the windows, a perceptible
+dullness yawned through our conversation.
+
+We were, indeed, somewhat low in spirit, for one of our number,
+Charley Bentley, was leaving us indefinitely, in response to an
+imperative summons from home. To-morrow his studio, just across the
+hall from Hartwell's, was to pass into other hands, and Bentley's
+luggage was even now piled in discouraged resignation before his
+door. The various bales and boxes seemed literally to weigh upon us
+as we sat in his neighbor's hospitable rooms, drearily putting in
+the time until he should leave us to catch the ten o'clock express
+for Dieppe.
+
+The day we had got through very comfortably, for Bentley made it the
+occasion of a somewhat pretentious luncheon at Maxim's. There had
+been twelve of us at table, and the two young Poles were thirsty,
+the Gascon so fabulously entertaining, that it was near upon five
+o'clock when we put down our liqueur glasses for the last time, and
+the red, perspiring waiter, having pocketed the reward of his
+arduous and protracted services, bowed us affably to the door,
+flourishing his napkin and brushing back the streaks of wet, black
+hair from his rosy forehead. Our guests having betaken themselves
+belated to their respective engagements, the rest of us returned
+with Bentley--only to be confronted by the depressing array before
+his door. A glance about his denuded rooms had sufficed to chill the
+glow of the afternoon, and we fled across the hall in a body and
+begged Lyon Hartwell to take us in.
+
+Bentley had said very little about it, but we all knew what it meant
+to him to be called home. Each of us knew what it would mean to
+himself, and each had felt something of that quickened sense of
+opportunity which comes at seeing another man in any way counted out
+of the race. Never had the game seemed so enchanting, the chance to
+play it such a piece of unmerited, unbelievable good fortune.
+
+It must have been, I think, about the middle of October, for I
+remember that the sycamores were almost bare in the Luxembourg
+Gardens that morning, and the terrace about the queens of France
+were strewn with crackling brown leaves. The fat red roses, out the
+summer long on the stand of the old flower woman at the corner, had
+given place to dahlias and purple asters. First glimpses of autumn
+toilettes flashed from the carriages; wonderful little bonnets
+nodded at one along the Champs-Elysées; and in the Quarter an
+occasional feather boa, red or black or white, brushed one's coat
+sleeve in the gay twilight of the early evening. The crisp, sunny
+autumn air was all day full of the stir of people and carriages and
+of the cheer of salutations; greetings of the students, returned
+brown and bearded from their holiday, gossip of people come back
+from Trouville, from St. Valery, from Dieppe, from all over Brittany
+and the Norman coast. Everywhere was the joyousness of return, the
+taking up again of life and work and play.
+
+I had felt ever since early morning that this was the saddest of all
+possible seasons for saying good-by to that old, old city of youth,
+and to that little corner of it on the south shore which since the
+Dark Ages themselves--yes, and before--has been so peculiarly the
+land of the young.
+
+I can recall our very postures as we lounged about Hartwell's rooms
+that evening, with Bentley making occasional hurried trips to his
+desolated workrooms across the hall--as if haunted by a feeling of
+having forgotten something--or stopping to poke nervously at his
+_perroquets_, which he had bequeathed to Hartwell, gilt cage and
+all. Our host himself sat on the couch, his big, bronze-like
+shoulders backed up against the window, his shaggy head, beaked
+nose, and long chin cut clean against the gray light.
+
+Our drowsing interest, in so far as it could be said to be fixed
+upon anything, was centered upon Hartwell's new figure, which stood
+on the block ready to be cast in bronze, intended as a monument for
+some American battlefield. He called it "The Color Sergeant." It was
+the figure of a young soldier running, clutching the folds of a
+flag, the staff of which had been shot away. We had known it in all
+the stages of its growth, and the splendid action and feeling of the
+thing had come to have a kind of special significance for the half
+dozen of us who often gathered at Hartwell's rooms--though, in
+truth, there was as much to dishearten one as to inflame, in the
+case of a man who had done so much in a field so amazingly
+difficult; who had thrown up in bronze all the restless, teeming
+force of that adventurous wave still climbing westward in our own
+land across the waters. We recalled his "Scout," his "Pioneer," his
+"Gold Seekers," and those monuments in which he had invested one and
+another of the heroes of the Civil War with such convincing dignity
+and power.
+
+"Where in the world does he get the heat to make an idea like that
+carry?" Bentley remarked morosely, scowling at the clay figure.
+"Hang me, Hartwell, if I don't think it's just because you're not
+really an American at all, that you can look at it like that."
+
+The big man shifted uneasily against the window. "Yes," he replied
+smiling, "perhaps there is something in that. My citizenship was
+somewhat belated and emotional in its flowering. I've half a mind to
+tell you about it, Bentley." He rose uncertainly, and, after
+hesitating a moment, went back into his workroom, where he began
+fumbling among the litter in the corners.
+
+At the prospect of any sort of personal expression from Hartwell, we
+glanced questioningly at one another; for although he made us feel
+that he liked to have us about, we were always held at a distance by
+a certain diffidence of his. There were rare occasions--when he was
+in the heat of work or of ideas--when he forgot to be shy, but they
+were so exceptional that no flattery was quite so seductive as being
+taken for a moment into Hartwell's confidence. Even in the matter of
+opinions--the commonest of currency in our circle--he was niggardly
+and prone to qualify. No man ever guarded his mystery more
+effectually. There was a singular, intense spell, therefore, about
+those few evenings when he had broken through this excessive
+modesty, or shyness, or melancholy, and had, as it were, committed
+himself.
+
+When Hartwell returned from the back room, he brought with him an
+unframed canvas which he put on an easel near his clay figure. We
+drew close about it, for the darkness was rapidly coming on. Despite
+the dullness of the light, we instantly recognized the boy of
+Hartwell's "Color Sergeant." It was the portrait of a very handsome
+lad in uniform, standing beside a charger impossibly rearing. Not
+only in his radiant countenance and flashing eyes, but in every line
+of his young body there was an energy, a gallantry, a joy of life,
+that arrested and challenged one.
+
+"Yes, that's where I got the notion," Hartwell remarked, wandering
+back to his seat in the window. "I've wanted to do it for years, but
+I've never felt quite sure of myself. I was afraid of missing it. He
+was an uncle of mine, my father's half-brother, and I was named for
+him. He was killed in one of the big battles of Sixty-four, when I
+was a child. I never saw him--never knew him until he had been dead
+for twenty years. And then, one night, I came to know him as we
+sometimes do living persons--intimately, in a single moment."
+
+He paused to knock the ashes out of his short pipe, refilled it, and
+puffed at it thoughtfully for a few moments with his hands on his
+knees. Then, settling back heavily among the cushions and looking
+absently out of the window, he began his story. As he proceeded
+further and further into the experience which he was trying to
+convey to us, his voice sank so low and was sometimes so charged
+with feeling, that I almost thought he had forgotten our presence
+and was remembering aloud. Even Bentley forgot his nervousness in
+astonishment and sat breathless under the spell of the man's thus
+breathing his memories out into the dusk.
+
+"It was just fifteen years ago this last spring that I first went
+home, and Bentley's having to cut away like this brings it all back
+to me.
+
+"I was born, you know, in Italy. My father was a sculptor, though I
+dare say you've not heard of him. He was one of those first fellows
+who went over after Story and Powers,--went to Italy for 'Art,'
+quite simply; to lift from its native bough the willing, iridescent
+bird. Their story is told, informingly enough, by some of those
+ingenuous marble things at the Metropolitan. My father came over
+some time before the outbreak of the Civil War, and was regarded as
+a renegade by his family because he did not go home to enter the
+army. His half-brother, the only child of my grandfather's second
+marriage, enlisted at fifteen and was killed the next year. I was
+ten years old when the news of his death reached us. My mother died
+the following winter, and I was sent away to a Jesuit school, while
+my father, already ill himself, stayed on at Rome, chipping away at
+his Indian maidens and marble goddesses, still gloomily seeking the
+thing for which he had made himself the most unhappy of exiles.
+
+"He died when I was fourteen, but even before that I had been put to
+work under an Italian sculptor. He had an almost morbid desire that
+I should carry on his work, under, as he often pointed out to me,
+conditions so much more auspicious. He left me in the charge of his
+one intimate friend, an American gentleman in the consulate at Rome,
+and his instructions were that I was to be educated there and to
+live there until I was twenty-one. After I was of age, I came to
+Paris and studied under one master after another until I was nearly
+thirty. Then, almost for the first time, I was confronted by a duty
+which was not my pleasure.
+
+"My grandfather's death, at an advanced age, left an invalid maiden
+sister of my father's quite alone in the world. She had suffered for
+years from a cerebral disease, a slow decay of the faculties which
+rendered her almost helpless. I decided to go to America and, if
+possible, bring her back to Paris, where I seemed on my way toward
+what my poor father had wished for me.
+
+"On my arrival at my father's birthplace, however, I found that this
+was not to be thought of. To tear this timid, feeble, shrinking
+creature, doubly aged by years and illness, from the spot where she
+had been rooted for a lifetime, would have been little short of
+brutality. To leave her to the care of strangers seemed equally
+heartless. There was clearly nothing for me to do but to remain and
+wait for that slow and painless malady to run its course. I was
+there something over two years.
+
+"My grandfather's home, his father's homestead before him, lay on
+the high banks of a river in Western Pennsylvania. The little town
+twelve miles down the stream, whither my great-grandfather used to
+drive his ox-wagon on market days, had become, in two generations,
+one of the largest manufacturing cities in the world. For hundreds
+of miles about us the gentle hill slopes were honeycombed with gas
+wells and coal shafts; oil derricks creaked in every valley and
+meadow; the brooks were sluggish and discolored with crude
+petroleum, and the air was impregnated by its searching odor. The
+great glass and iron manufactories had come up and up the river
+almost to our very door; their smoky exhalations brooded over us,
+and their crashing was always in our ears. I was plunged into the
+very incandescence of human energy. But, though my nerves tingled
+with the feverish, passionate endeavor which snapped in the very air
+about me, none of these great arteries seemed to feed me; this
+tumultuous life did not warm me. On every side were the great muddy
+rivers, the ragged mountains from which the timber was being
+ruthlessly torn away, the vast tracts of wild country, and the
+gulches that were like wounds in the earth; everywhere the glare of
+that relentless energy which followed me like a searchlight and
+seemed to scorch and consume me. I could only hide myself in the
+tangled garden, where the dropping of a leaf or the whistle of a
+bird was the only incident.
+
+"The Hartwell homestead had been sold away little by little, until
+all that remained of it was garden and orchard. The house, a square
+brick structure, stood in the midst of a great garden which sloped
+toward the river, ending in a grassy bank which fell some forty feet
+to the water's edge. The garden was now little more than a tangle of
+neglected shrubbery; damp, rank, and of that intense blue-green
+peculiar to vegetation in smoky places where the sun shines but
+rarely, and the mists form early in the evening and hang late in the
+morning.
+
+"I shall never forget it as I saw it first, when I arrived there in
+the chill of a backward June. The long, rank grass, thick and soft
+and falling in billows, was always wet until midday. The gravel
+walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes, mock-orange, and
+bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected rose garden,
+surrounded by a low stone wall over which the long suckers trailed
+and matted. They had wound their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon
+layer, about the lock and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even
+the porches of the house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy
+with growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet vine. The
+garden was grown up with trees, especially that part of it which lay
+above the river. The bark of the old locusts was blackened by the
+smoke that crept continually up the valley, and their feathery
+foliage, so merry in its movement and so yellow and joyous in its
+color, seemed peculiarly precious under that somber sky. There were
+sycamores and copper beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear;
+and fall pear-trees, hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all
+with a leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid
+in color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my
+great-grandfather built his cabin there, more than a century before,
+and this garden was almost the only spot for miles along the river
+where any of the original forest growth still survived. The smoke
+from the mills was fatal to trees of the larger sort, and even these
+had the look of doomed things--bent a little toward the town and
+seemed to wait with head inclined before that on-coming, shrieking
+force.
+
+"About the river, too, there was a strange hush, a tragic
+submission--it was so leaden and sullen in its color, and it flowed
+so soundlessly forever past our door.
+
+"I sat there every evening, on the high veranda overlooking it,
+watching the dim outlines of the steep hills on the other shore, the
+flicker of the lights on the island, where there was a boat-house,
+and listening to the call of the boatmen through the mist. The mist
+came as certainly as night, whitened by moonshine or starshine. The
+tin water-pipes went splash, splash, with it all evening, and the
+wind, when it rose at all, was little more than a sighing of the old
+boughs and a troubled breath in the heavy grasses.
+
+"At first it was to think of my distant friends and my old life that
+I used to sit there; but after awhile it was simply to watch the
+days and weeks go by, like the river which seemed to carry them
+away.
+
+"Within the house I was never at home. Month followed month, and yet
+I could feel no sense of kinship with anything there. Under the roof
+where my father and grandfather were born, I remained utterly
+detached. The somber rooms never spoke to me, the old furniture
+never seemed tinctured with race. This portrait of my boy uncle was
+the only thing to which I could draw near, the only link with
+anything I had ever known before.
+
+"There is a good deal of my father in the face, but it is my father
+transformed and glorified; his hesitating discontent drowned in a
+kind of triumph. From my first day in that house, I continually
+turned to this handsome kinsman of mine, wondering in what terms he
+had lived and had his hope; what he had found there to look like
+that, to bound at one, after all those years, so joyously out of the
+canvas.
+
+"From the timid, clouded old woman over whose life I had come to
+watch, I learned that in the backyard, near the old rose garden,
+there was a locust-tree which my uncle had planted. After his death,
+while it was still a slender sapling, his mother had a seat built
+round it, and she used to sit there on summer evenings. His grave
+was under the apple-trees in the old orchard.
+
+"My aunt could tell me little more than this. There were days when
+she seemed not to remember him at all.
+
+"It was from an old soldier in the village that I learned the boy's
+story. Lyon was, the old man told me, but fourteen when the first
+enlistment occurred, but was even then eager to go. He was in the
+court-house square every evening to watch the recruits at their
+drill, and when the home company was ordered off he rode into the
+city on his pony to see the men board the train and to wave them
+good-by. The next year he spent at home with a tutor, but when he
+was fifteen he held his parents to their promise and went into the
+army. He was color sergeant of his regiment and fell in a charge
+upon the breastworks of a fort about a year after his enlistment.
+
+"The veteran showed me an account of this charge which had been
+written for the village paper by one of my uncle's comrades who had
+seen his part in the engagement. It seems that as his company were
+running at full speed across the bottom lands toward the fortified
+hill, a shell burst over them. This comrade, running beside my
+uncle, saw the colors waver and sink as if falling, and looked to
+see that the boy's hand and forearm had been torn away by the
+exploding shrapnel. The boy, he thought, did not realize the extent
+of his injury, for he laughed, shouted something which his comrade
+did not catch, caught the flag in his left hand, and ran on up the
+hill. They went splendidly up over the breastworks, but just as my
+uncle, his colors flying, reached the top of the embankment, a
+second shell carried away his left arm at the arm-pit, and he fell
+over the wall with the flag settling about him.
+
+"It was because this story was ever present with me, because I was
+unable to shake it off, that I began to read such books as my
+grandfather had collected upon the Civil War. I found that this war
+was fought largely by boys, that more men enlisted at eighteen than
+at any other age. When I thought of those battlefields--and I
+thought of them much in those days--there was always that glory of
+youth above them, that impetuous, generous passion stirring the long
+lines on the march, the blue battalions in the plain. The bugle,
+whenever I have heard it since, has always seemed to me the very
+golden throat of that boyhood which spent itself so gaily, so
+incredibly.
+
+"I used often to wonder how it was that this uncle of mine, who
+seemed to have possessed all the charm and brilliancy allotted to
+his family and to have lived up its vitality in one splendid hour,
+had left so little trace in the house where he was born and where he
+had awaited his destiny. Look as I would, I could find no letters
+from him, no clothing or books that might have been his. He had been
+dead but twenty years, and yet nothing seemed to have survived
+except the tree he had planted. It seemed incredible and cruel that
+no physical memory of him should linger to be cherished among his
+kindred,--nothing but the dull image in the brain of that aged
+sister. I used to pace the garden walks in the evening, wondering
+that no breath of his, no echo of his laugh, of his call to his pony
+or his whistle to his dogs, should linger about those shaded paths
+where the pale roses exhaled their dewy, country smell. Sometimes,
+in the dim starlight, I have thought that I heard on the grasses
+beside me the stir of a footfall lighter than my own, and under the
+black arch of the lilacs I have fancied that he bore me company.
+
+"There was, I found, one day in the year for which my old aunt
+waited, and which stood out from the months that were all of a
+sameness to her. On the thirtieth of May she insisted that I should
+bring down the big flag from the attic and run it up upon the tall
+flagstaff beside Lyon's tree in the garden. Later in the morning she
+went with me to carry some of the garden flowers to the grave in the
+orchard,--a grave scarcely larger than a child's.
+
+"I had noticed, when I was hunting for the flag in the attic, a
+leather trunk with my own name stamped upon it, but was unable to
+find the key. My aunt was all day less apathetic than usual; she
+seemed to realize more clearly who I was, and to wish me to be with
+her. I did not have an opportunity to return to the attic until
+after dinner that evening, when I carried a lamp up-stairs and
+easily forced the lock of the trunk. I found all the things that I
+had looked for; put away, doubtless, by his mother, and still
+smelling faintly of lavender and rose leaves; his clothes, his
+exercise books, his letters from the army, his first boots, his
+riding-whip, some of his toys, even. I took them out and replaced
+them gently. As I was about to shut the lid, I picked up a copy of
+the Æneid, on the fly-leaf of which was written in a slanting,
+boyish hand,
+
+  Lyon Hartwell, January, 1862.
+
+He had gone to the wars in Sixty-three, I remembered.
+
+"My uncle, I gathered, was none too apt at his Latin, for the pages
+were dog-eared and rubbed and interlined, the margins mottled with
+pencil sketches--bugles, stacked bayonets, and artillery carriages.
+In the act of putting the book down, I happened to run over the
+pages to the end, and on the fly-leaf at the back I saw his name
+again, and a drawing--with his initials and a date--of the Federal
+flag; above it, written in a kind of arch and in the same unformed
+hand:
+
+  'Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light
+  What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?'
+
+It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some
+Egyptian inscription, but, the moment I saw it, wind and color
+seemed to touch it. I caught up the book, blew out the lamp, and
+rushed down into the garden.
+
+"I seemed, somehow, at last to have known him; to have been with him
+in that careless, unconscious moment and to have known him as he was
+then.
+
+"As I sat there in the rush of this realization, the wind began to
+rise, stirring the light foliage of the locust over my head and
+bringing, fresher than before, the woody odor of the pale roses that
+overran the little neglected garden. Then, as it grew stronger, it
+brought the sound of something sighing and stirring over my head in
+the perfumed darkness.
+
+"I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the Greeks
+believed, watched from birth over those marked for a violent or
+untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the shine of the
+morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing eyes looking
+straight before him, and at his side that grave figure, hidden in
+her draperies, her eyes following his, but seeing so much
+farther--seeing what he never saw, that great moment at the end,
+when he swayed above his comrades on the earthen wall.
+
+"All the while, the bunting I had run up in the morning flapped fold
+against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the dark--against a sky
+so black with rain clouds that I could see above me only the blur of
+something in soft, troubled motion.
+
+"The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly to a man so
+dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same feeling that artists
+know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of
+union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad
+that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and
+blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not
+begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and
+rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until
+the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring
+out of me and running into the ground."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hartwell drew a long breath that lifted his heavy shoulders, and
+then let them fall again. He shifted a little and faced more
+squarely the scattered, silent company before him. The darkness had
+made us almost invisible to each other, and, except for the
+occasional red circuit of a cigarette end traveling upward from the
+arm of a chair, he might have supposed us all asleep.
+
+"And so," Hartwell added thoughtfully, "I naturally feel an interest
+in fellows who are going home. It's always an experience."
+
+No one said anything, and in a moment there was a loud rap at the
+door,--the concierge, come to take down Bentley's luggage and to
+announce that the cab was below. Bentley got his hat and coat,
+enjoined Hartwell to take good care of his _perroquets_, gave each
+of us a grip of the hand, and went briskly down the long flights of
+stairs. We followed him into the street, calling our good wishes,
+and saw him start on his drive across the lighted city to the Gare
+St. Lazare.
+
+                                         _McClure's_, March 1907
+
+
+
+
+_The Enchanted Bluff_
+
+
+We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper
+the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand
+about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown
+stretches of corn field as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of
+air that had rested over the water and our clean sand-bar grew
+fresher and smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on
+the flatter shore. The river was brown and sluggish, like any other
+of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraska corn lands. On one
+shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffs where a few
+scrub-oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops threw light
+shadows on the long grass. The western shore was low and level, with
+corn fields that stretched to the sky-line, and all along the
+water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where slim
+cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.
+
+The turbulence of the river in spring-time discouraged milling, and,
+beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did
+not concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were
+left in undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through
+the miles of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and,
+after the winter skating season was over and the ice had gone out,
+the spring freshets and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement
+of the year. The channel was never the same for two successive
+seasons. Every spring the swollen stream undermined a bluff to the
+east, or bit out a few acres of corn field to the west and whirled
+the soil away to deposit it in spumy mud banks somewhere else. When
+the water fell low in midsummer, new sand-bars were thus exposed to
+dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes these were banked so
+firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to unseat them; the
+little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth,
+broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and with their
+mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them against the
+batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood soon
+glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that, even
+on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
+road, trembled along the face of the water.
+
+It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green,
+that we built our watch-fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow
+wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added
+that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with
+ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and
+fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured. We
+had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although we
+often swam out to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.
+
+This was our last watch-fire of the year, and there were reasons why
+I should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the
+other boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown
+High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first
+country school in the Norwegian district. I was already homesick at
+the thought of quitting the boys with whom I had always played; of
+leaving the river, and going up into a windy plain that was all
+windmills and corn fields and big pastures; where there was nothing
+wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands, and no
+chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the watercourses.
+
+Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
+but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were
+friends mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler
+boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were
+the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned
+hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder,
+was the best mathematician in school, and clever at his books, but
+he always dropped out in the spring term as if the river could not
+get on without him. He and Fritz caught the fat, horned catfish and
+sold them about the town, and they lived so much in the water that
+they were as brown and sandy as the river itself.
+
+There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who
+took half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in
+for reading detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith,
+destined by his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our
+games, though he walked like a timid little old man and had a funny,
+cracked laugh. Tip worked hard in his father's grocery store every
+afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning. Even his
+recreations were laborious. He collected cigarette cards and tin
+tobacco-tags indefatigably, and would sit for hours humped up over a
+snarling little scroll-saw which he kept in his attic. His dearest
+possessions were some little pill-bottles that purported to contain
+grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from the Jordan and the
+Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His father had bought
+these dull things from a Baptist missionary who peddled them, and
+Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their remote origin.
+
+The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were
+almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant
+voice that we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to
+read poetry aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be
+sure, he was not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen
+and should have finished the High School the year before, but he was
+always off somewhere with his gun. Arthur's mother was dead, and his
+father, who was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to
+send the boy away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur
+always begged off for another year and promised to study. I remember
+him as a tall, brown boy with an intelligent face, always lounging
+among a lot of us little fellows, laughing at us oftener than with
+us, but such a soft, satisfied laugh that we felt rather flattered
+when we provoked it. In after-years people said that Arthur had been
+given to evil ways even as a lad, and it is true that we often saw
+him with the gambler's sons and with old Spanish Fanny's boy, but if
+he learned anything ugly in their company he never betrayed it to
+us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am bound to say
+that he led us into no worse places than the cattail marshes and the
+stubble fields. These, then, were the boys who camped with me that
+summer night upon the sand-bar.
+
+After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for
+driftwood. By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen,
+and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased with the
+coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire and made another
+futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it
+often before, but he could never be got past the big one.
+
+"You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the
+bright one in the middle?" said Otto Hassler; "that's Orion's belt,
+and the bright one is the clasp." I crawled behind Otto's shoulder
+and sighted up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip
+of his steady forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at
+night, and they knew a good many stars.
+
+Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands
+clasped under his head. "I can see the North Star," he announced,
+contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. "Any one might get
+lost and need to know that."
+
+We all looked up at it.
+
+"How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point
+north any more?" Tip asked.
+
+Otto shook his head. "My father says that there was another North
+Star once, and that maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what
+would happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?"
+
+Arthur chuckled. "I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to
+it in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good
+dead Indians."
+
+We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world.
+The gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a
+mutinous, complaining note in it at night, quite different from its
+cheerful daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much
+deeper and more powerful stream. Our water had always these two
+moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable,
+passionate regret.
+
+"Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams," remarked Otto.
+"You could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always
+look as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody's fortune
+is all written out in the stars, don't they?"
+
+"They believe so in the old country," Fritz affirmed.
+
+But Arthur only laughed at him. "You're thinking of Napoleon,
+Fritzey. He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles.
+I guess the stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown folks."
+
+We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred
+before the evening star went down behind the corn fields, when some
+one cried, "There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!"
+
+We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us.
+It came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing,
+red as an angry heathen god.
+
+"When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice
+their prisoners on the temple top," Percy announced.
+
+"Go on, Perce. You got that out of _Golden Days_. Do you believe
+that, Arthur?" I appealed.
+
+Arthur answered, quite seriously: "Like as not. The moon was one of
+their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where
+they used to sacrifice their prisoners."
+
+As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the
+Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the
+Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were
+still conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.
+
+"Must have been a big cat jumping," said Fritz. "They do sometimes.
+They must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!"
+
+There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current
+fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.
+
+"Suppose there ever _was_ any gold hid away in this old river?"
+Fritz asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire,
+his chin on his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother
+laughed at him, but Arthur took his suggestion seriously.
+
+"Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere.
+Seven cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his
+men came up to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country
+once."
+
+Percy looked interested. "Was that before the Mormons went through?"
+
+We all laughed at this.
+
+"Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they
+came along this very river. They always followed the watercourses."
+
+"I wonder where this river really does begin?" Tip mused. That was
+an old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain.
+On the map the little black line stopped somewhere in western
+Kansas; but since rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only
+reasonable to suppose that ours came from the Rockies. Its
+destination, we knew, was the Missouri, and the Hassler boys always
+maintained that we could embark at Sandtown in flood-time, follow
+our noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans. Now they took up
+their old argument. "If us boys had grit enough to try it, it
+wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St. Joe."
+
+We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler
+boys wanted to see the stock-yards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted
+to see a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not
+betray himself.
+
+"Now it's your turn, Tip."
+
+Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked
+shyly out of his queer, tight little face. "My place is awful far
+away. My uncle Bill told me about it."
+
+Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had
+drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had
+drifted out again.
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+"Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads
+or anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water
+before you get there and have to drink canned tomatoes."
+
+"Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?"
+
+Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.
+
+"There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for
+about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this
+here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the
+Enchanted Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on
+top of it. The sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall.
+The Indians say that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards
+came, there was a village away up there in the air. The tribe that
+lived there had some sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, hung
+down over the face of the bluff, and the braves went down to hunt
+and carried water up in big jars swung on their backs. They kept a
+big supply of water and dried meat up there, and never went down
+except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe that made cloth and
+pottery, and they went up there to get out of the wars. You see,
+they could pick off any war party that tried to get up their little
+steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and they had
+some sort of a queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were
+Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't
+fighters, anyhow.
+
+"One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a
+kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found
+their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few
+steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped
+at the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the
+north came along and massacred 'em to a man, with all the old folks
+and women looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south
+and left the village to get down the best way they could. Of course
+they never got down. They starved to death up there, and when the
+war party came back on their way north, they could hear the children
+crying from the edge of the bluff where they had crawled out, but
+they didn't see a sign of a grown Indian, and nobody has ever been
+up there since."
+
+We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.
+
+"There couldn't have been many people up there," Percy demurred.
+"How big is the top, Tip?"
+
+"Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as
+tall as it is. The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of
+worn away for several hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so
+hard to climb."
+
+I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.
+
+"Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along
+once and saw that there was a town up there, and that was all."
+
+Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. "Of course there must be
+some way to get up there. Couldn't people get a rope over someway
+and pull a ladder up?"
+
+Tip's little eyes were shining with excitement. "I know a way. Me
+and Uncle Bill talked it all over. There's a kind of rocket that
+would take a rope over--life-savers use 'em--and then you could
+hoist a rope-ladder and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight
+with guy-ropes on the other side. I'm going to climb that there
+bluff, and I've got it all planned out."
+
+Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.
+
+"Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of
+their idols. There might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want
+to see."
+
+"Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?" Arthur asked.
+
+"Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried
+to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man
+can reach. The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a
+boulder the glaciers left. It's a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but
+cactus and desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the
+bluff there's good water and plenty of grass. That's why the bison
+used to go down there."
+
+Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a
+dark, slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping-crane,
+we knew by her cry and her long neck. We ran to the edge of the
+island, hoping we might see her alight, but she wavered southward
+along the rivercourse until we lost her. The Hassler boys declared
+that by the look of the heavens it must be after midnight, so we
+threw more wood on our fire, put on our jackets, and curled down in
+the warm sand. Several of us pretended to doze, but I fancy we were
+really thinking about Tip's Bluff and the extinct people. Over in
+the wood the ring-doves were calling mournfully to one another, and
+once we heard a dog bark, far away. "Somebody getting into old
+Tommy's melon patch," Fritz murmured, sleepily, but nobody answered
+him. By and by Percy spoke out of the shadow.
+
+"Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?"
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?"
+
+"Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell the rest
+of us exactly what he finds," remarked one of the Hassler boys, and
+to this we all readily assented.
+
+Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have dreamed
+about a race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear that other
+people were getting ahead of me and that I was losing my chance. I
+sat up in my damp clothes and looked at the other boys, who lay
+tumbled in uneasy attitudes about the dead fire. It was still dark,
+but the sky was blue with the last wonderful azure of night. The
+stars glistened like crystal globes, and trembled as if they shone
+through a depth of clear water. Even as I watched, they began to
+pale and the sky brightened. Day came suddenly, almost
+instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue night, and it
+was gone. Everywhere the birds began to call, and all manner of
+little insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows. A breeze
+sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened corn.
+The boys rolled over and shook themselves. We stripped and plunged
+into the river just as the sun came up over the windy bluffs.
+
+When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out to our
+island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted Bluff,
+renewing our resolution to find it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the
+Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and
+will go nowhere that his red touring-car cannot carry him. Otto
+Hassler went on the railroad and lost his foot braking; after which
+he and Fritz succeeded their father as the town tailors.
+
+Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before
+he was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was home on one
+of my college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer-chair under a
+cottonwood tree in the little yard behind one of the two Sandtown
+saloons. He was very untidy and his hand was not steady, but when he
+rose, unabashed, to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as
+ever. When I had talked with him for an hour and heard him laugh
+again, I wondered how it was that when Nature had taken such pains
+with a man, from his hands to the arch of his long foot, she had
+ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about Tip Smith's Bluff, and
+declared he was going down there just as soon as the weather got
+cooler; he thought the Grand Cañon might be worth while, too.
+
+I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond
+the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood.
+And, indeed, it was under that very tree that he died one summer
+morning.
+
+Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married a
+slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a
+perambulator, and has grown stooped and gray from irregular meals
+and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over,
+and he has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in
+Sandtown I walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he
+had balanced his cash and shut up his store. We took the long way
+around and sat down on the schoolhouse steps, and between us we
+quite revived the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct
+people. Tip insists that he still means to go down there, but he
+thinks now he will wait until his boy, Bert, is old enough to go
+with him. Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing
+but the Enchanted Bluff.
+
+                                          _Harper's_, April 1909
+
+
+
+
+_The Joy of Nelly Deane_
+
+
+Nell and I were almost ready to go on for the last act of "Queen
+Esther," and we had for the moment got rid of our three patient
+dressers, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny. Nell was peering
+over my shoulder into the little cracked looking-glass that Mrs. Dow
+had taken from its nail on her kitchen wall and brought down to the
+church under her shawl that morning. When she realized that we were
+alone, Nell whispered to me in the quick, fierce way she had:
+
+"Say, Peggy, won't you go up and stay with me to-night? Scott
+Spinny's asked to take me home, and I don't want to walk up with him
+alone."
+
+"I guess so, if you'll ask my mother."
+
+"Oh, I'll fix her!" Nell laughed, with a toss of her head which
+meant that she usually got what she wanted, even from people much
+less tractable than my mother.
+
+In a moment our tiring-women were back again. The three old
+ladies--at least they seemed old to us--fluttered about us, more
+agitated than we were ourselves. It seemed as though they would
+never leave off patting Nell and touching her up. They kept trying
+things this way and that, never able in the end to decide which way
+was best. They wouldn't hear to her using rouge, and as they
+powdered her neck and arms, Mrs. Freeze murmured that she hoped we
+wouldn't get into the habit of using such things. Mrs. Spinny
+divided her time between pulling up and tucking down the "illusion"
+that filled in the square neck of Nelly's dress. She didn't like
+things much low, she said; but after she had pulled it up, she stood
+back and looked at Nell thoughtfully through her glasses. While the
+excited girl was reaching for this and that, buttoning a slipper,
+pinning down a curl, Mrs. Spinny's smile softened more and more
+until, just before _Esther_ made her entrance, the old lady tiptoed
+up to her and softly tucked the illusion down as far as it would go.
+
+"She's so pink; it seems a pity not," she whispered apologetically
+to Mrs. Dow.
+
+Every one admitted that Nelly was the prettiest girl in Riverbend,
+and the gayest--oh, the gayest! When she was not singing, she was
+laughing. When she was not laid up with a broken arm, the outcome of
+a foolhardy coasting feat, or suspended from school because she ran
+away at recess to go buggy-riding with Guy Franklin, she was sure to
+be up to mischief of some sort. Twice she broke through the ice and
+got soused in the river because she never looked where she skated or
+cared what happened so long as she went fast enough. After the
+second of these duckings our three dressers declared that she was
+trying to be a Baptist despite herself.
+
+Mrs. Spinny and Mrs. Freeze and Mrs. Dow, who were always hovering
+about Nelly, often whispered to me their hope that she would
+eventually come into our church and not "go with the Methodists";
+her family were Wesleyans. But to me these artless plans of theirs
+never wholly explained their watchful affection. They had good
+daughters themselves,--except Mrs. Spinny, who had only the sullen
+Scott,--and they loved their plain girls and thanked God for them.
+But they loved Nelly differently. They were proud of her pretty
+figure and yellow-brown eyes, which dilated so easily and sparkled
+with a kind of golden effervescence. They were always making pretty
+things for her, always coaxing her to come to the sewing-circle,
+where she knotted her thread, and put in the wrong sleeve, and
+laughed and chattered and said a great many things that she should
+not have said, and somehow always warmed their hearts. I think they
+loved her for her unquenchable joy.
+
+All the Baptist ladies liked Nell, even those who criticized her
+most severely, but the three who were first in fighting the battles
+of our little church, who held it together by their prayers and the
+labor of their hands, watched over her as they did over Mrs. Dow's
+century-plant before it blossomed. They looked for her on Sunday
+morning and smiled at her as she hurried, always a little late, up
+to the choir. When she rose and stood behind the organ and sang
+"There Is a Green Hill," one could see Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Freeze
+settle back in their accustomed seats and look up at her as if she
+had just come from that hill and had brought them glad tidings.
+
+It was because I sang contralto, or, as we said, alto, in the
+Baptist choir that Nell and I became friends. She was so gay and
+grown up, so busy with parties and dances and picnics, that I would
+scarcely have seen much of her had we not sung together. She liked
+me better than she did any of the older girls, who tried clumsily to
+be like her, and I felt almost as solicitous and admiring as did
+Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Spinny. I think even then I must have loved to see
+her bloom and glow, and I loved to hear her sing, in "The Ninety and
+Nine,"
+
+  But one was out on the hills away
+
+in her sweet, strong voice. Nell had never had a singing lesson, but
+she had sung from the time she could talk, and Mrs. Dow used fondly
+to say that it was singing so much that made her figure so pretty.
+
+After I went into the choir it was found to be easier to get Nelly
+to choir practice. If I stopped outside her gate on my way to church
+and coaxed her, she usually laughed, ran in for her hat and jacket,
+and went along with me. The three old ladies fostered our
+friendship, and because I was "quiet," they esteemed me a good
+influence for Nelly. This view was propounded in a sewing-circle
+discussion and, leaking down to us through our mothers, greatly
+amused us. Dear old ladies! It was so manifestly for what Nell was
+that they loved her, and yet they were always looking for
+"influences" to change her.
+
+The "Queen Esther" performance had cost us three months of hard
+practice, and it was not easy to keep Nell up to attending the
+tedious rehearsals. Some of the boys we knew were in the chorus of
+Assyrian youths, but the solo cast was made up of older people, and
+Nell found them very poky. We gave the cantata in the Baptist church
+on Christmas eve, "to a crowded house," as the Riverbend "Messenger"
+truly chronicled. The country folk for miles about had come in
+through a deep snow, and their teams and wagons stood in a long row
+at the hitch-bars on each side of the church door. It was certainly
+Nelly's night, for however much the tenor--he was her schoolmaster,
+and naturally thought poorly of her--might try to eclipse her in his
+dolorous solos about the rivers of Babylon, there could be no doubt
+as to whom the people had come to hear--and to see.
+
+After the performance was over, our fathers and mothers came back to
+the dressing-rooms--the little rooms behind the baptistry where the
+candidates for baptism were robed--to congratulate us, and Nell
+persuaded my mother to let me go home with her. This arrangement may
+not have been wholly agreeable to Scott Spinny, who stood glumly
+waiting at the baptistry door; though I used to think he dogged
+Nell's steps not so much for any pleasure he got from being with her
+as for the pleasure of keeping other people away. Dear little Mrs.
+Spinny was perpetually in a state of humiliation on account of his
+bad manners, and she tried by a very special tenderness to make up
+to Nelly for the remissness of her ungracious son.
+
+Scott was a spare, muscular fellow, good-looking, but with a face so
+set and dark that I used to think it very like the castings he sold.
+He was taciturn and domineering, and Nell rather liked to provoke
+him. Her father was so easy with her that she seemed to enjoy being
+ordered about now and then. That night, when every one was praising
+her and telling her how well she sang and how pretty she looked,
+Scott only said, as we came out of the dressing-room:
+
+"Have you got your high shoes on?"
+
+"No; but I've got rubbers on over my low ones. Mother doesn't care."
+
+"Well, you just go back and put 'em on as fast as you can."
+
+Nell made a face at him and ran back, laughing. Her mother, fat,
+comfortable Mrs. Deane, was immensely amused at this.
+
+"That's right, Scott," she chuckled. "You can do enough more with
+her than I can. She walks right over me an' Jud."
+
+Scott grinned. If he was proud of Nelly, the last thing he wished to
+do was to show it. When she came back he began to nag again. "What
+are you going to do with all those flowers? They'll freeze stiff as
+pokers."
+
+"Well, there won't none of _your_ flowers freeze, Scott Spinny, so
+there!" Nell snapped. She had the best of him that time, and the
+Assyrian youths rejoiced. They were most of them high-school boys,
+and the poorest of them had "chipped in" and sent all the way to
+Denver for _Queen Esther's_ flowers. There were bouquets from half a
+dozen townspeople, too, but none from Scott. Scott was a prosperous
+hardware merchant and notoriously penurious, though he saved his
+face, as the boys said, by giving liberally to the church.
+
+"There's no use freezing the fool things, anyhow. You get me some
+newspapers, and I'll wrap 'em up." Scott took from his pocket a
+folded copy of the Riverbend "Messenger" and began laboriously to
+wrap up one of the bouquets. When we left the church door he bore
+three large newspaper bundles, carrying them as carefully as if they
+had been so many newly frosted wedding-cakes, and left Nell and me
+to shift for ourselves as we floundered along the snow-burdened
+sidewalk.
+
+Although it was after midnight, lights were shining from many of the
+little wooden houses, and the roofs and shrubbery were so deep in
+snow that Riverbend looked as if it had been tucked down into a warm
+bed. The companies of people, all coming from church, tramping this
+way and that toward their homes and calling "Good night" and "Merry
+Christmas" as they parted company, all seemed to us very unusual and
+exciting.
+
+When we got home, Mrs. Deane had a cold supper ready, and Jud Deane
+had already taken off his shoes and fallen to on his fried chicken
+and pie. He was so proud of his pretty daughter that he must give
+her her Christmas presents then and there, and he went into the
+sleeping-chamber behind the dining-room and from the depths of his
+wife's closet brought out a short sealskin jacket and a round cap
+and made Nelly put them on.
+
+Mrs. Deane, who sat busy between a plate of spice cake and a tray
+piled with her famous whipped-cream tarts, laughed inordinately at
+his behavior.
+
+"Ain't he worse than any kid you ever see? He's been running to that
+closet like a cat shut away from her kittens. I wonder Nell ain't
+caught on before this. I did think he'd make out now to keep 'em
+till Christmas morning; but he's never made out to keep anything
+yet."
+
+That was true enough, and fortunately Jud's inability to keep
+anything seemed always to present a highly humorous aspect to his
+wife. Mrs. Deane put her heart into her cooking, and said that so
+long as a man was a good provider she had no cause to complain.
+Other people were not so charitable toward Jud's failing. I remember
+how many strictures were passed upon that little sealskin and how he
+was censured for his extravagance. But what a public-spirited thing,
+after all, it was for him to do! How, the winter through, we all
+enjoyed seeing Nell skating on the river or running about the town
+with the brown collar turned up about her bright cheeks and her hair
+blowing out from under the round cap! "No seal," Mrs. Dow said,
+"would have begrudged it to her. Why should we?" This was at the
+sewing-circle, when the new coat was under grave discussion.
+
+At last Nelly and I got up-stairs and undressed, and the pad of
+Jud's slippered feet about the kitchen premises--where he was
+carrying up from the cellar things that might freeze--ceased. He
+called "Good night, daughter," from the foot of the stairs, and the
+house grew quiet. But one is not a prima donna the first time for
+nothing, and it seemed as if we could not go to bed. Our light must
+have burned long after every other in Riverbend was out. The muslin
+curtains of Nell's bed were drawn back; Mrs. Deane had turned down
+the white counterpane and taken off the shams and smoothed the
+pillows for us. But their fair plumpness offered no temptation to
+two such hot young heads. We could not let go of life even for a
+little while. We sat and talked in Nell's cozy room, where there was
+a tiny, white fur rug--the only one in Riverbend--before the bed;
+and there were white sash curtains, and the prettiest little desk
+and dressing-table I had ever seen. It was a warm, gay little room,
+flooded all day long with sunlight from east and south windows that
+had climbing-roses all about them in summer. About the dresser were
+photographs of adoring high-school boys; and one of Guy Franklin,
+much groomed and barbered, in a dress-coat and a boutonnière. I
+never liked to see that photograph there. The home boys looked
+properly modest and bashful on the dresser, but he seemed to be
+staring impudently all the time.
+
+I knew nothing definite against Guy, but in Riverbend all
+"traveling-men" were considered worldly and wicked. He traveled for
+a Chicago dry-goods firm, and our fathers didn't like him because he
+put extravagant ideas into our mothers' heads. He had very smooth
+and nattering ways, and he introduced into our simple community a
+great variety of perfumes and scented soaps, and he always reminded
+me of the merchants in Cæsar, who brought into Gaul "those things
+which effeminate the mind," as we translated that delightfully easy
+passage.
+
+Nell was silting before the dressing-table in her nightgown, holding
+the new fur coat and rubbing her cheek against it, when I saw a
+sudden gleam of tears in her eyes. "You know, Peggy," she said in
+her quick, impetuous way, "this makes me feel bad. I've got a secret
+from my daddy."
+
+I can see her now, so pink and eager, her brown hair in two springy
+braids down her back, and her eyes shining with tears and with
+something even softer and more tremulous.
+
+"I'm engaged, Peggy," she whispered, "really and truly."
+
+She leaned forward, unbuttoning her nightgown, and there on her
+breast, hung by a little gold chain about her neck, was a diamond
+ring--Guy Franklin's solitaire; every one in Riverbend knew it well.
+
+"I'm going to live in Chicago, and take singing lessons, and go to
+operas, and do all those nice things--oh, everything! I know you
+don't like him, Peggy, but you know you _are_ a kid. You'll see how
+it is yourself when you grow up. He's so _different_ from our boys,
+and he's just terribly in love with me. And then, Peggy,"--flushing
+all down over her soft shoulders,--"I'm awfully fond of him, too.
+Awfully."
+
+"Are you, Nell, truly?" I whispered. She seemed so changed to me by
+the warm light in her eyes and that delicate suffusion of color. I
+felt as I did when I got up early on picnic mornings in summer, and
+saw the dawn come up in the breathless sky above the river meadows
+and make all the cornfields golden.
+
+"Sure I do, Peggy; don't look so solemn. It's nothing to look that
+way about, kid. It's nice." She threw her arms about me suddenly and
+hugged me.
+
+"I hate to think about your going so far away from us all, Nell."
+
+"Oh, you'll love to come and visit me. Just you wait."
+
+She began breathlessly to go over things Guy Franklin had told her
+about Chicago, until I seemed to see it all looming up out there
+under the stars that kept watch over our little sleeping town. We
+had neither of us ever been to a city, but we knew what it would be
+like. We heard it throbbing like great engines, and calling to us,
+that far-away world. Even after we had opened the windows and
+scurried into bed, we seemed to feel a pulsation across all the
+miles of snow. The winter silence trembled with it, and the air was
+full of something new that seemed to break over us in soft waves. In
+that snug, warm little bed I had a sense of imminent change and
+danger. I was somehow afraid for Nelly when I heard her breathing so
+quickly beside me, and I put my arm about her protectingly as we
+drifted toward sleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the following spring we were both graduated from the Riverbend
+high school, and I went away to college. My family moved to Denver,
+and during the next four years I heard very little of Nelly Deane.
+My life was crowded with new people and new experiences, and I am
+afraid I held her little in mind. I heard indirectly that Jud Deane
+had lost what little property he owned in a luckless venture in
+Cripple Creek, and that he had been able to keep his house in
+Riverbend only through the clemency of his creditors. Guy Franklin
+had his route changed and did not go to Riverbend any more. He
+married the daughter of a rich cattle-man out near Long Pine, and
+ran a dry-goods store of his own. Mrs. Dow wrote me a long letter
+about once a year, and in one of these she told me that Nelly was
+teaching in the sixth grade in the Riverbend school.
+
+"Dear Nelly does not like teaching very well. The children try her,
+and she is so pretty it seems a pity for her to be tied down to
+uncongenial employment. Scott is still very attentive, and I have
+noticed him look up at the window of Nelly's room in a very
+determined way as he goes home to dinner. Scott continues
+prosperous; he has made money during these hard times and now owns
+both our hardware stores. He is close, but a very honorable fellow.
+Nelly seems to hold off, but I think Mrs. Spinny has hopes. Nothing
+would please her more. If Scott were more careful about his
+appearance, it would help. He of course gets black about his
+business, and Nelly, you know, is very dainty. People do say his
+mother does his courting for him, she is so eager. If only Scott
+does not turn out hard and penurious like his father! We must all
+have our schooling in this life, but I don't want Nelly's to be too
+severe. She is a dear girl, and keeps her color."
+
+Mrs. Dow's own schooling had been none too easy. Her husband had
+long been crippled with rheumatism, and was bitter and faultfinding.
+Her daughters had married poorly, and one of her sons had fallen
+into evil ways. But her letters were always cheerful, and in one of
+them she gently remonstrated with me because I "seemed inclined to
+take a sad view of life."
+
+In the winter vacation of my senior year I stopped on my way home to
+visit Mrs. Dow. The first thing she told me when I got into her old
+buckboard at the station was that "Scott had at last prevailed," and
+that Nelly was to marry him in the spring. As a preliminary step,
+Nelly was about to join the Baptist church. "Just think, you will be
+here for her baptizing! How that will please Nelly! She is to be
+immersed to-morrow night."
+
+I met Scott Spinny in the post-office that morning, and he gave me a
+hard grip with one black hand. There was something grim and
+saturnine about his powerful body and bearded face and his strong,
+cold hands. I wondered what perverse fate had driven him for eight
+years to dog the footsteps of a girl whose charm was due to
+qualities naturally distasteful to him. It still seems strange to me
+that in easy-going Riverbend, where there were so many boys who
+could have lived contentedly enough with my little grasshopper, it
+was the pushing ant who must have her and all her careless ways.
+
+By a kind of unformulated etiquette one did not call upon candidates
+for baptism on the day of the ceremony, so I had my first glimpse of
+Nelly that evening. The baptistry was a cemented pit directly under
+the pulpit rostrum, over which we had our stage when we sang "Queen
+Esther." I sat through the sermon somewhat nervously. After the
+minister, in his long, black gown, had gone down into the water and
+the choir had finished singing, the door from the dressing-room
+opened, and, led by one of the deacons, Nelly came down the steps
+into the pool. Oh, she looked so little and meek and chastened! Her
+white cashmere robe clung about her, and her brown hair was brushed
+straight back and hung in two soft braids from a little head bent
+humbly. As she stepped down into the water I shivered with the cold
+of it, and I remembered sharply how much I had loved her. She went
+down until the water was well above her waist, and stood white and
+small, with her hands crossed on her breast, while the minister said
+the words about being buried with Christ in baptism. Then, lying in
+his arm, she disappeared under the dark water. "It will be like that
+when she dies," I thought, and a quick pain caught my heart. The
+choir began to sing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb" as she rose
+again, the door behind the baptistry opened, revealing those three
+dear guardians, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny, and she went
+up into their arms.
+
+I went to see Nell next day, up in the little room of many memories.
+Such a sad, sad visit! She seemed changed--a little embarrassed and
+quietly despairing. We talked of many of the old Riverbend girls and
+boys, but she did not mention Guy Franklin or Scott Spinny, except
+to say that her father had got work in Scott's hardware store. She
+begged me, putting her hands on my shoulders with something of her
+old impulsiveness, to come and stay a few days with her. But I was
+afraid--afraid of what she might tell me and of what I might say.
+When I sat in that room with all her trinkets, the foolish harvest
+of her girlhood, lying about, and the white curtains and the little
+white rug, I thought of Scott Spinny with positive terror and could
+feel his hard grip on my hand again. I made the best excuse I could
+about having to hurry on to Denver; but she gave me one quick look,
+and her eyes ceased to plead. I saw that she understood me
+perfectly. We had known each other so well. Just once, when I got up
+to go and had trouble with my veil, she laughed her old merry laugh
+and told me there were some things I would never learn, for all my
+schooling.
+
+The next day, when Mrs. Dow drove me down to the station to catch
+the morning train for Denver, I saw Nelly hurrying to school with
+several books under her arm. She had been working up her lessons at
+home, I thought. She was never quick at her books, dear Nell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was ten years before I again visited Riverbend. I had been in
+Rome for a long time, and had fallen into bitter homesickness. One
+morning, sitting among the dahlias and asters that bloom so bravely
+upon those gigantic heaps of earth-red ruins that were once the
+palaces of the Cæsars, I broke the seal of one of Mrs. Dow's long
+yearly letters. It brought so much sad news that I resolved then and
+there to go home to Riverbend, the only place that had ever really
+been home to me. Mrs. Dow wrote me that her husband, after years of
+illness, had died in the cold spell last March. "So good and patient
+toward the last," she wrote, "and so afraid of giving extra
+trouble." There was another thing she saved until the last. She
+wrote on and on, dear woman, about new babies and village
+improvements, as if she could not bear to tell me; and then it came:
+
+"You will be sad to hear that two months ago our dear Nelly left us.
+It was a terrible blow to us all. I cannot write about it yet, I
+fear. I wake up every morning feeling that I ought to go to her. She
+went three days after her little boy was born. The baby is a fine
+child and will live, I think, in spite of everything. He and her
+little girl, now eight years old, whom she named Margaret, after
+you, have gone to Mrs. Spinny's. She loves them more than if they
+were her own. It seems as if already they had made her quite young
+again. I wish you could see Nelly's children."
+
+Ah, that was what I wanted, to see Nelly's children! The wish came
+aching from my heart along with the bitter homesick tears; along
+with a quick, torturing recollection that flashed upon me, as I
+looked about and tried to collect myself, of how we two had sat in
+our sunny seat in the corner of the old bare school-room one
+September afternoon and learned the names of the seven hills
+together. In that place, at that moment, after so many years, how it
+all came back to me--the warm sun on my back, the chattering girl
+beside me, the curly hair, the laughing yellow eyes, the stubby
+little finger on the page! I felt as if even then, when we sat in
+the sun with our heads together, it was all arranged, written out
+like a story, that at this moment I should be sitting among the
+crumbling bricks and drying grass, and she should be lying in the
+place I knew so well, on that green hill far away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Dow sat with her Christmas sewing in the familiar sitting-room,
+where the carpet and the wall-paper and the table-cover had all
+faded into soft, dull colors, and even the chromo of Hagar and
+Ishmael had been toned to the sobriety of age. In the bay-window the
+tall wire flower-stand still bore its little terraces of potted
+plants, and the big fuchsia and the Martha Washington geranium had
+blossomed for Christmas-tide. Mrs. Dow herself did not look greatly
+changed to me. Her hair, thin ever since I could remember it, was
+now quite white, but her spare, wiry little person had all its old
+activity, and her eyes gleamed with the old friendliness behind her
+silver-bowed glasses. Her gray house-dress seemed just like those
+she used to wear when I ran in after school to take her angel-food
+cake down to the church supper.
+
+The house sat on a hill, and from behind the geraniums I could see
+pretty much all of Riverbend, tucked down in the soft snow, and the
+air above was full of big, loose flakes, falling from a gray sky
+which betokened settled weather. Indoors the hard-coal burner made a
+tropical temperature, and glowed a warm orange from its isinglass
+sides. We sat and visited, the two of us, with a great sense of
+comfort and completeness. I had reached Riverbend only that morning,
+and Mrs. Dow, who had been haunted by thoughts of shipwreck and
+suffering upon wintry seas, kept urging me to draw nearer to the
+fire and suggesting incidental refreshment. We had chattered all
+through the winter morning and most of the afternoon, taking up one
+after another of the Riverbend girls and boys, and agreeing that we
+had reason to be well satisfied with most of them. Finally, after a
+long pause in which I had listened to the contented ticking of the
+clock and the crackle of the coal, I put the question I had until
+then held back:
+
+"And now, Mrs. Dow, tell me about the one we loved best of all.
+Since I got your letter I've thought of her every day. Tell me all
+about Scott and Nelly."
+
+The tears flashed behind her glasses, and she smoothed the little
+pink bag on her knee.
+
+"Well, dear, I'm afraid Scott proved to be a hard man, like his
+father. But we must remember that Nelly always had Mrs. Spinny. I
+never saw anything like the love there was between those two. After
+Nelly lost her own father and mother, she looked to Mrs. Spinny for
+everything. When Scott was too unreasonable, his mother could 'most
+always prevail upon him. She never lifted a hand to fight her own
+battles with Scott's father, but she was never afraid to speak up
+for Nelly. And then Nelly took great comfort of her little girl.
+Such a lovely child!"
+
+"Had she been very ill before the little baby came?"
+
+"No, Margaret; I'm afraid 't was all because they had the wrong
+doctor. I feel confident that either Doctor Tom or Doctor Jones
+could have brought her through. But, you see, Scott had offended
+them both, and they'd stopped trading at his store, so he would have
+young Doctor Fox, a boy just out of college and a stranger. He got
+scared and didn't know what to do. Mrs. Spinny felt he wasn't doing
+right, so she sent for Mrs. Freeze and me. It seemed like Nelly had
+got discouraged. Scott would move into their big new house before
+the plastering was dry, and though 't was summer, she had taken a
+terrible cold that seemed to have drained her, and she took no
+interest in fixing the place up. Mrs. Spinny had been down with her
+back again and wasn't able to help, and things was just anyway. We
+won't talk about that, Margaret; I think 't would hurt Mrs. Spinny
+to have you know. She nearly died of mortification when she sent for
+us, and blamed her poor back. We did get Nelly fixed up nicely
+before she died. I prevailed upon Doctor Tom to come in at the last,
+and it 'most broke his heart. 'Why, Mis' Dow,' he said, 'if you'd
+only have come and told me how 't was, I'd have come and carried her
+right off in my arms.'"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Dow," I cried, "then it needn't have been?"
+
+Mrs. Dow dropped her needle and clasped her hands quickly. "We
+mustn't look at it that way, dear," she said tremulously and a
+little sternly; "we mustn't let ourselves. We must just feel that
+our Lord wanted her _then_, and took her to Himself. When it was all
+over, she did look so like a child of God, young and trusting, like
+she did on her baptizing night, you remember?"
+
+I felt that Mrs. Dow did not want to talk any more about Nelly then,
+and, indeed, I had little heart to listen; so I told her I would go
+for a walk, and suggested that I might stop at Mrs. Spinny's to see
+the children.
+
+Mrs. Dow looked up thoughtfully at the clock. "I doubt if you'll
+find little Margaret there now. It's half-past four, and she'll have
+been out of school an hour and more. She'll be most likely coasting
+on Lupton's Hill. She usually makes for it with her sled the minute
+she is out of the school-house door. You know, it's the old hill
+where you all used to slide. If you stop in at the church about six
+o'clock, you'll likely find Mrs. Spinny there with the baby. I
+promised to go down and help Mrs. Freeze finish up the tree, and
+Mrs. Spinny said she'd run in with the baby, if 't wasn't too
+bitter. She won't leave him alone with the Swede girl. She's like a
+young woman with her first."
+
+Lupton's Hill was at the other end of town, and when I got there the
+dusk was thickening, drawing blue shadows over the snowy fields.
+There were perhaps twenty children creeping up the hill or whizzing
+down the packed sled-track. When I had been watching them for some
+minutes, I heard a lusty shout, and a little red sled shot past me
+into the deep snow-drift beyond. The child was quite buried for a
+moment, then she struggled out and stood dusting the snow from her
+short coat and red woolen comforter. She wore a brown fur cap, which
+was too big for her and of an old-fashioned shape, such as girls
+wore long ago, but I would have known her without the cap. Mrs. Dow
+had said a beautiful child, and there would not be two like this in
+Riverbend. She was off before I had time to speak to her, going up
+the hill at a trot, her sturdy little legs plowing through the
+trampled snow. When she reached the top she never paused to take
+breath, but threw herself upon her sled and came down with a whoop
+that was quenched only by the deep drift at the end.
+
+"Are you Margaret Spinny?" I asked as she struggled out in a cloud
+of snow.
+
+"Yes, 'm." She approached me with frank curiosity, pulling her
+little sled behind her. "Are you the strange lady staying at Mrs.
+Dow's?" I nodded, and she began to look my clothes over with
+respectful interest.
+
+"Your grandmother is to be at the church at six o'clock, isn't she?"
+
+"Yes, 'm."
+
+"Well, suppose we walk up there now. It's nearly six, and all the
+other children are going home." She hesitated, and looked up at the
+faintly gleaming track on the hill-slope. "Do you want another
+slide? Is that it?" I asked.
+
+"Do you mind?" she asked shyly.
+
+"No. I'll wait for you. Take your time; don't run."
+
+Two little boys were still hanging about the slide, and they cheered
+her as she came down, her comforter streaming in the wind.
+
+"Now," she announced, getting up out of the drift, "I'll show you
+where the church is."
+
+"Shall I tie your comforter again?"
+
+"No, 'm, thanks. I'm plenty warm." She put her mittened hand
+confidingly in mine and trudged along beside me.
+
+Mrs. Dow must have heard us tramping up the snowy steps of the
+church, for she met us at the door. Every one had gone except the
+old ladies. A kerosene lamp flickered over the Sunday-school chart,
+with the lesson-picture of the Wise Men, and the little barrel-stove
+threw out a deep glow over the three white heads that bent above the
+baby. There the three friends sat, patting him, and smoothing his
+dress, and playing with his hands, which made theirs look so brown.
+
+"You ain't seen nothing finer in all your travels," said Mrs.
+Spinny, and they all laughed.
+
+They showed me his full chest and how strong his back was; had me
+feel the golden fuzz on his head, and made him look at me with his
+round, bright eyes. He laughed and reared himself in my arms as I
+took him up and held him close to me. He was so warm and tingling
+with life, and he had the flush of new beginnings, of the new
+morning and the new rose. He seemed to have come so lately from his
+mother's heart! It was as if I held her youth and all her young joy.
+As I put my cheek down against his, he spied a pink flower in my
+hat, and making a gleeful sound, he lunged at it with both fists.
+
+"Don't let him spoil it," murmured Mrs. Spinny. "He loves color
+so--like Nelly."
+
+                                         _Century_, October 1911
+
+
+
+
+_The Bohemian Girl_
+
+
+The Trans-continental Express swung along the windings of the Sand
+River Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young
+man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the
+fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and
+strong back. There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity
+about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he
+stood up and squared them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue
+silk necktie with loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at
+the waist, and his short sack-coat hung open. His heavy shoes had
+seen good service. His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had a
+foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish
+eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close shaving, and even
+the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the smooth brown of his
+skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very white. His
+head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the green
+cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe summer
+country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. Once, as
+he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes,
+curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight
+line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly
+mockery. He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in
+getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when
+he could. Neither the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the
+brakeman's call disturbed him. It was not until after the train had
+stopped that he rose, put on a Panama hat, took from the rack a
+small valise and a flute-case, and stepped deliberately to the
+station platform. The baggage was already unloaded, and the stranger
+presented a check for a battered sole-leather steamer-trunk.
+
+"Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent. "I may
+send for it, and I may not."
+
+"Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?" demanded the
+agent in a challenging tone.
+
+"Just so."
+
+The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the small
+trunk, which was marked "N.E.," and handed out a claim check without
+further comment. The stranger watched him as he caught one end of
+the trunk and dragged it into the express room. The agent's manner
+seemed to remind him of something amusing. "Doesn't seem to be a
+very big place," he remarked, looking about.
+
+"It's big enough for us," snapped the agent, as he banged the trunk
+into a corner.
+
+That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He
+chuckled quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and
+swung his valise around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama
+securely on his head, turned up his trousers, tucked the flute-case
+under his arm, and started off across the fields. He gave the town,
+as he would have said, a wide berth, and cut through a great fenced
+pasture, emerging, when he rolled under the barbed wire at the
+farther corner, upon a white dusty road which ran straight up from
+the river valley to the high prairies, where the ripe wheat stood
+yellow and the tin roofs and weather-cocks were twinkling in the
+fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles, the sun was
+sinking and the farm-wagons on their way home from town came
+rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze. When one
+of the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift, he
+clambered in willingly. The driver was a thin, grizzled old man with
+a long lean neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat's. "How
+fur ye goin'?" he asked, as he clucked to his horses and started
+off.
+
+"Do you go by the Ericson place?"
+
+"Which Ericson?" The old man drew in his reins as if he expected to
+stop again.
+
+"Preacher Ericson's."
+
+"Oh, the Old Lady Ericson's!" He turned and looked at Nils. "La, me!
+If you're goin' out there you might 'a' rid out in the automobile.
+That's a pity, now. The Old Lady Ericson was in town with her auto.
+You might 'a' heard it snortin' anywhere about the post-office er
+the butcher-shop."
+
+"Has she a motor?" asked the stranger absently.
+
+"'Deed an' she has! She runs into town every night about this time
+for her mail and meat for supper. Some folks say she's afraid her
+auto won't get exercise enough, but I say that's jealousy."
+
+"Aren't there any other motors about here?"
+
+"Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all. But nobody else gets around like
+the Old Lady Ericson. She's out, rain er shine, over the whole
+county, chargin' into town and out amongst her farms, an' up to her
+sons' places. Sure you ain't goin' to the wrong place?" He craned
+his neck and looked at Nils' flute-case with eager curiosity. "The
+old woman ain't got any piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand.
+His wife's musical; took lessons in Chicago."
+
+"I'm going up there to-morrow," said Nils imperturbably. He saw that
+the driver took him for a piano-tuner.
+
+"Oh, I see!" The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously. He was a
+little dashed by the stranger's non-communicativeness, but he soon
+broke out again.
+
+"I'm one o' Mis' Ericson's tenants. Look after one of her places. I
+did own the place myself oncet, but I lost it a while back, in the
+bad years just after the World's Fair. Just as well, too, I say.
+Lets you out o' payin' taxes. The Ericsons do own most of the county
+now. I remember the old preacher's fav'rite text used to be, 'To
+them that hath shall be given.' They've spread something
+wonderful--run over this here country like bindweed. But I ain't one
+that begretches it to 'em. Folks is entitled to what they kin git;
+and they're hustlers. Olaf, he's in the Legislature now, and a
+likely man fur Congress. Listen, if that ain't the old woman comin'
+now. Want I should stop her?"
+
+Nils shook his head. He heard the deep chug-chug of a motor
+vibrating steadily in the clear twilight behind them. The pale
+lights of the car swam over the hill, and the old man slapped his
+reins and turned clear out of the road, ducking his head at the
+first of three angry snorts from behind. The motor was running at a
+hot, even speed, and passed without turning an inch from its course.
+The driver was a stalwart woman who sat at ease in the front seat
+and drove her car bareheaded. She left a cloud of dust and a trail
+of gasoline behind her. Her tenant threw back his head and sneezed.
+
+"Whew! I sometimes say I'd as lief be _before_ Mrs. Ericson as
+behind her. She does beat all! Nearly seventy, and never lets
+another soul touch that car. Puts it into commission herself every
+morning, and keeps it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day. I never
+stop work for a drink o' water that I don't hear her a-churnin' up
+the road. I reckon her darter-in-laws never sets down easy nowadays.
+Never know when she'll pop in. Mis' Otto, she says to me: 'We're so
+afraid that thing'll blow up and do Ma some injury yet, she's so
+turrible venturesome.' Says I: 'I wouldn't stew, Mis' Otto; the old
+lady'll drive that car to the funeral of every darter-in-law she's
+got.' That was after the old woman had jumped a turrible bad
+culvert."
+
+The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying. Just now he
+was experiencing something very much like homesickness, and he was
+wondering what had brought it about. The mention of a name or two,
+perhaps; the rattle of a wagon along a dusty road; the rank,
+resinous smell of sunflowers and ironweed, which the night damp
+brought up from the draws and low places; perhaps, more than all,
+the dancing lights of the motor that had plunged by. He squared his
+shoulders with a comfortable sense of strength.
+
+The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady upgrade.
+The country, receding from the rough river valley, swelled more and
+more gently, as if it had been smoothed out by the wind. On one of
+the last of the rugged ridges, at the end of a branch road, stood a
+grim square house with a tin roof and double porches. Behind the
+house stretched a row of broken, wind-racked poplars, and down the
+hill-slope to the left straggled the sheds and stables. The old man
+stopped his horses where the Ericsons' road branched across a dry
+sand creek that wound about the foot of the hill.
+
+"That's the old lady's place. Want I should drive in?"
+
+"No, thank you. I'll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good
+night."
+
+His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old man
+drove on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see how
+the stranger would be received.
+
+As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive tramp of a
+horse coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he flashed out of
+the road and stood behind a thicket of wild plum bushes that grew in
+the sandy bed. Peering through the dusk, he saw a light horse, under
+tight rein, descending the hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a
+slender woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an
+old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding-skirt. She sat lightly in
+the saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the
+distance. As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air
+and shied. She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry
+exclamation, "_Blázne!_" in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let
+him out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high
+land, where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the
+band of faint color that lingered in the west. This horse and rider,
+with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to
+be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the last
+sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as an
+inevitable detail of the landscape.
+
+Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck
+against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the
+hill. When he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but
+a light was shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing
+in the hog corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two
+big wooden buckets, moving about among them. Half way between the
+barn and the house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path
+that ran around to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the
+screen door into the lamp-lit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest
+room in the house; Nils remembered that his older brothers used to
+give dances there when he was a boy. Beside the stove stood a little
+girl with two light yellow braids and a broad, flushed face, peering
+anxiously into a frying-pan. In the dining-room beyond, a large,
+broad-shouldered woman was moving about the table. She walked with
+an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and florid, almost
+without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy. Nils felt proud
+of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a momentary
+hesitation, or a movement that did not tell. He waited until she
+came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside, took her
+place at the stove. Then he tapped on the screen door and entered.
+
+"It's nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren't looking for me."
+
+Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at him.
+"Bring the lamp, Hilda, and let me look."
+
+Nils laughed and unslung his valise. "What's the matter, Mother?
+Don't you know me?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp. "You must be Nils. You don't look
+very different, anyway."
+
+"Nor you, Mother. You hold your own. Don't you wear glasses yet?"
+
+"Only to read by. Where's your trunk, Nils?"
+
+"Oh, I left that in town. I thought it might not be convenient for
+you to have company so near threshing-time."
+
+"Don't be foolish, Nils." Mrs. Ericson turned back to the stove. "I
+don't thresh now. I hitched the wheat land onto the next farm and
+have a tenant. Hilda, take some hot water up to the company room,
+and go call little Eric."
+
+The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute amazement, took
+up the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils a long, admiring look
+from the door of the kitchen stairs.
+
+"Who's the youngster?" Nils asked, dropping down on the bench behind
+the kitchen stove.
+
+"One of your Cousin Henrik's."
+
+"How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?"
+
+"Six years. There are two boys. One stays with Peter and one with
+Anders. Olaf is their guardeen."
+
+There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky boy
+peered wonderingly in through the screen door. He had a fair, gentle
+face and big gray eyes, and wisps of soft yellow hair hung down
+under his cap. Nils sprang up and pulled him into the kitchen,
+hugging him and slapping him on the shoulders. "Well, if it isn't my
+kid! Look at the size of him! Don't you know me, Eric?"
+
+The boy reddened under his sunburn and freckles, and hung his head.
+"I guess it's Nils," he said shyly.
+
+"You're a good guesser," laughed Nils, giving the lad's hand a
+swing. To himself he was thinking: "That's why the little girl
+looked so friendly. He's taught her to like me. He was only six when
+I went away, and he's remembered for twelve years."
+
+Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling. "You look just like I
+thought you would," he ventured.
+
+"Go wash your hands, Eric," called Mrs. Ericson. "I've got cob corn
+for supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you don't get much of
+that in the old country. Here's Hilda; she'll take you up to your
+room. You'll want to get the dust off you before you eat."
+
+Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate, and the
+little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him know that
+his room was ready. He put out his hand and she took it, with a
+startled glance up at his face. Little Eric dropped his towel, threw
+an arm about Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze,
+and then stumbled out to the porch.
+
+During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of his eight
+grown brothers farmed, how their crops were coming on, and how much
+live stock they were feeding. His mother watched him narrowly as she
+talked. "You've got better looking, Nils," she remarked abruptly,
+whereupon he grinned and the children giggled. Eric, although he was
+eighteen and as tall as Nils, was always accounted a child, being
+the last of so many sons. His face seemed childlike, too, Nils
+thought, and he had the open, wandering eyes of a little boy. All
+the others had been men at his age.
+
+After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on the
+step to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him
+and began to knit busily. It was one of the few old-world customs
+she had kept up, for she could not bear to sit with idle hands.
+
+"Where's little Eric, Mother?"
+
+"He's helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own will; I
+don't like a boy to be too handy about the house."
+
+"He seems like a nice kid."
+
+"He's very obedient."
+
+Nils smiled a little in the dark. It was just as well to shift the
+line of conversation. "What are you knitting there, Mother?"
+
+"Baby stockings. The boys keep me busy." Mrs. Ericson chuckled and
+clicked her needles.
+
+"How many grandchildren have you?"
+
+"Only thirty-one now. Olaf lost his three. They were sickly, like
+their mother."
+
+"I supposed he had a second crop by this time!"
+
+"His second wife has no children. She's too proud. She tears about
+on horseback all the time. But she'll get caught up with, yet. She
+sets herself very high, though nobody knows what for. They were low
+enough Bohemians she came of. I never thought much of Bohemians;
+always drinking."
+
+Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson knitted
+on. In a few moments she added grimly: "She was down here to-night,
+just before you came. She'd like to quarrel with me and come between
+me and Olaf, but I don't give her the chance. I suppose you'll be
+bringing a wife home some day."
+
+"I don't know. I've never thought much about it."
+
+"Well, perhaps it's best as it is," suggested Mrs. Ericson
+hopefully. "You'd never be contented tied down to the land. There
+was roving blood in your father's family, and it's come out in you.
+I expect your own way of life suits you best." Mrs. Ericson had
+dropped into a blandly agreeable tone which Nils well remembered. It
+seemed to amuse him a good deal and his white teeth flashed behind
+his pipe. His mother's strategies had always diverted him, even when
+he was a boy--they were so flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned
+to her vigor and force. "They've been waiting to see which way I'd
+jump," he reflected. He felt that Mrs. Ericson was pondering his
+case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.
+
+"I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work," she went on
+presently. "Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long. It's a
+pity you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair. Your
+father picked up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times,
+and I expect maybe he'd have give you a farm. It's too bad you put
+off comin' back so long, for I always thought he meant to do
+something by you."
+
+Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. "I'd have missed a
+lot if I had come back then. But I'm sorry I didn't get back to see
+father."
+
+"Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other.
+Perhaps you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as
+you'd have been with a farm," said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.
+
+"Land's a good thing to have," Nils commented, as he lit another
+match and sheltered it with his hand.
+
+His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out.
+"Only when you stay on it!" she hastened to say.
+
+Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with
+a yawn. "Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will take a little
+tramp before bed-time. It will make me sleep."
+
+"Very well; only don't stay long. I'll sit up and wait for you. I
+like to lock up myself."
+
+Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down the
+hill and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond.
+Neither spoke. They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his
+pipe. There was no moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay
+faint in the starlight. Over everything was darkness and thick
+silence, and the smell of dust and sunflowers. The brothers followed
+the road for a mile or more without finding a place to sit down.
+Finally Nils perched on a stile over the wire fence, and Eric sat on
+the lower step.
+
+"I began to think you never would come back, Nils," said the boy
+softly.
+
+"Didn't I promise you I would?"
+
+"Yes; but people don't bother about promises they make to babies.
+Did you really know you were going away for good when you went to
+Chicago with the cattle that time?"
+
+"I thought it very likely, if I could make my way."
+
+"I don't see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could." Eric
+rubbed his shoulder against his brother's knee.
+
+"The hard thing was leaving home--you and father. It was easy
+enough, once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got awful homesick;
+used to cry myself to sleep. But I'd burned my bridges."
+
+"You had always wanted to go, hadn't you?"
+
+"Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood
+still by the window?"
+
+Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the gray
+darkness.
+
+"You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering when
+they rustled at night? Well, they always whispered to me about the
+sea. Sometimes they said names out of the geography books. In a high
+wind they had a desperate sound, like something trying to tear
+loose."
+
+"How funny, Nils," said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his hand.
+"That tree still talks like that, and 'most always it talks to me
+about you."
+
+They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric whispered
+anxiously: "Hadn't we better go back now? Mother will get tired
+waiting for us." They rose and took a short cut home, through the
+pasture.
+
+
+II
+
+The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that came
+with dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room reflected the glare
+that shone through the thin window-shades, and he found it
+impossible to sleep. He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the hall
+and up the back stairs to the half-story room which he used to share
+with his little brother. Eric, in a skimpy night-shirt, was sitting
+on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair
+standing up in tufts all over his head. When he saw Nils, he
+murmured something confusedly and hustled his long legs into his
+trousers. "I didn't expect you'd be up so early, Nils," he said, as
+his head emerged from his blue shirt.
+
+"Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?" Nils gave him a playful tap
+which bent the tall boy up like a clasp-knife. "See here; I must
+teach you to box." Nils thrust his hands into his pockets and walked
+about. "You haven't changed things much up here. Got most of my old
+traps, haven't you?"
+
+He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the
+dresser. "If this isn't the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself with!"
+
+The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.
+
+"Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did he do
+it, Nils? You were with father when he found Lou, weren't you?"
+
+"Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we drove
+along, Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought we'd stop
+and cheer him up. When we found him father said he'd been dead a
+couple days. He'd tied a piece of binding twine round his neck, made
+a noose in each end, fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick,
+and let the stick spring straight; strangled himself."
+
+"What made him kill himself such a silly way?"
+
+The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He clapped
+little Eric on the shoulder. "What made him such a silly as to kill
+himself at all, I should say!"
+
+"Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died on him,
+didn't they?"
+
+"Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were plenty of
+hogs left in the world, weren't there?"
+
+"Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any good?"
+Eric asked, in astonishment.
+
+"Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people's hogs.
+He was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig--think of
+that, now!" Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and quite
+embarrassed little Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and hands at
+the tin basin. While he was patting his wet hair at the kitchen
+looking-glass, a heavy tread sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped
+his comb. "Gracious, there's Mother. We must have talked too long."
+He hurried out to the shed, slipped on his overalls, and disappeared
+with the milking-pails.
+
+Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black hair
+shining from the application of a wet brush.
+
+"Good morning, Mother. Can't I make the fire for you?"
+
+"No, thank you, Nils. It's no trouble to make a cob fire, and I like
+to manage the kitchen stove myself." Mrs. Ericson paused with a
+shovel full of ashes in her hand. "I expect you will be wanting to
+see your brothers as soon as possible. I'll take you up to Anders'
+place this morning. He's threshing, and most of our boys are over
+there."
+
+"Will Olaf be there?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between
+shovels. "No; Olaf's wheat is all in, put away in his new barn. He
+got six thousand bushel this year. He's going to town to-day to get
+men to finish roofing his barn."
+
+"So Olaf is building a new barn?" Nils asked absently.
+
+"Biggest one in the county, and almost done. You'll likely be here
+for the barn-raising. He's going to have a supper and a dance as
+soon as everybody's done threshing. Says it keeps the voters in a
+good humor. I tell him that's all nonsense; but Olaf has a long head
+for politics."
+
+"Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik's land?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke curling up
+about the cobs. "Yes; he holds it in trust for the children, Hilda
+and her brothers. He keeps strict account of everything he raises on
+it, and puts the proceeds out at compound interest for them."
+
+Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up. The door of
+the back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms behind her,
+buttoning up her long gingham apron as she came. He nodded to her
+gaily, and she twinkled at him out of her little blue eyes, set far
+apart over her wide cheek-bones.
+
+"There, Hilda, you grind the coffee--and just put in an extra
+handful; I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong," said Mrs.
+Ericson, as she went out to the shed.
+
+Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the
+coffee-grinder between her knees and ground so hard that her two
+braids bobbed and her face flushed under its broad spattering of
+freckles. He noticed on her middle finger something that had not
+been there last night, and that had evidently been put on for
+company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set garnet stone. As her
+hand went round and round he touched the ring with the tip of his
+finger, smiling.
+
+Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs. Ericson had
+disappeared. "My Cousin Clara gave me that," she whispered
+bashfully. "She's Cousin Olaf's wife."
+
+
+III
+
+Mrs. Olaf Ericson--Clara Vavrika, as many people still called
+her--was moving restlessly about her big bare house that morning.
+Her husband had left for the county town before his wife was out of
+bed--her lateness in rising was one of the many things the Ericson
+family had against her. Clara seldom came downstairs before eight
+o'clock, and this morning she was even later, for she had dressed
+with unusual care. She put on, however, only a tight-fitting black
+dress, which people thereabouts thought very plain. She was a tall,
+dark woman of thirty, with a rather sallow complexion and a touch of
+dull salmon red in her cheeks, where the blood seemed to burn under
+her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly above her low forehead, was
+so black that there were distinctly blue lights in it. Her black
+eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes were long and
+heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a strain of Tartar
+or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery determination and
+sometimes dull and opaque. Her expression was never altogether
+amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or, when she was
+animated, sarcastic. She was most attractive in profile, for then
+one saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head and delicate ears,
+and felt at once that here was a very positive, if not an altogether
+pleasing, personality.
+
+The entire management of Mrs. Olaf's household devolved upon her
+aunt, Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty. When
+Clara was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna's life had been
+spent in ungrudging service to her niece. Clara, like many
+self-willed and discontented persons, was really very apt, without
+knowing it, to do as other people told her, and to let her destiny
+be decided for her by intelligences much below her own. It was her
+Aunt Johanna who had humored and spoiled her in her girlhood, who
+had got her off to Chicago to study piano, and who had finally
+persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match she would be
+likely to make in that part of the country. Johanna Vavrika had been
+deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country. She was short and
+fat, homely and jolly and sentimental. She was so broad, and took
+such short steps when she walked, that her brother, Joe Vavrika,
+always called her his duck. She adored her niece because of her
+talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but most of
+all because of her selfishness.
+
+Clara's marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna's particular triumph.
+She was inordinately proud of Olaf's position, and she found a
+sufficiently exciting career in managing Clara's house, in keeping
+it above the criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf to keep him
+from finding fault with his wife, and in concealing from every one
+Clara's domestic infelicities. While Clara slept of a morning,
+Johanna Vavrika was bustling about, seeing that Olaf and the men had
+their breakfast, and that the cleaning or the butter-making or the
+washing was properly begun by the two girls in the kitchen. Then, at
+about eight o'clock, she would take Clara's coffee up to her, and chat
+with her while she drank it, telling her what was going on in the
+house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently said that her daughter-in-law would
+not know what day of the week it was if Johanna did not tell her
+every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised and pitied Johanna, but did not
+wholly dislike her. The one thing she hated in her daughter-in-law
+above everything else was the way in which Clara could come it over
+people. It enraged her that the affairs of her son's big, barnlike
+house went on as well as they did, and she used to feel that in this
+world we have to wait over-long to see the guilty punished. "Suppose
+Johanna Vavrika died or got sick?" the old lady used to say to Olaf.
+"Your wife wouldn't know where to look for her own dish-cloth." Olaf
+only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did not
+die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was looking
+poorly, she was never ill. She seldom left the house, and she slept
+in a little room off the kitchen. No Ericson, by night or day, could
+come prying about there to find fault without her knowing it. Her
+one weakness was that she was an incurable talker, and she sometimes
+made trouble without meaning to.
+
+This morning Clara was tying a wine-colored ribbon about her throat
+when Johanna appeared with her coffee. After putting the tray on a
+sewing-table, she began to make Clara's bed, chattering the while in
+Bohemian.
+
+"Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking. I'm going down
+presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf. He asked for prune
+preserves at breakfast, and I told him I was out of them, and to
+bring some prunes and honey and cloves from town."
+
+Clara poured her coffee. "Ugh! I don't see how men can eat so much
+sweet stuff. In the morning, too!"
+
+Her aunt chuckled knowingly. "Bait a bear with honey, as we say in
+the old country."
+
+"Was he cross?" her niece asked indifferently.
+
+"Olaf? Oh, no! He was in fine spirits. He's never cross if you know
+how to take him. I never knew a man to make so little fuss about
+bills. I gave him a list of things to get a yard long, and he didn't
+say a word; just folded it up and put it in his pocket."
+
+"I can well believe he didn't say a word," Clara remarked with a
+shrug. "Some day he'll forget how to talk."
+
+"Oh, but they say he's a grand speaker in the Legislature. He knows
+when to keep quiet. That's why he's got such influence in politics.
+The people have confidence in him." Johanna beat up a pillow and
+held it under her fat chin while she slipped on the case. Her niece
+laughed.
+
+"Maybe we could make people believe we were wise, Aunty, if we held
+our tongues. Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson that Norman threw me
+again last Saturday and turned my foot? She's been talking to Olaf."
+
+Johanna fell into great confusion. "Oh, but, my precious, the old
+lady asked for you, and she's always so angry if I can't give an
+excuse. Anyhow, she needn't talk; she's always tearing up something
+with that motor of hers."
+
+When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to dust the
+parlor. Since there was not much there to dust, this did not take
+very long. Olaf had built the house new for her before their
+marriage, but her interest in furnishing it had been short-lived. It
+went, indeed, little beyond a bath-tub and her piano. They had
+disagreed about almost every other article of furniture, and Clara
+had said she would rather have her house empty than full of things
+she didn't want. The house was set in a hillside, and the west
+windows of the parlor looked out above the kitchen yard thirty feet
+below. The east windows opened directly into the front yard. At one
+of the latter, Clara, while she was dusting, heard a low whistle.
+She did not turn at once, but listened intently as she drew her
+cloth slowly along the round of a chair. Yes, there it was:
+
+  "_I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,_"
+
+She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight, his hat in
+his hand, just outside the window. As she crossed the room he leaned
+against the wire screen. "Aren't you at all surprised to see me,
+Clara Vavrika?"
+
+"No; I was expecting to see you. Mother Ericson telephoned Olaf last
+night that you were here."
+
+Nils squinted and gave a long whistle. "Telephoned? That must have
+been while Eric and I were out walking. Isn't she enterprising? Lift
+this screen, won't you?"
+
+Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the
+window-sill. As he stepped into the room she said: "You didn't think
+you were going to get ahead of your mother, did you?"
+
+He threw his hat on the piano. "Oh, I do sometimes. You see, I'm
+ahead of her now. I'm supposed to be in Anders' wheat-field. But, as
+we were leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place beside the
+road and sank up to the hubs. While they were going for horses to
+pull her out, I cut away behind the stacks and escaped." Nils
+chuckled. Clara's dull eyes lit up as she looked at him admiringly.
+
+"You've got them guessing already. I don't know what your mother
+said to Olaf over the telephone, but he came back looking as if he'd
+seen a ghost, and he didn't go to bed until a dreadful hour--ten
+o'clock, I should think. He sat out on the porch in the dark like a
+graven image. It had been one of his talkative days, too." They both
+laughed, easily and lightly, like people who have laughed a great
+deal together; but they remained standing.
+
+"Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts, too,
+over in the threshing-field. What's the matter with them all?"
+
+Clara gave him a quick, searching look. "Well, for one thing,
+they've always been afraid you have the other will."
+
+Nils looked interested. "The other will?"
+
+"Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another, but they
+never knew what he did with it. They almost tore the old house to
+pieces looking for it. They always suspected that he carried on a
+clandestine correspondence with you, for the one thing he would do
+was to get his own mail himself. So they thought he might have sent
+the new will to you for safekeeping. The old one, leaving everything
+to your mother, was made long before you went away, and it's
+understood among them that it cuts you out--that she will leave all
+the property to the others. Your father made the second will to
+prevent that. I've been hoping you had it. It would be such fun to
+spring it on them." Clara laughed mirthfully, a thing she did not
+often do now.
+
+Nils shook his head reprovingly. "Come, now, you're malicious."
+
+"No, I'm not. But I'd like something to happen to stir them all up,
+just for once. There never was such a family for having nothing ever
+happen to them but dinner and threshing. I'd almost be willing to
+die, just to have a funeral. _You_ wouldn't stand it for three
+weeks."
+
+Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys with the
+finger of one hand. "I wouldn't? My dear young lady, how do you know
+what I can stand? _You_ wouldn't wait to find out."
+
+Clara flushed darkly and frowned. "I didn't believe you would ever
+come back--" she said defiantly.
+
+"Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went away.
+However, all's well that ends well, and I haven't come back to be a
+skeleton at the feast. We mustn't quarrel. Mother will be here with
+a search-warrant pretty soon." He swung round and faced her,
+thrusting his hands into his coat pockets. "Come, you ought to be
+glad to see me, if you want something to happen. I'm something, even
+without a will. We can have a little fun, can't we? I think we can!"
+
+She echoed him, "I think we can!" They both laughed and their eyes
+sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when she had
+put the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.
+
+"You know, I'm so tickled to see mother," Nils went on. "I didn't
+know I was so proud of her. A regular pile-driver. How about little
+pigtails, down at the house? Is Olaf doing the square thing by those
+children?"
+
+Clara frowned pensively. "Olaf has to do something that looks like
+the square thing, now that he's a public man!" She glanced drolly at
+Nils. "But he makes a good commission out of it. On Sundays they all
+get together here and figure. He lets Peter and Anders put in big
+bills for the keep of the two boys, and he pays them out of the
+estate. They are always having what they call accountings. Olaf gets
+something out of it, too. I don't know just how they do it, but it's
+entirely a family matter, as they say. And when the Ericsons say
+that--" Clara lifted her eyebrows.
+
+Just then the angry _honk-honk_ of an approaching motor sounded from
+down the road. Their eyes met and they began to laugh. They laughed
+as children do when they can not contain themselves, and can not
+explain the cause of their mirth to grown people, but share it
+perfectly together. When Clara Vavrika sat down at the piano after
+he was gone, she felt that she had laughed away a dozen years. She
+practised as if the house were burning over her head.
+
+When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat of the
+motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she made no comment
+upon his truancy until she had turned her car and was retracing her
+revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf's big pasture. Then she
+remarked dryly:
+
+"If I were you I wouldn't see too much of Olaf's wife while you are
+here. She's the kind of woman who can't see much of men without
+getting herself talked about. She was a good deal talked about
+before he married her."
+
+"Hasn't Olaf tamed her?" Nils asked indifferently.
+
+Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. "Olaf don't seem to
+have much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek
+enough, but she was always ailing. And this one has her own way. He
+says if he quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and then
+he'd lose the Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks in this
+district. But when you find a man under his wife's thumb you can
+always be sure there's a soft spot in him somewhere."
+
+Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. "She brought him a good
+deal of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson sniffed. "Well, she has a fair half section in her own
+name, but I can't see as that does Olaf much good. She will have a
+good deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don't marry again.
+But I don't consider a saloonkeeper's money as good as other
+people's money."
+
+Nils laughed outright. "Come, Mother, don't let your prejudices
+carry you that far. Money's money. Old Vavrika's a mighty decent
+sort of saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him."
+
+Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily: "Oh, I know you always stood up for
+them! But hanging around there when you were a boy never did you any
+good, Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there. There weren't
+so many after her when she married Olaf, let me tell you. She knew
+enough to grab her chance."
+
+Nils settled back in his seat. "Of course I liked to go there,
+Mother, and you were always cross about it. You never took the
+trouble to find out that it was the one jolly house in this country
+for a boy to go to. All the rest of you were working yourselves to
+death, and the houses were mostly a mess, full of babies and washing
+and flies. Oh, it was all right--I understand that; but you are
+young only once, and I happened to be young then. Now, Vavrika's was
+always jolly. He played the violin, and I used to take my flute, and
+Clara played the piano, and Johanna used to sing Bohemian songs. She
+always had a big supper for us--herrings and pickles and poppyseed
+bread, and lots of cake and preserves. Old Joe had been in the army
+in the old country, and he could tell lots of good stories. I can
+see him cutting bread, at the head of the table, now. I don't know
+what I'd have done when I was a kid if it hadn't been for the
+Vavrikas, really."
+
+"And all the time he was taking money that other people had worked
+hard in the fields for," Mrs. Ericson observed.
+
+"So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing. People ought
+to get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old Joe."
+
+"Your father," Mrs. Ericson said grimly, "liked everybody."
+
+As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place, Mrs.
+Ericson observed, "There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his way
+from town." Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his brother,
+who was waiting on the porch.
+
+Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement. His
+head was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at a
+distance, tried to remember what his brother looked like, he could
+recall only his heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils, and
+pale-blue eyes, set far apart. Olaf's features were rudimentary: the
+thing one noticed was the face itself, wide and flat and pale,
+devoid of any expression, betraying his fifty years as little as it
+betrayed anything else, and powerful by reason of its very
+stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked at him from
+under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could ever say
+what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had always felt in
+Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness of wet
+loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the most difficult
+of his brothers.
+
+"How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?"
+
+"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily. "I like this country
+better than I used to."
+
+"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.
+
+"Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm about
+ready to settle down." Nils saw his brother lower his big head.
+("Exactly like a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading me to
+slow down now, and go in for farming," he went on lightly.
+
+Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. "Farming ain't learned in a
+day," he brought out, still looking at the ground.
+
+"Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly." Nils had not meant to
+antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing it.
+"Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big success,
+as you fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious. I won't want
+much. A little land, and some cattle, maybe."
+
+Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to ask
+Nils what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't have a
+business somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he hadn't more
+pride than to come back with only a little sole-leather trunk to
+show for himself, and to present himself as the only failure in the
+family. He did not ask one of these questions, but he made them all
+felt distinctly.
+
+"Humph!" Nils thought. "No wonder the man never talks, when he can
+butt his ideas into you like that without ever saying a word. I
+suppose he uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife all the
+time. But I guess she has her innings." He chuckled, and Olaf looked
+up. "Never mind me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing why, like little
+Eric. He's another cheerful dog."
+
+"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid. He's just let his
+mother's best cow go dry because he don't milk her right. I was
+hoping you'd take him away somewhere and put him into business. If
+he don't do any good among strangers, he never will." This was a
+long speech for Olaf, and as he finished it he climbed into his
+buggy.
+
+Nils shrugged his shoulders. "Same old tricks," he thought. "Hits
+from behind you every time. What a whale of a man!" He turned and
+went round to the kitchen, where his mother was scolding little Eric
+for letting the gasoline get low.
+
+
+IV
+
+Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county-seat, where Olaf and Mrs.
+Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a little
+Bohemian settlement which lay at the other end of the county, ten
+level miles north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see her father
+almost every day. Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in the back yard
+of his saloon. The garden between the two buildings was inclosed by
+a high board fence as tight as a partition, and in summer Joe kept
+beer-tables and wooden benches among the gooseberry bushes under his
+little cherry tree. At one of these tables Nils Ericson was seated
+in the late afternoon, three days after his return home. Joe had
+gone in to serve a customer, and Nils was lounging on his elbows,
+looking rather mournfully into his half-emptied pitcher, when he
+heard a laugh across the little garden. Clara, in her riding-habit,
+was standing at the back door of the house, under the grapevine
+trellis that old Joe had grown there long ago. Nils rose.
+
+"Come out and keep your father and me company. We've been gossiping
+all afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the flies."
+
+She shook her head. "No, I never come out here any more. Olaf
+doesn't like it. I must live up to my position, you know."
+
+"You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as
+you used to? He _has_ tamed you! Who keeps up these flower-beds?"
+
+"I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the Bohemian
+papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is open. What have
+you two been doing?"
+
+"Talking, as I told you. I've been telling him about my travels. I
+find I can't talk much at home, not even to Eric."
+
+Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white moth that
+was fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves. "I suppose you
+will never tell me about all those things."
+
+"Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf's house, certainly. What's the
+matter with our talking here?" He pointed persuasively with his hat
+to the bushes and the green table, where the flies were singing
+lazily above the empty beer-glasses.
+
+Clara shook her head weakly. "No, it wouldn't do. Besides, I am
+going now."
+
+"I'm on Eric's mare. Would you be angry if I overtook you?"
+
+Clara looked back and laughed. "You might try and see. I can leave
+you if I don't want you. Eric's mare can't keep up with Norman."
+
+Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big Joe, six
+feet four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped him on the
+shoulder. "Not a God-damn a your money go in my drawer, you hear?
+Only next time you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty." Joe wagged
+his fingers in imitation of the flute-player's position. "My Clara,
+she come all-a-time Sundays an' play for me. She not like to play at
+Ericson's place." He shook his yellow curls and laughed. "Not a
+God-damn a fun at Ericson's. You come a Sunday. You like-a fun. No
+forget de flute." Joe talked very rapidly and always tumbled over
+his English. He seldom spoke it to his customers, and had never
+learned much.
+
+Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west end of
+the village, where the houses and gardens scattered into
+prairie-land and the road turned south. Far ahead of him, in the
+declining light, he saw Clara Vavrika's slender figure, loitering on
+horseback. He touched his mare with the whip, and shot along the
+white, level road, under the reddening sky. When he overtook Olaf's
+wife he saw that she had been crying. "What's the matter, Clara
+Vavrika?" he asked kindly.
+
+"Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there with
+father. I wonder why I ever went away."
+
+Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women:
+"That's what I've been wondering these many years. You were the last
+girl in the country I'd have picked for a wife for Olaf. What made
+you do it, Clara?"
+
+"I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbors"--Clara tossed
+her head. "People were beginning to wonder."
+
+"To wonder?"
+
+"Yes--why I didn't get married. I suppose I didn't like to keep them
+in suspense. I've discovered that most girls marry out of
+consideration for the neighborhood."
+
+Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed. "I'd have
+gambled that one girl I knew would say, 'Let the neighborhood be
+damned.'"
+
+Clara shook her head mournfully. "You see, they have it on you,
+Nils; that is, if you're a woman. They say you're beginning to go
+off. That's what makes us get married: we can't stand the laugh."
+
+Nils looked sidewise at her. He had never seen her head droop
+before. Resignation was the last thing he would have expected of
+her. "In your case, there wasn't something else?"
+
+"Something else?"
+
+"I mean, you didn't do it to spite somebody? Somebody who didn't
+come back?"
+
+Clara drew herself up. "Oh, I never thought you'd come back. Not
+after I stopped writing to you, at least. _That_ was all over, long
+before I married Olaf."
+
+"It never occurred to you, then, that the meanest thing you could do
+to me was to marry Olaf?"
+
+Clara laughed. "No; I didn't know you were so fond of Olaf."
+
+Nils smoothed his horse's mane with his glove. "You know, Clara
+Vavrika, you are never going to stick it out. You'll cut away some
+day, and I've been thinking you might as well cut away with me."
+
+Clara threw up her chin. "Oh, you don't know me as well as you
+think. I won't cut away. Sometimes, when I'm with father, I feel
+like it. But I can hold out as long as the Ericsons can. They've
+never got the best of me yet, and one can live, so long as one isn't
+beaten. If I go back to father, it's all up with Olaf in politics.
+He knows that, and he never goes much beyond sulking. I've as much
+wit as the Ericsons. I'll never leave them unless I can show them a
+thing or two."
+
+"You mean unless you can come it over them?"
+
+"Yes--unless I go away with a man who is cleverer than they are, and
+who has more money."
+
+Nils whistled. "Dear me, you are demanding a good deal. The
+Ericsons, take the lot of them, are a bunch to beat. But I should
+think the excitement of tormenting them would have worn off by this
+time."
+
+"It has, I'm afraid," Clara admitted mournfully.
+
+"Then why don't you cut away? There are more amusing games than this
+in the world. When I came home I thought it might amuse me to bully
+a few quarter sections out of the Ericsons; but I've almost decided
+I can get more fun for my money somewhere else."
+
+Clara took in her breath sharply. "Ah, you have got the other will!
+That was why you came home!"
+
+"No, it wasn't. I came home to see how you were getting on with
+Olaf."
+
+Clara struck her horse with the whip, and in a bound she was far
+ahead of him. Nils dropped one word, "Damn!" and whipped after her;
+but she leaned forward in her saddle and fairly cut the wind. Her
+long riding-skirt rippled in the still air behind her. The sun was
+just sinking behind the stubble in a vast, clear sky, and the
+shadows drew across the fields so rapidly that Nils could scarcely
+keep in sight the dark figure on the road. When he overtook her he
+caught her horse by the bridle. Norman reared, and Nils was
+frightened for her; but Clara kept her seat.
+
+"Let me go, Nils Ericson!" she cried. "I hate you more than any of
+them. You were created to torture me, the whole tribe of you--to
+make me suffer in every possible way."
+
+She struck her horse again and galloped away from him. Nils set his
+teeth and looked thoughtful. He rode slowly home along the deserted
+road, watching the stars come out in the clear violet sky. They
+flashed softly into the limpid heavens, like jewels let fall into
+clear water. They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid world. As he
+turned across the sand creek, he looked up at the North Star and
+smiled, as if there were an understanding between them. His mother
+scolded him for being late for supper.
+
+
+V
+
+On Sunday afternoon Joe Vavrika, in his shirt-sleeves and
+carpet-slippers, was sitting in his garden, smoking a long-tasseled
+porcelain pipe with a hunting scene painted on the bowl. Clara sat
+under the cherry tree, reading aloud to him from the weekly Bohemian
+papers. She had worn a white muslin dress under her riding-habit,
+and the leaves of the cherry tree threw a pattern of sharp shadows
+over her skirt. The black cat was dozing in the sunlight at her
+feet, and Joe's dachshund was scratching a hole under the scarlet
+geraniums and dreaming of badgers. Joe was filling his pipe for the
+third time since dinner, when he heard a knocking on the fence. He
+broke into a loud guffaw and unlatched the little door that led into
+the street. He did not call Nils by name, but caught him by the hand
+and dragged him in. Clara stiffened and the color deepened under her
+dark skin. Nils, too, felt a little awkward. He had not seen her
+since the night when she rode away from him and left him alone on
+the level road between the fields. Joe dragged him to the wooden
+bench beside the green table.
+
+"You bring de flute," he cried, tapping the leather case under Nils'
+arm. "Ah, das-a good! Now we have some liddle fun like old times. I
+got somet'ing good for you." Joe shook his finger at Nils and winked
+his blue eyes, a bright clear eye, full of fire, though the tiny
+blood-vessels on the ball were always a little distended. "I got
+somet'ing for you from"--he paused and waved his hand--"Hongarie.
+You know Hongarie? You wait!" He pushed Nils down on the bench, and
+went through the back door of his saloon.
+
+Nils looked at Clara, who sat frigidly with her white skirts drawn
+tight about her. "He didn't tell you he had asked me to come, did
+he? He wanted a party and proceeded to arrange it. Isn't he fun?
+Don't be cross; let's give him a good time."
+
+Clara smiled and shook out her skirt. "Isn't that like father? And
+he has sat here so meekly all day. Well, I won't pout. I'm glad you
+came. He doesn't have very many good times now any more. There are
+so few of his kind left. The second generation are a tame lot."
+
+Joe came back with a flask in one hand and three wine-glasses caught
+by the stems between the fingers of the other. These he placed on
+the table with an air of ceremony, and, going behind Nils, held the
+flask between him and the sun, squinting into it admiringly. "You
+know dis, Tokai? A great friend of mine, he bring dis to me, a
+present out of Hongarie. You know how much it cost, dis wine? Chust
+so much what it weigh in gold. Nobody but de nobles drink him in
+Bohemie. Many, many years I save him up, dis Tokai." Joe whipped out
+his official cork-screw and delicately removed the cork. "De old man
+die what bring him to me, an' dis wine he lay on his belly in my
+cellar an' sleep. An' now," carefully pouring out the heavy yellow
+wine, "an' now he wake up; and maybe he wake us up, too!" He carried
+one of the glasses to his daughter and presented it with great
+gallantry.
+
+Clara shook her head, but, seeing her father's disappointment,
+relented. "You taste it first. I don't want so much."
+
+Joe sampled it with a beatific expression, and turned to Nils. "You
+drink him slow, dis wine. He very soft, but he go down hot. You
+see!"
+
+After a second glass Nils declared that he couldn't take any more
+without getting sleepy. "Now get your fiddle, Vavrika," he said as
+he opened his flute-case.
+
+But Joe settled back in his wooden rocker and wagged his big
+carpet-slipper. "No-no-no-no-no-no-no! No play fiddle now any more:
+too much ache in de finger," waving them, "all-a-time rheumatiz. You
+play de flute, te-tety-te-tety-te. Bohemie songs."
+
+"I've forgotten all the Bohemian songs I used to play with you and
+Johanna. But here's one that will make Clara pout. You remember how
+her eyes used to snap when we called her the Bohemian Girl?" Nils
+lifted his flute and began "When Other Lips and Other Hearts," and
+Joe hummed the air in a husky baritone, waving his carpet-slipper.
+"Oh-h-h, das-a fine music," he cried, clapping his hands as Nils
+finished. "Now 'Marble Halls, Marble Halls'! Clara, you sing him."
+
+Clara smiled and leaned back in her chair, beginning softly:
+
+  "_I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,
+  With vassals and serfs at my knee,_"
+
+and Joe hummed like a big bumble-bee.
+
+"There's one more you always played," Clara said quietly; "I
+remember that best." She locked her hands over her knee and began
+"The Heart Bowed Down," and sang it through without groping for the
+words. She was singing with a good deal of warmth when she came to
+the end of the old song:
+
+  "_For memory is the only friend
+  That grief can call its own._"
+
+Joe flashed out his red silk handkerchief and blew his nose, shaking
+his head. "No-no-no-no-no-no-no! Too sad, too sad! I not like-a dat.
+Play quick somet'ing gay now."
+
+Nils put his lips to the instrument, and Joe lay back in his chair,
+laughing and singing, "Oh, Evelina, Sweet Evelina!" Clara laughed,
+too. Long ago, when she and Nils went to high school, the model
+student of their class was a very homely girl in thick spectacles.
+Her name was Evelina Oleson; she had a long, swinging walk which
+somehow suggested the measure of that song, and they used
+mercilessly to sing it at her.
+
+"Dat ugly Oleson girl, she teach in de school," Joe gasped, "an' she
+still walk chust like dat, yup-a, yup-a, yup-a, chust like a camel
+she go! Now, Nils, we have some more li'l drink. Oh,
+yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-_yes!_ Dis time you haf to drink, and Clara
+she haf to, so she show she not jealous. So, we all drink to your
+girl. You not tell her name, eh? No-no-no, I no make you tell. She
+pretty, eh? She make good sweetheart? I bet!" Joe winked and lifted
+his glass. "How soon you get married?"
+
+Nils screwed up his eyes. "That I don't know. When she says."
+
+Joe threw out his chest. "Das-a way boys talks. No way for mans.
+Mans say, 'You come to de church, an' get a hurry on you.' Das-a way
+mans talks."
+
+"Maybe Nils hasn't got enough to keep a wife," put in Clara
+ironically. "How about that, Nils?" she asked him frankly, as if she
+wanted to know.
+
+Nils looked at her coolly, raising one eyebrow. "Oh, I can keep her,
+all right."
+
+"The way she wants to be kept?"
+
+"With my wife, I'll decide that," replied Nils calmly. "I'll give
+her what's good for her."
+
+Clara made a wry face. "You'll give her the strap, I expect, like
+old Peter Oleson gave his wife."
+
+"When she needs it," said Nils lazily, locking his hands behind his
+head and squinting up through the leaves of the cherry tree. "Do you
+remember the time I squeezed the cherries all over your clean dress,
+and Aunt Johanna boxed my ears for me? My gracious, weren't you mad!
+You had both hands full of cherries, and I squeezed 'em and made the
+juice fly all over you. I liked to have fun with you; you'd get so
+mad."
+
+"We _did_ have fun, didn't we? None of the other kids ever had so
+much fun. We knew how to play."
+
+Nils dropped his elbows on the table and looked steadily across at
+her. "I've played with lots of girls since, but I haven't found one
+who was such good fun."
+
+Clara laughed. The late afternoon sun was shining full in her face,
+and deep in the back of her eyes there shone something fiery, like
+the yellow drops of Tokai in the brown glass bottle. "Can you still
+play, or are you only pretending?"
+
+"I can play better than I used to, and harder."
+
+"Don't you ever work, then?" She had not intended to say it. It
+slipped out because she was confused enough to say just the wrong
+thing.
+
+"I work between times." Nils' steady gaze still beat upon her.
+"Don't you worry about my working, Mrs. Ericson. You're getting like
+all the rest of them." He reached his brown, warm hand across the
+table and dropped it on Clara's, which was cold as an icicle. "Last
+call for play, Mrs. Ericson!" Clara shivered, and suddenly her hands
+and cheeks grew warm. Her fingers lingered in his a moment, and they
+looked at each other earnestly. Joe Vavrika had put the mouth of the
+bottle to his lips and was swallowing the last drops of the Tokai,
+standing. The sun, just about to sink behind his shop, glistened on
+the bright glass, on his flushed face and curly yellow hair. "Look,"
+Clara whispered; "that's the way I want to grow old."
+
+
+VI
+
+On the day of Olaf Ericson's barn-raising, his wife, for once in a
+way, rose early. Johanna Vavrika had been baking cakes and frying
+and boiling and spicing meats for a week beforehand, but it was not
+until the day before the party was to take place that Clara showed
+any interest in it. Then she was seized with one of her fitful
+spasms of energy, and took the wagon and little Eric and spent the
+day on Plum Creek, gathering vines and swamp goldenrod to decorate
+the barn.
+
+By four o'clock in the afternoon buggies and wagons began to arrive
+at the big unpainted building in front of Olaf's house. When Nils
+and his mother came at five, there were more than fifty people in
+the barn, and a great drove of children. On the ground floor stood
+six long tables, set with the crockery of seven flourishing Ericson
+families, lent for the occasion. In the middle of each table was a
+big yellow pumpkin, hollowed out and filled with woodbine. In one
+corner of the barn, behind a pile of green-and-white-striped
+watermelons, was a circle of chairs for the old people; the younger
+guests sat on bushel measures or barbed-wire spools, and the
+children tumbled about in the haymow. The box-stalls Clara had
+converted into booths. The framework was hidden by goldenrod and
+sheaves of wheat, and the partitions were covered with wild
+grapevines full of fruit. At one of these Johanna Vavrika watched
+over her cooked meats, enough to provision an army; and at the next
+her kitchen girls had ranged the ice-cream freezers, and Clara was
+already cutting pies and cakes against the hour of serving. At the
+third stall, little Hilda, in a bright pink lawn dress, dispensed
+lemonade throughout the afternoon. Olaf, as a public man, had
+thought it inadvisable to serve beer in his barn; but Joe Vavrika
+had come over with two demijohns concealed in his buggy, and after
+his arrival the wagon-shed was much frequented by the men.
+
+"Hasn't Cousin Clara fixed things lovely?" little Hilda whispered,
+when Nils went up to her stall and asked for lemonade.
+
+Nils leaned against the booth, talking to the excited little girl
+and watching the people. The barn faced the west, and the sun,
+pouring in at the big doors, filled the whole interior with a golden
+light, through which filtered fine particles of dust from the
+haymow, where the children were romping. There was a great
+chattering from the stall where Johanna Vavrika exhibited to the
+admiring women her platters heaped with fried chicken, her roasts of
+beef, boiled tongues, and baked hams with cloves stuck in the crisp
+brown fat and garnished with tansy and parsley. The older women,
+having assured themselves that there were twenty kinds of cake, not
+counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies, repaired to the corner
+behind the pile of watermelons, put on their white aprons, and fell
+to their knitting and fancy-work. They were a fine company of old
+women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them there
+together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent
+long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the
+rafters. There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best
+black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined hands;
+and several of almost heroic frame, not less massive than old Mrs.
+Ericson herself. Few of them wore glasses, and old Mrs. Svendsen, a
+Danish woman, who was quite bald, wore the only cap among them. Mrs.
+Oleson, who had twelve big grandchildren, could still show two
+braids of yellow hair as thick as her own wrists. Among all these
+grandmothers there were more brown heads than white. They all had a
+pleased, prosperous air, as if they were more than satisfied with
+themselves and with life. Nils, leaning against Hilda's
+lemonade-stand, watched them as they sat chattering in four
+languages, their fingers never lagging behind their tongues.
+
+"Look at them over there," he whispered, detaining Clara as she
+passed him. "Aren't they the Old Guard? I've just counted thirty
+hands. I guess they've wrung many a chicken's neck and warmed many a
+boy's jacket for him in their time."
+
+In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the Herculean
+labors those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of the cows they
+had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted,
+the children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had
+worn out, the mountains of food they had cooked. It made him dizzy.
+Clara Vavrika smiled a hard, enigmatical smile at him and walked
+rapidly away. Nils' eyes followed her white figure as she went
+toward the house. He watched her walking alone in the sunlight,
+looked at her slender, defiant shoulders and her little hard-set
+head with its coils of blue-black hair. "No," he reflected; "she'd
+never be like them, not if she lived here a hundred years. She'd
+only grow more bitter. You can't tame a wild thing; you can only
+chain it. People aren't all alike. I mustn't lose my nerve." He gave
+Hilda's pigtail a parting tweak and set out after Clara. "Where to?"
+he asked, as he came upon her in the kitchen.
+
+"I'm going to the cellar for preserves."
+
+"Let me go with you. I never get a moment alone with you. Why do you
+keep out of my way?"
+
+Clara laughed. "I don't usually get in anybody's way."
+
+Nils followed her down the stairs and to the far corner of the
+cellar, where a basement window let in a stream of light. From a
+swinging shelf Clara selected several glass jars, each labeled in
+Johanna's careful hand. Nils took up a brown flask. "What's this? It
+looks good."
+
+"It is. It's some French brandy father gave me when I was married.
+Would you like some? Have you a corkscrew? I'll get glasses."
+
+When she brought them, Nils took them from her and put them down on
+the window-sill. "Clara Vavrika, do you remember how crazy I used to
+be about you?"
+
+Clara shrugged her shoulders. "Boys are always crazy about somebody
+or other. I dare say some silly has been crazy about Evelina Oleson.
+You got over it in a hurry."
+
+"Because I didn't come back, you mean? I had to get on, you know,
+and it was hard sledding at first. Then I heard you'd married Olaf."
+
+"And then you stayed away from a broken heart," Clara laughed.
+
+"And then I began to think about you more than I had since I first
+went away. I began to wonder if you were really as you had seemed to
+me when I was a boy. I thought I'd like to see. I've had lots of
+girls, but no one ever pulled me the same way. The more I thought
+about you, the more I remembered how it used to be--like hearing a
+wild tune you can't resist, calling you out at night. It had been a
+long while since anything had pulled me out of my boots, and I
+wondered whether anything ever could again." Nils thrust his hands
+into his coat pockets and squared his shoulders, as his mother
+sometimes squared hers, as Olaf, in a clumsier manner, squared his.
+"So I thought I'd come back and see. Of course the family have tried
+to do me, and I rather thought I'd bring out father's will and make
+a fuss. But they can have their old land; they've put enough sweat
+into it." He took the flask and filled the two glasses carefully to
+the brim. "I've found out what I want from the Ericsons. Drink
+_skoal_, Clara." He lifted his glass, and Clara took hers with
+downcast eyes. "Look at me, Clara Vavrika. _Skoal!_"
+
+She raised her burning eyes and answered fiercely: "_Skoal!_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The barn supper began at six o'clock and lasted for two hilarious
+hours. Yense Nelson had made a wager that he could eat two whole
+fried chickens, and he did. Eli Swanson stowed away two whole
+custard pies, and Nick Hermanson ate a chocolate layer cake to the
+last crumb. There was even a cooky contest among the children, and
+one thin, slablike Bohemian boy consumed sixteen and won the prize,
+a ginger-bread pig which Johanna Vavrika had carefully decorated
+with red candies and burnt sugar. Fritz Sweiheart, the German
+carpenter, won in the pickle contest, but he disappeared soon after
+supper and was not seen for the rest of the evening. Joe Vavrika
+said that Fritz could have managed the pickles all right, but he had
+sampled the demijohn in his buggy too often before sitting down to
+the table.
+
+While the supper was being cleared away the two fiddlers began to
+tune up for the dance. Clara was to accompany them on her old
+upright piano, which had been brought down from her father's. By
+this time Nils had renewed old acquaintances. Since his interview
+with Clara in the cellar, he had been busy telling all the old women
+how young they looked, and all the young ones how pretty they were,
+and assuring the men that they had here the best farm-land in the
+world. He had made himself so agreeable that old Mrs. Ericson's
+friends began to come up to her and tell how lucky she was to get
+her smart son back again, and please to get him to play his flute.
+Joe Vavrika, who could still play very well when he forgot that he
+had rheumatism, caught up a fiddle from Johnny Oleson and played a
+crazy Bohemian dance tune that set the wheels going. When he dropped
+the bow every one was ready to dance.
+
+Olaf, in a frock-coat and a solemn made-up necktie, led the grand
+march with his mother. Clara had kept well out of _that_ by sticking
+to the piano. She played the march with a pompous solemnity which
+greatly amused the prodigal son, who went over and stood behind her.
+
+"Oh, aren't you rubbing it into them, Clara Vavrika? And aren't you
+lucky to have me here, or all your wit would be thrown away."
+
+"I'm used to being witty for myself. It saves my life."
+
+The fiddles struck up a polka, and Nils convulsed Joe Vavrika by
+leading out Evelina Oleson, the homely school-teacher. His next
+partner was a very fat Swedish girl, who, although she was an
+heiress, had not been asked for the first dance, but had stood
+against the wall in her tight, high-heeled shoes, nervously
+fingering a lace handkerchief. She was soon out of breath, so Nils
+led her, pleased and panting, to her seat, and went over to the
+piano, from which Clara had been watching his gallantry. "Ask Olena
+Yenson," she whispered. "She waltzes beautifully."
+
+Olena, too, was rather inconveniently plump, handsome in a smooth,
+heavy way, with a fine color and good-natured, sleepy eyes. She was
+redolent of violet sachet powder, and had warm, soft, white hands,
+but she danced divinely, moving as smoothly as the tide coming in.
+"There, that's something like," Nils said as he released her.
+"You'll give me the next waltz, won't you? Now I must go and dance
+with my little cousin."
+
+Hilda was greatly excited when Nils went up to her stall and held
+out his arm. Her little eyes sparkled, but she declared that she
+could not leave her lemonade. Old Mrs. Ericson, who happened along
+at this moment, said she would attend to that, and Hilda came out,
+as pink as her pink dress. The dance was a schottische, and in a
+moment her yellow braids were fairly standing on end. "Bravo!" Nils
+cried encouragingly. "Where did you learn to dance so nicely?"
+
+"My Cousin Clara taught me," the little girl panted.
+
+Nils found Eric sitting with a group of boys who were too awkward or
+too shy to dance, and told him that he must dance the next waltz
+with Hilda.
+
+The boy screwed up his shoulders. "Aw, Nils, I can't dance. My feet
+are too big; I look silly."
+
+"Don't be thinking about yourself. It doesn't matter how boys look."
+
+Nils had never spoken to him so sharply before, and Eric made haste
+to scramble out of his corner and brush the straw from his coat.
+
+Clara nodded approvingly. "Good for you, Nils. I've been trying to
+get hold of him. They dance very nicely together; I sometimes play
+for them."
+
+"I'm obliged to you for teaching him. There's no reason why he
+should grow up to be a lout."
+
+"He'll never be that. He's more like you than any of them. Only he
+hasn't your courage." From her slanting eyes Clara shot forth one of
+those keen glances, admiring and at the same time challenging, which
+she seldom bestowed on any one, and which seemed to say, "Yes, I
+admire you, but I am your equal."
+
+Clara was proving a much better host than Olaf, who, once the supper
+was over, seemed to feel no interest in anything but the lanterns.
+He had brought a locomotive headlight from town to light the revels,
+and he kept skulking about it as if he feared the mere light from it
+might set his new barn on fire. His wife, on the contrary, was
+cordial to every one, was animated and even gay. The deep salmon
+color in her cheeks burned vividly, and her eyes were full of life.
+She gave the piano over to the fat Swedish heiress, pulled her
+father away from the corner where he sat gossiping with his cronies,
+and made him dance a Bohemian dance with her. In his youth Joe had
+been a famous dancer, and his daughter got him so limbered up that
+every one sat round and applauded them. The old ladies were
+particularly delighted, and made them go through the dance again.
+From their corner where they watched and commented, the old women
+kept time with their feet and hands, and whenever the fiddles struck
+up a new air old Mrs. Svendsen's white cap would begin to bob.
+
+Clara was waltzing with little Eric when Nils came up to them,
+brushed his brother aside, and swung her out among the dancers.
+"Remember how we used to waltz on rollers at the old skating-rink in
+town? I suppose people don't do that any more. We used to keep it up
+for hours. You know, we never did moon around as other boys and
+girls did. It was dead serious with us from the beginning. When we
+were most in love with each other, we used to fight. You were always
+pinching people; your fingers were like little nippers. A regular
+snapping-turtle, you were. Lord, how you'd like Stockholm! Sit out
+in the streets in front of cafés and talk all night in summer. Just
+like a reception--officers and ladies and funny English people.
+Jolliest people in the world, the Swedes, once you get them going.
+Always drinking things--champagne and stout mixed, half-and-half;
+serve it out of big pitchers, and serve plenty. Slow pulse, you
+know; they can stand a lot. Once they light up, they're glow-worms,
+I can tell you."
+
+"All the same, you don't really like gay people."
+
+"_I_ don't?"
+
+"No; I could see that when you were looking at the old women there
+this afternoon. They're the kind you really admire, after all; women
+like your mother. And that's the kind you'll marry."
+
+"Is it, Miss Wisdom? You'll see who I'll marry, and she won't have a
+domestic virtue to bless herself with. She'll be a snapping-turtle,
+and she'll be a match for me. All the same, they're a fine bunch of
+old dames over there. You admire them yourself."
+
+"No, I don't; I detest them."
+
+"You won't, when you look back on them from Stockholm or Budapest.
+Freedom settles all that. Oh, but you're the real Bohemian Girl,
+Clara Vavrika!" Nils laughed down at her sullen frown and began
+mockingly to sing:
+
+  "_Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me
+  Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?_"
+
+Clara clutched his shoulder. "Hush, Nils; every one is looking at
+you."
+
+"I don't care. They can't gossip. It's all in the family, as the
+Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda's patrimony amongst
+them. Besides, we'll give them something to talk about when we hit
+the trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to them! They haven't had
+anything so interesting to chatter about since the grasshopper year.
+It'll give them a new lease of life. And Olaf won't lose the
+Bohemian vote, either. They'll have the laugh on him so that they'll
+vote two apiece. They'll send him to Congress. They'll never forget
+his barn party, or us. They'll always remember us as we're dancing
+together now. We're making a legend. Where's my waltz, boys?" he
+called as they whirled past the fiddlers.
+
+The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and began a
+new air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell from a quick
+waltz to a long, slow glide:
+
+  "_When other lips and other hearts
+    Their tale of love shall tell,
+  In language whose excess imparts
+    The power they feel so well,_"
+
+The old women applauded vigorously. "What a gay one he is, that
+Nils!" And old Mrs. Svendsen's cap lurched dreamily from side to
+side to the flowing measure of the dance.
+
+  "_Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,
+    And you'll remember me._"
+
+
+VII
+
+The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay
+yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp
+black shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a
+deep, crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything
+seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great,
+golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it seemed to
+transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to
+take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal
+to it, as if one were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river
+of melody. Near the road, Nils Ericson was lying against a straw
+stack in Olaf's wheat-field. His own life seemed strange and
+unfamiliar to him, as if it were something he had read about, or
+dreamed, and forgotten. He lay very still, watching the white road
+that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields, and then, at
+a distance, reappeared over a little hill. At last, against this
+white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got up and walked
+to the edge of the field. "She is passing the row of poplars now,"
+he thought. He heard the padded beat of hoofs along the dusty road,
+and as she came into sight he stepped out and waved his arms. Then,
+for fear of frightening the horse, he drew back and waited. Clara
+had seen him, and she came up at a walk. Nils took the horse by the
+bit and stroked his neck.
+
+"What are you doing out so late, Clara Vavrika? I went to the house,
+but Johanna told me you had gone to your father's."
+
+"Who can stay in the house on a night like this? Aren't you out
+yourself?"
+
+"Ah, but that's another matter."
+
+Nils turned the horse into the field.
+
+"What are you doing? Where are you taking Norman?"
+
+"Not far, but I want to talk to you to-night; I have something to
+say to you. I can't talk to you at the house, with Olaf sitting
+there on the porch, weighing a thousand tons."
+
+Clara laughed. "He won't be sitting there now. He's in bed by this
+time, and asleep--weighing a thousand tons."
+
+Nils plodded on across the stubble. "Are you really going to spend
+the rest of your life like this, night after night, summer after
+summer? Haven't you anything better to do on a night like this than
+to wear yourself and Norman out tearing across the country to your
+father's and back? Besides, your father won't live forever, you
+know. His little place will be shut up or sold, and then you'll have
+nobody but the Ericsons. You'll have to fasten down the hatches for
+the winter then."
+
+Clara moved her head restlessly. "Don't talk about that. I try never
+to think of it. If I lost father I'd lose everything, even my hold
+over the Ericsons."
+
+"Bah! You'd lose a good deal more than that. You'd lose your race,
+everything that makes you yourself. You've lost a good deal of it
+now."
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Of your love of life, your capacity for delight."
+
+Clara put her hands up to her face. "I haven't, Nils Ericson, I
+haven't! Say anything to me but that. I won't have it!" she declared
+vehemently.
+
+Nils led the horse up to a straw stack, and turned to Clara, looking
+at her intently, as he had looked at her that Sunday afternoon at
+Vavrika's. "But why do you fight for that so? What good is the power
+to enjoy, if you never enjoy? Your hands are cold again; what are
+you afraid of all the time? Ah, you're afraid of losing it; that's
+what's the matter with you! And you will, Clara Vavrika, you will!
+When I used to know you--listen; you've caught a wild bird in your
+hand, haven't you, and felt its heart beat so hard that you were
+afraid it would shatter its little body to pieces? Well, you used to
+be just like that, a slender, eager thing with a wild delight inside
+you. That is how I remembered you. And I come back and find you--a
+bitter woman. This is a perfect ferret fight here; you live by
+biting and being bitten. Can't you remember what life used to be?
+Can't you remember that old delight? I've never forgotten it, or
+known its like, on land or sea."
+
+He drew the horse under the shadow of the straw stack. Clara felt
+him take her foot out of the stirrup, and she slid softly down into
+his arms. He kissed her slowly. He was a deliberate man, but his
+nerves were steel when he wanted anything. Something flashed out
+from him like a knife out of a sheath. Clara felt everything
+slipping away from her; she was flooded by the summer night. He
+thrust his hand into his pocket, and then held it out at arm's
+length. "Look," he said. The shadow of the straw stack fell sharp
+across his wrist, and in the palm of his hand she saw a silver
+dollar shining. "That's my pile," he muttered; "will you go with
+me?"
+
+Clara nodded, and dropped her forehead on his shoulder.
+
+Nils took a deep breath. "Will you go with me to-night?"
+
+"Where?" she whispered softly.
+
+"To town, to catch the midnight flyer."
+
+Clara lifted her head and pulled herself together. "Are you crazy,
+Nils? We couldn't go away like that."
+
+"That's the only way we ever will go. You can't sit on the bank and
+think about it. You have to plunge. That's the way I've always done,
+and it's the right way for people like you and me. There's nothing
+so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth,
+and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing
+easier. Most people do that. You'd be better off tramping the roads
+with me than you are here." Nils held back her head and looked into
+her eyes. "But I'm not that kind of a tramp, Clara. You won't have
+to take in sewing. I'm with a Norwegian shipping line; came over on
+business with the New York offices, but now I'm going straight back
+to Bergen. I expect I've got as much money as the Ericsons. Father
+sent me a little to get started. They never knew about that. There,
+I hadn't meant to tell you; I wanted you to come on your own nerve."
+
+Clara looked off across the fields. "It isn't that, Nils, but
+something seems to hold me. I'm afraid to pull against it. It comes
+out of the ground, I think."
+
+"I know all about that. One has to tear loose. You're not needed
+here. Your father will understand; he's made like us. As for Olaf,
+Johanna will take better care of him than ever you could. It's now
+or never, Clara Vavrika. My bag's at the station; I smuggled it
+there yesterday."
+
+Clara clung to him and hid her face against his shoulder. "Not
+to-night," she whispered. "Sit here and talk to me to-night. I don't
+want to go anywhere to-night. I may never love you like this again."
+
+Nils laughed through his teeth. "You can't come that on me. That's
+not my way, Clara Vavrika. Eric's mare is over there behind the
+stacks, and I'm off on the midnight. It's good-by, or off across the
+world with me. My carriage won't wait. I've written a letter to
+Olaf; I'll mail it in town. When he reads it he won't bother us--not
+if I know him. He'd rather have the land. Besides, I could demand an
+investigation of his administration of Cousin Henrik's estate, and
+that would be bad for a public man. You've no clothes, I know; but
+you can sit up to-night, and we can get everything on the way.
+Where's your old dash, Clara Vavrika? What's become of your Bohemian
+blood? I used to think you had courage enough for anything. Where's
+your nerve--what are you waiting for?"
+
+Clara drew back her head, and he saw the slumberous fire in her
+eyes. "For you to say one thing, Nils Ericson."
+
+"I never say that thing to any woman, Clara Vavrika." He leaned
+back, lifted her gently from the ground, and whispered through his
+teeth: "But I'll never, never let you go, not to any man on earth
+but me! Do you understand me? Now, wait here."
+
+Clara sank down on a sheaf of wheat and covered her face with her
+hands. She did not know what she was going to do--whether she would
+go or stay. The great, silent country seemed to lay a spell upon
+her. The ground seemed to hold her as if by roots. Her knees were
+soft under her. She felt as if she could not bear separation from
+her old sorrows, from her old discontent. They were dear to her,
+they had kept her alive, they were a part of her. There would be
+nothing left of her if she were wrenched away from them. Never could
+she pass beyond that sky-line against which her restlessness had
+beat so many times. She felt as if her soul had built itself a nest
+there on that horizon at which she looked every morning and every
+evening, and it was dear to her, inexpressibly dear. She pressed her
+fingers against her eyeballs to shut it out. Beside her she heard
+the tramping of horses in the soft earth. Nils said nothing to her.
+He put his hands under her arms and lifted her lightly to her
+saddle. Then he swung himself into his own.
+
+"We shall have to ride fast to catch the midnight train. A last
+gallop, Clara Vavrika. Forward!"
+
+There was a start, a thud of hoofs along the moonlit road, two dark
+shadows going over the hill; and then the great, still land
+stretched untroubled under the azure night. Two shadows had passed.
+
+
+VIII
+
+A year after the flight of Olaf Ericson's wife, the night train was
+steaming across the plains of Iowa. The conductor was hurrying
+through one of the day-coaches, his lantern on his arm, when a lank,
+fair-haired boy sat up in one of the plush seats and tweaked him by
+the coat.
+
+"What is the next stop, please, sir?"
+
+"Red Oak, Iowa. But you go through to Chicago, don't you?" He looked
+down, and noticed that the boy's eyes were red and his face was
+drawn, as if he were in trouble.
+
+"Yes. But I was wondering whether I could get off at the next place
+and get a train back to Omaha."
+
+"Well, I suppose you could. Live in Omaha?"
+
+"No. In the western part of the State. How soon do we get to Red
+Oak?"
+
+"Forty minutes. You'd better make up your mind, so I can tell the
+baggageman to put your trunk off."
+
+"Oh, never mind about that! I mean, I haven't got any," the boy
+added, blushing.
+
+"Run away," the conductor thought, as he slammed the coach door
+behind him.
+
+Eric Ericson crumpled down in his seat and put his brown hand to his
+forehead. He had been crying, and he had had no supper, and his head
+was aching violently. "Oh, what shall I do?" he thought, as he
+looked dully down at his big shoes. "Nils will be ashamed of me; I
+haven't got any spunk."
+
+Ever since Nils had run away with his brother's wife, life at home
+had been hard for little Eric. His mother and Olaf both suspected
+him of complicity. Mrs. Ericson was harsh and fault-finding,
+constantly wounding the boy's pride; and Olaf was always getting her
+against him.
+
+Joe Vavrika heard often from his daughter. Clara had always been
+fond of her father, and happiness made her kinder. She wrote him
+long accounts of the voyage to Bergen, and of the trip she and Nils
+took through Bohemia to the little town where her father had grown
+up and where she herself was born. She visited all her kinsmen
+there, and sent her father news of his brother, who was a priest; of
+his sister, who had married a horse-breeder--of their big farm and
+their many children. These letters Joe always managed to read to
+little Eric. They contained messages for Eric and Hilda. Clara sent
+presents, too, which Eric never dared to take home and which poor
+little Hilda never even saw, though she loved to hear Eric tell
+about them when they were out getting the eggs together. But Olaf
+once saw Eric coming out of Vavrika's house,--the old man had never
+asked the boy to come into his saloon,--and Olaf went straight to
+his mother and told her. That night Mrs. Ericson came to Eric's room
+after he was in bed and made a terrible scene. She could be very
+terrifying when she was really angry. She forbade him ever to speak
+to Vavrika again, and after that night she would not allow him to go
+to town alone. So it was a long while before Eric got any more news
+of his brother. But old Joe suspected what was going on, and he
+carried Clara's letters about in his pocket. One Sunday he drove out
+to see a German friend of his, and chanced to catch sight of Eric,
+sitting by the cattle-pond in the big pasture. They went together
+into Fritz Oberlies' barn, and read the letters and talked things
+over. Eric admitted that things were getting hard for him at home.
+That very night old Joe sat down and laboriously penned a statement
+of the case to his daughter.
+
+Things got no better for Eric. His mother and Olaf felt that,
+however closely he was watched, he still, as they said, "heard."
+Mrs. Ericson could not admit neutrality. She had sent Johanna
+Vavrika packing back to her brother's, though Olaf would much rather
+have kept her than Anders' eldest daughter, whom Mrs. Ericson
+installed in her place. He was not so high-handed as his mother, and
+he once sulkily told her that she might better have taught her
+granddaughter to cook before she sent Johanna away. Olaf could have
+borne a good deal for the sake of prunes spiced in honey, the secret
+of which Johanna had taken away with her.
+
+At last two letters came to Joe Vavrika: one from Nils, inclosing a
+postal order for money to pay Eric's passage to Bergen, and one from
+Clara, saying that Nils had a place for Eric in the offices of his
+company, that he was to live with them, and that they were only
+waiting for him to come. He was to leave New York on one of the
+boats of Nils' own line; the captain was one of their friends, and
+Eric was to make himself known at once.
+
+Nils' directions were so explicit that a baby could have followed
+them, Eric felt. And here he was, nearing Red Oak, Iowa, and rocking
+backward and forward in despair. Never had he loved his brother so
+much, and never had the big world called to him so hard. But there
+was a lump in his throat which would not go down. Ever since
+nightfall he had been tormented by the thought of his mother, alone
+in that big house that had sent forth so many men. Her unkindness
+now seemed so little, and her loneliness so great. He remembered
+everything she had ever done for him: how frightened she had been
+when he tore his hand in the corn-sheller, and how she wouldn't let
+Olaf scold him. When Nils went away he didn't leave his mother all
+alone, or he would never have gone. Eric felt sure of that.
+
+The train whistled. The conductor came in, smiling not unkindly.
+"Well, young man, what are you going to do? We stop at Red Oak in
+three minutes."
+
+"Yes, thank you. I'll let you know." The conductor went out, and the
+boy doubled up with misery. He couldn't let his one chance go like
+this. He felt for his breast pocket and crackled Nils' kind letter
+to give him courage. He didn't want Nils to be ashamed of him. The
+train stopped. Suddenly he remembered his brother's kind, twinkling
+eyes, that always looked at you as if from far away. The lump in his
+throat softened. "Ah, but Nils, Nils would _understand_!" he
+thought. "That's just it about Nils; he always understands."
+
+A lank, pale boy with a canvas telescope stumbled off the train to
+the Red Oak siding, just as the conductor called, "All aboard!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next night Mrs. Ericson was sitting alone in her wooden
+rocking-chair on the front porch. Little Hilda had been sent to bed
+and had cried herself to sleep. The old woman's knitting was in her
+lap, but her hands lay motionless on top of it. For more than an
+hour she had not moved a muscle. She simply sat, as only the
+Ericsons and the mountains can sit. The house was dark, and there
+was no sound but the croaking of the frogs down in the pond of the
+little pasture.
+
+Eric did not come home by the road, but across the fields, where no
+one could see him. He set his telescope down softly in the kitchen
+shed, and slipped noiselessly along the path to the front porch. He
+sat down on the step without saying anything. Mrs. Ericson made no
+sign, and the frogs croaked on. At last the boy spoke timidly.
+
+"I've come back, Mother."
+
+"Very well," said Mrs. Ericson.
+
+Eric leaned over and picked up a little stick out of the grass.
+
+"How about the milking?" he faltered.
+
+"That's been done, hours ago."
+
+"Who did you get?"
+
+"Get? I did it myself. I can milk as good as any of you."
+
+Eric slid along the step nearer to her. "Oh, Mother, why did you?"
+he asked sorrowfully. "Why didn't you get one of Otto's boys?"
+
+"I didn't want anybody to know I was in need of a boy," said Mrs.
+Ericson bitterly. She looked straight in front of her and her mouth
+tightened. "I always meant to give you the home farm," she added.
+
+The boy started and slid closer. "Oh, Mother," he faltered, "I don't
+care about the farm. I came back because I thought you might be
+needing me, maybe." He hung his head and got no further.
+
+"Very well," said Mrs. Ericson. Her hand went out from her suddenly
+and rested on his head. Her fingers twined themselves in his soft,
+pale hair. His tears splashed down on the boards; happiness filled
+his heart.
+
+                                        _McClure's_, August 1912
+
+
+
+
+_Consequences_
+
+
+Henry Eastman, a lawyer, aged forty, was standing beside the
+Flatiron building in a driving November rainstorm, signaling
+frantically for a taxi. It was six-thirty, and everything on wheels
+was engaged. The streets were in confusion about him, the sky was in
+turmoil above him, and the Flatiron building, which seemed about to
+blow down, threw water like a mill-shoot. Suddenly, out of the
+brutal struggle of men and cars and machines and people tilting at
+each other with umbrellas, a quiet, well-mannered limousine paused
+before him, at the curb, and an agreeable, ruddy countenance
+confronted him through the open window of the car.
+
+"Don't you want me to pick you up, Mr. Eastman? I'm running directly
+home now."
+
+Eastman recognized Kier Cavenaugh, a young man of pleasure, who
+lived in the house on Central Park South, where he himself had an
+apartment.
+
+"Don't I?" he exclaimed, bolting into the car. "I'll risk getting
+your cushions wet without compunction. I came up in a taxi, but I
+didn't hold it. Bad economy. I thought I saw your car down on
+Fourteenth Street about half an hour ago."
+
+The owner of the car smiled. He had a pleasant, round face and round
+eyes, and a fringe of smooth, yellow hair showed under the rim of
+his soft felt hat. "With a lot of little broilers fluttering into
+it? You did. I know some girls who work in the cheap shops down
+there. I happened to be down-town and I stopped and took a load of
+them home. I do sometimes. Saves their poor little clothes, you
+know. Their shoes are never any good."
+
+Eastman looked at his rescuer. "Aren't they notoriously afraid of
+cars and smooth young men?" he inquired.
+
+Cavenaugh shook his head. "They know which cars are safe and which
+are chancy. They put each other wise. You have to take a bunch at a
+time, of course. The Italian girls can never come along; their men
+shoot. The girls understand, all right; but their fathers don't. One
+gets to see queer places, sometimes, taking them home."
+
+Eastman laughed drily. "Every time I touch the circle of your
+acquaintance, Cavenaugh, it's a little wider. You must know New York
+pretty well by this time."
+
+"Yes, but I'm on my good behavior below Twenty-third Street," the
+young man replied with simplicity. "My little friends down there
+would give me a good character. They're wise little girls. They have
+grand ways with each other, a romantic code of loyalty. You can find
+a good many of the lost virtues among them."
+
+The car was standing still in a traffic block at Fortieth Street,
+when Cavenaugh suddenly drew his face away from the window and
+touched Eastman's arm. "Look, please. You see that hansom with the
+bony gray horse--driver has a broken hat and red flannel around his
+throat. Can you see who is inside?"
+
+Eastman peered out. The hansom was just cutting across the line, and
+the driver was making a great fuss about it, bobbing his head and
+waving his whip. He jerked his dripping old horse into Fortieth
+Street and clattered off past the Public Library grounds toward
+Sixth Avenue. "No, I couldn't see the passenger. Someone you know?"
+
+"Could you see whether there was a passenger?" Cavenaugh asked.
+
+"Why, yes. A man, I think. I saw his elbow on the apron. No driver
+ever behaves like that unless he has a passenger."
+
+"Yes, I may have been mistaken," Cavenaugh murmured absent-mindedly.
+Ten minutes or so later, after Cavenaugh's car had turned off Fifth
+Avenue into Fifty-eighth Street, Eastman exclaimed, "There's your
+same cabby, and his cart's empty. He's headed for a drink now, I
+suppose." The driver in the broken hat and the red flannel neck
+cloth was still brandishing the whip over his old gray. He was
+coming from the west now, and turned down Sixth Avenue, under the
+elevated.
+
+Cavenaugh's car stopped at the bachelor apartment house between
+Sixth and Seventh Avenues where he and Eastman lived, and they went
+up in the elevator together. They were still talking when the lift
+stopped at Cavenaugh's floor, and Eastman stepped out with him and
+walked down the hall, finishing his sentence while Cavenaugh found
+his latch-key. When he opened the door, a wave of fresh cigarette
+smoke greeted them. Cavenaugh stopped short and stared into his
+hallway. "Now how in the devil--!" he exclaimed angrily.
+
+"Someone waiting for you? Oh, no, thanks. I wasn't coming in. I have
+to work to-night. Thank you, but I couldn't." Eastman nodded and
+went up the two flights to his own rooms.
+
+Though Eastman did not customarily keep a servant he had this winter
+a man who had been lent to him by a friend who was abroad. Rollins
+met him at the door and took his coat and hat.
+
+"Put out my dinner clothes, Rollins, and then get out of here until
+ten o'clock. I've promised to go to a supper to-night. I shan't be
+dining. I've had a late tea and I'm going to work until ten. You may
+put out some kumiss and biscuit for me."
+
+Rollins took himself off, and Eastman settled down at the big table
+in his sitting-room. He had to read a lot of letters submitted as
+evidence in a breach of contract case, and before he got very far he
+found that long paragraphs in some of the letters were written in
+German. He had a German dictionary at his office, but none here.
+Rollins had gone, and anyhow, the bookstores would be closed. He
+remembered having seen a row of dictionaries on the lower shelf of
+one of Cavenaugh's bookcases. Cavenaugh had a lot of books, though
+he never read anything but new stuff. Eastman prudently turned down
+his student's lamp very low--the thing had an evil habit of
+smoking--and went down two flights to Cavenaugh's door.
+
+The young man himself answered Eastman's ring. He was freshly
+dressed for the evening, except for a brown smoking jacket, and his
+yellow hair had been brushed until it shone. He hesitated as he
+confronted his caller, still holding the door knob, and his round
+eyes and smooth forehead made their best imitation of a frown. When
+Eastman began to apologize, Cavenaugh's manner suddenly changed. He
+caught his arm and jerked him into the narrow hall. "Come in, come
+in. Right along!" he said excitedly. "Right along," he repeated as
+he pushed Eastman before him into his sitting-room. "Well I'll--" he
+stopped short at the door and looked about his own room with an air
+of complete mystification. The back window was wide open and a
+strong wind was blowing in. Cavenaugh walked over to the window and
+stuck out his head, looking up and down the fire escape. When he
+pulled his head in, he drew down the sash.
+
+"I had a visitor I wanted you to see," he explained with a nervous
+smile. "At least I thought I had. He must have gone out that way,"
+nodding toward the window.
+
+"Call him back. I only came to borrow a German dictionary, if you
+have one. Can't stay. Call him back."
+
+Cavenaugh shook his head despondently. "No use. He's beat it.
+Nowhere in sight."
+
+"He must be active. Has he left something?" Eastman pointed to a
+very dirty white glove that lay on the floor under the window.
+
+"Yes, that's his." Cavenaugh reached for his tongs, picked up the
+glove, and tossed it into the grate, where it quickly shriveled on
+the coals. Eastman felt that he had happened in upon something
+disagreeable, possibly something shady, and he wanted to get away at
+once. Cavenaugh stood staring at the fire and seemed stupid and
+dazed; so he repeated his request rather sternly, "I think I've seen
+a German dictionary down there among your books. May I have it?"
+
+Cavenaugh blinked at him. "A German dictionary? Oh, possibly! Those
+were my father's. I scarcely know what there is." He put down the
+tongs and began to wipe his hands nervously with his handkerchief.
+
+Eastman went over to the bookcase behind the Chesterfield, opened
+the door, swooped upon the book he wanted and stuck it under his
+arm. He felt perfectly certain now that something shady had been
+going on in Cavenaugh's rooms, and he saw no reason why he should
+come in for any hang-over. "Thanks. I'll send it back to-morrow," he
+said curtly as he made for the door.
+
+Cavenaugh followed him. "Wait a moment. I wanted you to see him. You
+did see his glove," glancing at the grate.
+
+Eastman laughed disagreeably. "I saw a glove. That's not evidence. Do
+your friends often use that means of exit? Somewhat inconvenient."
+
+Cavenaugh gave him a startled glance. "Wouldn't you think so? For an
+old man, a very rickety old party? The ladders are steep, you know,
+and rusty." He approached the window again and put it up softly. In
+a moment he drew his head back with a jerk. He caught Eastman's arm
+and shoved him toward the window. "Hurry, please. Look! Down there."
+He pointed to the little patch of paved court four flights down.
+
+The square of pavement was so small and the walls about it were so
+high, that it was a good deal like looking down a well. Four tall
+buildings backed upon the same court and made a kind of shaft, with
+flagstones at the bottom, and at the top a square of dark blue with
+some stars in it. At the bottom of the shaft Eastman saw a black
+figure, a man in a caped coat and a tall hat stealing cautiously
+around, not across the square of pavement, keeping close to the dark
+wall and avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones
+from a window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was of
+course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling and
+decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with exaggerated care
+and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet street. When he
+reached the gate that led into an alley way between two buildings,
+he felt about for the latch, opened the door a mere crack, and then
+shot out under the feeble lamp that burned in the brick arch over
+the gateway. The door closed after him.
+
+"He'll get run in," Eastman remarked curtly, turning away from the
+window. "That door shouldn't be left unlocked. Any crook could come
+in. I'll speak to the janitor about it, if you don't mind," he added
+sarcastically.
+
+"Wish you would." Cavenaugh stood brushing down the front of his
+jacket, first with his right hand and then with his left. "You saw
+him, didn't you?"
+
+"Enough of him. Seems eccentric. I have to see a lot of buggy
+people. They don't take me in any more. But I'm keeping you and I'm
+in a hurry myself. Good night."
+
+Cavenaugh put out his hand detainingly and started to say something;
+but Eastman rudely turned his back and went down the hall and out of
+the door. He had never felt anything shady about Cavenaugh before,
+and he was sorry he had gone down for the dictionary. In five
+minutes he was deep in his papers; but in the half hour when he was
+loafing before he dressed to go out, the young man's curious
+behavior came into his mind again.
+
+Eastman had merely a neighborly acquaintance with Cavenaugh. He had
+been to a supper at the young man's rooms once, but he didn't
+particularly like Cavenaugh's friends; so the next time he was
+asked, he had another engagement. He liked Cavenaugh himself, if for
+nothing else than because he was so cheerful and trim and ruddy. A
+good complexion is always at a premium in New York, especially when
+it shines reassuringly on a man who does everything in the world to
+lose it. It encourages fellow mortals as to the inherent vigor of
+the human organism and the amount of bad treatment it will stand
+for. "Footprints that perhaps another," etc.
+
+Cavenaugh, he knew, had plenty of money. He was the son of a
+Pennsylvania preacher, who died soon after he discovered that his
+ancestral acres were full of petroleum, and Kier had come to New
+York to burn some of the oil. He was thirty-two and was still at it;
+spent his life, literally, among the breakers. His motor hit the
+Park every morning as if it were the first time ever. He took people
+out to supper every night. He went from restaurant to restaurant,
+sometimes to half-a-dozen in an evening. The head waiters were his
+hosts and their cordiality made him happy. They made a life-line for
+him up Broadway and down Fifth Avenue. Cavenaugh was still fresh and
+smooth, round and plump, with a lustre to his hair and white teeth
+and a clear look in his round eyes. He seemed absolutely unwearied
+and unimpaired; never bored and never carried away.
+
+Eastman always smiled when he met Cavenaugh in the entrance hall,
+serenely going forth to or returning from gladiatorial combats with
+joy, or when he saw him rolling smoothly up to the door in his car
+in the morning after a restful night in one of the remarkable new
+roadhouses he was always finding. Eastman had seen a good many young
+men disappear on Cavenaugh's route, and he admired this young man's
+endurance.
+
+To-night, for the first time, he had got a whiff of something
+unwholesome about the fellow--bad nerves, bad company, something on
+hand that he was ashamed of, a visitor old and vicious, who must
+have had a key to Cavenaugh's apartment, for he was evidently there
+when Cavenaugh returned at seven o'clock. Probably it was the same
+man Cavenaugh had seen in the hansom. He must have been able to let
+himself in, for Cavenaugh kept no man but his chauffeur; or perhaps
+the janitor had been instructed to let him in. In either case, and
+whoever he was, it was clear enough that Cavenaugh was ashamed of
+him and was mixing up in questionable business of some kind.
+
+Eastman sent Cavenaugh's book back by Rollins, and for the next few
+weeks he had no word with him beyond a casual greeting when they
+happened to meet in the hall or the elevator. One Sunday morning
+Cavenaugh telephoned up to him to ask if he could motor out to a
+roadhouse in Connecticut that afternoon and have supper; but when
+Eastman found there were to be other guests he declined.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On New Year's eve Eastman dined at the University Club at six
+o'clock and hurried home before the usual manifestations of insanity
+had begun in the streets. When Rollins brought his smoking coat, he
+asked him whether he wouldn't like to get off early.
+
+"Yes, sir. But won't you be dressing, Mr. Eastman?" he inquired.
+
+"Not to-night." Eastman handed him a bill. "Bring some change in the
+morning. There'll be fees."
+
+Rollins lost no time in putting everything to rights for the night,
+and Eastman couldn't help wishing that he were in such a hurry to be
+off somewhere himself. When he heard the hall door close softly, he
+wondered if there were any place, after all, that he wanted to go.
+From his window he looked down at the long lines of motors and taxis
+waiting for a signal to cross Broadway. He thought of some of their
+probable destinations and decided that none of those places pulled
+him very hard. The night was warm and wet, the air was drizzly.
+Vapor hung in clouds about the _Times_ Building, half hid the top of
+it, and made a luminous haze along Broadway. While he was looking
+down at the army of wet, black carriage-tops and their reflected
+headlights and tail-lights, Eastman heard a ring at his door. He
+deliberated. If it were a caller, the hall porter would have
+telephoned up. It must be the janitor. When he opened the door,
+there stood a rosy young man in a tuxedo, without a coat or hat.
+
+"Pardon. Should I have telephoned? I half thought you wouldn't be
+in."
+
+Eastman laughed. "Come in, Cavenaugh. You weren't sure whether you
+wanted company or not, eh, and you were trying to let chance decide
+it? That was exactly my state of mind. Let's accept the verdict."
+When they emerged from the narrow hall into his sitting-room, he
+pointed out a seat by the fire to his guest. He brought a tray of
+decanters and soda bottles and placed it on his writing table.
+
+Cavenaugh hesitated, standing by the fire. "Sure you weren't
+starting for somewhere?"
+
+"Do I look it? No, I was just making up my mind to stick it out
+alone when you rang. Have one?" he picked up a tall tumbler.
+
+"Yes, thank you. I always do."
+
+Eastman chuckled. "Lucky boy! So will I. I had a very early dinner.
+New York is the most arid place on holidays," he continued as he
+rattled the ice in the glasses. "When one gets too old to hit the
+rapids down there, and tired of gobbling food to heathenish dance
+music, there is absolutely no place where you can get a chop and
+some milk toast in peace, unless you have strong ties of blood
+brotherhood on upper Fifth Avenue. But you, why aren't you starting
+for somewhere?"
+
+The young man sipped his soda and shook his head as he replied:
+
+"Oh, I couldn't get a chop, either. I know only flashy people, of
+course." He looked up at his host with such a grave and candid
+expression that Eastman decided there couldn't be anything very
+crooked about the fellow. His smooth cheeks were positively
+cherubic.
+
+"Well, what's the matter with them? Aren't they flashing to-night?"
+
+"Only the very new ones seem to flash on New Year's eve. The older
+ones fade away. Maybe they are hunting a chop, too."
+
+"Well"--Eastman sat down--"holidays do dash one. I was just about to
+write a letter to a pair of maiden aunts in my old home town,
+up-state; old coasting hill, snow-covered pines, lights in the
+church windows. That's what you've saved me from."
+
+Cavenaugh shook himself. "Oh, I'm sure that wouldn't have been good
+for you. Pardon me," he rose and took a photograph from the
+bookcase, a handsome man in shooting clothes. "Dudley, isn't it? Did
+you know him well?"
+
+"Yes. An old friend. Terrible thing, wasn't it? I haven't got over
+the jolt yet."
+
+"His suicide? Yes, terrible! Did you know his wife?"
+
+"Slightly. Well enough to admire her very much. She must be terribly
+broken up. I wonder Dudley didn't think of that."
+
+Cavenaugh replaced the photograph carefully, lit a cigarette, and
+standing before the fire began to smoke. "Would you mind telling me
+about him? I never met him, but of course I'd read a lot about him,
+and I can't help feeling interested. It was a queer thing."
+
+Eastman took out his cigar case and leaned back in his deep chair.
+"In the days when I knew him best he hadn't any story, like the
+happy nations. Everything was properly arranged for him before he
+was born. He came into the world happy, healthy, clever, straight,
+with the right sort of connections and the right kind of fortune,
+neither too large nor too small. He helped to make the world an
+agreeable place to live in until he was twenty-six. Then he married
+as he should have married. His wife was a Californian, educated
+abroad. Beautiful. You have seen her picture?"
+
+Cavenaugh nodded. "Oh, many of them."
+
+"She was interesting, too. Though she was distinctly a person of the
+world, she had retained something, just enough of the large Western
+manner. She had the habit of authority, of calling out a special
+train if she needed it, of using all our ingenious mechanical
+contrivances lightly and easily, without over-rating them. She and
+Dudley knew how to live better than most people. Their house was the
+most charming one I have ever known in New York. You felt freedom
+there, and a zest of life, and safety--absolute sanctuary--from
+everything sordid or petty. A whole society like that would justify
+the creation of man and would make our planet shine with a soft,
+peculiar radiance among the constellations. You think I'm putting it
+on thick?"
+
+The young man sighed gently. "Oh, no! One has always felt there must
+be people like that. I've never known any."
+
+"They had two children, beautiful ones. After they had been married
+for eight years, Rosina met this Spaniard. He must have amounted to
+something. She wasn't a flighty woman. She came home and told Dudley
+how matters stood. He persuaded her to stay at home for six months
+and try to pull up. They were both fair-minded people, and I'm as
+sure as if I were the Almighty, that she did try. But at the end of
+the time, Rosina went quietly off to Spain, and Dudley went to hunt
+in the Canadian Rockies. I met his party out there. I didn't know
+his wife had left him and talked about her a good deal. I noticed
+that he never drank anything, and his light used to shine through
+the log chinks of his room until all hours, even after a hard day's
+hunting. When I got back to New York, rumors were creeping about.
+Dudley did not come back. He bought a ranch in Wyoming, built a big
+log house and kept splendid dogs and horses. One of his sisters went
+out to keep house for him, and the children were there when they
+were not in school. He had a great many visitors, and everyone who
+came back talked about how well Dudley kept things going.
+
+"He put in two years out there. Then, last month, he had to come
+back on business. A trust fund had to be settled up, and he was
+administrator. I saw him at the club; same light, quick step, same
+gracious handshake. He was getting gray, and there was something
+softer in his manner; but he had a fine red tan on his face and said
+he found it delightful to be here in the season when everything is
+going hard. The Madison Avenue house had been closed since Rosina
+left it. He went there to get some things his sister wanted. That,
+of course, was the mistake. He went alone, in the afternoon, and
+didn't go out for dinner--found some sherry and tins of biscuit in
+the sideboard. He shot himself sometime that night. There were
+pistols in his smoking-room. They found burnt out candles beside him
+in the morning. The gas and electricity were shut off. I suppose
+there, in his own house, among his own things, it was too much for
+him. He left no letters."
+
+Cavenaugh blinked and brushed the lapel of his coat. "I suppose," he
+said slowly, "that every suicide is logical and reasonable, if one
+knew all the facts."
+
+Eastman roused himself. "No, I don't think so. I've known too many
+fellows who went off like that--more than I deserve, I think--and
+some of them were absolutely inexplicable. I can understand Dudley;
+but I can't see why healthy bachelors, with money enough, like
+ourselves, need such a device. It reminds me of what Dr. Johnson
+said, that the most discouraging thing about life is the number of
+fads and hobbies and fake religions it takes to put people through a
+few years of it."
+
+"Dr. Johnson? The specialist? Oh, the old fellow!" said Cavenaugh
+imperturbably. "Yes, that's interesting. Still, I fancy if one knew
+the facts--Did you know about Wyatt?"
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"You wouldn't, probably. He was just a fellow about town who spent
+money. He wasn't one of the _forestieri_, though. Had connections
+here and owned a fine old place over on Staten Island. He went in
+for botany, and had been all over, hunting things; rusts, I believe.
+He had a yacht and used to take a gay crowd down about the South
+Seas, botanizing. He really did botanize, I believe. I never knew
+such a spender--only not flashy. He helped a lot of fellows and he
+was awfully good to girls, the kind who come down here to get a
+little fun, who don't like to work and still aren't really tough,
+the kind you see talking hard for their dinner. Nobody knows what
+becomes of them, or what they get out of it, and there are hundreds
+of new ones every year. He helped dozens of 'em; it was he who got
+me curious about the little shop girls. Well, one afternoon when his
+tea was brought, he took prussic acid instead. He didn't leave any
+letters, either; people of any taste don't. They wouldn't leave any
+material reminder if they could help it. His lawyers found that he
+had just $314.72 above his debts when he died. He had planned to
+spend all his money, and then take his tea; he had worked it out
+carefully."
+
+Eastman reached for his pipe and pushed his chair away from the
+fire. "That looks like a considered case, but I don't think
+philosophical suicides like that are common. I think they usually
+come from stress of feeling and are really, as the newspapers call
+them, desperate acts; done without a motive. You remember when Anna
+Karenina was under the wheels, she kept saying, 'Why am I here?'"
+
+Cavenaugh rubbed his upper lip with his pink finger and made an effort
+to wrinkle his brows. "May I, please?" reaching for the whiskey.
+"But have you," he asked, blinking as the soda flew at him, "have
+you ever known, yourself, cases that were really inexplicable?"
+
+"A few too many. I was in Washington just before Captain Jack Purden
+was married and I saw a good deal of him. Popular army man, fine
+record in the Philippines, married a charming girl with lots of
+money; mutual devotion. It was the gayest wedding of the winter, and
+they started for Japan. They stopped in San Francisco for a week and
+missed their boat because, as the bride wrote back to Washington,
+they were too happy to move. They took the next boat, were both good
+sailors, had exceptional weather. After they had been out for two
+weeks, Jack got up from his deck chair one afternoon, yawned, put
+down his book, and stood before his wife. 'Stop reading for a moment
+and look at me.' She laughed and asked him why. 'Because you happen
+to be good to look at.' He nodded to her, went back to the stern and
+was never seen again. Must have gone down to the lower deck and
+slipped overboard, behind the machinery. It was the luncheon hour,
+not many people about; steamer cutting through a soft green sea.
+That's one of the most baffling cases I know. His friends raked up
+his past, and it was as trim as a cottage garden. If he'd so much as
+dropped an ink spot on his fatigue uniform, they'd have found it. He
+wasn't emotional or moody; wasn't, indeed, very interesting; simply
+a good soldier, fond of all the pompous little formalities that make
+up a military man's life. What do you make of that, my boy?"
+
+Cavenaugh stroked his chin. "It's very puzzling, I admit. Still, if
+one knew everything----"
+
+"But we do know everything. His friends wanted to find something to
+help them out, to help the girl out, to help the case of the human
+creature."
+
+"Oh, I don't mean things that people could unearth," said Cavenaugh
+uneasily. "But possibly there were things that couldn't be found
+out."
+
+Eastman shrugged his shoulders. "It's my experience that when there
+are 'things' as you call them, they're very apt to be found. There
+is no such thing as a secret. To make any move at all one has to
+employ human agencies, employ at least one human agent. Even when
+the pirates killed the men who buried their gold for them, the bones
+told the story."
+
+Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny smile.
+
+"I like that idea. It's reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it
+means that we can't, after all, go so far afield as we might," he
+hesitated, "yes, as we might."
+
+Eastman looked at him sourly. "Cavenaugh, when you've practised law
+in New York for twelve years, you find that people can't go far in
+any direction, except--" He thrust his forefinger sharply at the
+floor. "Even in that direction, few people can do anything out of
+the ordinary. Our range is limited. Skip a few baths, and we become
+personally objectionable. The slightest carelessness can rot a man's
+integrity or give him ptomaine poisoning. We keep up only by
+incessant cleansing operations, of mind and body. What we call
+character, is held together by all sorts of tacks and strings and
+glue."
+
+Cavenaugh looked startled. "Come now, it's not so bad as that, is
+it? I've always thought that a serious man, like you, must know a
+lot of Launcelots." When Eastman only laughed, the younger man
+squirmed about in his chair. He spoke again hastily, as if he were
+embarrassed. "Your military friend may have had personal
+experiences, however, that his friends couldn't possibly get a line
+on. He may accidentally have come to a place where he saw himself in
+too unpleasant a light. I believe people can be chilled by a draft
+from outside, somewhere."
+
+"Outside?" Eastman echoed. "Ah, you mean the far outside! Ghosts,
+delusions, eh?"
+
+Cavenaugh winced. "That's putting it strong. Why not say tips from
+the outside? Delusions belong to a diseased mind, don't they? There
+are some of us who have no minds to speak of, who yet have had
+experiences. I've had a little something in that line myself and I
+don't look it, do I?"
+
+Eastman looked at the bland countenance turned toward him. "Not
+exactly. What's your delusion?"
+
+"It's not a delusion. It's a haunt."
+
+The lawyer chuckled. "Soul of a lost Casino girl?"
+
+"No; an old gentleman. A most unattractive old gentleman, who
+follows me about."
+
+"Does he want money?"
+
+Cavenaugh sat up straight. "No. I wish to God he wanted
+anything--but the pleasure of my society! I'd let him clean me out
+to be rid of him. He's a real article. You saw him yourself that
+night when you came to my rooms to borrow a dictionary, and he went
+down the fire-escape. You saw him down in the court."
+
+"Well, I saw somebody down in the court, but I'm too cautious to
+take it for granted that I saw what you saw. Why, anyhow, should I
+see your haunt? If it was your friend I saw, he impressed me
+disagreeably. How did you pick him up?"
+
+Cavenaugh looked gloomy. "That was queer, too. Charley Burke and I
+had motored out to Long Beach, about a year ago, sometime in
+October, I think. We had supper and stayed until late. When we were
+coming home, my car broke down. We had a lot of girls along who had
+to get back for morning rehearsals and things; so I sent them all
+into town in Charley's car, and he was to send a man back to tow me
+home. I was driving myself, and didn't want to leave my machine. We
+had not taken a direct road back; so I was stuck in a lonesome,
+woody place, no houses about. I got chilly and made a fire, and was
+putting in the time comfortably enough, when this old party steps
+up. He was in shabby evening clothes and a top hat, and had on his
+usual white gloves. How he got there, at three o'clock in the
+morning, miles from any town or railway, I'll leave it to you to
+figure out. _He_ surely had no car. When I saw him coming up to the
+fire, I disliked him. He had a silly, apologetic walk. His teeth
+were chattering, and I asked him to sit down. He got down like a
+clothes-horse folding up. I offered him a cigarette, and when he
+took off his gloves I couldn't help noticing how knotted and spotty
+his hands were. He was asthmatic, and took his breath with a wheeze.
+'Haven't you got anything--refreshing in there?' he asked, nodding
+at the car. When I told him I hadn't, he sighed. 'Ah, you young
+fellows are greedy. You drink it all up. You drink it all up, all
+up--up!' he kept chewing it over."
+
+Cavenaugh paused and looked embarrassed again. "The thing that was
+most unpleasant is difficult to explain. The old man sat there by
+the fire and leered at me with a silly sort of admiration that
+was--well, more than humiliating. 'Gay boy, gay dog!' he would
+mutter, and when he grinned he showed his teeth, worn and
+yellow--shells. I remembered that it was better to talk casually to
+insane people; so I remarked carelessly that I had been out with a
+party and got stuck.
+
+"'Oh yes, I remember,' he said, 'Flora and Lottie and Maybelle and
+Marcelline, and poor Kate.'
+
+"He had named them correctly; so I began to think I had been hitting
+the bright waters too hard.
+
+"Things I drank never had seemed to make me woody; but you can never
+tell when trouble is going to hit you. I pulled my hat down and
+tried to look as uncommunicative as possible; but he kept croaking
+on from time to time, like this: 'Poor Kate! Splendid arms, but dope
+got her. She took up with Eastern religions after she had her hair
+dyed. Got to going to a Swami's joint, and smoking opium. Temple of
+the Lotus, it was called, and the police raided it.'
+
+"This was nonsense, of course; the young woman was in the pink of
+condition. I let him rave, but I decided that if something didn't
+come out for me pretty soon, I'd foot it across Long Island. There
+wasn't room enough for the two of us. I got up and took another try
+at my car. He hopped right after me.
+
+"'Good car,' he wheezed, 'better than the little Ford.'
+
+"I'd had a Ford before, but so has everybody; that was a safe guess.
+
+"'Still,' he went on, 'that run in from Huntington Bay in the rain
+wasn't bad. Arrested for speeding, he-he.'
+
+"It was true I had made such a run, under rather unusual
+circumstances, and had been arrested. When at last I heard my
+life-boat snorting up the road, my visitor got up, sighed, and
+stepped back into the shadow of the trees. I didn't wait to see what
+became of him, you may believe. That was visitation number one. What
+do you think of it?"
+
+Cavenaugh looked at his host defiantly. Eastman smiled.
+
+"I think you'd better change your mode of life, Cavenaugh. Had many
+returns?" he inquired.
+
+"Too many, by far." The young man took a turn about the room and
+came back to the fire. Standing by the mantel he lit another
+cigarette before going on with his story:
+
+"The second visitation happened in the street, early in the evening,
+about eight o'clock. I was held up in a traffic block before the
+Plaza. My chauffeur was driving. Old Nibbs steps up out of the
+crowd, opens the door of my car, gets in and sits down beside me. He
+had on wilted evening clothes, same as before, and there was some
+sort of heavy scent about him. Such an unpleasant old party! A
+thorough-going rotter; you knew it at once. This time he wasn't
+talkative, as he had been when I first saw him. He leaned back in
+the car as if he owned it, crossed his hands on his stick and looked
+out at the crowd--sort of hungrily.
+
+"I own I really felt a loathing compassion for him. We got down the
+avenue slowly. I kept looking out at the mounted police. But what
+could I do? Have him pulled? I was afraid to. I was awfully afraid
+of getting him into the papers.
+
+"'I'm going to the New Astor,' I said at last. 'Can I take you
+anywhere?'
+
+"'No, thank you,' says he. 'I get out when you do. I'm due on West
+44th. I'm dining to-night with Marcelline--all that is left of her!'
+
+"He put his hand to his hat brim with a grewsome salute. Such a
+scandalous, foolish old face as he had! When we pulled up at the
+Astor, I stuck my hand in my pocket and asked him if he'd like a
+little loan.
+
+"'No, thank you, but'--he leaned over and whispered, ugh!--'but save
+a little, save a little. Forty years from now--a little--comes in
+handy. Save a little.'
+
+"His eyes fairly glittered as he made his remark. I jumped out. I'd
+have jumped into the North River. When he tripped off, I asked my
+chauffeur if he'd noticed the man who got into the car with me. He
+said he knew someone was with me, but he hadn't noticed just when he
+got in. Want to hear any more?"
+
+Cavenaugh dropped into his chair again. His plump cheeks were a
+trifle more flushed than usual, but he was perfectly calm. Eastman
+felt that the young man believed what he was telling him.
+
+"Of course I do. It's very interesting. I don't see quite where you
+are coming out though."
+
+Cavenaugh sniffed. "No more do I. I really feel that I've been put
+upon. I haven't deserved it any more than any other fellow of my
+kind. Doesn't it impress you disagreeably?"
+
+"Well, rather so. Has anyone else seen your friend?"
+
+"You saw him."
+
+"We won't count that. As I said, there's no certainty that you and I
+saw the same person in the court that night. Has anyone else had a
+look in?"
+
+"People sense him rather than see him. He usually crops up when I'm
+alone or in a crowd on the street. He never approaches me when I'm
+with people I know, though I've seen him hanging about the doors of
+theatres when I come out with a party; loafing around the stage
+exit, under a wall; or across the street, in a doorway. To be frank,
+I'm not anxious to introduce him. The third time, it was I who came
+upon him. In November my driver, Harry, had a sudden attack of
+appendicitis. I took him to the Presbyterian Hospital in the car,
+early in the evening. When I came home, I found the old villain in
+my rooms. I offered him a drink, and he sat down. It was the first
+time I had seen him in a steady light, with his hat off.
+
+"His face is lined like a railway map, and as to color--Lord, what a
+liver! His scalp grows tight to his skull, and his hair is dyed
+until it's perfectly dead, like a piece of black cloth."
+
+Cavenaugh ran his fingers through his own neatly trimmed thatch, and
+seemed to forget where he was for a moment.
+
+"I had a twin brother, Brian, who died when we were sixteen. I have
+a photograph of him on my wall, an enlargement from a kodak of him,
+doing a high jump, rather good thing, full of action. It seemed to
+annoy the old gentleman. He kept looking at it and lifting his
+eyebrows, and finally he got up, tip-toed across the room, and
+turned the picture to the wall.
+
+"'Poor Brian! Fine fellow, but died young,' says he.
+
+"Next morning, there was the picture, still reversed."
+
+"Did he stay long?" Eastman asked interestedly.
+
+"Half an hour, by the clock."
+
+"Did he talk?"
+
+"Well, he rambled."
+
+"What about?"
+
+Cavenaugh rubbed his pale eyebrows before answering.
+
+"About things that an old man ought to want to forget. His
+conversation is highly objectionable. Of course he knows me like a
+book; everything I've ever done or thought. But when he recalls
+them, he throws a bad light on them, somehow. Things that weren't
+much off color, look rotten. He doesn't leave one a shred of
+self-respect, he really doesn't. That's the amount of it." The young
+man whipped out his handkerchief and wiped his face.
+
+"You mean he really talks about things that none of your friends
+know?"
+
+"Oh, dear, yes! Recalls things that happened in school. Anything
+disagreeable. Funny thing, he always turns Brian's picture to the
+wall."
+
+"Does he come often?"
+
+"Yes, oftener, now. Of course I don't know how he gets in
+down-stairs. The hall boys never see him. But he has a key to my
+door. I don't know how he got it, but I can hear him turn it in the
+lock."
+
+"Why don't you keep your driver with you, or telephone for me to
+come down?"
+
+"He'd only grin and go down the fire escape as he did before. He's
+often done it when Harry's come in suddenly. Everybody has to be
+alone sometimes, you know. Besides, I don't want anybody to see him.
+He has me there."
+
+"But why not? Why do you feel responsible for him?"
+
+Cavenaugh smiled wearily. "That's rather the point, isn't it? Why do
+I? But I absolutely do. That identifies him, more than his knowing
+all about my life and my affairs."
+
+Eastman looked at Cavenaugh thoughtfully. "Well, I should advise you
+to go in for something altogether different and new, and go in for
+it hard; business, engineering, metallurgy, something this old
+fellow wouldn't be interested in. See if you can make him remember
+logarithms."
+
+Cavenaugh sighed. "No, he has me there, too. People never really
+change; they go on being themselves. But I would never make much
+trouble. Why can't they let me alone, damn it! I'd never hurt
+anybody, except, perhaps----"
+
+"Except your old gentleman, eh?" Eastman laughed. "Seriously,
+Cavenaugh, if you want to shake him, I think a year on a ranch would
+do it. He would never be coaxed far from his favorite haunts. He
+would dread Montana."
+
+Cavenaugh pursed up his lips. "So do I!"
+
+"Oh, you think you do. Try it, and you'll find out. A gun and a
+horse beats all this sort of thing. Besides losing your haunt, you'd
+be putting ten years in the bank for yourself. I know a good ranch
+where they take people, if you want to try it."
+
+"Thank you. I'll consider. Do you think I'm batty?"
+
+"No, but I think you've been doing one sort of thing too long. You
+need big horizons. Get out of this."
+
+Cavenaugh smiled meekly. He rose lazily and yawned behind his hand.
+"It's late, and I've taken your whole evening." He strolled over to
+the window and looked out. "Queer place, New York; rough on the
+little fellows. Don't you feel sorry for them, the girls especially?
+I do. What a fight they put up for a little fun! Why, even that old
+goat is sorry for them, the only decent thing he kept."
+
+Eastman followed him to the door and stood in the hall, while
+Cavenaugh waited for the elevator. When the car came up Cavenaugh
+extended his pink, warm hand. "Good night."
+
+The cage sank and his rosy countenance disappeared, his round-eyed
+smile being the last thing to go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Weeks passed before Eastman saw Cavenaugh again. One morning, just
+as he was starting for Washington to argue a case before the Supreme
+Court, Cavenaugh telephoned him at his office to ask him about the
+Montana ranch he had recommended; said he meant to take his advice
+and go out there for the spring and summer.
+
+When Eastman got back from Washington, he saw dusty trunks, just up
+from the trunk room, before Cavenaugh's door. Next morning, when he
+stopped to see what the young man was about, he found Cavenaugh in
+his shirt sleeves, packing.
+
+"I'm really going; off to-morrow night. You didn't think it of me,
+did you?" he asked gaily.
+
+"Oh, I've always had hopes of you!" Eastman declared. "But you are
+in a hurry, it seems to me."
+
+"Yes, I am in a hurry." Cavenaugh shot a pair of leggings into one
+of the open trunks. "I telegraphed your ranch people, used your
+name, and they said it would be all right. By the way, some of my
+crowd are giving a little dinner for me at Rector's to-night.
+Couldn't you be persuaded, as it's a farewell occasion?" Cavenaugh
+looked at him hopefully.
+
+Eastman laughed and shook his head. "Sorry, Cavenaugh, but that's
+too gay a world for me. I've got too much work lined up before me. I
+wish I had time to stop and look at your guns, though. You seem to
+know something about guns. You've more than you'll need, but nobody
+can have too many good ones." He put down one of the revolvers
+regretfully. "I'll drop in to see you in the morning, if you're up."
+
+"I shall be up, all right. I've warned my crowd that I'll cut away
+before midnight."
+
+"You won't, though," Eastman called back over his shoulder as he
+hurried down-stairs.
+
+The next morning, while Eastman was dressing, Rollins came in
+greatly excited.
+
+"I'm a little late, sir. I was stopped by Harry, Mr. Cavenaugh's
+driver. Mr. Cavenaugh shot himself last night, sir."
+
+Eastman dropped his vest and sat down on his shoe-box. "You're
+drunk, Rollins," he shouted. "He's going away to-day!"
+
+"Yes, sir. Harry found him this morning. Ah, he's quite dead, sir.
+Harry's telephoned for the coroner. Harry don't know what to do with
+the ticket."
+
+Eastman pulled on his coat and ran down the stairway. Cavenaugh's
+trunks were strapped and piled before the door. Harry was walking up
+and down the hall with a long green railroad ticket in his hand and
+a look of complete stupidity on his face.
+
+"What shall I do about this ticket, Mr. Eastman?" he whispered. "And
+what about his trunks? He had me tell the transfer people to come
+early. They may be here any minute. Yes, sir. I brought him home in
+the car last night, before twelve, as cheerful as could be."
+
+"Be quiet, Harry. Where is he?"
+
+"In his bed, sir."
+
+Eastman went into Cavenaugh's sleeping-room. When he came back to
+the sitting-room, he looked over the writing table; railway folders,
+time-tables, receipted bills, nothing else. He looked up for the
+photograph of Cavenaugh's twin brother. There it was, turned to the
+wall. Eastman took it down and looked at it; a boy in track clothes,
+half lying in the air, going over the string shoulders first, above
+the heads of a crowd of lads who were running and cheering. The face
+was somewhat blurred by the motion and the bright sunlight. Eastman
+put the picture back, as he found it. Had Cavenaugh entertained his
+visitor last night, and had the old man been more convincing than
+usual? "Well, at any rate, he's seen to it that the old man can't
+establish identity. What a soft lot they are, fellows like poor
+Cavenaugh!" Eastman thought of his office as a delightful place.
+
+                                      _McClure's_, November 1915
+
+
+
+
+_The Bookkeeper's Wife_
+
+
+Nobody but the janitor was stirring about the offices of the Remsen
+Paper Company, and still Percy Bixby sat at his desk, crouched on
+his high stool and staring out at the tops of the tall buildings
+flushed with the winter sunset, at the hundreds of windows, so many
+rectangles of white electric light, flashing against the broad waves
+of violet that ebbed across the sky. His ledgers were all in their
+places, his desk was in order, his office coat on its peg, and yet
+Percy's smooth, thin face wore the look of anxiety and strain which
+usually meant that he was behind in his work. He was trying to
+persuade himself to accept a loan from the company without the
+company's knowledge. As a matter of fact, he had already accepted
+it. His books were fixed, the money, in a black-leather bill-book,
+was already inside his waistcoat pocket.
+
+He had still time to change his mind, to rectify the false figures
+in his ledger, and to tell Stella Brown that they couldn't possibly
+get married next month. There he always halted in his reasoning, and
+went back to the beginning.
+
+The Remsen Paper Company was a very wealthy concern, with easy,
+old-fashioned working methods. They did a longtime credit business
+with safe customers, who never thought of paying up very close on
+their large indebtedness. From the payments on these large accounts
+Percy had taken a hundred dollars here and two hundred there until
+he had made up the thousand he needed. So long as he stayed by the
+books himself and attended to the mail-orders he couldn't possibly
+be found out. He could move these little shortages about from
+account to account indefinitely. He could have all the time he
+needed to pay back the deficit, and more time than he needed.
+
+Although he was so far along in one course of action, his mind still
+clung resolutely to the other. He did not believe he was going to do
+it. He was the least of a sharper in the world. Being scrupulously
+honest even in the most trifling matters was a pleasure to him. He
+was the sort of young man that Socialists hate more than they hate
+capitalists. He loved his desk, he loved his books, which had no
+handwriting in them but his own. He never thought of resenting the
+fact that he had written away in those books the good red years
+between twenty-one and twenty-seven. He would have hated to let any
+one else put so much as a pen-scratch in them. He liked all the boys
+about the office; his desk, worn smooth by the sleeves of his alpaca
+coat; his rulers and inks and pens and calendars. He had a great
+pride in working economics, and he always got so far ahead when
+supplies were distributed that he had drawers full of pencils and
+pens and rubber bands against a rainy day.
+
+Percy liked regularity: to get his work done on time, to have his
+half-day off every Saturday, to go to the theater Saturday night, to
+buy a new necktie twice a month, to appear in a new straw hat on the
+right day in May, and to know what was going on in New York. He read
+the morning and evening papers coming and going on the elevated, and
+preferred journals of approximate reliability. He got excited about
+ballgames and elections and business failures, was not above an
+interest in murders and divorce scandals, and he checked the news
+off as neatly as he checked his mail-orders. In short, Percy Bixby
+was like the model pupil who is satisfied with his lessons and his
+teachers and his holidays, and who would gladly go to school all his
+life. He had never wanted anything outside his routine until he
+wanted Stella Brown to marry him, and that had upset everything.
+
+It wasn't, he told himself for the hundredth time, that she was
+extravagant. Not a bit of it. She was like all girls. Moreover, she
+made good money, and why should she marry unless she could better
+herself? The trouble was that he had lied to her about his salary.
+There were a lot of fellows rushing Mrs. Brown's five daughters, and
+they all seemed to have fixed on Stella as first choice and this or
+that one of the sisters as second. Mrs. Brown thought it proper to
+drop an occasional hint in the presence of these young men to the
+effect that she expected Stella to "do well." It went without saying
+that hair and complexion like Stella's could scarcely be expected to
+do poorly. Most of the boys who went to the house and took the girls
+out in a bunch to dances and movies seemed to realize this. They
+merely wanted a whirl with Stella before they settled down to one of
+her sisters. It was tacitly understood that she came too high for
+them. Percy had sensed all this through those slumbering instincts
+which awake in us all to befriend us in love or in danger.
+
+But there was one of his rivals, he knew, who was a man to be
+reckoned with. Charley Greengay was a young salesman who wore
+tailor-made clothes and spotted waistcoats, and had a necktie for
+every day in the month. His air was that of a young man who is out
+for things that come high and who is going to get them. Mrs. Brown
+was ever and again dropping a word before Percy about how the girl
+that took Charley would have her flat furnished by the best
+furniture people, and her china-closet stocked with the best ware,
+and would have nothing to worry about but nicks and scratches. It
+was because he felt himself pitted against this pulling power of
+Greengay's that Percy had brazenly lied to Mrs. Brown, and told her
+that his salary had been raised to fifty a week, and that now he
+wanted to get married.
+
+When he threw out this challenge to Mother Brown, Percy was getting
+thirty-five dollars a week, and he knew well enough that there were
+several hundred thousand young men in New York who would do his work
+as well as he did for thirty.
+
+These were the factors in Percy's present situation. He went over
+them again and again as he sat stooping on his tall stool. He had
+quite lost track of time when he heard the janitor call good night
+to the watchman. Without thinking what he was doing, he slid into
+his overcoat, caught his hat, and rushed out to the elevator, which
+was waiting for the janitor. The moment the car dropped, it occurred
+to him that the thing was decided without his having made up his
+mind at all. The familiar floors passed him, ten, nine, eight,
+seven. By the time he reached the fifth, there was no possibility of
+going back; the click of the drop-lever seemed to settle that. The
+money was in his pocket. Now, he told himself as he hurried out into
+the exciting clamor of the street, he was not going to worry about
+it any more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Percy reached the Browns' flat on 123d Street that evening he
+felt just the slightest chill in Stella's greeting. He could make
+that all right, he told himself, as he kissed her lightly in the
+dark three-by-four entrance-hall. Percy's courting had been
+prosecuted mainly in the Bronx or in winged pursuit of a Broadway
+car. When he entered the crowded sitting-room he greeted Mrs. Brown
+respectfully and the four girls playfully. They were all piled on
+one couch, reading the continued story in the evening paper, and
+they didn't think it necessary to assume more formal attitudes for
+Percy. They looked up over the smeary pink sheets of paper, and
+handed him, as Percy said, the same old jolly:
+
+"Hullo, Perc'! Come to see me, ain't you? So flattered!"
+
+"Any sweet goods on you, Perc'? Anything doing in the bong-bong line
+to-night?"
+
+"Look at his new neckwear! Say, Perc', remember me. That tie would
+go lovely with my new tailored waist."
+
+"Quit your kiddin', girls!" called Mrs. Brown, who was drying
+shirt-waists on the dining-room radiator. "And, Percy, mind the rugs
+when you're steppin' round among them gum-drops."
+
+Percy fired his last shot at the recumbent figures, and followed
+Stella into the dining-room, where the table and two large
+easy-chairs formed, in Mrs. Brown's estimation, a proper background
+for a serious suitor.
+
+"I say, Stell'," he began as he walked about the table with his
+hands in his pockets, "seems to me we ought to begin buying our
+stuff." She brightened perceptibly. "Ah," Percy thought, "so that
+_was_ the trouble!" "To-morrow's Saturday; why can't we make an
+afternoon of it?" he went on cheerfully. "Shop till we're tired,
+then go to Houtin's for dinner, and end up at the theater."
+
+As they bent over the lists she had made of things needed, Percy
+glanced at her face. She was very much out of her sisters' class and
+out of his, and he kept congratulating himself on his nerve. He was
+going in for something much too handsome and expensive and
+distinguished for him, he felt, and it took courage to be a plunger.
+To begin with, Stella was the sort of girl who had to be well
+dressed. She had pale primrose hair, with bluish tones in it, very
+soft and fine, so that it lay smooth however she dressed it, and
+pale-blue eyes, with blond eyebrows and long, dark lashes. She would
+have been a little too remote and languid even for the fastidious
+Percy had it not been for her hard, practical mouth, with lips that
+always kept their pink even when the rest of her face was pale. Her
+employers, who at first might be struck by her indifference,
+understood that anybody with that sort of mouth would get through
+the work.
+
+After the shopping-lists had been gone over, Percy took up the
+question of the honeymoon. Stella said she had been thinking of
+Atlantic City. Percy met her with firmness. Whatever happened, he
+couldn't leave his books now.
+
+"I want to do my traveling right here on Forty-second Street, with a
+high-price show every night," he declared. He made out an itinerary,
+punctuated by theaters and restaurants, which Stella consented to
+accept as a substitute for Atlantic City.
+
+"They give your fellows a week off when they're married, don't
+they?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, but I'll want to drop into the office every morning to look
+after my mail. That's only businesslike."
+
+"I'd like to have you treated as well as the others, though." Stella
+turned the rings about on her pale hand and looked at her polished
+finger-tips.
+
+"I'll look out for that. What do you say to a little walk, Stell'?"
+Percy put the question coaxingly. When Stella was pleased with him
+she went to walk with him, since that was the only way in which
+Percy could ever see her alone. When she was displeased, she said
+she was too tired to go out. To-night she smiled at him
+incredulously, and went to put on her hat and gray fur piece.
+
+Once they were outside, Percy turned into a shadowy side street that
+was only partly built up, a dreary waste of derricks and foundation
+holes, but comparatively solitary. Stella liked Percy's steady,
+sympathetic silences; she was not a chatterbox herself. She often
+wondered why she was going to marry Bixby instead of Charley
+Greengay. She knew that Charley would go further in the world.
+Indeed, she had often coolly told herself that Percy would never go
+very far. But, as she admitted with a shrug, she was "weak to
+Percy." In the capable New York stenographer, who estimated values
+coldly and got the most for the least outlay, there was something
+left that belonged to another kind of woman--something that liked
+the very things in Percy that were not good business assets. However
+much she dwelt upon the effectiveness of Greengay's dash and color
+and assurance, her mind always came back to Percy's neat little
+head, his clean-cut face, and warm, clear, gray eyes, and she liked
+them better than Charley's fullness and blurred floridness. Having
+reckoned up their respective chances with no doubtful result, she
+opposed a mild obstinacy to her own good sense. "I guess I'll take
+Percy, _anyway_," she said simply, and that was all the good her
+clever business brain did her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy spent a night of torment, lying tense on his bed in the dark,
+and figuring out how long it would take him to pay back the money he
+was advancing to himself. Any fool could do it in five years, he
+reasoned, but he was going to do it in three. The trouble was that
+his expensive courtship had taken every penny of his salary. With
+competitors like Charley Greengay, you had to spend money or drop
+out. Certain birds, he reflected ruefully, are supplied with more
+attractive plumage when they are courting, but nature hadn't been so
+thoughtful for men. When Percy reached the office in the morning he
+climbed on his tall stool and leaned his arms on his ledger. He was
+so glad to feel it there that he was faint and weak-kneed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oliver Remsen, Junior, had brought new blood into the Remsen Paper
+Company. He married shortly after Percy Bixby did, and in the five
+succeeding years he had considerably enlarged the company's business
+and profits. He had been particularly successful in encouraging
+efficiency and loyalty in the employees. From the time he came into
+the office he had stood for shorter hours, longer holidays, and a
+generous consideration of men's necessities. He came out of college
+on the wave of economic reform, and he continued to read and think a
+good deal about how the machinery of labor is operated. He knew more
+about the men who worked for him than their mere office records.
+
+Young Remsen was troubled about Percy Bixby because he took no
+summer vacations--always asked for the two weeks' extra pay instead.
+Other men in the office had skipped a vacation now and then, but
+Percy had stuck to his desk for five years, had tottered to his
+stool through attacks of grippe and tonsilitis. He seemed to have
+grown fast to his ledger, and it was to this that Oliver objected.
+He liked his men to stay men, to look like men and live like men. He
+remembered how alert and wide-awake Bixby had seemed to him when he
+himself first came into the office. He had picked Bixby out as the
+most intelligent and interested of his father's employees, and since
+then had often wondered why he never seemed to see chances to forge
+ahead. Promotions, of course, went to the men who went after them.
+When Percy's baby died, he went to the funeral, and asked Percy to
+call on him if he needed money. Once when he chanced to sit down by
+Bixby on the elevated and found him reading Bryce's "American
+Commonwealth," he asked him to make use of his own large office
+library. Percy thanked him, but he never came for any books. Oliver
+wondered whether his bookkeeper really tried to avoid him.
+
+One evening Oliver met the Bixbys in the lobby of a theater. He
+introduced Mrs. Remsen to them, and held them for some moments in
+conversation. When they got into their motor, Mrs. Remsen said:
+
+"Is that little man afraid of you, Oliver? He looked like a scared
+rabbit."
+
+Oliver snapped the door, and said with a shade of irritation:
+
+"I don't know what's the matter with him. He's the fellow I've told
+you about who never takes a vacation. I half believe it's his wife.
+She looks pitiless enough for anything."
+
+"She's very pretty of her kind," mused Mrs. Remsen, "but rather
+chilling. One can see that she has ideas about elegance."
+
+"Rather unfortunate ones for a bookkeeper's wife. I surmise that
+Percy felt she was overdressed, and that made him awkward with me.
+I've always suspected that fellow of good taste."
+
+After that, when Remsen passed the counting-room and saw Percy
+screwed up over his ledger, he often remembered Mrs. Bixby, with her
+cold, pale eyes and long lashes, and her expression that was
+something between indifference and discontent. She rose behind
+Percy's bent shoulders like an apparition.
+
+One spring afternoon Remsen was closeted in his private office with
+his lawyer until a late hour. As he came down the long hall in the
+dusk he glanced through the glass partition into the counting-room,
+and saw Percy Bixby huddled up on his tall stool, though it was too
+dark to work. Indeed, Bixby's ledger was closed, and he sat with his
+two arms resting on the brown cover. He did not move a muscle when
+young Remsen entered.
+
+"You are late, Bixby, and so am I," Oliver began genially as he
+crossed to the front of the room and looked out at the lighted
+windows of other tall buildings. "The fact is, I've been doing
+something that men have a foolish way of putting off. I've been
+making my will."
+
+"Yes, sir." Percy brought it out with a deep breath.
+
+"Glad to be through with it," Oliver went on. "Mr. Melton will bring
+the paper back to-morrow, and I'd like to ask you to be one of the
+witnesses."
+
+"I'd be very proud, Mr. Remsen."
+
+"Thank you, Bixby. Good night." Remsen took up his hat just as Percy
+slid down from his stool.
+
+"Mr. Remsen, I'm told you're going to have the books gone over."
+
+"Why, yes, Bixby. Don't let that trouble you. I'm taking in a new
+partner, you know, an old college friend. Just because he is a
+friend, I insist upon all the usual formalities. But it is a
+formality, and I'll guarantee the expert won't make a scratch on
+your books. Good night. You'd better be coming, too." Remsen had
+reached the door when he heard "Mr. Remsen!" in a desperate voice
+behind him. He turned, and saw Bixby standing uncertainly at one end
+of the desk, his hand still on his ledger, his uneven shoulders
+drooping forward and his head hanging as if he were seasick. Remsen
+came back and stood at the other end of the long desk. It was too
+dark to see Bixby's face clearly.
+
+"What is it, Bixby?"
+
+"Mr. Remsen, five years ago, just before I was married, I falsified
+the books a thousand dollars, and I used the money." Percy leaned
+forward against his desk, which took him just across the chest.
+
+"What's that, Bixby?" Young Remsen spoke in a tone of polite
+surprise. He felt painfully embarrassed.
+
+"Yes, sir. I thought I'd get it all paid back before this. I've put
+back three hundred, but the books are still seven hundred out of
+true. I've played the shortages about from account to account these
+five years, but an expert would find 'em in twenty-four hours."
+
+"I don't just understand how--" Oliver stopped and shook his head.
+
+"I held it out of the Western remittances, Mr. Remsen. They were
+coming in heavy just then. I was up against it. I hadn't saved
+anything to marry on, and my wife thought I was getting more money
+than I was. Since we've been married, I've never had the nerve to
+tell her. I could have paid it all back if it hadn't been for the
+unforeseen expenses."
+
+Remsen sighed.
+
+"Being married is largely unforeseen expenses, Percy. There's only
+one way to fix this up: I'll give you seven hundred dollars in cash
+to-morrow, and you can give me your personal note, with the
+understanding that I hold ten dollars a week out of your pay-check
+until it is paid. I think you ought to tell your wife exactly how
+you are fixed, though. You can't expect her to help you much when
+she doesn't know."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night Mrs. Bixby was sitting in their flat, waiting for her
+husband. She was dressed for a bridge party, and often looked with
+impatience from her paper to the Mission clock, as big as a coffin
+and with nothing but two weights dangling in its hollow framework.
+Percy had been loath to buy the clock when they got their furniture,
+and he had hated it ever since. Stella had changed very little since
+she came into the flat a bride. Then she wore her hair in a
+Floradora pompadour; now she wore it hooded close about her head
+like a scarf, in a rather smeary manner, like an Impressionist's
+brush-work. She heard her husband come in and close the door softly.
+While he was taking off his hat in the narrow tunnel of a hall, she
+called to him:
+
+"I hope you've had something to eat down-town. You'll have to dress
+right away." Percy came in and sat down. She looked up from the
+evening paper she was reading. "You've no time to sit down. We must
+start in fifteen minutes."
+
+He shaded his eyes from the glaring overhead light.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't go anywhere to-night. I'm all in."
+
+Mrs. Bixby rattled her paper, and turned from the theatrical page to
+the fashions.
+
+"You'll feel better after you dress. We won't stay late."
+
+Her even persistence usually conquered her husband. She never forgot
+anything she had once decided to do. Her manner of following it up
+grew more chilly, but never weaker. To-night there was no spring in
+Percy. He closed his eyes and replied without moving:
+
+"I can't go. You had better telephone the Burks we aren't coming. I
+have to tell you something disagreeable."
+
+Stella rose.
+
+"I certainly am not going to disappoint the Burks and stay at home
+to talk about anything disagreeable."
+
+"You're not very sympathetic, Stella."
+
+She turned away.
+
+"If I were, you'd soon settle down into a pretty dull proposition.
+We'd have no social life now if I didn't keep at you."
+
+Percy roused himself a little.
+
+"Social life? Well, we'll have to trim that pretty close for a
+while. I'm in debt to the company. We've been living beyond our
+means ever since we were married."
+
+"We can't live on less than we do," Stella said quietly. "No use in
+taking that up again."
+
+Percy sat up, clutching the arms of his chair.
+
+"We'll have to take it up. I'm seven hundred dollars short, and the
+books are to be audited to-morrow. I told young Remsen and he's
+going to take my note and hold the money out of my pay-checks. He
+could send me to jail, of course."
+
+Stella turned and looked down at him with a gleam of interest.
+
+"Oh, you've been playing solitaire with the books, have you? And
+he's found you out! I hope I'll never see that man again. Sugar
+face!" She said this with intense acrimony. Her forehead flushed
+delicately, and her eyes were full of hate. Young Remsen was not her
+idea of a "business man."
+
+Stella went into the other room. When she came back she wore her
+evening coat and carried long gloves and a black scarf. This she
+began to arrange over her hair before the mirror above the false
+fireplace. Percy lay inert in the Morris chair and watched her. Yes,
+he understood; it was very difficult for a woman with hair like that
+to be shabby and to go without things. Her hair made her
+conspicuous, and it had to be lived up to. It had been the deciding
+factor in his fate.
+
+Stella caught the lace over one ear with a large gold hairpin. She
+repeated this until she got a good effect. Then turning to Percy,
+she began to draw on her gloves.
+
+"I'm not worrying any, because I'm going back into business," she
+said firmly. "I meant to, anyway, if you didn't get a raise the
+first of the year. I have the offer of a good position, and we can
+live in an apartment hotel."
+
+Percy was on his feet in an instant.
+
+"I won't have you grinding in any office. That's flat."
+
+Stella's lower lip quivered in a commiserating smile. "Oh, I won't
+lose my health. Charley Greengay's a partner in his concern now, and
+he wants a private secretary."
+
+Percy drew back.
+
+"You can't work for Greengay. He's got too bad a reputation. You've
+more pride than that, Stella."
+
+The thin sweep of color he knew so well went over Stella's face.
+
+"His business reputation seems to be all right," she commented,
+working the kid on with her left hand.
+
+"What if it is?" Percy broke out. "He's the cheapest kind of a
+skate. He gets into scrapes with the girls in his own office. The
+last one got into the newspapers, and he had to pay the girl a wad."
+
+"He don't get into scrapes with his books, anyway, and he seems to
+be able to stand getting into the papers. I excuse Charley. His
+wife's a pill."
+
+"I suppose you think he'd have been all right if he'd married you,"
+said Percy, bitterly.
+
+"Yes, I do." Stella buttoned her glove with an air of finishing
+something, and then looked at Percy without animosity. "Charley and
+I both have sporty tastes, and we like excitement. You might as well
+live in Newark if you're going to sit at home in the evening. You
+oughtn't to have married a business woman; you need somebody
+domestic. There's nothing in this sort of life for either of us."
+
+"That means, I suppose, that you're going around with Greengay and
+his crowd?"
+
+"Yes, that's my sort of crowd, and you never did fit into it. You're
+too intellectual. I've always been proud of you, Percy. You're
+better style than Charley, but that gets tiresome. You will never
+burn much red fire in New York, now, will you?"
+
+Percy did not reply. He sat looking at the minute-hand of the
+eviscerated Mission clock. His wife almost never took the trouble to
+argue with him.
+
+"You're old style, Percy," she went on. "Of course everybody marries
+and wishes they hadn't, but nowadays people get over it. Some women
+go ahead on the quiet, but I'm giving it to you straight. I'm going
+to work for Greengay. I like his line of business, and I meet people
+well. Now I'm going to the Burks'."
+
+Percy dropped his hands limply between his knees.
+
+"I suppose," he brought out, "the real trouble is that you've
+decided my earning power is not very great."
+
+"That's part of it, and part of it is you're old-fashioned." Stella
+paused at the door and looked back. "What made you rush me, anyway,
+Percy?" she asked indulgently. "What did you go and pretend to be a
+spender and get tied up with me for?"
+
+"I guess everybody wants to be a spender when he's in love," Percy
+replied.
+
+Stella shook her head mournfully.
+
+"No, you're a spender or you're not. Greengay has been broke three
+times, fired, down and out, black-listed. But he's always come back,
+and he always will. You will never be fired, but you'll always be
+poor." She turned and looked back again before she went out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Six months later Bixby came to young Oliver Remsen one afternoon and
+said he would like to have twenty dollars a week held out of his pay
+until his debt was cleared off.
+
+Oliver looked up at his sallow employee and asked him how he could
+spare as much as that.
+
+"My expenses are lighter," Bixby replied. "My wife has gone into
+business with a ready-to-wear firm. She is not living with me any
+more."
+
+Oliver looked annoyed, and asked him if nothing could be done to
+readjust his domestic affairs. Bixby said no; they would probably
+remain as they were.
+
+"But where are you living, Bixby? How have you arranged things?" the
+young man asked impatiently.
+
+"I'm very comfortable. I live in a boarding-house and have my own
+furniture. There are several fellows there who are fixed the same
+way. Their wives went back into business, and they drifted apart."
+
+With a baffled expression Remsen stared at the uneven shoulders
+under the skin-fitting alpaca desk coat as his bookkeeper went out.
+He had meant to do something for Percy, but somehow, he reflected,
+one never did do anything for a fellow who had been stung as hard as
+that.
+
+                                             _Century_, May 1916
+
+
+
+
+_Ardessa_
+
+
+The grand-mannered old man who sat at a desk in the reception-room
+of "The Outcry" offices to receive visitors and incidentally to keep
+the time-book of the employees, looked up as Miss Devine entered at
+ten minutes past ten and condescendingly wished him good morning. He
+bowed profoundly as she minced past his desk, and with an
+indifferent air took her course down the corridor that led to the
+editorial offices. Mechanically he opened the flat, black book at
+his elbow and placed his finger on D, running his eye along the line
+of figures after the name Devine. "It's banker's hours she keeps,
+indeed," he muttered. What was the use of entering so capricious a
+record? Nevertheless, with his usual preliminary flourish he wrote
+10:10 under this, the fourth day of May.
+
+The employee who kept banker's hours rustled on down the corridor to
+her private room, hung up her lavender jacket and her trim spring
+hat, and readjusted her side combs by the mirror inside her closet
+door. Glancing at her desk, she rang for an office boy, and reproved
+him because he had not dusted more carefully and because there were
+lumps in her paste. When he disappeared with the paste-jar, she sat
+down to decide which of her employer's letters he should see and
+which he should not.
+
+Ardessa was not young and she was certainly not handsome. The
+coquettish angle at which she carried her head was a mannerism
+surviving from a time when it was more becoming. She shuddered at
+the cold candor of the new business woman, and was insinuatingly
+feminine.
+
+Ardessa's employer, like young Lochinvar, had come out of the West,
+and he had done a great many contradictory things before he became
+proprietor and editor of "The Outcry." Before he decided to go to
+New York and make the East take notice of him, O'Mally had acquired
+a punctual, reliable silver-mine in South Dakota. This silent friend
+in the background made his journalistic success comparatively easy.
+He had figured out, when he was a rich nobody in Nevada, that the
+quickest way to cut into the known world was through the
+printing-press. He arrived in New York, bought a highly respectable
+publication, and turned it into a red-hot magazine of protest, which
+he called "The Outcry." He knew what the West wanted, and it proved
+to be what everybody secretly wanted. In six years he had done the
+thing that had hitherto seemed impossible: built up a national
+weekly, out on the news-stands the same day in New York and San
+Francisco; a magazine the people howled for, a moving-picture film
+of their real tastes and interests.
+
+O'Mally bought "The Outcry" to make a stir, not to make a career,
+but he had got built into the thing more than he ever intended. It
+had made him a public man and put him into politics. He found the
+publicity game diverting, and it held him longer than any other game
+had ever done. He had built up about him an organization of which he
+was somewhat afraid and with which he was vastly bored. On his staff
+there were five famous men, and he had made every one of them. At
+first it amused him to manufacture celebrities. He found he could
+take an average reporter from the daily press, give him a "line" to
+follow, a trust to fight, a vice to expose,--this was all in that
+good time when people were eager to read about their own
+wickedness,--and in two years the reporter would be recognized as an
+authority. Other people--Napoleon, Disraeli, Sarah Bernhardt--had
+discovered that advertising would go a long way; but Marcus O'Mally
+discovered that in America it would go all the way--as far as you
+wished to pay its passage. Any human countenance, plastered in
+three-sheet posters from sea to sea, would be revered by the
+American people. The strangest thing was that the owners of these
+grave countenances, staring at their own faces on newsstands and
+billboards, fell to venerating themselves; and even he, O'Mally, was
+more or less constrained by these reputations that he had created
+out of cheap paper and cheap ink.
+
+Constraint was the last thing O'Mally liked. The most engaging and
+unusual thing about the man was that he couldn't be fooled by the
+success of his own methods, and no amount of "recognition" could
+make a stuffed shirt of him. No matter how much he was advertised as
+a great medicine-man in the councils of the nation, he knew that he
+was a born gambler and a soldier of fortune. He left his dignified
+office to take care of itself for a good many months of the year
+while he played about on the outskirts of social order. He liked
+being a great man from the East in rough-and-tumble Western cities
+where he had once been merely an unconsidered spender.
+
+O'Mally's long absences constituted one of the supreme advantages of
+Ardessa Devine's position. When he was at his post her duties were
+not heavy, but when he was giving balls in Goldfield, Nevada, she
+lived an ideal life. She came to the office every day, indeed, to
+forward such of O'Mally's letters as she thought best, to attend to
+his club notices and tradesmen's bills, and to taste the sense of
+her high connections. The great men of the staff were all about her,
+as contemplative as Buddhas in their private offices, each
+meditating upon the particular trust or form of vice confided to his
+care. Thus surrounded, Ardessa had a pleasant sense of being at the
+heart of things. It was like a mental massage, exercise without
+exertion. She read and she embroidered. Her room was pleasant, and
+she liked to be seen at ladylike tasks and to feel herself a
+graceful contrast to the crude girls in the advertising and
+circulation departments across the hall. The younger stenographers,
+who had to get through with the enormous office correspondence, and
+who rushed about from one editor to another with wire baskets full
+of letters, made faces as they passed Ardessa's door and saw her
+cool and cloistered, daintily plying her needle. But no matter how
+hard the other stenographers were driven, no one, not even one of
+the five oracles of the staff, dared dictate so much as a letter to
+Ardessa. Like a sultan's bride, she was inviolate in her lord's
+absence; she had to be kept for him.
+
+Naturally the other young women employed in "The Outcry" offices
+disliked Miss Devine. They were all competent girls, trained in the
+exacting methods of modern business, and they had to make good every
+day in the week, had to get through with a great deal of work or
+lose their position. O'Mally's private secretary was a mystery to
+them. Her exemptions and privileges, her patronizing remarks, formed
+an exhaustless subject of conversation at the lunch-hour. Ardessa
+had, indeed, as they knew she must have, a kind of "purchase" on her
+employer.
+
+When O'Mally first came to New York to break into publicity, he
+engaged Miss Devine upon the recommendation of the editor whose
+ailing publication he bought and rechristened. That editor was a
+conservative, scholarly gentleman of the old school, who was
+retiring because he felt out of place in the world of brighter,
+breezier magazines that had been flowering since the new century
+came in. He believed that in this vehement world young O'Mally would
+make himself heard and that Miss Devine's training in an editorial
+office would be of use to him.
+
+When O'Mally first sat down at a desk to be an editor, all the cards
+that were brought in looked pretty much alike to him. Ardessa was at
+his elbow. She had long been steeped in literary distinctions and in
+the social distinctions which used to count for much more than they
+do now. She knew all the great men, all the nephews and clients of
+great men. She knew which must be seen, which must be made welcome,
+and which could safely be sent away. She could give O'Mally on the
+instant the former rating in magazine offices of nearly every name
+that was brought in to him. She could give him an idea of the man's
+connections, of the price his work commanded, and insinuate whether
+he ought to be met with the old punctiliousness or with the new
+joviality. She was useful in explaining to her employer the
+significance of various invitations, and the standing of clubs and
+associations. At first she was virtually the social mentor of the
+bullet-headed young Westerner who wanted to break into everything,
+the solitary person about the office of the humming new magazine who
+knew anything about the editorial traditions of the eighties and
+nineties which, antiquated as they now were, gave an editor, as
+O'Mally said, a background.
+
+Despite her indolence, Ardessa was useful to O'Mally as a social
+reminder. She was the card catalogue of his ever-changing personal
+relations. O'Mally went in for everything and got tired of
+everything; that was why he made a good editor. After he was through
+with people, Ardessa was very skilful in covering his retreat. She
+read and answered the letters of admirers who had begun to bore him.
+When great authors, who had been dined and fêted the month before,
+were suddenly left to cool their heels in the reception-room, thrown
+upon the suave hospitality of the grand old man at the desk, it was
+Ardessa who went out and made soothing and plausible explanations as
+to why the editor could not see them. She was the brake that checked
+the too-eager neophyte, the emollient that eased the severing of
+relationships, the gentle extinguisher of the lights that failed.
+When there were no longer messages of hope and cheer to be sent to
+ardent young writers and reformers, Ardessa delivered, as sweetly as
+possible, whatever messages were left.
+
+In handling these people with whom O'Mally was quite through,
+Ardessa had gradually developed an industry which was immensely
+gratifying to her own vanity. Not only did she not crush them; she
+even fostered them a little. She continued to advise them in the
+reception-room and "personally" received their manuscripts long
+after O'Mally had declared that he would never read another line
+they wrote. She let them outline their plans for stories and
+articles to her, promising to bring these suggestions to the
+editor's attention. She denied herself to nobody, was gracious even
+to the Shakspere-Bacon man, the perpetual-motion man, the
+travel-article man, the ghosts which haunt every magazine office.
+The writers who had had their happy hour of O'Mally's favor kept
+feeling that Ardessa might reinstate them. She answered their
+letters of inquiry in her most polished and elegant style, and even
+gave them hints as to the subjects in which the restless editor was
+or was not interested at the moment: she feared it would be useless
+to send him an article on "How to Trap Lions," because he had just
+bought an article on "Elephant-Shooting in Majuba Land," etc.
+
+So when O'Mally plunged into his office at 11:30 on this, the fourth
+day of May, having just got back from three-days' fishing, he found
+Ardessa in the reception-room, surrounded by a little court of
+discards. This was annoying, for he always wanted his stenographer
+at once. Telling the office boy to give her a hint that she was
+needed, he threw off his hat and topcoat and began to race through
+the pile of letters Ardessa had put on his desk. When she entered,
+he did not wait for her polite inquiries about his trip, but broke
+in at once.
+
+"What is that fellow who writes about phossy jaw still hanging round
+here for? I don't want any articles on phossy jaw, and if I did, I
+wouldn't want his."
+
+"He has just sold an article on the match industry to 'The New Age,'
+Mr. O'Mally," Ardessa replied as she took her seat at the editor's
+right.
+
+"Why does he have to come and tell us about it? We've nothing to do
+with 'The New Age.' And that prison-reform guy, what's he loafing
+about for?"
+
+Ardessa bridled.
+
+"You remember, Mr. O'Mally, he brought letters of introduction from
+Governor Harper, the reform Governor of Mississippi."
+
+O'Mally jumped up, kicking over his waste-basket in his impatience.
+
+"That was months ago. I went through his letters and went through him,
+too. He hasn't got anything we want. I've been through with Governor
+Harper a long while. We're asleep at the switch in here. And let me
+tell you, if I catch sight of that causes-of-blindness-in-babies
+woman around here again, I'll do something violent. Clear them out,
+Miss Devine! Clear them out! We need a traffic policeman in this
+office. Have you got that article on 'Stealing Our National Water
+Power' ready for me?"
+
+"Mr. Gerrard took it back to make modifications. He gave it to me at
+noon on Saturday, just before the office closed. I will have it
+ready for you to-morrow morning, Mr. O'Mally, if you have not too
+many letters for me this afternoon," Ardessa replied pointedly.
+
+"Holy Mike!" muttered O'Mally, "we need a traffic policeman for the
+staff, too. Gerrard's modified that thing half a dozen times
+already. Why don't they get accurate information in the first
+place?"
+
+He began to dictate his morning mail, walking briskly up and down
+the floor by way of giving his stenographer an energetic example.
+Her indolence and her ladylike deportment weighed on him. He wanted
+to take her by the elbows and run her around the block. He didn't
+mind that she loafed when he was away, but it was becoming harder
+and harder to speed her up when he was on the spot. He knew his
+correspondence was not enough to keep her busy, so when he was in
+town he made her type his own breezy editorials and various articles
+by members of his staff.
+
+Transcribing editorial copy is always laborious, and the only way to
+make it easy is to farm it out. This Ardessa was usually clever
+enough to do. When she returned to her own room after O'Mally had
+gone out to lunch, Ardessa rang for an office boy and said
+languidly, "James, call Becky, please."
+
+In a moment a thin, tense-faced Hebrew girl of eighteen or nineteen
+came rushing in, carrying a wire basket full of typewritten sheets.
+She was as gaunt as a plucked spring chicken, and her cheap, gaudy
+clothes might have been thrown on her. She looked as if she were
+running to catch a train and in mortal dread of missing it. While
+Miss Devine examined the pages in the basket, Becky stood with her
+shoulders drawn up and her elbows drawn in, apparently trying to
+hide herself in her insufficient open-work waist. Her wild, black
+eyes followed Miss Devine's hands desperately. Ardessa sighed.
+
+"This seems to be very smeary copy again, Becky. You don't keep your
+mind on your work, and so you have to erase continually."
+
+Becky spoke up in wailing self-vindication.
+
+"It ain't that, Miss Devine. It's so many hard words he uses that I
+have to be at the dictionary all the time. Look! Look!" She produced
+a bunch of manuscript faintly scrawled in pencil, and thrust it
+under Ardessa's eyes. "He don't write out the words at all. He just
+begins a word, and then makes waves for you to guess."
+
+"I see you haven't always guessed correctly, Becky," said Ardessa,
+with a weary smile. "There are a great many words here that would
+surprise Mr. Gerrard, I am afraid."
+
+"And the inserts," Becky persisted. "How is anybody to tell where
+they go, Miss Devine? It's mostly inserts; see, all over the top and
+sides and back."
+
+Ardessa turned her head away.
+
+"Don't claw the pages like that, Becky. You make me nervous. Mr.
+Gerrard has not time to dot his i's and cross his t's. That is what
+we keep copyists for. I will correct these sheets for you,--it would
+be terrible if Mr. O'Mally saw them,--and then you can copy them
+over again. It must be done by to-morrow morning, so you may have to
+work late. See that your hands are clean and dry, and then you will
+not smear it."
+
+"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Miss Devine. Will you tell the janitor,
+please, it's all right if I have to stay? He was cross because I was
+here Saturday afternoon doing this. He said it was a holiday, and
+when everybody else was gone I ought to--"
+
+"That will do, Becky. Yes, I will speak to the janitor for you. You
+may go to lunch now."
+
+Becky turned on one heel and then swung back.
+
+"Miss Devine," she said anxiously, "will it be all right if I get
+white shoes for now?"
+
+Ardessa gave her kind consideration.
+
+"For office wear, you mean? No, Becky. With only one pair, you could
+not keep them properly clean; and black shoes are much less
+conspicuous. Tan, if you prefer."
+
+Becky looked down at her feet. They were too large, and her skirt
+was as much too short as her legs were too long.
+
+"Nearly all the girls I know wear white shoes to business," she
+pleaded.
+
+"They are probably little girls who work in factories or department
+stores, and that is quite another matter. Since you raise the
+question, Becky, I ought to speak to you about your new waist. Don't
+wear it to the office again, please. Those cheap open-work waists
+are not appropriate in an office like this. They are all very well
+for little chorus girls."
+
+"But Miss Kalski wears expensive waists to business more open than
+this, and jewelry--"
+
+Ardessa interrupted. Her face grew hard.
+
+"Miss Kalski," she said coldly, "works for the business department.
+You are employed in the editorial offices. There is a great
+difference. You see, Becky, I might have to call you in here at any
+time when a scientist or a great writer or the president of a
+university is here talking over editorial matters, and such clothes
+as you have on to-day would make a bad impression. Nearly all our
+connections are with important people of that kind, and we ought to
+be well, but quietly, dressed."
+
+"Yes, Miss Devine. Thank you," Becky gasped and disappeared. Heaven
+knew she had no need to be further impressed with the greatness of
+"The Outcry" office. During the year and a half she had been there
+she had never ceased to tremble. She knew the prices all the authors
+got as well as Miss Devine did, and everything seemed to her to be
+done on a magnificent scale. She hadn't a good memory for long
+technical words, but she never forgot dates or prices or initials or
+telephone numbers.
+
+Becky felt that her job depended on Miss Devine, and she was so glad
+to have it that she scarcely realized she was being bullied.
+Besides, she was grateful for all that she had learned from Ardessa;
+Ardessa had taught her to do most of the things that she was
+supposed to do herself. Becky wanted to learn, she had to learn;
+that was the train she was always running for. Her father, Isaac
+Tietelbaum, the tailor, who pressed Miss Devine's skirts and kept
+her ladylike suits in order, had come to his client two years ago
+and told her he had a bright girl just out of a commercial high
+school. He implored Ardessa to find some office position for his
+daughter. Ardessa told an appealing story to O'Mally, and brought
+Becky into the office, at a salary of six dollars a week, to help
+with the copying and to learn business routine. When Becky first
+came she was as ignorant as a young savage. She was rapid at her
+shorthand and typing, but a Kafir girl would have known as much
+about the English language. Nobody ever wanted to learn more than
+Becky. She fairly wore the dictionary out. She dug up her old school
+grammar and worked over it at night. She faithfully mastered Miss
+Devine's fussy system of punctuation.
+
+There were eight children at home, younger than Becky, and they were
+all eager to learn. They wanted to get their mother out of the three
+dark rooms behind the tailor shop and to move into a flat up-stairs,
+where they could, as Becky said, "live private." The young
+Tietelbaums doubted their father's ability to bring this change
+about, for the more things he declared himself ready to do in his
+window placards, the fewer were brought to him to be done. "Dyeing,
+Cleaning, Ladies' Furs Remodeled"--it did no good.
+
+Rebecca was out to "improve herself," as her father had told her she
+must. Ardessa had easy way with her. It was one of those rare
+relationships from which both persons profit. The more Becky could
+learn from Ardessa, the happier she was; and the more Ardessa could
+unload on Becky, the greater was her contentment. She easily broke
+Becky of the gum-chewing habit, taught her to walk quietly, to
+efface herself at the proper moment, and to hold her tongue. Becky
+had been raised to eight dollars a week; but she didn't care half so
+much about that as she did about her own increasing efficiency. The
+more work Miss Devine handed over to her the happier she was, and
+the faster she was able to eat it up. She tested and tried herself
+in every possible way. She now had full confidence that she would
+surely one day be a high-priced stenographer, a real "business
+woman."
+
+Becky would have corrupted a really industrious person, but a
+bilious temperament like Ardessa's couldn't make even a feeble stand
+against such willingness. Ardessa had grown soft and had lost the
+knack of turning out work. Sometimes, in her importance and
+serenity, she shivered. What if O'Mally should die, and she were
+thrust out into the world to work in competition with the brazen,
+competent young women she saw about her everywhere? She believed
+herself indispensable, but she knew that in such a mischanceful
+world as this the very powers of darkness might rise to separate her
+from this pearl among jobs.
+
+When Becky came in from lunch she went down the long hall to the
+wash-room, where all the little girls who worked in the advertising
+and circulation departments kept their hats and jackets. There were
+shelves and shelves of bright spring hats, piled on top of one
+another, all as stiff as sheet-iron and trimmed with gay flowers. At
+the marble wash-stand stood Rena Kalski, the right bower of the
+business manager, polishing her diamond rings with a nail-brush.
+
+"Hullo, kid," she called over her shoulder to Becky. "I've got a
+ticket for you for Thursday afternoon."
+
+Becky's black eyes glowed, but the strained look on her face drew
+tighter than ever.
+
+"I'll never ask her, Miss Kalski," she said rapidly. "I don't dare.
+I have to stay late to-night again; and I know she'd be hard to
+please after, if I was to try to get off on a week-day. I thank you,
+Miss Kalski, but I'd better not."
+
+Miss Kalski laughed. She was a slender young Hebrew, handsome in an
+impudent, Tenderloin sort of way, with a small head, reddish-brown
+almond eyes, a trifle tilted, a rapacious mouth, and a beautiful
+chin.
+
+"Ain't you under that woman's thumb, though! Call her bluff. She
+isn't half the prima donna she thinks she is. On my side of the hall
+we know who's who about this place."
+
+The business and editorial departments of "The Outcry" were
+separated by a long corridor and a great contempt. Miss Kalski dried
+her rings with tissue-paper and studied them with an appraising eye.
+
+"Well, since you're such a 'fraidy-calf,'" she went on, "maybe I can
+get a rise out of her myself. Now I've got you a ticket out of that
+shirt-front, I want you to go. I'll drop in on Devine this
+afternoon."
+
+When Miss Kalski went back to her desk in the business manager's
+private office, she turned to him familiarly, but not impertinently.
+
+"Mr. Henderson, I want to send a kid over in the editorial
+stenographers' to the Palace Thursday afternoon. She's a nice kid,
+only she's scared out of her skin all the time. Miss Devine's her
+boss, and she'll be just mean enough not to let the young one off.
+Would you say a word to her?"
+
+The business manager lit a cigar.
+
+"I'm not saying words to any of the high-brows over there. Try it
+out with Devine yourself. You're not bashful."
+
+Miss Kalski shrugged her shoulders and smiled.
+
+"Oh, very well." She serpentined out of the room and crossed the
+Rubicon into the editorial offices. She found Ardessa typing
+O'Mally's letters and wearing a pained expression.
+
+"Good afternoon, Miss Devine," she said carelessly. "Can we borrow
+Becky over there for Thursday afternoon? We're short."
+
+Miss Devine looked piqued and tilted her head.
+
+"I don't think it's customary, Miss Kalski, for the business
+department to use our people. We never have girls enough here to do
+the work. Of course if Mr. Henderson feels justified--"
+
+"Thanks awfully, Miss Devine,"--Miss Kalski interrupted her with the
+perfectly smooth, good-natured tone which never betrayed a hint of
+the scorn every line of her sinuous figure expressed,--"I will tell
+Mr. Henderson. Perhaps we can do something for you some day."
+Whether this was a threat, a kind wish, or an insinuation, no mortal
+could have told. Miss Kalski's face was always suggesting insolence
+without being quite insolent. As she returned to her own domain she
+met the cashier's head clerk in the hall. "That Devine woman's a
+crime," she murmured. The head clerk laughed tolerantly.
+
+That afternoon as Miss Kalski was leaving the office at 5:15, on her
+way down the corridor she heard a typewriter clicking away in the
+empty, echoing editorial offices. She looked in, and found Becky
+bending forward over the machine as if she were about to swallow it.
+
+"Hello, kid. Do you sleep with that?" she called. She walked up to
+Becky and glanced at her copy. "What do you let 'em keep you up
+nights over that stuff for?" she asked contemptuously. "The world
+wouldn't suffer if that stuff never got printed."
+
+Rebecca looked up wildly. Not even Miss Kalski's French pansy hat or
+her ear-rings and landscape veil could loosen Becky's tenacious mind
+from Mr. Gerrard's article on water power. She scarcely knew what
+Miss Kalski had said to her, certainly not what she meant.
+
+"But I must make progress already, Miss Kalski," she panted.
+
+Miss Kalski gave her low, siren laugh.
+
+"I should say you must!" she ejaculated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ardessa decided to take her vacation in June, and she arranged that
+Miss Milligan should do O'Mally's work while she was away. Miss
+Milligan was blunt and noisy, rapid and inaccurate. It would be just
+as well for O'Mally to work with a coarse instrument for a time; he
+would be more appreciative, perhaps, of certain qualities to which
+he had seemed insensible of late. Ardessa was to leave for East
+Hampton on Sunday, and she spent Saturday morning instructing her
+substitute as to the state of the correspondence. At noon O'Mally
+burst into her room. All the morning he had been closeted with a new
+writer of mystery-stories just over from England.
+
+"Can you stay and take my letters this afternoon, Miss Devine? You
+'re not leaving until to-morrow."
+
+Ardessa pouted, and tilted her head at the angle he was tired of.
+
+"I'm sorry, Mr. O'Mally, but I've left all my shopping for this
+afternoon. I think Becky Tietelbaum could do them for you. I will
+tell her to be careful."
+
+"Oh, all right." O'Mally bounced out with a reflection of Ardessa's
+disdainful expression on his face. Saturday afternoon was always a
+half-holiday, to be sure, but since she had weeks of freedom when he
+was away--However--
+
+At two o'clock Becky Tietelbaum appeared at his door, clad in the
+sober office suit which Miss Devine insisted she should wear, her
+note-book in her hand, and so frightened that her fingers were cold
+and her lips were pale. She had never taken dictation from the
+editor before. It was a great and terrifying occasion.
+
+"Sit down," he said encouragingly. He began dictating while he shook
+from his bag the manuscripts he had snatched away from the amazed
+English author that morning. Presently he looked up.
+
+"Do I go too fast?"
+
+"No, sir," Becky found strength to say.
+
+At the end of an hour he told her to go and type as many of the
+letters as she could while he went over the bunch of stuff he had
+torn from the Englishman. He was with the Hindu detective in an
+opium den in Shanghai when Becky returned and placed a pile of
+papers on his desk.
+
+"How many?" he asked, without looking up.
+
+"All you gave me, sir."
+
+"All, so soon? Wait a minute and let me see how many mistakes." He
+went over the letters rapidly, signing them as he read. "They seem
+to be all right. I thought you were the girl that made so many
+mistakes."
+
+Rebecca was never too frightened to vindicate herself.
+
+"Mr. O'Mally, sir, I don't make mistakes with letters. It's only
+copying the articles that have so many long words, and when the
+writing isn't plain, like Mr. Gerrard's. I never make many mistakes
+with Mr. Johnson's articles, or with yours I don't."
+
+O'Mally wheeled round in his chair, looked with curiosity at her
+long, tense face, her black eyes, and straight brows.
+
+"Oh, so you sometimes copy articles, do you? How does that happen?"
+
+"Yes, sir. Always Miss Devine gives me the articles to do. It's good
+practice for me."
+
+"I see." O'Mally shrugged his shoulders. He was thinking that he
+could get a rise out of the whole American public any day easier
+than he could get a rise out of Ardessa. "What editorials of mine
+have you copied lately, for instance?"
+
+Rebecca blazed out at him, reciting rapidly:
+
+"Oh, 'A Word about the Rosenbaums,' 'Useless Navy-Yards,' 'Who
+Killed Cock Robin'--"
+
+"Wait a minute." O'Mally checked her flow. "What was that one
+about--Cock Robin?"
+
+"It was all about why the secretary of the interior dismissed--"
+
+"All right, all right. Copy those letters, and put them down the
+chute as you go out. Come in here for a minute on Monday morning."
+
+Becky hurried home to tell her father that she had taken the
+editor's letters and had made no mistakes. On Monday she learned
+that she was to do O'Mally's work for a few days. He disliked Miss
+Milligan, and he was annoyed with Ardessa for trying to put her over
+on him when there was better material at hand. With Rebecca he got
+on very well; she was impersonal, unreproachful, and she fairly
+panted for work. Everything was done almost before he told her what
+he wanted. She raced ahead with him; it was like riding a good
+modern bicycle after pumping along on an old hard tire.
+
+On the day before Miss Devine's return O'Mally strolled over for a
+chat with the business office.
+
+"Henderson, your people are taking vacations now, I suppose? Could
+you use an extra girl?"
+
+"If it's that thin black one, I can."
+
+O'Mally gave him a wise smile.
+
+"It isn't. To be honest, I want to put one over on you. I want you
+to take Miss Devine over here for a while and speed her up. I can't
+do anything. She's got the upper hand of me. I don't want to fire
+her, you understand, but she makes my life too difficult. It's my
+fault, of course. I've pampered her. Give her a chance over here;
+maybe she'll come back. You can be firm with 'em, can't you?"
+
+Henderson glanced toward the desk where Miss Kalski's lightning eye
+was skimming over the printing-house bills that he was supposed to
+verify himself.
+
+"Well, if I can't, I know who can," he replied, with a chuckle.
+
+"Exactly," O'Mally agreed. "I'm counting on the force of Miss
+Kalski's example. Miss Devine's all right, Miss Kalski, but she
+needs regular exercise. She owes it to her complexion. I can't
+discipline people."
+
+Miss Kalski's only reply was a low, indulgent laugh.
+
+O'Mally braced himself on the morning of Ardessa's return. He told
+the waiter at his club to bring him a second pot of coffee and to
+bring it hot. He was really afraid of her. When she presented
+herself at his office at 10:30 he complimented her upon her tan and
+asked about her vacation. Then he broke the news to her.
+
+"We want to make a few temporary changes about here, Miss Devine,
+for the summer months. The business department is short of help.
+Henderson is going to put Miss Kalski on the books for a while to
+figure out some economies for him, and he is going to take you over.
+Meantime I'll get Becky broken in so that she could take your work
+if you were sick or anything."
+
+Ardessa drew herself up.
+
+"I've not been accustomed to commercial work, Mr. O'Mally. I've no
+interest in it, and I don't care to brush up in it."
+
+"Brushing up is just what we need, Miss Devine." O'Mally began
+tramping about his room expansively. "I'm going to brush everybody
+up. I'm going to brush a few people out; but I want you to stay with
+us, of course. You belong here. Don't be hasty now. Go to your room
+and think it over."
+
+Ardessa was beginning to cry, and O'Mally was afraid he would lose
+his nerve. He looked out of the window at a new sky-scraper that was
+building, while she retired without a word.
+
+At her own desk Ardessa sat down breathless and trembling. The one
+thing she had never doubted was her unique value to O'Mally. She
+had, as she told herself, taught him everything. She would say a few
+things to Becky Tietelbaum, and to that pigeon-breasted tailor, her
+father, too! The worst of it was that Ardessa had herself brought it
+all about; she could see that clearly now. She had carefully trained
+and qualified her successor. Why had she ever civilized Becky? Why
+had she taught her manners and deportment, broken her of the
+gum-chewing habit, and made her presentable? In her original state
+O'Mally would never have put up with her, no matter what her
+ability.
+
+Ardessa told herself that O'Mally was notoriously fickle; Becky
+amused him, but he would soon find out her limitations. The wise
+thing, she knew, was to humor him; but it seemed to her that she
+could not swallow her pride. Ardessa grew yellower within the hour.
+Over and over in her mind she bade O'Mally a cold adieu and minced
+out past the grand old man at the desk for the last time. But each
+exit she rehearsed made her feel sorrier for herself. She thought
+over all the offices she knew, but she realized that she could never
+meet their inexorable standards of efficiency.
+
+While she was bitterly deliberating, O'Mally himself wandered in,
+rattling his keys nervously in his pocket. He shut the door behind
+him.
+
+"Now, you're going to come through with this all right, aren't you,
+Miss Devine? I want Henderson to get over the notion that my people
+over here are stuck up and think the business department are old
+shoes. That's where we get our money from, as he often reminds me.
+You'll be the best-paid girl over there; no reduction, of course.
+You don't want to go wandering off to some new office where
+personality doesn't count for anything." He sat down confidentially
+on the edge of her desk. "Do you, now, Miss Devine?"
+
+Ardessa simpered tearfully as she replied.
+
+"Mr. O'Mally," she brought out, "you'll soon find that Becky is not
+the sort of girl to meet people for you when you are away. I don't
+see how you can think of letting her."
+
+"That's one thing I want to change, Miss Devine. You're too
+soft-handed with the has-beens and the never-was-ers. You're too
+much of a lady for this rough game. Nearly everybody who comes in
+here wants to sell us a gold-brick, and you treat them as if they
+were bringing in wedding presents. Becky is as rough as sandpaper,
+and she'll clear out a lot of dead wood." O'Mally rose, and tapped
+Ardessa's shrinking shoulder. "Now, be a sport and go through with
+it, Miss Devine. I'll see that you don't lose. Henderson thinks
+you'll refuse to do his work, so I want you to get moved in there
+before he comes back from lunch. I've had a desk put in his office
+for you. Miss Kalski is in the bookkeeper's room half the time now."
+
+Rena Kalski was amazed that afternoon when a line of office boys
+entered, carrying Miss Devine's effects, and when Ardessa herself
+coldly followed them. After Ardessa had arranged her desk, Miss
+Kalski went over to her and told her about some matters of routine
+very good-naturedly. Ardessa looked pretty badly shaken up, and Rena
+bore no grudges.
+
+"When you want the dope on the correspondence with the paper men,
+don't bother to look it up. I've got it all in my head, and I can
+save time for you. If he wants you to go over the printing bills
+every week, you'd better let me help you with that for a while. I
+can stay almost any afternoon. It's quite a trick to figure out the
+plates and over-time charges till you get used to it. I've worked
+out a quick method that saves trouble."
+
+When Henderson came in at three he found Ardessa, chilly, but civil,
+awaiting his instructions. He knew she disapproved of his tastes and
+his manners, but he didn't mind. What interested and amused him was
+that Rena Kalski, whom he had always thought as cold-blooded as an
+adding-machine, seemed to be making a hair-mattress of herself to
+break Ardessa's fall.
+
+At five o'clock, when Ardessa rose to go, the business manager said
+breezily:
+
+"See you at nine in the morning, Miss Devine. We begin on the
+stroke."
+
+Ardessa faded out of the door, and Miss Kalski's slender back
+squirmed with amusement.
+
+"I never thought to hear such words spoken," she admitted; "but I
+guess she'll limber up all right. The atmosphere is bad over there.
+They get moldy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the next monthly luncheon of the heads of departments, O'Mally
+said to Henderson, as he feed the coat-boy:
+
+"By the way, how are you making it with the bartered bride?"
+
+Henderson smashed on his Panama as he said:
+
+"Any time you want her back, don't be delicate."
+
+But O'Mally shook his red head and laughed.
+
+"Oh, I'm no Indian giver!"
+
+                                             _Century_, May 1918
+
+
+
+
+_Her Boss_
+
+
+Paul Wanning opened the front door of his house in Orange, closed it
+softly behind him, and stood looking about the hall as he drew off
+his gloves.
+
+Nothing was changed there since last night, and yet he stood gazing
+about him with an interest which a long-married man does not often
+feel in his own reception hall. The rugs, the two pillars, the
+Spanish tapestry chairs, were all the same. The Venus di Medici
+stood on her column as usual and there, at the end of the hall
+(opposite the front door), was the full-length portrait of Mrs.
+Wanning, maturely blooming forth in an evening gown, signed with the
+name of a French painter who seemed purposely to have made his
+signature indistinct. Though the signature was largely what one paid
+for, one couldn't ask him to do it over.
+
+In the dining room the colored man was moving about the table set
+for dinner, under the electric cluster. The candles had not yet been
+lighted. Wanning watched him with a homesick feeling in his heart.
+They had had Sam a long while, twelve years, now. His warm hall, the
+lighted dining-room, the drawing room where only the flicker of the
+wood fire played upon the shining surfaces of many objects--they
+seemed to Wanning like a haven of refuge. It had never occurred to
+him that his house was too full of things. He often said, and he
+believed, that the women of his household had "perfect taste." He
+had paid for these objects, sometimes with difficulty, but always
+with pride. He carried a heavy life-insurance and permitted himself
+to spend most of the income from a good law practise. He wished,
+during his life-time, to enjoy the benefits of his wife's
+discriminating extravagance.
+
+Yesterday Wanning's doctor had sent him to a specialist. Today the
+specialist, after various laboratory tests, had told him most
+disconcerting things about the state of very necessary, but hitherto
+wholly uninteresting, organs of his body.
+
+The information pointed to something incredible; insinuated that his
+residence in this house was only temporary; that he, whose time was so
+full, might have to leave not only his house and his office and his
+club, but a world with which he was extremely well satisfied--the
+only world he knew anything about.
+
+Wanning unbuttoned his overcoat, but did not take it off. He stood
+folding his muffler slowly and carefully. What he did not understand
+was, how he could go while other people stayed. Sam would be moving
+about the table like this, Mrs. Wanning and her daughters would be
+dressing upstairs, when he would not be coming home to dinner any
+more; when he would not, indeed, be dining anywhere.
+
+Sam, coming to turn on the parlor lights, saw Wanning and stepped
+behind him to take his coat.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Wanning, sah, excuse me. You entahed so quietly,
+sah, I didn't heah you."
+
+The master of the house slipped out of his coat and went languidly
+upstairs.
+
+He tapped at the door of his wife's room, which stood ajar.
+
+"Come in, Paul," she called from her dressing table.
+
+She was seated, in a violet dressing gown, giving the last touches to
+her coiffure, both arms lifted. They were firm and white, like her neck
+and shoulders. She was a handsome woman of fifty-five,--still a
+woman, not an old person, Wanning told himself, as he kissed her
+cheek. She was heavy in figure, to be sure, but she had kept, on the
+whole, presentable outlines. Her complexion was good, and she wore
+less false hair than either of her daughters.
+
+Wanning himself was five years older, but his sandy hair did not
+show the gray in it, and since his mustache had begun to grow white
+he kept it clipped so short that it was unobtrusive. His fresh skin
+made him look younger than he was. Not long ago he had overheard the
+stenographers in his law office discussing the ages of their
+employers. They had put him down at fifty, agreeing that his two
+partners must be considerably older than he--which was not the case.
+Wanning had an especially kindly feeling for the little new girl, a
+copyist, who had exclaimed that "Mr. Wanning couldn't be fifty; he
+seemed so boyish!"
+
+Wanning lingered behind his wife, looking at her in the mirror.
+
+"Well, did you tell the girls, Julia?" he asked, trying to speak
+casually.
+
+Mrs. Wanning looked up and met his eyes in the glass. "The girls?"
+
+She noticed a strange expression come over his face.
+
+"About your health, you mean? Yes, dear, but I tried not to alarm
+them. They feel dreadfully. I'm going to have a talk with Dr. Seares
+myself. These specialists are all alarmists, and I've often heard of
+his frightening people."
+
+She rose and took her husband's arm, drawing him toward the
+fireplace.
+
+"You are not going to let this upset you, Paul? If you take care of
+yourself, everything will come out all right. You have always been
+so strong. One has only to look at you."
+
+"Did you," Wanning asked, "say anything to Harold?"
+
+"Yes, of course. I saw him in town today, and he agrees with me that
+Seares draws the worst conclusions possible. He says even the young
+men are always being told the most terrifying things. Usually they
+laugh at the doctors and do as they please. You certainly don't look
+like a sick man, and you don't feel like one, do you?"
+
+She patted his shoulder, smiled at him encouragingly, and rang for
+the maid to come and hook her dress.
+
+When the maid appeared at the door, Wanning went out through the
+bathroom to his own sleeping chamber. He was too much dispirited to
+put on a dinner coat, though such remissness was always noticed. He
+sat down and waited for the sound of the gong, leaving his door
+open, on the chance that perhaps one of his daughters would come in.
+
+When Wanning went down to dinner he found his wife already at her
+chair, and the table laid for four.
+
+"Harold," she explained, "is not coming home. He has to attend a
+first night in town."
+
+A moment later their two daughters entered, obviously "dressed."
+They both wore earrings and masses of hair. The daughters' names
+were Roma and Florence,--Roma, Firenze, one of the young men who
+came to the house often, but not often enough, had called them.
+Tonight they were going to a rehearsal of "The Dances of the
+Nations,"--a benefit performance in which Miss Roma was to lead the
+Spanish dances, her sister the Grecian.
+
+The elder daughter had often been told that her name suited her
+admirably. She looked, indeed, as we are apt to think the
+unrestrained beauties of later Rome must have looked,--but as their
+portrait busts emphatically declare they did not. Her head was
+massive, her lips full and crimson, her eyes large and heavy-lidded,
+her forehead low. At costume balls and in living pictures she was
+always Semiramis, or Poppea, or Theodora. Barbaric accessories
+brought out something cruel and even rather brutal in her handsome
+face. The men who were attracted to her were somehow afraid of her.
+
+Florence was slender, with a long, graceful neck, a restless head,
+and a flexible mouth--discontent lurked about the corners of it. Her
+shoulders were pretty, but her neck and arms were too thin. Roma was
+always struggling to keep within a certain weight--her chin and
+upper arms grew persistently more solid--and Florence was always
+striving to attain a certain weight. Wanning used sometimes to
+wonder why these disconcerting fluctuations could not go the other
+way; why Roma could not melt away as easily as did her sister, who
+had to be sent to Palm Beach to save the precious pounds.
+
+"I don't see why you ever put Rickie Allen in charge of the English
+country dances," Florence said to her sister, as they sat down. "He
+knows the figures, of course, but he has no real style."
+
+Roma looked annoyed. Rickie Allen was one of the men who came to the
+house almost often enough.
+
+"He is absolutely to be depended upon, that's why," she said firmly.
+
+"I think he is just right for it, Florence," put in Mrs. Wanning.
+"It's remarkable he should feel that he can give up the time; such a
+busy man. He must be very much interested in the movement."
+
+Florence's lip curled drolly under her soup spoon. She shot an
+amused glance at her mother's dignity.
+
+"Nothing doing," her keen eyes seemed to say.
+
+Though Florence was nearly thirty and her sister a little beyond,
+there was, seriously, nothing doing. With so many charms and so much
+preparation, they never, as Florence vulgarly said, quite pulled it
+off. They had been rushed, time and again, and Mrs. Wanning had
+repeatedly steeled herself to bear the blow. But the young men went
+to follow a career in Mexico or the Philippines, or moved to
+Yonkers, and escaped without a mortal wound.
+
+Roma turned graciously to her father.
+
+"I met Mr. Lane at the Holland House today, where I was lunching
+with the Burtons, father. He asked about you, and when I told him
+you were not so well as usual, he said he would call you up. He
+wants to tell you about some doctor he discovered in Iowa, who cures
+everything with massage and hot water. It sounds freakish, but Mr.
+Lane is a very clever man, isn't he?"
+
+"Very," assented Wanning.
+
+"I should think he must be!" sighed Mrs. Wanning. "How in the world
+did he make all that money, Paul? He didn't seem especially
+promising years ago, when we used to see so much of them."
+
+"Corporation business. He's attorney for the P. L. and G.," murmured
+her husband.
+
+"What a pile he must have!" Florence watched the old negro's slow
+movements with restless eyes. "Here is Jenny, a Contessa, with a
+glorious palace in Genoa that her father must have bought her.
+Surely Aldrini had nothing. Have you seen the baby count's pictures,
+Roma? They're very cunning. I should think you'd go to Genoa and
+visit Jenny."
+
+"We must arrange that, Roma. It's such an opportunity." Though Mrs.
+Wanning addressed her daughter, she looked at her husband. "You
+would get on so well among their friends. When Count Aldrini was
+here you spoke Italian much better than poor Jenny. I remember when
+we entertained him, he could scarcely say anything to her at all."
+
+Florence tried to call up an answering flicker of amusement upon her
+sister's calm, well-bred face. She thought her mother was rather
+outdoing herself tonight,--since Aldrini had at least managed to say
+the one important thing to Jenny, somehow, somewhere. Jenny Lane had
+been Roma's friend and schoolmate, and the Count was an ephemeral
+hope in Orange. Mrs. Wanning was one of the first matrons to declare
+that she had no prejudices against foreigners, and at the dinners
+that were given for the Count, Roma was always put next him to act
+as interpreter.
+
+Roma again turned to her father.
+
+"If I were you, dear, I would let Mr. Lane tell me about his doctor.
+New discoveries are often made by queer people."
+
+Roma's voice was low and sympathetic; she never lost her dignity.
+
+Florence asked if she might have her coffee in her room, while she
+dashed off a note, and she ran upstairs humming "Bright Lights" and
+wondering how she was going to stand her family until the summer
+scattering. Why could Roma never throw off her elegant reserve and
+call things by their names? She sometimes thought she might like her
+sister, if she would only come out in the open and howl about her
+disappointments.
+
+Roma, drinking her coffee deliberately, asked her father if they
+might have the car early, as they wanted to pick up Mr. Allen and
+Mr. Rydberg on their way to rehearsal.
+
+Wanning said certainly. Heaven knew he was not stingy about his car,
+though he could never quite forget that in his day it was the young
+men who used to call for the girls when they went to rehearsals.
+
+"You are going with us, Mother?" Roma asked as they rose.
+
+"I think so dear. Your father will want to go to bed early, and I
+shall sleep better if I go out. I am going to town tomorrow to pour
+tea for Harold. We must get him some new silver, Paul. I am quite
+ashamed of his spoons."
+
+Harold, the only son, was a playwright--as yet "unproduced"--and he
+had a studio in Washington Square.
+
+A half-hour later, Wanning was alone in his library. He would not
+permit himself to feel aggrieved. What was more commendable than a
+mother's interest in her children's pleasures? Moreover, it was his
+wife's way of following things up, of never letting die grass grow
+under her feet, that had helped to push him along in the world. She
+was more ambitious than he,--that had been good for him. He was
+naturally indolent, and Julia's childlike desire to possess material
+objects, to buy what other people were buying, had been the spur
+that made him go after business. It had, moreover, made his house
+the attractive place he believed it to be.
+
+"Suppose," his wife sometimes said to him when the bills came in
+from Céleste or Mme. Blanche, "suppose you had homely daughters; how
+would you like that?"
+
+He wouldn't have liked it. When he went anywhere with his three
+ladies, Wanning always felt very well done by. He had no complaint
+to make about them, or about anything. That was why it seemed so
+unreasonable--He felt along his back incredulously with his hand.
+Harold, of course, was a trial; but among all his business friends,
+he knew scarcely one who had a promising boy.
+
+The house was so still that Wanning could hear a faint, metallic
+tinkle from the butler's pantry. Old Sam was washing up the silver,
+which he put away himself every night.
+
+Wanning rose and walked aimlessly down the hall and out through the
+dining-room.
+
+"Any Apollinaris on ice, Sam? I'm not feeling very well tonight."
+
+The old colored man dried his hands.
+
+"Yessah, Mistah Wanning. Have a little rye with it, sah?"
+
+"No, thank you, Sam. That's one of the things I can't do any more.
+I've been to see a big doctor in the city, and he tells me there's
+something seriously wrong with me. My kidneys have sort of gone back
+on me."
+
+It was a satisfaction to Wanning to name the organ that had betrayed
+him, while all the rest of him was so sound.
+
+Sam was immediately interested. He shook his grizzled head and
+looked full of wisdom.
+
+"Don't seem like a gen'leman of such a temperate life ought to have
+anything wrong thar, sah."
+
+"No, it doesn't, does it?"
+
+Wanning leaned against the china closet and talked to Sam for nearly
+half an hour. The specialist who condemned him hadn't seemed half so
+much interested. There was not a detail about the examination and
+the laboratory tests in which Sam did not show the deepest concern.
+He kept asking Wanning if he could remember "straining himself" when
+he was a young man.
+
+"I've knowed a strain like that to sleep in a man for yeahs and
+yeahs, and then come back on him, 'deed I have," he said,
+mysteriously. "An' again, it might be you got a floatin' kidney,
+sah. Aftah dey once teah loose, dey sometimes don't make no trouble
+for quite a while."
+
+When Wanning went to his room he did not go to bed. He sat up until
+he heard the voices of his wife and daughters in the hall below. His
+own bed somehow frightened him. In all the years he had lived in
+this house he had never before looked about his room, at that bed,
+with the thought that he might one day be trapped there, and might
+not get out again. He had been ill, of course, but his room had
+seemed a particularly pleasant place for a sick man; sunlight,
+flowers,--agreeable, well-dressed women coming in and out.
+
+Now there was something sinister about the bed itself, about its
+position, and its relation to the rest of the furniture.
+
+
+II
+
+The next morning, on his way downtown, Wanning got off the subway
+train at Astor Place and walked over to Washington Square. He
+climbed three flights of stairs and knocked at his son's studio.
+Harold, dressed, with his stick and gloves in his hand, opened the
+door. He was just going over to the Brevoort for breakfast. He
+greeted his father with the cordial familiarity practised by all the
+"boys" of his set, clapped him on the shoulder and said in his
+light, tonsilitis voice:
+
+"Come in, Governor, how delightful! I haven't had a call from you in
+a long time."
+
+He threw his hat and gloves on the writing table. He was a perfect
+gentleman, even with his father.
+
+Florence said the matter with Harold was that he had heard people
+say he looked like Byron, and stood for it.
+
+What Harold would stand for in such matters was, indeed, the best
+definition of him. When he read his play "The Street Walker" in
+drawing rooms and one lady told him it had the poetic symbolism of
+Tchekhov, and another said that it suggested the biting realism of
+Brieux, he never, in his most secret thoughts, questioned the acumen
+of either lady. Harold's speech, even if you heard it in the next
+room and could not see him, told you that he had no sense of the
+absurd,--a throaty staccato, with never a downward inflection,
+trustfully striving to please.
+
+"Just going out?" his father asked. "I won't keep you. Your mother
+told you I had a discouraging session with Seares?"
+
+"So awfully sorry you've had this bother, Governor; just as sorry as
+I can be. No question about it's coming out all right, but it's a
+downright nuisance, your having to diet and that sort of thing. And
+I suppose you ought to follow directions, just to make us all feel
+comfortable, oughtn't you?" Harold spoke with fluent sympathy.
+
+Wanning sat down on the arm of a chair and shook his head. "Yes,
+they do recommend a diet, but they don't promise much from it."
+
+Harold laughed precipitately. "Delicious! All doctors are, aren't
+they? So profound and oracular! The medicine-man; it's quite the
+same idea, you see; with tom-toms."
+
+Wanning knew that Harold meant something subtle,--one of the
+subtleties which he said were only spoiled by being explained--so he
+came bluntly to one of the issues he had in mind.
+
+"I would like to see you settled before I quit the harness, Harold."
+
+Harold was absolutely tolerant.
+
+He took out his cigarette case and burnished it with his
+handkerchief.
+
+"I perfectly understand your point of view, dear Governor, but
+perhaps you don't altogether get mine. Isn't it so? I am settled.
+What you mean by being settled, would unsettle me, completely. I'm
+cut out for just such an existence as this; to live four floors up
+in an attic, get my own breakfast, and have a charwoman to do for
+me. I should be awfully bored with an establishment. I'm quite
+content with a little diggings like this."
+
+Wanning's eyes fell. Somebody had to pay the rent of even such
+modest quarters as contented Harold, but to say so would be rude,
+and Harold himself was never rude. Wanning did not, this morning,
+feel equal to hearing a statement of his son's uncommercial ideals.
+
+"I know," he said hastily. "But now we're up against hard facts, my
+boy. I did not want to alarm your mother, but I've had a time limit
+put on me, and it's not a very long one."
+
+Harold threw away the cigarette he had just lighted in a burst of
+indignation.
+
+"That's the sort of thing I consider criminal, Father, absolutely
+criminal! What doctor has a right to suggest such a thing? Seares
+himself may be knocked out tomorrow. What have laboratory tests got
+to do with a man's will to live? The force of that depends upon his
+entire personality, not on any organ or pair of organs."
+
+Harold thrust his hands in his pockets and walked up and down, very
+much stirred. "Really, I have a very poor opinion of scientists.
+They ought to be made serve an apprenticeship in art, to get some
+conception of the power of human motives. Such brutality!"
+
+Harold's plays dealt with the grimmest and most depressing matters,
+but he himself was always agreeable, and he insisted upon high
+cheerfulness as the correct tone of human intercourse.
+
+Wanning rose and turned to go. There was, in Harold, simply no
+reality, to which one could break through. The young man took up his
+hat and gloves.
+
+"Must you go? Let me step along with you to the sub. The walk will
+do me good."
+
+Harold talked agreeably all the way to Astor Place. His father heard
+little of what he said, but he rather liked his company and his wish
+to be pleasant.
+
+Wanning went to his club for luncheon, meaning to spend the
+afternoon with some of his friends who had retired from business and
+who read the papers there in the empty hours between two and seven.
+He got no satisfaction, however. When he tried to tell these men of
+his present predicament, they began to describe ills of their own in
+which he could not feel interested. Each one of them had a
+treacherous organ of which he spoke with animation, almost with
+pride, as if it were a crafty business competitor whom he was
+constantly outwitting. Each had a doctor, too, for whom he was
+ardently soliciting business. They wanted either to telephone their
+doctor and make an appointment for Wanning, or to take him then and
+there to the consulting room. When he did not accept these
+invitations, they lost interest in him and remembered engagements.
+He called a taxi and returned to the offices of McQuiston, Wade, and
+Wanning.
+
+Settled at his desk, Wanning decided that he would not go home to
+dinner, but would stay at the office and dictate a long letter to an
+old college friend who lived in Wyoming. He could tell Douglas Brown
+things that he had not succeeded in getting to any one else. Brown,
+out in the Wind River mountains, couldn't defend himself, couldn't
+slap Wanning on the back and tell him to gather up the sunbeams.
+
+He called up his house in Orange to say that he would not be home
+until late. Roma answered the telephone. He spoke mournfully, but
+she was not disturbed by it.
+
+"Very well, Father. Don't get too tired," she said in her well
+modulated voice.
+
+When Wanning was ready to dictate his letter, he looked out from his
+private office into the reception room and saw that his stenographer
+in her hat and gloves, and furs of the newest cut, was just leaving.
+
+"Goodnight, Mr. Wanning," she said, drawing down her dotted veil.
+
+Had there been important business letters to be got off on the night
+mail, he would have felt that he could detain her, but not for
+anything personal. Miss Doane was an expert legal stenographer, and
+she knew her value. The slightest delay in dispatching office
+business annoyed her. Letters that were not signed until the next
+morning awoke her deepest contempt. She was scrupulous in
+professional etiquette, and Wanning felt that their relations,
+though pleasant, were scarcely cordial.
+
+As Miss Doane's trim figure disappeared through the outer door,
+little Annie Wooley, the copyist, came in from the stenographers'
+room. Her hat was pinned over one ear, and she was scrambling into
+her coat as she came, holding her gloves in her teeth and her
+battered handbag in the fist that was already through a sleeve.
+
+"Annie, I wanted to dictate a letter. You were just leaving, weren't
+you?"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind!" she answered cheerfully, and pulling off her old
+coat, threw it on a chair. "I'll get my book."
+
+She followed him into his room and sat down by a table,--though she
+wrote with her book on her knee.
+
+Wanning had several times kept her after office hours to take his
+private letters for him, and she had always been good-natured about
+it. On each occasion, when he gave her a dollar to get her dinner,
+she protested, laughing, and saying that she could never eat so much
+as that.
+
+She seemed a happy sort of little creature, didn't pout when she was
+scolded, and giggled about her own mistakes in spelling. She was
+plump and undersized, always dodging under the elbows of taller
+people and clattering about on high heels, much run over. She had
+bright black eyes and fuzzy black hair in which, despite Miss
+Doane's reprimands, she often stuck her pencil. She was the girl who
+couldn't believe that Wanning was fifty, and he had liked her ever
+since he overheard that conversation.
+
+Tilting back his chair--he never assumed this position when he
+dictated to Miss Doane--Wanning began: "To Mr. D. E. Brown, South
+Forks, Wyoming."
+
+He shaded his eyes with his hand and talked off a long letter to
+this man who would be sorry that his mortal frame was breaking up.
+He recalled to him certain fine months they had spent together on
+the Wind River when they were young men, and said he sometimes
+wished that like D. E. Brown, he had claimed his freedom in a big
+country where the wheels did not grind a man as hard as they did in
+New York. He had spent all these years hustling about and getting
+ready to live the way he wanted to live, and now he had a puncture
+the doctors couldn't mend. What was the use of it?
+
+Wanning's thoughts were fixed on the trout streams and the great
+silver-firs in the canyons of the Wind River Mountains, when he was
+disturbed by a soft, repeated sniffling. He looked out between his
+fingers. Little Annie, carried away by his eloquence, was fairly
+panting to make dots and dashes fast enough, and she was sopping her
+eyes with an unpresentable, end-of-the-day handkerchief.
+
+Wanning rambled on in his dictation. Why was she crying? What did it
+matter to her? He was a man who said good-morning to her, who
+sometimes took an hour of the precious few she had left at the end
+of the day and then complained about her bad spelling. When the
+letter was finished, he handed her a new two dollar bill.
+
+"I haven't got any change tonight; and anyhow, I'd like you to eat a
+whole lot. I'm on a diet, and I want to see everybody else eat."
+
+Annie tucked her notebook under her arm and stood looking at the
+bill which she had not taken up from the table.
+
+"I don't like to be paid for taking letters to your friends, Mr.
+Wanning," she said impulsively. "I can run personal letters off
+between times. It ain't as if I needed the money," she added
+carelessly.
+
+"Get along with you! Anybody who is eighteen years old and has a
+sweet tooth needs money, all they can get."
+
+Annie giggled and darted out with the bill in her hand.
+
+Wanning strolled aimlessly after her into the reception room.
+
+"Let me have that letter before lunch tomorrow, please, and be sure
+that nobody sees it." He stopped and frowned. "I don't look very
+sick, do I?"
+
+"I should say you don't!" Annie got her coat on after considerable
+tugging. "Why don't you call in a specialist? My mother called a
+specialist for my father before he died."
+
+"Oh, is your father dead?"
+
+"I should say he is! He was a painter by trade, and he fell off a
+seventy-foot stack into the East River. Mother couldn't get anything
+out of the company, because he wasn't buckled. He lingered for four
+months, so I know all about taking care of sick people. I was
+attending business college then, and sick as he was, he used to give
+me dictation for practise. He made us all go into professions; the
+girls, too. He didn't like us to just run."
+
+Wanning would have liked to keep Annie and hear more about her
+family, but it was nearly seven o'clock, and he knew he ought, in
+mercy, to let her go. She was the only person to whom he had talked
+about his illness who had been frank and honest with him, who had
+looked at him with eyes that concealed nothing. When he broke the
+news of his condition to his partners that morning, they shut him
+off as if he were uttering indecent ravings. All day they had met
+him with a hurried, abstracted manner. McQuiston and Wade went out
+to lunch together, and he knew what they were thinking, perhaps
+talking, about. Wanning had brought into the firm valuable business,
+but he was less enterprising than either of his partners.
+
+
+III
+
+In the early summer Wanning's family scattered. Roma swallowed her
+pride and sailed for Genoa to visit the Contessa Jenny. Harold went
+to Cornish to be in an artistic atmosphere. Mrs. Wanning and
+Florence took a cottage at York Harbor where Wanning was supposed to
+join them whenever he could get away from town. He did not often get
+away. He felt most at ease among his accustomed surroundings. He
+kept his car in the city and went back and forth from his office to
+the club where he was living. Old Sam, his butler, came in from
+Orange every night to put his clothes in order and make him
+comfortable.
+
+Wanning began to feel that he would not tire of his office in a
+hundred years. Although he did very little work, it was pleasant to
+go down town every morning when the streets were crowded, the sky
+clear, and the sunshine bright. From the windows of his private
+office he could see the harbor and watch the ocean liners come down
+the North River and go out to sea.
+
+While he read his mail, he often looked out and wondered why he had
+been so long indifferent to that extraordinary scene of human
+activity and hopefulness. How had a short-lived race of beings the
+energy and courage valiantly to begin enterprises which they could
+follow for only a few years; to throw up towers and build
+sea-monsters and found great businesses, when the frailest of the
+materials with which they worked, the paper upon which they wrote,
+the ink upon their pens, had more permanence in this world than
+they? All this material rubbish lasted. The linen clothing and
+cosmetics of the Egyptians had lasted. It was only the human flame
+that certainly, certainly went out. Other things had a fighting
+chance; they might meet with mishap and be destroyed, they might
+not. But the human creature who gathered and shaped and hoarded and
+foolishly loved these things, he had no chance--absolutely none.
+Wanning's cane, his hat, his topcoat, might go from beggar to beggar
+and knock about in this world for another fifty years or so; but not
+he.
+
+In the late afternoon he never hurried to leave his office now.
+Wonderful sunsets burned over the North River, wonderful stars
+trembled up among the towers; more wonderful than anything he could
+hurry away to. One of his windows looked directly down upon the
+spire of Old Trinity, with the green churchyard and the pale
+sycamores far below. Wanning often dropped into the church when he
+was going out to lunch; not because he was trying to make his peace
+with Heaven, but because the church was old and restful and
+familiar, because it and its gravestones had sat in the same place
+for a long while. He bought flowers from the street boys and kept
+them on his desk, which his partners thought strange behavior, and
+which Miss Doane considered a sign that he was failing.
+
+But there were graver things than bouquets for Miss Doane and the
+senior partner to ponder over.
+
+The senior partner, McQuiston, in spite of his silvery hair and
+mustache and his important church connections, had rich natural
+taste for scandal.--After Mr. Wade went away for his vacation, in
+May, Wanning took Annie Wooley out of the copying room, put her at a
+desk in his private office, and raised her pay to eighteen dollars a
+week, explaining to McQuiston that for the summer months he would
+need a secretary. This explanation satisfied neither McQuiston nor
+Miss Doane.
+
+Annie was also paid for overtime, and although Wanning attended to
+very little of the office business now, there was a great deal of
+overtime. Miss Doane was, of course, 'above' questioning a chit like
+Annie; but what was he doing with his time and his new secretary,
+she wanted to know?
+
+If anyone had told her that Wanning was writing a book, she would
+have said bitterly that it was just like him. In his youth Wanning
+had hankered for the pen. When he studied law, he had intended to
+combine that profession with some tempting form of authorship. Had
+he remained a bachelor, he would have been an unenterprising
+literary lawyer to the end of his days. It was his wife's
+restlessness and her practical turn of mind that had made him a
+money-getter. His illness seemed to bring back to him the illusions
+with which he left college.
+
+As soon as his family were out of the way and he shut up the Orange
+house, he began to dictate his autobiography to Annie Wooley. It was
+not only the story of his life, but an expression of all his
+theories and opinions, and a commentary on the fifty years of events
+which he could remember.
+
+Fortunately, he was able to take great interest in this undertaking.
+He had the happiest convictions about the clear-cut style he was
+developing and his increasing felicity in phrasing. He meant to
+publish the work handsomely, at his own expense and under his own
+name. He rather enjoyed the thought of how greatly disturbed Harold
+would be. He and Harold differed in their estimates of books. All
+the solid works which made up Wanning's library, Harold considered
+beneath contempt. Anybody, he said, could do that sort of thing.
+
+When Wanning could not sleep at night, he turned on the light beside
+his bed and made notes on the chapter he meant to dictate the next
+day.
+
+When he returned to the office after lunch, he gave instructions
+that he was not to be interrupted by telephone calls, and shut
+himself up with his secretary.
+
+After he had opened all the windows and taken off his coat, he fell
+to dictating. He found it a delightful occupation, the solace of
+each day. Often he had sudden fits of tiredness; then he would lie
+down on the leather sofa and drop asleep, while Annie read "The
+Leopard's Spots" until he awoke.
+
+Like many another business man Wanning had relied so long on
+stenographers that the operation of writing with a pen had become
+laborious to him. When he undertook it, he wanted to cut everything
+short. But walking up and down his private office, with the strong
+afternoon sun pouring in at his windows, a fresh air stirring, all
+the people and boats moving restlessly down there, he could say
+things he wanted to say. It was like living his life over again.
+
+He did not miss his wife or his daughters. He had become again the
+mild, contemplative youth he was in college, before he had a
+profession and a family to grind for, before the two needs which
+shape our destiny had made of him pretty much what they make of
+every man.
+
+At five o'clock Wanning sometimes went out for a cup of tea and took
+Annie along. He felt dull and discouraged as soon as he was alone.
+So long as Annie was with him, he could keep a grip on his own
+thoughts. They talked about what he had just been dictating to her.
+She found that he liked to be questioned, and she tried to be
+greatly interested in it all.
+
+After tea, they went back to the office. Occasionally Wanning lost
+track of time and kept Annie until it grew dark. He knew he had old
+McQuiston guessing, but he didn't care. One day the senior partner
+came to him with a reproving air.
+
+"I am afraid Miss Doane is leaving us, Paul. She feels that Miss
+Wooley's promotion is irregular."
+
+"How is that any business of hers, I'd like to know? She has all my
+legal work. She is always disagreeable enough about doing anything
+else."
+
+McQuiston's puffy red face went a shade darker.
+
+"Miss Doane has a certain professional pride; a strong feeling for
+office organization. She doesn't care to fill an equivocal position.
+I don't know that I blame her. She feels that there is something not
+quite regular about the confidence you seem to place in this
+inexperienced young woman."
+
+Wanning pushed back his chair.
+
+"I don't care a hang about Miss Doane's sense of propriety. I need a
+stenographer who will carry out my instructions. I've carried out
+Miss Doane's long enough. I've let that schoolma'am hector me for
+years. She can go when she pleases."
+
+That night McQuiston wrote to his partner that things were in a bad
+way, and they would have to keep an eye on Wanning. He had been seen
+at the theatre with his new stenographer.
+
+That was true. Wanning had several times taken Annie to the Palace
+on Saturday afternoon. When all his acquaintances were off motoring
+or playing golf, when the down-town offices and even the streets
+were deserted, it amused him to watch a foolish show with a
+delighted, cheerful little person beside him.
+
+Beyond her generosity, Annie had no shining merits of character, but
+she had the gift of thinking well of everything, and wishing well.
+When she was there Wanning felt as if there were someone who cared
+whether this was a good or a bad day with him. Old Sam, too, was
+like that. While the old black man put him to bed and made him
+comfortable, Wanning could talk to him as he talked to little Annie.
+Even if he dwelt upon his illness, in plain terms, in detail, he did
+not feel as if he were imposing on them.
+
+People like Sam and Annie admitted misfortune,--admitted it almost
+cheerfully. Annie and her family did not consider illness or any of
+its hard facts vulgar or indecent. It had its place in their scheme
+of life, as it had not in that of Wanning's friends.
+
+Annie came out of a typical poor family of New York. Of eight
+children, only four lived to grow up. In such families the stream of
+life is broad enough, but runs shallow. In the children, vitality is
+exhausted early. The roots do not go down into anything very strong.
+Illness and deaths and funerals, in her own family and in those of
+her friends, had come at frequent intervals in Annie's life. Since
+they had to be, she and her sisters made the best of them. There was
+something to be got out of funerals, even, if they were managed
+right. They kept people in touch with old friends who had moved
+uptown, and revived kindly feelings.
+
+Annie had often given up things she wanted because there was
+sickness at home, and now she was patient with her boss. What he
+paid her for overtime work by no means made up to her what she lost.
+
+Annie was not in the least thrifty, nor were any of her sisters. She
+had to make a living, but she was not interested in getting all she
+could for her time, or in laying up for the future. Girls like Annie
+know that the future is a very uncertain thing, and they feel no
+responsibility about it. The present is what they have--and it is
+all they have. If Annie missed a chance to go sailing with the
+plumber's son on Saturday afternoon, why, she missed it. As for the
+two dollars her boss gave her, she handed them over to her mother.
+Now that Annie was getting more money, one of her sisters quit a job
+she didn't like and was staying at home for a rest. That was all
+promotion meant to Annie.
+
+The first time Annie's boss asked her to work on Saturday afternoon,
+she could not hide her disappointment. He suggested that they might
+knock off early and go to a show, or take a run in his car, but she
+grew tearful and said it would be hard to make her family
+understand. Wanning thought perhaps he could explain to her mother.
+He called his motor and took Annie home.
+
+When his car stopped in front of the tenement house on Eighth
+Avenue, heads came popping out of the windows for six storys up, and
+all the neighbor women, in dressing sacks and wrappers, gazed down
+at the machine and at the couple alighting from it. A motor meant a
+wedding or the hospital.
+
+The plumber's son, Willy Steen, came over from the corner saloon to
+see what was going on, and Annie introduced him at the doorstep.
+
+Mrs. Wooley asked Wanning to come into the parlor and invited him to
+have a chair of ceremony between the folding bed and the piano.
+
+Annie, nervous and tearful, escaped to the dining-room--the cheerful
+spot where the daughters visited with each other and with their
+friends. The parlor was a masked sleeping chamber and store room.
+
+The plumber's son sat down on the sofa beside Mrs. Wooley, as if he
+were accustomed to share in the family councils. Mrs. Wooley waited
+expectant and kindly. She looked the sensible, hard-working woman
+that she was, and one could see she hadn't lived all her life on
+Eighth Avenue without learning a great deal.
+
+Wanning explained to her that he was writing a book which he wanted
+to finish during the summer months when business was not so heavy.
+He was ill and could not work regularly. His secretary would have to
+take his dictation when he felt able to give it; must, in short, be
+a sort of companion to him. He would like to feel that she could go
+out in his car with him, or even to the theater, when he felt like
+it. It might have been better if he had engaged a young man for this
+work, but since he had begun it with Annie, he would like to keep
+her if her mother was willing.
+
+Mrs. Wooley watched him with friendly, searching eyes. She glanced
+at Willy Steen, who, wise in such distinctions, had decided that
+there was nothing shady about Annie's boss. He nodded his sanction.
+
+"I don't want my girl to conduct herself in any such way as will
+prejudice her, Mr. Wanning," she said thoughtfully. "If you've got
+daughters, you know how that is. You've been liberal with Annie, and
+it's a good position for her. It's right she should go to business
+every day, and I want her to do her work right, but I like to have
+her home after working hours. I always think a young girl's time is
+her own after business hours, and I try not to burden them when they
+come home. I'm willing she should do your work as suits you, if it's
+her wish; but I don't like to press her. The good times she misses
+now, it's not you nor me, sir, that can make them up to her. These
+young things has their feelings."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to press her, either," Wanning said hastily. "I
+simply want to know that you understand the situation. I've made her
+a little present in my will as a recognition that she is doing more
+for me than she is paid for."
+
+"That's something above me, sir. We'll hope there won't be no
+question of wills for many years yet," Mrs. Wooley spoke heartily.
+"I'm glad if my girl can be of any use to you, just so she don't
+prejudice herself."
+
+The plumber's son rose as if the interview were over.
+
+"It's all right, Mama Wooley, don't you worry," he said.
+
+He picked up his canvas cap and turned to Wanning. "You see, Annie
+ain't the sort of girl that would want to be spotted circulating
+around with a monied party her folks didn't know all about. She'd
+lose friends by it."
+
+After this conversation Annie felt a great deal happier. She was
+still shy and a trifle awkward with poor Wanning when they were
+outside the office building, and she missed the old freedom of her
+Saturday afternoons. But she did the best she could, and Willy Steen
+tried to make it up to her.
+
+In Annie's absence he often came in of an afternoon to have a cup of
+tea and a sugar-bun with Mrs. Wooley and the daughter who was
+"resting." As they sat at the dining-room table, they discussed
+Annie's employer, his peculiarities, his health, and what he had
+told Mrs. Wooley about his will.
+
+Mrs. Wooley said she sometimes felt afraid he might disinherit his
+children, as rich people often did, and make talk; but she hoped for
+the best. Whatever came to Annie, she prayed it might not be in the
+form of taxable property.
+
+
+IV
+
+Late in September Wanning grew suddenly worse. His family hurried
+home, and he was put to bed in his house in Orange. He kept asking
+the doctors when he could get back to the office, but he lived only
+eight days.
+
+The morning after his father's funeral, Harold went to the office to
+consult Wanning's partners and to read the will. Everything in the
+will was as it should be. There were no surprises except a codicil
+in the form of a letter to Mrs. Wanning, dated July 8th, requesting
+that out of the estate she should pay the sum of one thousand
+dollars to his stenographer, Annie Wooley, "in recognition of her
+faithful services."
+
+"I thought Miss Doane was my father's stenographer," Harold
+exclaimed.
+
+Alec McQuiston looked embarrassed and spoke in a low, guarded tone.
+
+"She was, for years. But this spring,--" he hesitated.
+
+McQuiston loved a scandal. He leaned across his desk toward Harold.
+
+"This spring your father put this little girl, Miss Wooley, a
+copyist, utterly inexperienced, in Miss Doane's place. Miss Doane
+was indignant and left us. The change made comment here in the
+office. It was slightly--No, I will be frank with you, Harold, it
+was very irregular."
+
+Harold also looked grave. "What could my father have meant by such a
+request as this to my mother?"
+
+The silver haired senior partner flushed and spoke as if he were
+trying to break something gently.
+
+"I don't understand it, my boy. But I think, indeed I prefer to
+think, that your father was not quite himself all this summer. A man
+like your father does not, in his right senses, find pleasure in the
+society of an ignorant, common little girl. He does not make a
+practise of keeping her at the office after hours, often until eight
+o'clock, or take her to restaurants and to the theater with him;
+not, at least, in a slanderous city like New York."
+
+Harold flinched before McQuiston's meaning gaze and turned aside in
+pained silence. He knew, as a dramatist, that there are dark
+chapters in all men's lives, and this but too clearly explained why
+his father had stayed in town all summer instead of joining his
+family.
+
+McQuiston asked if he should ring for Annie Wooley.
+
+Harold drew himself up. "No. Why should I see her? I prefer not to.
+But with your permission, Mr. McQuiston, I will take charge of this
+request to my mother. It could only give her pain, and might awaken
+doubts in her mind."
+
+"We hardly know," murmured the senior partner, "where an
+investigation would lead us. Technically, of course, I cannot agree
+with you. But if, as one of the executors of the will, you wish to
+assume personal responsibility for this bequest, under the
+circumstances--irregularities beget irregularities."
+
+"My first duty to my father," said Harold, "is to protect my
+mother."
+
+That afternoon McQuiston called Annie Wooley into his private office
+and told her that her services would not be needed any longer, and
+that in lieu of notice the clerk would give her two weeks' salary.
+
+"Can I call up here for references?" Annie asked.
+
+"Certainly. But you had better ask for me, personally. You must know
+there has been some criticism of you here in the office, Miss
+Wooley."
+
+"What about?" Annie asked boldly.
+
+"Well, a young girl like you cannot render so much personal service
+to her employer as you did to Mr. Wanning without causing
+unfavorable comment. To be blunt with you, for your own good, my
+dear young lady, your services to your employer should terminate in
+the office, and at the close of office hours. Mr. Wanning was a very
+sick man and his judgment was at fault, but you should have known
+what a girl in your station can do and what she cannot do."
+
+The vague discomfort of months flashed up in little Annie. She had
+no mind to stand by and be lectured without having a word to say for
+herself.
+
+"Of course he was sick, poor man!" she burst out. "Not as anybody
+seemed much upset about it. I wouldn't have given up my
+half-holidays for anybody if they hadn't been sick, no matter what
+they paid me. There wasn't anything in it for me."
+
+McQuiston raised his hand warningly.
+
+"That will do, young lady. But when you get another place, remember
+this: it is never your duty to entertain or to provide amusement for
+your employer."
+
+He gave Annie a look which she did not clearly understand, although
+she pronounced him a nasty old man as she hustled on her hat and
+jacket.
+
+When Annie reached home she found Willy Steen sitting with her
+mother and sister at the dining-room table. This was the first day
+that Annie had gone to the office since Wanning's death, and her
+family awaited her return with suspense.
+
+"Hello yourself," Annie called as she came in and threw her handbag
+into an empty armchair.
+
+"You're off early, Annie," said her mother gravely. "Has the will
+been read?"
+
+"I guess so. Yes, I know it has. Miss Wilson got it out of the safe
+for them. The son came in. He's a pill."
+
+"Was nothing said to you, daughter?"
+
+"Yes, a lot. Please give me some tea, mother." Annie felt that her
+swagger was failing.
+
+"Don't tantalize us, Ann," her sister broke in. "Didn't you get
+anything?"
+
+"I got the mit, all right. And some back talk from the old man that
+I'm awful sore about."
+
+Annie dashed away the tears and gulped her tea.
+
+Gradually her mother and Willy drew the story from her. Willy
+offered at once to go to the office building and take his stand
+outside the door and never leave it until he had punched old Mr.
+McQuiston's face. He rose as if to attend to it at once, but Mrs.
+Wooley drew him to his chair again and patted his arm.
+
+"It would only start talk and get the girl in trouble, Willy. When
+it's lawyers, folks in our station is helpless. I certainly believed
+that man when he sat here; you heard him yourself. Such a gentleman
+as he looked."
+
+Willy thumped his great fist, still in punching position, down on
+his knee.
+
+"Never you be fooled again, Mama Wooley. You'll never get anything
+out of a rich guy that he ain't signed up in the courts for. Rich is
+tight. There's no exceptions."
+
+Annie shook her head.
+
+"I didn't want anything out of him. He was a nice, kind man, and he
+had his troubles, I guess. He wasn't tight."
+
+"Still," said Mrs. Wooley sadly, "Mr. Wanning had no call to hold
+out promises. I hate to be disappointed in a gentleman. You've had
+confining work for some time, daughter; a rest will do you good."
+
+                                       _Smart Set_, October 1919
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+REVIEWS AND ESSAYS
+
+
+
+
+_Mark Twain_
+
+
+If there is anything which should make an American sick and
+disgusted at the literary taste of his country, and almost swerve
+his allegiance to his flag it is that controversy between Mark Twain
+and Max O'Rell, in which the Frenchman proves himself a wit and a
+gentleman and the American shows himself little short of a clown and
+an all around tough. The squabble arose apropos of Paul Bourget's
+new book on America, "Outre Mer," a book which deals more fairly and
+generously with this country than any book yet written in a foreign
+tongue. Mr. Clemens did not like the book, and like all men of his
+class, and limited mentality, he cannot criticise without becoming
+personal and insulting. He cannot be scathing without being a
+blackguard. He tried to demolish a serious and well considered work
+by publishing a scurrilous, slangy and loosely written article about
+it. In this article Mr. Clemens proves very little against Mr.
+Bourget and a very great deal against himself. He demonstrates
+clearly that he is neither a scholar, a reader or a man of letters
+and very little of a gentleman. His ignorance of French literature
+is something appalling. Why, in these days it is as necessary for a
+literary man to have a wide knowledge of the French masterpieces as
+it is for him to have read Shakespeare or the Bible. What man who
+pretends to be an author can afford to neglect those models of style
+and composition. George Meredith, Thomas Hardy and Henry James
+excepted, the great living novelists are Frenchmen.
+
+Mr. Clemens asks what the French sensualists can possibly teach the
+great American people about novel writing or morality? Well, it
+would not seriously hurt the art of the classic author of "Puddin'
+Head Wilson" to study Daudet, De Maupassant, Hugo and George Sand,
+whatever it might do to his morals. Mark Twain is a humorist of a
+kind. His humor is always rather broad, so broad that the polite
+world can justly call it coarse. He is not a reader nor a thinker
+nor a man who loves art of any kind. He is a clever Yankee who has
+made a "good thing" out of writing. He has been published in the
+North American Review and in the Century, but he is not and never
+will be a part of literature. The association and companionship of
+cultured men has given Mark Twain a sort of professional veneer, but
+it could not give him fine instincts or nice discriminations or
+elevated tastes. His works are pure and suitable for children, just
+as the work of most shallow and mediocre fellows. House dogs and
+donkeys make the most harmless and chaste companions for young
+innocence in the world. Mark Twain's humor is of the kind that
+teamsters use in bantering with each other, and his laugh is the
+gruff "haw-haw" of the backwoodsman. He is still the rough, awkward,
+good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands on the river steamer
+and chewed uncured tobacco when he was three years old. Thoroughly
+likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters. It is
+an unfortunate feature of American literature that a hostler with
+some natural cleverness and a great deal of assertion receives the
+same recognition as a standard American author that a man like
+Lowell does. The French academy is a good thing after all. It at
+least divides the sheep from the goats and gives a sheep the
+consolation of knowing that he is a sheep.
+
+It is rather a pity that Paul Bourget should have written "Outre
+Mer," thoroughly creditable book though it is. Mr. Bourget is a
+novelist, and he should not content himself with being an essayist,
+there are far too many of them in the world already. He can develop
+strong characters, invent strong situations, he can write the truth
+and he should not drift into penning opinions and platitudes. When
+God has made a man a creator, it is a great mistake for him to turn
+critic. It is rather an insult to God and certainly a very great
+wrong to man.
+
+                           _Nebraska State Journal_, May 5, 1895
+
+
+I got a letter last week from a little boy just half-past seven who
+had just read "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer." He said: "If
+there are any more books like them in the world, send them to me
+quick." I had to humbly confess to him that if there were any others
+I had not the good fortune to know of them. What a red-letter-day it
+is to a boy, the day he first opens "Tom Sawyer." I would rather
+sail on the raft down the Missouri again with "Huck" Finn and Jim
+than go down the Nile in December or see Venice from a gondola in
+May. Certainly Mark Twain is much better when he writes of his
+Missouri boys than when he makes sickley romances about Joan of Arc.
+And certainly he never did a better piece of work than "Prince and
+Pauper." One seems to get at the very heart of old England in that
+dearest of children's books, and in its pages the frail boy king,
+and his gloomy sister Mary who in her day wrought so much woe for
+unhappy England, and the dashing Princess Elizabeth who lived to
+rule so well, seem to live again. A friend of Mr. Clemens' once told
+me that he said he wrote that book so that when his little daughters
+grew up they might know that their tired old jester of a father
+could be serious and gentle sometimes.
+
+                                    _The Home Monthly_, May 1897
+
+
+
+
+_William Dean Howells_
+
+
+Certainly now in his old age Mr. Howells is selecting queer titles
+for his books. A while ago we had that feeble tale, "The Coast of
+Bohemia," and now we have "My Literary Passions." "Passions,"
+literary or otherwise, were never Mr. Howells' forte and surely no
+man could be further from even the coast of Bohemia.
+
+Apropos of "My Literary Passions" which has so long strung out in
+the Ladies' Home Journal along with those thrilling articles about
+how Henry Ward Beecher tied his necktie and what kind of coffee Mrs.
+Hall Cain likes, why did Mr. Howells write it? Doesn't Mr. Howells
+know that at one time or another every one raves over Don Quixote,
+imitates Heine, worships Tourgueneff and calls Tolstoi a prophet?
+Does Mr. Howells think that no one but he ever had youth and
+enthusiasm and aspirations? Doesn't he know that the only thing that
+makes the world worth living in at all is that once, when we are
+young, we all have that great love for books and impersonal things,
+all reverence and dream? We have all known the time when Porthos,
+Athos and d'Artagan were vastly more real and important to us than
+the folks who lived next door. We have all dwelt in that country
+where Anna Karenina and the Levins were the only people who mattered
+much. We have all known that intoxicating period when we thought we
+"understood life," because we had read Daudet, Zola and Guy de
+Maupassant, and like Mr. Howells we all looked back rather fondly
+upon the time when we believed that books were the truth and art was
+all. After a while books grow matter of fact like everything else
+and we always think enviously of the days when they were new and
+wonderful and strange. That's a part of existence. We lose our first
+keen relish for literature just as we lose it for ice-cream and
+confectionery. The taste grows older, wiser and more subdued. We
+would all wear out of very enthusiasm if it did not. But why should
+Mr. Howells tell the world this common experience in detail as
+though it were his and his alone. He might as well write a detailed
+account of how he had the measles and the whooping cough. It was all
+right and proper for Mr. Howells to like Heine and Hugo, but, in the
+words of the circus clown, "We've all been there."
+
+                         _Nebraska State Journal_, July 14, 1895
+
+
+
+
+_Edgar Allan Poe_
+
+
+  My tantalized spirit
+    Here blandly reposes,
+  Forgetting, or never
+    Regretting its roses,
+  Its old agitations
+    Of myrtles and roses.
+
+  For now, while so quietly
+    Lying, it fancies
+  A holier odor
+    About it, of pansies--
+  A rosemary odor
+    Commingled with pansies.
+  With rue and the beautiful
+    Puritan pansies.
+
+              --Edgar Allan Poe.
+
+The Shakespeare society of New York, which is really about the only
+useful literary organization in this country, is making vigorous
+efforts to redress an old wrong and atone for a long neglect.
+Sunday, Sept. 22, it held a meeting at the Poe cottage on
+Kingsbridge road near Fordham, for the purpose of starting an
+organized movement to buy back the cottage, restore it to its
+original condition and preserve it as a memorial of Poe. So it has
+come at last. After helping build monuments to Shelley, Keats and
+Carlyle we have at last remembered this man, the greatest of our
+poets and the most unhappy. I am glad that this movement is in the
+hands of American actors, for it was among them that Poe found his
+best friends and warmest admirers. Some way he always seemed to
+belong to the strolling Thespians who were his mother's people.
+
+Among all the thousands of life's little ironies that make history
+so diverting, there is none more paradoxical than that Edgar Poe
+should have been an American. Look at his face. Had we ever another
+like it? He must have been a strange figure in his youth, among
+those genial, courtly Virginians, this handsome, pale fellow,
+violent in his enthusiasm, ardent in his worship, but spiritually
+cold in his affections. Now playing heavily for the mere excitement
+of play, now worshipping at the shrine of a woman old enough to be
+his mother, merely because her voice was beautiful; now swimming six
+miles up the James river against a heavy current in the glaring sun
+of a June midday. He must have seemed to them an unreal figure, a
+sort of stage man who was wandering about the streets with his mask
+and buskins on, a theatrical figure who had escaped by some strange
+mischance into the prosaic daylight. His speech and actions were
+unconsciously and sincerely dramatic, always as though done for
+effect. He had that nervous, egotistic, self-centered nature common
+to stage children who seem to have been dazzled by the footlights
+and maddened by the applause before they are born. It was in his
+blood. With the exception of two women who loved him, lived for him,
+died for him, he went through life friendless, misunderstood, with
+that dense, complete, hopeless misunderstanding which, as Amiel
+said, is the secret of that sad smile upon the lips of the great.
+Men tried to befriend him, but in some way or other he hurt and
+disappointed them. He tried to mingle and share with other men, but
+he was always shut from them by that shadow, light as gossamer but
+unyielding as adamant, by which, from the beginning of the world,
+art has shielded and guarded and protected her own, that
+God-concealing mist in which the heroes of old were hidden, immersed
+in that gloom and solitude which, if we could but know it here, is
+but the shadow of God's hand as it falls upon his elect.
+
+We lament our dearth of great prose. With the exception of Henry
+James and Hawthorne, Poe is our only master of pure prose. We lament
+our dearth of poets. With the exception of Lowell, Poe is our only
+great poet. Poe found short story writing a bungling makeshift. He
+left it a perfect art. He wrote the first perfect short stories in
+the English language. He first gave the short story purpose, method,
+and artistic form. In a careless reading one can not realize the
+wonderful literary art, the cunning devices, the masterly effects
+that those entrancing tales conceal. They are simple and direct
+enough to delight us when we are children, subtle and artistic
+enough to be our marvel when we are old. To this day they are the
+wonder and admiration of the French, who are the acknowledged
+masters of craft and form. How in his wandering, laborious life,
+bound to the hack work of the press and crushed by an ever-growing
+burden of want and debt, did he ever come upon all this deep and
+mystical lore, this knowledge of all history, of all languages, of
+all art, this penetration into the hidden things of the East? As
+Steadman says, "The self training of genius is always a marvel." The
+past is spread before us all and most of us spend our lives in
+learning those things which we do not need to know, but genius
+reaches out instinctively and takes only the vital detail, by some
+sort of spiritual gravitation goes directly to the right thing.
+
+Poe belonged to the modern French school of decorative and
+discriminating prose before it ever existed in France. He rivalled
+Gautier, Flaubert and de Maupassant before they were born. He
+clothed his tales in a barbaric splendor and persuasive unreality
+never before heard of in English. No such profusion of color,
+oriental splendor of detail, grotesque combinations and mystical
+effects had ever before been wrought into language. There are tales
+as grotesque, as monstrous, unearthly as the stone griffens and
+gargoyles that are cut up among the unvisited niches and towers of
+Notre Dame, stories as poetic and delicately beautiful as the golden
+lace work chased upon an Etruscan ring. He fitted his words together
+as the Byzantine jewelers fitted priceless stones. He found the
+inner harmony and kinship of words. Where lived another man who
+could blend the beautiful and the horrible, the gorgeous and the
+grotesque in such intricate and inexplicable fashion? Who could
+delight you with his noun and disgust you with his verb, thrill you
+with his adjective and chill you with his adverb, make you run the
+whole gamut of human emotions in a single sentence? Sitting in that
+miserable cottage at Fordham he wrote of the splendor of dream
+palaces beyond the dreams of art. He hung those grimy walls with
+dream tapestries, paved those narrow halls with black marble and
+polished onyx, and into those low-roofed chambers he brought all the
+treasured imagery of fancy, from the "huge carvings of untutored
+Egypt" to "mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from strange
+convolute censers, together with multitudinous, flaring and
+flickering tongues of purple and violet fire." Hungry and ragged he
+wrote of Epicurean feasts and luxury that would have beggared the
+purpled pomp of pagan Rome and put Nero and his Golden House to
+shame.
+
+And this mighty master of the organ of language, who knew its every
+stop and pipe, who could awaken at will the thin silver tones of its
+slenderest reeds or the solemn cadence of its deepest thunder, who
+could make it sing like a flute or roar like a cataract, he was born
+into a country without a literature. He was of that ornate school
+which usually comes last in a national literature, and he came
+first. American taste had been vitiated by men like Griswold and N.
+P. Willis until it was at the lowest possible ebb. Willis was
+considered a genius, that is the worst that could possibly be said.
+In the North a new race of great philosophers was growing up, but
+Poe had neither their friendship nor encouragement. He went indeed,
+sometimes, to the chilly _salon_ of Margaret Fuller, but he was
+always a discord there. He was a mere artist and he had no business
+with philosophy, he had no theories as to the "higher life" and the
+"true happiness." He had only his unshapen dreams that battled with
+him in dark places, the unborn that struggled in his brain for
+birth. What time has an artist to learn the multiplication table or
+to talk philosophy? He was not afraid of them. He laughed at Willis,
+and flung Longfellow's lie in his teeth, the lie the rest of the
+world was twenty years in finding. He scorned the obtrusive learning
+of the transcendentalists and he disliked their hard talkative
+women. He left them and went back to his dream women, his
+_Berenice_, his _Ligeia_, his _Marchesa Aphrodite_, pale and cold as
+the mist maidens of the North, sad as the Norns who weep for human
+woe.
+
+The tragedy of Poe's life was not alcohol, but hunger. He died when
+he was forty, when his work was just beginning. Thackeray had not
+touched his great novels at forty, George Eliot was almost unknown
+at that age. Hugo, Goethe, Hawthorne, Lowell and Dumas all did their
+great work after they were forty years old. Poe never did his great
+work. He could not endure the hunger. This year the Drexel Institute
+has put over sixty thousand dollars into a new edition of Poe's
+poems and stories. He himself never got six thousand for them
+altogether. If one of the great and learned institutions of the land
+had invested one tenth of that amount in the living author forty
+years ago we should have had from him such works as would have made
+the name of this nation great. But he sold "The Masque of the Red
+Death" for a few dollars, and now the Drexel Institute pays a
+publisher thousands to publish it beautifully. It is enough to make
+Satan laugh until his ribs ache, and all the little devils laugh and
+heap on fresh coals. I don't wonder they hate humanity. It's so
+dense, so hopelessly stupid.
+
+Only a few weeks before Poe's death he said he had never had time or
+opportunity to make a serious effort. All his tales were merely
+experiments, thrown off when his day's work as a journalist was
+over, when he should have been asleep. All those voyages into the
+mystical unknown, into the gleaming, impalpable kingdom of pure
+romance from which he brought back such splendid trophies, were but
+experiments. He was only getting his tools into shape getting ready
+for his great effort, the effort that never came.
+
+Bread seems a little thing to stand in the way of genius, but it
+can. The simple sordid facts were these, that in the bitterest
+storms of winter Poe seldom wrote by a fire, that after he was
+twenty-five years old he never knew what it was to have enough to
+eat without dreading tomorrow's hunger. Chatterton had only himself
+to sacrifice, but Poe saw the woman he loved die of want before his
+very eyes, die smiling and begging him not to give up his work. They
+saw the depths together in those long winter nights when she lay in
+that cold room, wrapped in Poe's only coat, he, with one hand
+holding hers, and with the other dashing off some of the most
+perfect masterpieces of English prose. And when he would wince and
+turn white at her coughing, she would always whisper: "Work on, my
+poet, and when you have finished read it to me. I am happy when I
+listen." O, the devotion of women and the madness of art! They are
+the two most awesome things on earth, and surely this man knew both
+to the full.
+
+I have wondered so often how he did it. How he kept his purpose
+always clean and his taste always perfect. How it was that hard
+labor never wearied nor jaded him, never limited his imagination,
+that the jarring clamor about him never drowned the fine harmonies
+of his fancy. His discrimination remained always delicate, and from
+the constant strain of toil his fancy always rose strong and
+unfettered. Without encouragement or appreciation of any sort,
+without models or precedents he built up that pure style of his that
+is without peer in the language, that style of which every sentence
+is a drawing by Vedder. Elizabeth Barrett and a few great artists
+over in France knew what he was doing, they knew that in literature
+he was making possible a new heaven and a new earth. But he never
+knew that they knew it. He died without the assurance that he was or
+ever would be understood. And yet through all this, with the whole
+world of art and letters against him, betrayed by his own people, he
+managed to keep that lofty ideal of perfect work. What he suffered
+never touched or marred his work, but it wrecked his character.
+Poe's character was made by his necessity. He was a liar and an
+egotist; a man who had to beg for bread at the hands of his
+publishers and critics could be nothing but a liar, and had he not
+had the insane egotism and conviction of genius, he would have
+broken down and written the drivelling trash that his countrymen
+delighted to read. Poe lied to his publishers sometimes, there is no
+doubt of that, but there were two to whom he was never false, his
+wife and his muse. He drank sometimes too, when for very ugly and
+relentless reasons he could not eat. And then he forgot what he
+suffered. For Bacchus is the kindest of the gods after all. When
+Aphrodite has fooled us and left us and Athene has betrayed us in
+battle, then poor tipsy Bacchus, who covers his head with vine
+leaves where the curls are getting thin, holds out his cup to us and
+says, "forget." It's poor consolation, but he means it well.
+
+The Transcendentalists were good conversationalists, that in fact
+was their principal accomplishment. They used to talk a great deal
+of genius, that rare and capricious spirit that visits earth so
+seldom, that is wooed by so many, and won by so few. They had grand
+theories that all men should be poets, that the visits of that rare
+spirit should be made as frequent and universal as afternoon calls.
+O, they had plans to make a whole generation of little geniuses. But
+she only laughed her scornful laughter, that deathless lady of the
+immortals, up in her echoing chambers that are floored with dawn and
+roofed with the spangled stars. And she snatched from them the only
+man of their nation she had ever deigned to love, whose lips she had
+touched with music and whose soul with song. In his youth she had
+shown him the secrets of her beauty and his manhood had been one
+pursuit of her, blind to all else, like Anchises, who on the night
+that he knew the love of Venus, was struck sightless, that he might
+never behold the face of a mortal woman. For Our Lady of Genius has
+no care for the prayers and groans of mortals, nor for their
+hecatombs sweet of savor. Many a time of old she has foiled the
+plans of seers and none may entreat her or take her by force. She
+favors no one nation or clime. She takes one from the millions, and
+when she gives herself unto a man it is without his will or that of
+his fellows, and he pays for it, dear heaven, he pays!
+
+  "The sun comes forth and many reptiles spawn,
+  He sets and each ephemeral insect then
+  Is gathered unto death without a dawn,
+  And the immortal stars awake again."
+
+Yes, "and the immortal stars awake again." None may thwart the
+unerring justice of the gods, not even the Transcendentalists. What
+matter that one man's life was miserable, that one man was broken on
+the wheel? His work lives and his crown is eternal. That the work of
+his age was undone, that is the pity, that the work of his youth was
+done, that is the glory. The man is nothing. There are millions of
+men. The work is everything. There is so little perfection. We
+lament our dearth of poets when we let Poe starve. We are like the
+Hebrews who stoned their prophets and then marvelled that the voice
+of God was silent. We will wait a long time for another. There are
+Griswold and N. P. Willis, our chosen ones, let us turn to them.
+Their names are forgotten. God is just. They are,
+
+  "Gathered unto death without a dawn.
+  And the immortal stars awake again."
+
+                                 _The Courier_, October 12, 1895
+
+
+You can afford to give a little more care and attention to this
+imaginative boy of yours than to any of your other children. His
+nerves are more finely strung and all his life he will need your
+love more than the others. Be careful to get him the books he likes
+and see that they are good ones. Get him a volume of Poe's short
+stories. I know many people are prejudiced against Poe because of
+the story that he drank himself to death. But that myth has been
+exploded long ago. Poe drank less than even the average man of his
+time. No, the most artistic of all American story tellers did not
+die because he drank too much, but because he ate too little. And
+yet we, his own countrymen who should be so proud of him, are not
+content with having starved him and wronged him while he lived, we
+must even go on slandering him after he has been dead almost fifty
+years. But get his works for this imaginative boy of yours and he
+will tell you how great a man the author of "The Gold Bug" and "The
+Masque of the Red Death" was. Children are impartial critics and
+sometimes very good ones. They do not reason about a book, they just
+like it or dislike it intensely, and after all that is the
+conclusion of the whole matter. I am very sure that "The Fall of the
+House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Black Cat" will
+give this woolgathering lad of yours more pleasure than a new
+bicycle could.
+
+                                    _The Home Monthly_, May 1897
+
+
+
+
+_Walt Whitman_
+
+
+Speaking of monuments reminds one that there is more talk about a
+monument to Walt Whitman, "the good, gray poet." Just why the
+adjective good is always applied to Whitman it is difficult to
+discover, probably because people who could not understand him at
+all took it for granted that he meant well. If ever there was a poet
+who had no literary ethics at all beyond those of nature, it was he.
+He was neither good nor bad, any more than are the animals he
+continually admired and envied. He was a poet without an exclusive
+sense of the poetic, a man without the finer discriminations,
+enjoying everything with the unreasoning enthusiasm of a boy. He was
+the poet of the dung hill as well as of the mountains, which is
+admirable in theory but excruciating in verse. In the same paragraph
+he informs you that, "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,"
+and that "The malformed limbs are tied to the table, what is removed
+drop horribly into a pail." No branch of surgery is poetic, and that
+hopelessly prosaic word "pail" would kill a whole volume of sonnets.
+Whitman's poems are reckless rhapsodies over creation in general,
+some times sublime, some times ridiculous. He declares that the
+ocean with its "imperious waves, commanding" is beautiful, and that
+the fly-specks on the walls are also beautiful. Such catholic taste
+may go in science, but in poetry their results are sad. The poet's
+task is usually to select the poetic. Whitman never bothers to do
+that, he takes everything in the universe from fly-specks to the
+fixed stars. His "Leaves of Grass" is a sort of dictionary of the
+English language, and in it is the name of everything in creation
+set down with great reverence but without any particular connection.
+
+But however ridiculous Whitman may be there is a primitive elemental
+force about him. He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life.
+He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the
+old Greeks and the primitive poets did. He exults so in the red
+blood in his body and the strength in his arms. He has such a
+passion for the warmth and dignity of all that is natural. He has no
+code but to be natural, a code that this complex world has so long
+outgrown. He is sensual, not after the manner of Swinbourne and
+Gautier, who are always seeking for perverted and bizarre effects on
+the senses, but in the frank fashion of the old barbarians who ate
+and slept and married and smacked their lips over the mead horn. He
+is rigidly limited to the physical, things that quicken his pulses,
+please his eyes or delight his nostrils. There is an element of
+poetry in all this, but it is by no means the highest. If a joyous
+elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be
+very much like Whitman's famous "song of myself." It would have just
+about as much delicacy and deftness and discriminations. He says:
+
+"I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid
+and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do
+not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in
+the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick
+discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied nor not one is
+demented with the mania of many things. Not one kneels to another
+nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is
+respectable or unhappy, over the whole earth." And that is not irony
+on nature, he means just that, life meant no more to him. He
+accepted the world just as it is and glorified it, the seemly and
+unseemly, the good and the bad. He had no conception of a difference
+in people or in things. All men had bodies and were alike to him,
+one about as good as another. To live was to fulfil all natural laws
+and impulses. To be comfortable was to be happy. To be happy was the
+ultimatum. He did not realize the existence of a conscience or a
+responsibility. He had no more thought of good or evil than the
+folks in Kipling's Jungle book.
+
+And yet there is an undeniable charm about this optimistic vagabond
+who is made so happy by the warm sunshine and the smell of spring
+fields. A sort of good fellowship and whole-heartedness in every
+line he wrote. His veneration for things physical and material, for
+all that is in water or air or land, is so real that as you read him
+you think for the moment that you would rather like to live so if
+you could. For the time you half believe that a sound body and a
+strong arm are the greatest things in the world. Perhaps no book
+shows so much as "Leaves of Grass" that keen senses do not make a
+poet. When you read it you realize how spirited a thing poetry
+really is and how great a part spiritual perceptions play in
+apparently sensuous verse, if only to select the beautiful from the
+gross.
+
+                      _Nebraska State Journal_, January 19, 1896
+
+
+
+
+_Henry James_
+
+
+Their mania for careless and hasty work is not confined to the
+lesser men. Howells and Hardy have gone with the crowd. Now that
+Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English speaking author who
+is really keeping his self-respect and sticking for perfection. Of
+course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of
+human actions and motives, Henry James. In the last four years he
+has published, I believe, just two small volumes, "The Lesson of the
+Master" and "Terminations," and in those two little volumes of short
+stories he who will may find out something of what it means to be
+really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish is
+absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard, always
+calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I wish James
+would write about modern society, about "degeneracy" and the new
+woman and all the rest of it. Not that he would throw any light on
+it. He seldom does; but he would say such awfully clever things
+about it, and turn on so many side-lights. And then his sentences!
+If his character novels were all wrong one could read him forever
+for the mere beauty of his sentences. He never lets his phrases run
+away with him. They are never dull and never too brilliant. He
+subjects them to the general tone of his sentence and has his whole
+paragraph partake of the same predominating color. You are never
+startled, never surprised, never thrilled or never enraptured;
+always delighted by that masterly prose that is as correct, as
+classical, as calm and as subtle as the music of Mozart.
+
+                                _The Courier_, November 16, 1895
+
+
+It is strange that from "Felicia" down, the stage novel has never
+been a success. Henry James' "Tragic Muse" is the only theatrical
+novel that has a particle of the real spirit of the stage in it, a
+glimpse of the enthusiasm, the devotion, the exaltation and the
+sordid, the frivolous and the vulgar which are so strangely and
+inextricably blended in that life of the green room. For although
+Henry James cannot write plays he can write passing well of the
+people who enact them. He has put into one book all those inevitable
+attendants of the drama, the patronizing theatre goer who loves it
+above all things and yet feels so far superior to it personally; the
+old tragedienne, the queen of a dying school whose word is law and
+whose judgments are to a young actor as the judgments of God; and of
+course there is the girl, the aspirant, the tragic muse who beats
+and beats upon those brazen doors that guard the unapproachable
+until one fine morning she beats them down and comes into her
+kingdom, the kingdom of unborn beauty that is to live through her.
+It is a great novel, that book of the master's, so perfect as a
+novel that one does not realize what a masterly study it is of the
+life and ends and aims of the people who make plays live.
+
+                        _Nebraska State Journal_, March 29, 1896
+
+
+
+
+_Harold Frederic_
+
+
+    "THE MARKET-PLACE." Harold Frederic. $1.50. New York: F. A.
+    Stokes & Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.
+
+Unusual interest is attached to the posthumous work of that great
+man whose career ended so prematurely and so tragically. The story
+is a study in the ethics and purposes of money-getting, in the
+romantic element in modern business. In it finance is presented not
+as being merely the province of shrewdness, or greediness, or petty
+personal gratification, but of great projects, of great
+brain-battles, a field for the exercising of talent, daring,
+imagination, appealing to the strength of a strong man, filling the
+same place in men's lives that was once filled by the incentives of
+war, kindling in man the desire for the leadership of men. The hero
+of the story, "Joel Thorpe," is one of those men, huge of body, keen
+of brain, with cast iron nerves, as sound a heart as most men, and a
+magnificent capacity for bluff. He has lived and risked and lost in
+a dozen countries, been almost within reach of fortune a dozen
+times, and always missed her until, finally, in London, by promoting
+a great rubber syndicate he becomes a multi-millionaire. He marries
+the most beautiful and one of the most impecunious peeresses in
+England and retires to his country estate. There, as a gentleman of
+leisure, he loses his motive in life, loses power for lack of
+opportunity, and grows less commanding even in the eyes of his wife,
+who misses the uncompromising, barbaric strength which took her by
+storm and won her. Finally he evolves a gigantic philanthropic
+scheme of spending his money as laboriously as he made it.
+
+Mr. Frederic says:
+
+    "Napoleon was the greatest man of his age--one of the
+    greatest men of all ages--not only in war but in a hundred
+    other ways. He spent the last six years of his life at St.
+    Helena in excellent health, with companions that he talked
+    freely to, and in all the extraordinarily copious reports of
+    his conversations there, we don't get a single sentence
+    worth repeating. The greatness had entirely evaporated from
+    him the moment he was put on an island where he had nothing
+    to do."
+
+It is very fitting that Mr. Frederic's last book should be in praise
+of action, the thing that makes the world go round; of force,
+however misspent, which is the sum of life as distinguished from the
+inertia of death. In the forty-odd years of his life he wrote almost
+as many pages as Balzac, most of it mere newspaper copy, it is true,
+read and forgotten, but all of it vigorous and with the stamp of a
+strong man upon it. And he played just as hard as he worked--alas,
+it was the play that killed him! The young artist who illustrated
+the story gave to the pictures of "Joel Thorpe" very much the look
+of Harold Frederic himself, and they might almost stand for his
+portraits. I fancy the young man did not select his model
+carelessly. In this big, burly adventurer who took fortune and women
+by storm, who bluffed the world by his prowess and fought his way to
+the front with battle-ax blows, there is a great deal of Harold
+Frederic, the soldier of fortune, the Utica milk boy who fought his
+way from the petty slavery of a provincial newspaper to the foremost
+ranks of the journalists of the world and on into literature, into
+literature worth the writing. The man won his place in England much
+as his hero won his, by defiance, by strong shoulder blows, by his
+self-sufficiency and inexhaustible strength, and when he finished
+his book he did not know that his end would be so much less glorious
+than his hero's, that it would be his portion not to fall manfully
+in the thick of the combat and the press of battle, but to die
+poisoned in the tent of Chryseis. For who could foresee a tragedy so
+needless, so blind, so brutal in its lack of dignity, or know that
+such strength could perish through such insidious weakness, that so
+great a man could be stung to death by a mania born in little minds?
+
+In point of execution and literary excellence, both "The Market
+Place" and "Gloria Mundi" are vastly inferior to "The Damnation of
+Theron Ware," or that exquisite London idyl, "March Hares." The
+first 200 pages of "Theron Ware" are as good as anything in American
+fiction, much better than most of it. They are not so much the work
+of a literary artist as of a vigorous thinker, a man of strong
+opinions and an intimate and comprehensive knowledge of men. The
+whole work, despite its irregularities and indifference to form, is
+full of brain stuff, the kind of active, healthful, masterful
+intellect that some men put into politics, some into science and a
+few, a very few, into literature. Both "Gloria Mundi" and "The
+Market Place" bear unmistakable evidences of the slack rein and the
+hasty hand. Both of them contain considerable padding, the stamp of
+the space writer. They are imperfectly developed, and are not packed
+with ideas like his earlier novels. Their excellence is in flashes;
+it is not the searching, evenly distributed light which permeates
+his more careful work. There were, as we know too well, good reasons
+why Mr. Frederic should work hastily. He needed a large income and
+he worked heroically, writing many thousands of words a day to
+obtain it. From the experience of the ages we have learned to expect
+to find, coupled with great strength, a proportionate weakness, and
+usually it devours the greater part, as the seven lean kine devoured
+the seven fat in Pharaoh's vision. Achilles was a god in all his
+nobler parts, but his feet were of the earth and to the earth they
+held him down, and he died stung by an arrow in the heel.
+
+                               _Pittsburg Leader_, June 10, 1899
+
+
+
+
+_Kate Chopin_
+
+
+    "THE AWAKENING." Kate Chopin. $1.25. Chicago: H. S. Stone &
+    Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.
+
+A Creole "Bovary" is this little novel of Miss Chopin's. Not that
+the heroine is a creole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is a
+Flaubert--save the mark!--but the theme is similar to that which
+occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no need that a second "Madame
+Bovary" should be written, but an author's choice of themes is
+frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed
+by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is
+particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say
+why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive,
+well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes
+much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers
+is a genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but
+light, flexible, subtle and capable of producing telling effects
+directly and simply. The story she has to tell in the present
+instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. "Edna Pontellier,"
+a Kentucky girl, who, like "Emma Bovary," had been in love with
+innumerable dream heroes before she was out of short skirts, married
+"Leonce Pontellier" as a sort of reaction from a vague and visionary
+passion for a tragedian whose unresponsive picture she used to kiss.
+She acquired the habit of liking her husband in time, and even of
+liking her children. Though we are not justified in presuming that
+she ever threw articles from her dressing table at them, as the
+charming "Emma" had a winsome habit of doing, we are told that "she
+would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart, she would
+sometimes forget them." At a creole watering place, which is
+admirably and deftly sketched by Miss Chopin, "Edna" met "Robert
+Lebrun," son of the landlady, who dreamed of a fortune awaiting him
+in Mexico while he occupied a petty clerical position in New
+Orleans. "Robert" made it his business to be agreeable to his
+mother's boarders, and "Edna," not being a creole, much against his
+wish and will, took him seriously. "Robert" went to Mexico but found
+that fortunes were no easier to make there than in New Orleans. He
+returns and does not even call to pay his respects to her. She
+encounters him at the home of a friend and takes him home with her.
+She wheedles him into staying for dinner, and we are told she sent
+the maid off "in search of some delicacy she had not thought of for
+herself, and she recommended great care in the dripping of the
+coffee and having the omelet done to a turn."
+
+Only a few pages back we were informed that the husband, "M.
+Pontellier," had cold soup and burnt fish for his dinner. Such is
+life. The lover of course disappointed her, was a coward and ran
+away from his responsibilities before they began. He was afraid to
+begin a chapter with so serious and limited a woman. She remembered
+the sea where she had first met "Robert." Perhaps from the same
+motive which threw "Anna Keraninna" under the engine wheels, she
+threw herself into the sea, swam until she was tired and then let
+go.
+
+    "She looked into the distance, and for a moment the old
+    terror flamed up, then sank again. She heard her father's
+    voice, and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of
+    an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs
+    of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the
+    porch. There was a hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks
+    filled the air."
+
+"Edna Pontellier" and "Emma Bovary" are studies in the same feminine
+type; one a finished and complete portrayal, the other a hasty
+sketch, but the theme is essentially the same. Both women belong to
+a class, not large, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands
+more romance out of life than God put into it. Mr. G. Barnard Shaw
+would say that they are the victims of the over-idealization of
+love. They are the spoil of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment.
+The unfortunate feature of their disease is that it attacks only
+women of brains, at least of rudimentary brains, but whose
+development is one-sided; women of strong and fine intuitions, but
+without the faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about
+things. Probably, for emotional people, the most convenient thing
+about being able to think is that it occasionally gives them a rest
+from feeling. Now with women of the "Bovary" type, this relaxation
+and recreation is impossible. They are not critics of life, but, in
+the most personal sense, partakers of life. They receive impressions
+through the fancy. With them everything begins with fancy, and
+passions rise in the brain rather than in the blood, the poor,
+neglected, limited one-sided brain that might do so much better
+things than badgering itself into frantic endeavors to love. For
+these are the people who pay with their blood for the fine ideals of
+the poets, as Marie Delclasse paid for Dumas' great creation,
+"Marguerite Gauthier." These people really expect the passion of
+love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only
+intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist upon
+making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art,
+expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite
+variety, pleasure and distraction, to contribute to their lives what
+the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less
+limited and less intense idealists. So this passion, when set up
+against Shakespeare, Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them. They have
+staked everything on one hand, and they lose. They have driven the
+blood until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves
+up to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation
+is impossible. Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every
+sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get
+even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then "the awakening" comes.
+Sometimes it comes in the form of arsenic, as it came to "Emma
+Bovary," sometimes it is carbolic acid taken covertly in the police
+station, a goal to which unbalanced idealism not infrequently leads.
+"Edna Pontellier," fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea
+on a summer night and went down with the sound of her first lover's
+spurs in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time I
+hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent style of
+hers to a better cause.
+
+                                _Pittsburg Leader_, July 8, 1899
+
+
+
+
+_Stephen Crane_
+
+
+    "WAR IS KIND." Stephen Crane. $2.50. New York: F. A. Stokes
+    & Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.
+
+This truly remarkable book is printed on dirty gray blotting paper,
+on each page of which is a mere dot of print over a large I of
+vacancy. There are seldom more than ten lines on a page, and it
+would be better if most of those lines were not there at all. Either
+Mr. Crane is insulting the public or insulting himself, or he has
+developed a case of atavism and is chattering the primeval nonsense
+of the apes. His "Black Riders," uneven as it was, was a casket of
+polished masterpieces when compared with "War Is Kind." And it is
+not kind at all, Mr. Crane; when it provokes such verses as these,
+it is all that Sherman said it was.
+
+The only production in the volume that is at all coherent is the
+following, from which the book gets its title:
+
+  Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind,
+  Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky,
+  And the affrighted steed ran on alone.
+                  Do not weep,
+                  War is kind.
+
+  Hoarse booming drums of the regiment,
+  Little souls who thirst for fight,
+      These men were born to drill and die.
+  The unexplained glory flies above them.
+  Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom--
+      A field where a thousand corpses lie.
+
+  Do not weep, babe, for war is kind,
+  Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
+  Raged at the breast, gulped and died.
+                  Do not weep,
+                  War is kind.
+
+  Swift-blazing flag of the regiment,
+  Eagle with crest of red and gold,
+      These men were born to drill and die.
+  Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
+  Make plain to them the excellence of killing,
+      And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
+
+  Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
+  On the bright, splendid shroud of your son,
+                  Do not weep,
+                  War is kind.
+
+Of course, one may have objections to hearts hanging like humble
+buttons, or to buttons being humble at all, but one should not stop
+to quarrel about such trifles with a poet who can perpetrate the
+following:
+
+  Thou art my love,
+  And thou art the beard
+  On another man's face--
+  Woe is me.
+
+  Thou art my love,
+  And thou art a temple,
+  And in this temple is an altar,
+  And on this temple is my heart--
+  Woe is me.
+
+  Thou art my love,
+  And thou art a wretch.
+  Let these sacred love-lies choke thee.
+  For I am come to where I know your lies as truth
+  And your truth as lies--
+  Woe is me.
+
+Now, if you please, is the object of these verses animal, mineral or
+vegetable? Is the expression, "Thou art the beard on another man's
+face," intended as a figure, or was it written by a barber?
+Certainly, after reading this, "Simple Simon" is a ballade of
+perfect form, and "Jack and Jill" or "Hickity, Pickity, My Black
+Hen," are exquisite lyrics. But of the following what shall be said:
+
+  Now let me crunch you
+  With full weight of affrighted love.
+  I doubted you
+  --I doubted you--
+  And in this short doubting
+  My love grew like a genie
+  For my further undoing.
+
+  Beware of my friends,
+  Be not in speech too civil,
+  For in all courtesy
+  My weak heart sees specters,
+  Mists of desire
+  Arising from the lips of my chosen;
+  Be not civil.
+
+This is somewhat more lucid as evincing the bard's exquisite
+sensitiveness:
+
+  Ah, God, the way your little finger moved
+  As you thrust a bare arm backward.
+  And made play with your hair
+  And a comb, a silly gilt comb
+  --Ah, God, that I should suffer
+  Because of the way a little finger moved.
+
+Mr. Crane's verselets are illustrated by some Bradley pictures,
+which are badly drawn, in bad taste, and come with bad grace. On
+page 33 of the book there are just two lines which seem to
+completely sum up the efforts of both poet and artist:
+
+  "My good friend," said a learned bystander,
+  "Your operations are mad."
+
+Yet this fellow Crane has written short stories equal to
+some of Maupassant's.
+
+                                _Pittsburg Leader_, June 3, 1899
+
+
+After reading such a delightful newspaper story as Mr. Frank Norris'
+"Blix," it is with assorted sensations of pain and discomfort that
+one closes the covers of another newspaper novel, "Active Service,"
+by Stephen Crane. If one happens to have some trifling regard for
+pure English, he does not come forth from the reading of this novel
+unscathed. The hero of this lurid tale is a newspaper man, and he
+edits the Sunday edition of the New York "Eclipse," and delights in
+publishing "stories" about deformed and sightless infants. "The
+office of the 'Eclipse' was at the top of an immense building on
+Broadway. It was a sheer mountain to the heights of which the
+interminable thunder of the streets rose faintly. The Hudson was a
+broad path of silver in the distance." This leaves little doubt as
+to the fortunate journal which had secured Rufus Coleman as its
+Sunday editor. Mr. Coleman's days were spent in collecting yellow
+sensations for his paper, and we are told that he "planned for each
+edition as for a campaign." The following elevating passage is one
+of the realistic paragraphs by which Mr. Crane makes the routine of
+Coleman's life known to us:
+
+    Suddenly there was a flash of light and a cage of bronze,
+    gilt and steel dropped magically from above. Coleman yelled
+    "Down!" * * * A door flew open. Coleman stepped upon the
+    elevator. "Well, Johnnie," he said cheerfully to the lad who
+    operated the machine, "is business good?" "Yes, sir, pretty
+    good," answered the boy, grinning. The little cage sank
+    swiftly. Floor after floor seemed to be rising with
+    marvelous speed; the whole building was winging straight
+    into the sky. There was soaring lights, figures and the
+    opalescent glow of ground glass doors marked with black
+    inscriptions. Other lights were springing heavenward. All
+    the lofty corridors rang with cries. "Up!" "Down!" "Down!"
+    "Up!!" The boy's hand grasped a lever and his machine obeyed
+    his lightest movement with sometimes an unbalancing
+    swiftness.
+
+Later, when Coleman reached the street, Mr. Crane describes the
+cable cars as marching like panoplied elephants, which is rather
+far, to say the least. The gentleman's nights were spent something
+as follows:
+
+    "In the restaurant he first ordered a large bottle of
+    champagne. The last of the wine he finished in somber mood
+    like an unbroken and defiant man who chews the straw that
+    litters his prison house. During his dinner he was
+    continually sending out messenger boys. He was arranging a
+    poker party. Through a window he watched the beautiful
+    moving life of upper Broadway at night, with its crowds and
+    clanging cable cars and its electric signs, mammoth and
+    glittering like the jewels of a giantess.
+
+    "Word was brought to him that poker players were arriving.
+    He arose joyfully, leaving his cheese. In the broad hall,
+    occupied mainly by miscellaneous people and actors, all deep
+    in leather chairs, he found some of his friends waiting.
+    They trooped upstairs to Coleman's rooms, where, as a
+    preliminary, Coleman began to hurl books and papers from the
+    table to the floor. A boy came with drinks. Most of the men,
+    in order to prepare for the game, removed their coats and
+    cuffs and drew up the sleeves of their shirts. The electric
+    globes shed a blinding light upon the table. The sound of
+    clinking chips arose; the elected banker spun the cards,
+    careless and dextrous."
+
+The atmosphere of the entire novel is just that close and
+enervating. Every page is like the next morning taste of a champagne
+supper, and is heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes. There is no
+fresh air in the book and no sunlight, only the "blinding light shed
+by the electric globes." If the life of New York newspaper men is as
+unwholesome and sordid as this, Mr. Crane, who has experienced it,
+ought to be sadly ashamed to tell it. Next morning when Coleman went
+for breakfast in the grill room of his hotel he ordered eggs on
+toast and a pint of champagne for breakfast and discoursed affably
+to the waiter.
+
+    "May be you had a pretty lively time last night, Mr.
+    Coleman?"
+
+    "Yes, Pat," answered Coleman. "I did. It was all because of
+    an unrequitted affection, Patrick." The man stood near, a
+    napkin over his arm. Coleman went on impressively. "The ways
+    of the modern lover are strange. Now, I, Patrick, am a
+    modern lover, and when, yesterday, the dagger of
+    disappointment was driven deep into my heart, I immediately
+    played poker as hard as I could, and incidentally got
+    loaded. This is the modern point of view. I understand on
+    good authority that in old times lovers used to languish.
+    That is probably a lie, but at any rate we do not, in these
+    times, languish to any great extent. We get drunk. Do you
+    understand Patrick?"
+
+    The waiter was used to a harangue at Coleman's breakfast
+    time. He placed his hand over his mouth and giggled.
+    "Yessir."
+
+    "Of course," continued Coleman, thoughtfully. "It might be
+    pointed out by uneducated persons that it is difficult to
+    maintain a high standard of drunkenness for the adequate
+    length of time, but in the series of experiments which I am
+    about to make, I am sure I can easily prove them to be in
+    the wrong."
+
+    "I am sure, sir," said the waiter, "the young ladies would
+    not like to be hearing you talk this way."
+
+    "Yes; no doubt, no doubt. The young ladies have still quite
+    medieval ideas. They don't understand. They still prefer
+    lovers to languish."
+
+    "At any rate, sir, I don't see that your heart is sure
+    enough broken. You seem to take it very easy."
+
+    "Broken!" cried Coleman. "Easy? Man, my heart is in
+    fragments. Bring me another small bottle."
+
+After this Coleman went to Greece to write up the war for the
+"Eclipse," and incidentally to rescue his sweetheart from the hands
+of the Turks and make "copy" of it. Very valid arguments might be
+advanced that the lady would have fared better with the Turks. On
+the voyage Coleman spent all his days and nights in the card room
+and avoided the deck, since fresh air was naturally disagreeable to
+him. For all that he saw of Greece or that Mr. Crane's readers see
+of Greece Coleman might as well have stayed in the card room of the
+steamer, or in the card room of his New York hotel for that matter.
+Wherever he goes he carries the atmosphere of the card room with him
+and the "blinding glare of the electrics." In Greece he makes love
+when he has leisure, but he makes "copy" much more ardently, and on
+the whole is quite as lurid and sordid and showy as his worst Sunday
+editions. Some good bits of battle descriptions there are, of the
+"Red Badge of Courage" order, but one cannot make a novel of clever
+descriptions of earthworks and poker games. The book concerns itself
+not with large, universal interests or principles, but with a yellow
+journalist grinding out yellow copy in such a wooden fashion that
+the Sunday "Eclipse" must have been even worse than most. In spite
+of the fact that Mr. Crane has written some of the most artistic
+short stories in the English language, I begin to wonder whether,
+blinded by his youth and audacity, two qualities which the American
+people love, we have not taken him too seriously. It is a grave
+matter for a man in good health and with a bank account to have
+written a book so coarse and dull and charmless as "Active Service."
+Compared with this "War was kind," indeed.
+
+                           _Pittsburg Leader_, November 11, 1899
+
+
+
+
+_Frank Norris_
+
+
+A new and a great book has been written. The name of it is
+"McTeague, a Story of San Francisco," and the man who wrote it is
+Mr. Frank Norris. The great presses of the country go on year after
+year grinding out commonplace books, just as each generation goes on
+busily reproducing its own mediocrity. When in this enormous output
+of ink and paper, these thousands of volumes that are yearly rushed
+upon the shelves of the book stores, one appears which contains both
+power and promise, the reader may be pardoned some enthusiasm.
+Excellence always surprises: we are never quite prepared for it. In
+the case of "McTeague, a Story of San Francisco," it is even more
+surprising than usual. In the first place the title is not alluring,
+and not until you have read the book, can you know that there is an
+admirable consistency in the stiff, uncompromising commonplaceness
+of that title. In the second place the name of the author is as yet
+comparatively unfamiliar, and finally the book is dedicated to a
+member of the Harvard faculty, suggesting that whether it be a story
+of San Francisco or Dawson City, it must necessarily be vaporous,
+introspective and chiefly concerned with "literary" impressions. Mr.
+Norris is, indeed, a "Harvard man," but that he is a good many other
+kinds of a man is self-evident. His book is, in the language of Mr.
+Norman Hapgood, the work of "a large human being, with a firm
+stomach, who knows and loves the people."
+
+In a novel of such high merit as this, the subject matter is the
+least important consideration. Every newspaper contains the
+essential material for another "Comedie Humaine." In this case
+"McTeague," the central figure, happens to be a dentist practicing
+in a little side street of San Francisco. The novel opens with this
+description of him:
+
+    "It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day,
+    McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car
+    conductor's coffee joint on Polk street. He had a thick,
+    gray soup, heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate;
+    two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of
+    strong butter and sugar. Once in his office, or, as he
+    called it on his sign-board, 'Dental Parlors,' he took off
+    his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having crammed
+    his little stove with coke, he lay back in his operating
+    chair at the bay window, reading the paper, drinking steam
+    beer, and smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food
+    digested; crop-full, stupid and warm."
+
+McTeague had grown up in a mining camp in the mountains. He
+remembered the years he had spent there trundling heavy cars of ore
+in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For
+thirteen days out of each fortnight his father was a steady,
+hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an
+irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazed with alcohol. His
+mother cooked for the miners. Her one ambition was that her son
+should enter a profession. He was apprenticed to a traveling quack
+dentist and after a fashion, learned the business.
+
+    "Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his
+    mother's death; she had left him some money--not much, but
+    enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from
+    the charlatan and had opened his 'Dental Parlors' on Polk
+    street, an 'accommodation street' of small shops in the
+    residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected
+    a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks and car
+    conductors. He made but few acquaintances. Polk street
+    called him the 'doctor' and spoke of his enormous strength.
+    For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of
+    blonde hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving
+    his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly,
+    ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with
+    a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were as hard as wooden
+    mallets, strong as vices, the hands of the old-time car boy.
+    Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory
+    tooth with his thumb and finger. His head was square-cut,
+    angular; the jaw salient: like that of the carnivora.
+
+    "But for one thing McTeague would have been perfectly
+    contented. Just outside his window was his signboard--a
+    modest affair--that read: 'Doctor McTeague. Dental Parlors.
+    Gas Given;' but that was all. It was his ambition, his
+    dream, to have projecting from that corner window a huge
+    gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something
+    gorgeous and attractive. He would have it some day, but as
+    yet it was far beyond his means."
+
+Then Mr. Norris launches into a description of the street in which
+"McTeague" lives. He presents that street as it is on Sunday, as it
+is on working days; as it is in the early dawn when the workmen are
+going out with pickaxes on their shoulders, as it is at ten o'clock
+when the women are out purchasing from the small shopkeepers, as it
+is at night when the shop girls are out with the soda-fountain
+tenders and the motor cars dash by full of theatre-goers, and the
+Salvationists sing before the saloon on the corner. In four pages he
+reproduces the life in a by-street of a great city, the little
+tragedy of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of handling
+environment--most of them bad. When a young author has very little
+to say and no story worth telling, he resorts to environment. It is
+frequently used to disguise a weakness of structure, as ladies who
+paint landscapes put their cows knee-deep in water to conceal the
+defective drawing of the legs. But such description as one meets
+throughout Mr. Norris' book is in itself convincing proof of power,
+imagination and literary skill. It is a positive and active force,
+stimulating the reader's imagination, giving him an actual command,
+a realizing sense of this world into which he is suddenly
+transplanted. It gives to the book perspective, atmosphere, effects
+of time and distance, creates the illusion of life. This power of
+mature, and accurate and comprehensive description is very unusual
+among the younger American writers. Most of them observe the world
+through a temperament, and are more occupied with their medium than
+the objects they see. And temperament is a glass which distorts most
+astonishingly. But this young man sees with a clear eye, and
+reproduces with a touch firm and decisive, strong almost to
+brutalness. Yet this hand that can depict so powerfully the brute
+strength and brute passions of a "McTeague," can deal very finely
+and adroitly with the feminine element of his story. This is his
+portrait of the little Swiss girl, "Trina," whom the dentist
+marries:
+
+    "Trina was very small and prettily made. Her face was round
+    and rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue, like the
+    half-opened eyes of a baby; her lips and the lobes of her
+    tiny ears were pale, a little suggestive of anaemia. But it
+    was to her hair that one's attention was most attracted.
+    Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and braids, a royal
+    crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara, heavy,
+    abundant and odorous. All the vitality that should have
+    given color to her face seemed to have been absorbed by that
+    marvelous hair: It was the coiffure of a queen that shadowed
+    the temples of this little bourgeoise."
+
+The tragedy of the story dates from a chance, a seeming stroke of
+good fortune, one of those terrible gifts of the Danai. A few weeks
+before her marriage "Trina" drew $5 000 from a lottery ticket. From
+that moment her passion for hoarding money becomes the dominant
+theme of the story, takes command of the book and its characters.
+After their marriage the dentist is disbarred from practice. They
+move into a garret where she starves her husband and herself to save
+that precious hoard. She sells even his office furniture, everything
+but his concertina and his canary bird, with which he stubbornly
+refuses to part and which are destined to become very important
+accessories in the property room of the theatre where this drama is
+played. This removal from their first home is to this story what
+Gervaise's removal from her shop is to L'Assommoir; it is the fatal
+episode of the third act, the sacrifice of self-respect, the
+beginning of the end. From that time the money stands between
+"Trina" and her husband. Outraged and humiliated, hating her for her
+meanness, demoralized by his idleness and despair, he begins to
+abuse her. The story becomes a careful and painful study of the
+disintegration of this union, a penetrating and searching analysis
+of the degeneration of these two souls, the woman's corroded by
+greed, the man's poisoned by disappointment and hate.
+
+And all the while this same painful theme is placed in a lower key.
+Maria, the housemaid who took care of "McTeague's" dental parlors in
+his better days, was a half-crazy girl from somewhere in Central
+America, she herself did not remember just where. But she had a
+wonderful story about her people owning a dinner service of pure
+gold with a punch bowl you could scarcely lift, which rang like a
+church bell when you struck it. On the strength of this story
+"Zercow," the Jew junk man, marries her, and believing that she
+knows where this treasure is hidden, bullies and tortures her to
+force her to disclose her secret. At last "Maria" is found with her
+throat cut, and "Zercow" is picked up by the wharf with a sack full
+of rusty tin cans, which in his dementia he must have thought the
+fabled dinner service of gold.
+
+From this it is a short step to "McTeague's" crime. He kills his
+wife to get possession of her money, and escapes to the mountains.
+While he is on his way south, pushing toward Mexico, he is overtaken
+by his murdered wife's cousin and former suitor. Both men are half
+mad with thirst, and there in the desert wastes of Death's Valley,
+they spring to their last conflict. The cousin falls, but before he
+dies he slips a handcuff over "McTeague's" arm, and so the author
+leaves his hero in the wastes of Death's Valley, a hundred miles
+from water, with a dead man chained to his arm. As he stands there
+the canary bird, the survivor of his happier days, to which he had
+clung with stubborn affection, begins "chittering feebly in its
+little gilt prison." It reminds one a little of Stevenson's use of
+poor "Goddedaal's" canary in "The Wrecker." It is just such sharp,
+sure strokes that bring out the high lights in a story and separate
+excellence from the commonplace. They are at once dramatic and
+revelatory. Lacking them, a novel which may otherwise be a good one,
+lacks its chief reason for being. The fault with many worthy
+attempts at fiction lies not in what they are, but in what they are
+not.
+
+Mr. Norris' model, if he will admit that he has followed one, is
+clearly no less a person than M. Zola himself. Yet there is no
+discoverable trace of imitation in his book. He has simply taken a
+method which has been most successfully applied in the study of
+French life and applied it in studying American life, as one uses
+certain algebraic formulae to solve certain problems. It is perhaps
+the only truthful literary method of dealing with that part of
+society which environment and heredity hedge about like the walls of
+a prison. It is true that Mr. Norris now and then allows his
+"method" to become too prominent, that his restraint savors of
+constraint, yet he has written a true story of the people,
+courageous, dramatic, full of matter and warm with life. He has
+addressed himself seriously to art, and he seems to have no ambition
+to be clever. His horizon is wide, his invention vigorous and bold,
+his touch heavy and warm and human. This man is not limited by
+literary prejudices: he sees the people as they are, he is close to
+them and not afraid of their unloveliness. He has looked at truth in
+the depths, among men begrimed by toil and besotted by ignorance,
+and still found her fair. "McTeague" is an achievement for a young
+man. It may not win at once the success which it deserves, but Mr.
+Norris is one of those who can afford to wait.
+
+                                    _The Courier_, April 8, 1899
+
+
+If you want to read a story that is all wheat and no chaff, read
+"Blix." Last winter that brilliant young Californian, Mr. Norris,
+published a remarkable and gloomy novel, "McTeague," a book deep in
+insight, rich in promise and splendid in execution, but entirely
+without charm and as disagreeable as only a great piece of work can
+be. And now this gentleman, who is not yet thirty, turns around and
+gives us an idyll that sings through one's brain like a summer wind
+and makes one feel young enough to commit all manner of
+indiscretions. It may be that Mr. Norris is desirous of showing us
+his versatility and that he can follow any suit, or it may have been
+a process of reaction. I believe it was after M. Zola had completed
+one of his greatest and darkest novels of Parisian life that he went
+down to the seaside and wrote "La Reve," a book that every girl
+should read when she is eighteen, and then again when she is eighty.
+Powerful and solidly built as "McTeague" is, one felt that there
+method was carried almost too far, that Mr. Norris was too
+consciously influenced by his French masters. But "Blix" belongs to
+no school whatever, and there is not a shadow of pedantry or pride
+of craft in it from cover to cover. "Blix" herself is the method,
+the motives and the aim of the book. The story is an exhalation of
+youth and spring; it is the work of a man who breaks loose and
+forgets himself. Mr. Norris was married only last summer, and the
+march from "Lohengrin" is simply sticking out all over "Blix." It is
+the story of a San Francisco newspaper man and a girl. The newspaper
+man "came out" in fiction, so to speak, in the drawing room of Mr.
+Richard Harding Davis, and has languished under that gentleman's
+chaperonage until he has come to be regarded as a fellow careful of
+nothing but his toilet and his dinner. Mr. Davis' reporters all
+bathed regularly and all ate nice things, but beyond that their
+tastes were rather colorless. I am glad to see one red-blooded
+newspaper man, in the person of "Landy Rivers," of San Francisco,
+break into fiction; a real live reporter with no sentimental loyalty
+for his "paper," and no Byronic poses about his vices, and no
+astonishing taste about his clothes, and no money whatever, which is
+the natural and normal condition of all reporters. "Blix" herself
+was just a society girl, and "Landy" took her to theatres and
+parties and tried to make himself believe he was in love with her.
+But it wouldn't work, for "Landy" couldn't love a society girl, not
+though she were as beautiful as the morning and terrible as an army
+with banners, and had "round full arms," and "the skin of her face
+was white and clean, except where it flushed into a most charming
+pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks." For while "Landy Rivers" was at
+college he had been seized with the penchant for writing short
+stories, and had worshiped at the shrines of Maupassant and Kipling,
+and when a man is craft mad enough to worship Maupassant truly and
+know him well, when he has that tingling for technique in his
+fingers, not Aphrodite herself, new risen from the waves, could
+tempt him into any world where craft was not lord and king. So it
+happened that their real love affair never began until one morning
+when "Landy" had to go down to the wharf to write up a whaleback,
+and "Blix" went along, and an old sailor told them a story and
+"Blix" recognized the literary possibilities of it, and they had
+lunch in a Chinese restaurant, and "Landy" because he was a
+newspaper man and it was the end of the week, didn't have any change
+about his clothes, and "Blix" had to pay the bill. And it was in
+that green old tea house that "Landy" read "Blix" one of his
+favorite yarns by Kipling, and she in a calm, off-handed way,
+recognized one of the fine, technical points in it, and "Landy"
+almost went to pieces for joy of her doing it. That scene in the
+Chinese restaurant is one of the prettiest bits of color you'll find
+to rest your eyes upon, and mighty good writing it is. I wonder,
+though if when Mr. Norris adroitly mentioned the "clack and snarl"
+of the banjo "Landy" played, he remembered the "silver snarling
+trumpets" of Keats? After that, things went on as such things will,
+and "Blix" quit the society racket and went to queer places with
+"Landy," and got interested in his work, and she broke him of
+wearing red neckties and playing poker, and she made him work, she
+did, for she grew to realize how much that meant to him, and she
+jacked him up when he didn't work, and she suggested an ending for
+one of his stories that was better than his own; just this big,
+splendid girl, who had never gone to college to learn how to write
+novels. And so how, in the name of goodness, could he help loving
+her? So one morning down by the Pacific, with "Blix" and "The Seven
+Seas," it all came over "Landy," that "living was better than
+reading and life was better than literature." And so it is; once,
+and only once, for each of us; and that is the tune that sings and
+sings through one's head when one puts the book away.
+
+                                 _The Courier_, January 13, 1900
+
+
+AN HEIR APPARENT.
+
+Last winter a young Californian, Mr. Frank Norris, published a novel
+with the unpretentious title, "McTeague: a Story of San Francisco."
+It was a book that could not be ignored nor dismissed with a word.
+There was something very unusual about it, about its solidity and
+mass, the thoroughness and firmness of texture, and it came down
+like a blow from a sledge hammer among the slighter and more
+sprightly performances of the hour.
+
+The most remarkable thing about the book was its maturity and
+compactness. It has none of the ear-marks of those entertaining
+"young writers" whom every season produces as inevitably as its
+debutantes, young men who surprise for an hour and then settle down
+to producing industriously for the class with which their peculiar
+trick of phrase has found favor. It was a book addressed to the
+American people and to the critics of the world, the work of a young
+man who had set himself to the art of authorship with an almighty
+seriousness, and who had no ambition to be clever. "McTeague" was
+not an experiment in style nor a pretty piece of romantic folly, it
+was a true story of the people--having about it, as M. Zola would
+say, "the smell of the people"--courageous, dramatic, full of matter
+and warm with life. It was realism of the most uncompromising kind.
+The theme was such that the author could not have expected sudden
+popularity for his book, such as sometimes overtakes monstrosities
+of style in these discouraging days when Knighthood is in Flower to
+the extent of a quarter of a million copies, nor could he have hoped
+for pressing commissions from the fire-side periodicals. The life
+story of a quack dentist who sometimes extracted molars with his
+fingers, who mistreated and finally murdered his wife, is not, in
+itself, attractive. But, after all, the theme counts for very
+little. Every newspaper contains the essential subject matter for
+another _Comedie Humaine_. The important point is that a man
+considerably under thirty could take up a subject so grim and
+unattractive, and that, for the mere love of doing things well, he
+was able to hold himself down to the task of developing it
+completely, that he was able to justify this quack's existence in
+literature, to thrust this hairy, blonde dentist with the "salient
+jaw of the carnivora," in amongst the immortals.
+
+It was after M. Zola had completed one of the greatest and gloomiest
+of his novels of Parisian life, that he went down by the sea and
+wrote "La Reve," that tender, adolescent story of love and purity
+and youth. So, almost simultaneously with "McTeague," Mr. Norris
+published "Blix," another San Francisco story, as short as
+"McTeague" was lengthy, as light as "McTeague" was heavy, as poetic
+and graceful as "McTeague" was somber and charmless. Here is a man
+worth waiting on; a man who is both realist and poet, a man who can
+teach
+
+    "Not only by a comet's rush,
+  But by a rose's birth."
+
+Yet unlike as they are, in both books the source of power is the
+same, and, for that matter, it was even the same in his first book,
+"Moran of the Lady Letty." Mr. Norris has dispensed with the
+conventional symbols that have crept into art, with the trite,
+half-truths and circumlocutions, and got back to the physical basis
+of things. He has abjured tea-table psychology, and the analysis of
+figures in the carpet and subtile dissections of intellectual
+impotencies, and the diverting game of words and the whole
+literature of the nerves. He is big and warm and sometimes brutal,
+and the strength of the soil comes up to him with very little loss
+in the transmission. His art strikes deep down into the roots of
+life and the foundation of Things as They Are--not as we tell each
+other they are at the tea-table. But he is realistic art, not
+artistic realism. He is courageous, but he is without bravado.
+
+He sees things freshly, as though they had not been seen before, and
+describes them with singular directness and vividness, not with
+morbid acuteness, with a large, wholesome joy of life. Nowhere is
+this more evident than in his insistent use of environment. I recall
+the passage in which he describes the street in which McTeague
+lives. He represents that street as it is on Sunday, as it is on
+working days, as it is in the early dawn when the workmen are going
+out with pickaxes on their shoulders, as it is at ten o'clock when
+the women are out marketing among the small shopkeepers, as it is at
+night when the shop girls are out with the soda fountain tenders and
+the motor cars dash by full of theater-goers, and the Salvationists
+sing before the saloon on the corner. In four pages he reproduces in
+detail the life in a by-street of a great city, the little tragedy
+of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of handling
+environment--most of them bad. When a young author has very little
+to say and no story worth telling, he resorts to environment. It is
+frequently used to disguise a weakness of structure, as ladies who
+paint landscapes put their cows knee-deep in water to conceal the
+defective drawing of the legs. But such description as one meets
+throughout Mr. Norris' book is in itself convincing proof of power,
+imagination and literary skill. It is a positive and active force,
+stimulating the reader's imagination, giving him an actual command,
+a realizing sense of this world into which he is suddenly
+transported. It gives to the book perspective, atmosphere, effects
+of time and distance, creates the illusion of life. This power of
+mature and comprehensive description is very unusual among the
+younger American writers. Most of them observe the world through a
+temperament, and are more occupied with their medium than the
+objects they watch. And temperament is a glass which distorts most
+astonishingly. But this young man sees with a clear eye, and
+reproduces with a touch, firm and decisive, strong almost to
+brutalness.
+
+Mr. Norris approaches things on their physical side; his characters
+are personalities of flesh before they are anything else, types
+before they are individuals. Especially is this true of his women.
+His Trina is "very small and prettily made. Her face was round and
+rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue, like the half-opened
+eyes of a baby; her lips and the lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a
+little suggestive of anaemia. But it was to her hair that one's
+attention was most attracted. Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils
+and braids, a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara,
+heavy, abundant and odorous. All the vitality that should have given
+color to her face seems to have been absorbed by that marvelous
+hair. It was the coiffure of a queen that shadowed the temples of
+this little bourgeoise." Blix had "round, full arms," and "the skin
+of her face was white and clean, except where it flushed into a most
+charming pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks." In this grasp of the
+element of things, this keen, clean, frank pleasure at color and
+odor and warmth, this candid admission of the negative of beauty,
+which is co-existent with and inseparable from it, lie much of his
+power and promise. Here is a man catholic enough to include the
+extremes of physical and moral life, strong enough to handle the
+crudest colors and darkest shadows. Here is a man who has an
+appetite for the physical universe, who loves the rank smells of
+crowded alley-ways, or the odors of boudoirs, or the delicate
+perfume exhaled from a woman's skin; who is not afraid of Pan, be he
+ever so shaggy, and redolent of the herd.
+
+Structurally, where most young novelists are weak, Mr. Norris is
+very strong. He has studied the best French masters, and he has
+adopted their methods quite simply, as one selects an algebraic
+formula to solve his particular problem. As to his style, that is,
+as expression always is, just as vigorous as his thought compels it
+to be, just as vivid as his conception warrants. If God Almighty has
+given a man ideas, he will get himself a style from one source or
+another. Mr. Norris, fortunately, is not a conscious stylist. He has
+too much to say to be exquisitely vain about his medium. He has the
+kind of brain stuff that would vanquish difficulties in any
+profession, that might be put to building battleships, or solving
+problems of finance, or to devising colonial policies. Let us be
+thankful that he has put it to literature. Let us be thankful,
+moreover, that he is not introspective and that his intellect does
+not devour itself, but feeds upon the great race of man, and, above
+all, let us rejoice that he is not a "temperamental" artist, but
+something larger, for a great brain and an assertive temperament
+seldom dwell together.
+
+There are clever men enough in the field of American letters, and
+the fault of most of them is merely one of magnitude; they are not
+large enough; they travel in small orbits, they play on muted
+strings. They sing neither of the combats of Atriedes nor the labors
+of Cadmus, but of the tea-table and the Odyssey of the Rialto.
+Flaubert said that a drop of water contained all the elements of the
+sea, save one--immensity. Mr. Norris is concerned only with serious
+things, he has only large ambitions. His brush is bold, his color is
+taken fresh from the kindly earth, his canvas is large enough to
+hold American life, the real life of the people. He has come into
+the court of the troubadours singing the song of Elys, the song of
+warm, full nature. He has struck the true note of the common life.
+He is what Mr. Norman Hapgood said the great American dramatist must
+be: "A large human being, with a firm stomach, who knows and loves
+the people."
+
+                                    _The Courier_, April 7, 1900
+
+
+
+
+_When I Knew Stephen Crane_
+
+
+It was, I think, in the spring of '94 that a slender, narrow-chested
+fellow in a shabby grey suit, with a soft felt hat pulled low over
+his eyes, sauntered into the office of the managing editor of the
+Nebraska State Journal and introduced himself as Stephen Crane. He
+stated that he was going to Mexico to do some work for the Bacheller
+Syndicate and get rid of his cough, and that he would be stopping in
+Lincoln for a few days. Later he explained that he was out of money
+and would be compelled to wait until he got a check from the East
+before he went further. I was a Junior at the Nebraska State
+University at the time, and was doing some work for the State
+Journal in my leisure time, and I happened to be in the managing
+editor's room when Mr. Crane introduced himself. I was just off the
+range; I knew a little Greek and something about cattle and a good
+horse when I saw one, and beyond horses and cattle I considered
+nothing of vital importance except good stories and the people who
+wrote them. This was the first man of letters I had ever met in the
+flesh, and when the young man announced who he was, I dropped into a
+chair behind the editor's desk where I could stare at him without
+being too much in evidence.
+
+Only a very youthful enthusiasm and a large propensity for hero
+worship could have found anything impressive in the young man who
+stood before the managing editor's desk. He was thin to emaciation,
+his face was gaunt and unshaven, a thin dark moustache straggled on
+his upper lip, his black hair grew low on his forehead and was
+shaggy and unkempt. His grey clothes were much the worse for wear
+and fitted him so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured
+for them. He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a
+necktie, and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and
+were badly run over at the heel. I had seen many a tramp printer
+come up the Journal stairs to hunt a job, but never one who
+presented such a disreputable appearance as this story-maker man. He
+wore gloves, which seemed rather a contradiction to the general
+slovenliness of his attire, but when he took them off to search his
+pockets for his credentials, I noticed that his hands were
+singularly fine; long, white, and delicately shaped, with thin,
+nervous fingers. I have seen pictures of Aubrey Beardsley's hands
+that recalled Crane's very vividly.
+
+At that time Crane was but twenty-four, and almost an unknown man.
+Hamlin Garland had seen some of his work and believed in him, and
+had introduced him to Mr. Howells, who recommended him to the
+Bacheller Syndicate. "The Red Badge of Courage" had been published
+in the State Journal that winter along with a lot of other syndicate
+matter, and the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty
+that the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the
+copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the
+careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable
+performance. But the grammar certainly was bad. I remember one of
+the reporters who had corrected the phrase "it don't" for the tenth
+time remarked savagely, "If I couldn't write better English than
+this, I'd quit."
+
+Crane spent several days in the town, living from hand to mouth and
+waiting for his money. I think he borrowed a small amount from the
+managing editor. He lounged about the office most of the time, and I
+frequently encountered him going in and out of the cheap restaurants
+on Tenth Street. When he was at the office he talked a good deal in
+a wandering, absent-minded fashion, and his conversation was
+uniformly frivolous. If he could not evade a serious question by a
+joke, he bolted. I cut my classes to lie in wait for him, confident
+that in some unwary moment I could trap him into serious
+conversation, that if one burned incense long enough and ardently
+enough, the oracle would not be dumb. I was Maupassant mad at the
+time, a malady particularly unattractive in a Junior, and I made a
+frantic effort to get an expression of opinion from him on "Le
+Bonheur." "Oh, you're Moping, are you?" he remarked with a sarcastic
+grin, and went on reading a little volume of Poe that he carried in
+his pocket. At another time I cornered him in the Funny Man's room
+and succeeded in getting a little out of him. We were taught
+literature by an exceedingly analytical method at the University,
+and we probably distorted the method, and I was busy trying to find
+the least common multiple of _Hamlet_ and the greatest common
+divisor of _Macbeth_, and I began asking him whether stories were
+constructed by cabalistic formulae. At length he sighed wearily and
+shook his drooping shoulders, remarking:
+
+"Where did you get all that rot? Yarns aren't done by mathematics.
+You can't do it by rule any more than you can dance by rule. You
+have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers, and if you
+haven't,--well, you're damned lucky, and you'll live long and
+prosper, that's all."--And with that he yawned and went down the
+hall.
+
+Crane was moody most of the time, his health was bad and he seemed
+profoundly discouraged. Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic. He
+went about with the tense, preoccupied, self-centered air of a man
+who is brooding over some impending disaster, and I conjectured
+vainly as to what it might be. Though he was seemingly entirely idle
+during the few days I knew him, his manner indicated that he was in
+the throes of work that told terribly on his nerves. His eyes I
+remember as the finest I have ever seen, large and dark and full of
+lustre and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always
+lurking deep in them. They were eyes that seemed to be burning
+themselves out.
+
+As he sat at the desk with his shoulders drooping forward, his head
+low, and his long, white fingers drumming on the sheets of copy
+paper, he was as nervous as a race horse fretting to be on the
+track. Always, as he came and went about the halls, he seemed like a
+man preparing for a sudden departure. Now that he is dead it occurs
+to me that all his life was a preparation for sudden departure. I
+remember once when he was writing a letter he stopped and asked me
+about the spelling of a word, saying carelessly, "I haven't time to
+learn to spell."
+
+Then, glancing down at his attire, he added with an absent-minded
+smile, "I haven't time to dress either; it takes an awful slice out
+of a fellow's life."
+
+He said he was poor, and he certainly looked it, but four years
+later when he was in Cuba, drawing the largest salary ever paid a
+newspaper correspondent, he clung to this same untidy manner of
+dress, and his ragged overalls and buttonless shirt were eyesores to
+the immaculate Mr. Davis, in his spotless linen and neat khaki
+uniform, with his Gibson chin always freshly shaven. When I first
+heard of his serious illness, his old throat trouble aggravated into
+consumption by his reckless exposure in Cuba, I recalled a passage
+from Maeterlinck's essay, "The Pre-Destined," on those doomed to
+early death: "As children, life seems nearer to them than to other
+children. They appear to know nothing, and yet there is in their
+eyes so profound a certainty that we feel they must know all.--In
+all haste, but wisely and with minute care do they prepare
+themselves to live, and this very haste is a sign upon which mothers
+can scarce bring themselves to look." I remembered, too, the young
+man's melancholy and his tenseness, his burning eyes, and his way of
+slurring over the less important things, as one whose time is short.
+
+I have heard other people say how difficult it was to induce Crane
+to talk seriously about his work, and I suspect that he was
+particularly averse to discussions with literary men of wider
+education and better equipment than himself, yet he seemed to feel
+that this fuller culture was not for him. Perhaps the unreasoning
+instinct which lies deep in the roots of our lives, and which guides
+us all, told him that he had not time enough to acquire it.
+
+Men will sometimes reveal themselves to children, or to people whom
+they think never to see again, more completely than they ever do to
+their confreres. From the wise we hold back alike our folly and our
+wisdom, and for the recipients of our deeper confidences we seldom
+select our equals. The soul has no message for the friends with whom
+we dine every week. It is silenced by custom and convention, and we
+play only in the shallows. It selects its listeners willfully, and
+seemingly delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who
+meets us in the highway at a fated hour. There are moments too, when
+the tides run high or very low, when self-revelation is necessary to
+every man, if it be only to his valet or his gardener. At such a
+moment, I was with Mr. Crane.
+
+The hoped for revelation came unexpectedly enough. It was on the
+last night he spent in Lincoln. I had come back from the theatre and
+was in the Journal office writing a notice of the play. It was
+eleven o'clock when Crane came in. He had expected his money to
+arrive on the night mail and it had not done so, and he was out of
+sorts and deeply despondent. He sat down on the ledge of the open
+window that faced on the street, and when I had finished my notice I
+went over and took a chair beside him. Quite without invitation on
+my part, Crane began to talk, began to curse his trade from the
+first throb of creative desire in a boy to the finished work of the
+master. The night was oppressively warm; one of those dry winds that
+are the curse of that country was blowing up from Kansas. The white,
+western moonlight threw sharp, blue shadows below us. The streets
+were silent at that hour, and we could hear the gurgle of the
+fountain in the Post Office square across the street, and the twang
+of banjos from the lower verandah of the Hotel Lincoln, where the
+colored waiters were serenading the guests. The drop lights in the
+office were dull under their green shades, and the telegraph sounder
+clicked faintly in the next room. In all his long tirade, Crane
+never raised his voice; he spoke slowly and monotonously and even
+calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any man as he
+revealed to me that night. It was an arraignment of the wages of
+life, an invocation to the ministers of hate.
+
+Incidentally he told me the sum he had received for "The Red Badge
+of Courage," which I think was something like ninety dollars, and he
+repeated some lines from "The Black Riders," which was then in
+preparation. He gave me to understand that he led a double literary
+life; writing in the first place the matter that pleased himself,
+and doing it very slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff
+that would sell. And he remarked that his poor was just as bad as it
+could possibly be. He realized, he said, that his limitations were
+absolutely impassable. "What I can't do, I can't do at all, and I
+can't acquire it. I only hold one trump."
+
+He had no settled plans at all. He was going to Mexico wholly
+uncertain of being able to do any successful work there, and he
+seemed to feel very insecure about the financial end of his venture.
+The thing that most interested me was what he said about his slow
+method of composition. He declared that there was little money in
+story-writing at best, and practically none in it for him, because
+of the time it took him to work up his detail. Other men, he said,
+could sit down and write up an experience while the physical effect
+of it, so to speak, was still upon them, and yesterday's impressions
+made to-day's "copy." But when he came in from the streets to write
+up what he had seen there, his faculties were benumbed, and he sat
+twirling his pencil and hunting for words like a schoolboy.
+
+I mentioned "The Red Badge of Courage," which was written in nine
+days, and he replied that, though the writing took very little time,
+he had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out
+through most of his boyhood. His ancestors had been soldiers, and he
+had been imagining war stories ever since he was out of
+knickerbockers, and in writing his first war story he had simply
+gone over his imaginary campaigns and selected his favorite
+imaginary experiences. He declared that his imagination was hide
+bound; it was there, but it pulled hard. After he got a notion for a
+story, months passed before he could get any sort of personal
+contract with it, or feel any potency to handle it. "The detail of a
+thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a
+native product, but it takes forever," he remarked. I distinctly
+remember the illustration, for it rather took hold of me.
+
+I have often been astonished since to hear Crane spoken of as "the
+reporter in fiction," for the reportorial faculty of superficial
+reception and quick transference was what he conspicuously lacked.
+His first newspaper account of his shipwreck on the filibuster
+"Commodore" off the Florida coast was as lifeless as the "copy" of a
+police court reporter. It was many months afterwards that the
+literary product of his terrible experience appeared in that
+marvellous sea story "The Open Boat," unsurpassed in its vividness
+and constructive perfection.
+
+At the close of our long conversation that night, when the copy boy
+came in to take me home, I suggested to Crane that in ten years he
+would probably laugh at all his temporary discomfort. Again his body
+took on that strenuous tension and he clenched his hands, saying, "I
+can't wait ten years, I haven't time."
+
+The ten years are not up yet, and he has done his work and gathered
+his reward and gone. Was ever so much experience and achievement
+crowded into so short a space of time? A great man dead at
+twenty-nine! That would have puzzled the ancients. Edward Garnett
+wrote of him in The Academy of December 17, 1899: "I cannot remember
+a parallel in the literary history of fiction. Maupassant, Meredith,
+Henry James, Mr. Howells and Tolstoy, were all learning their
+expression at an age where Crane had achieved his and achieved it
+triumphantly." He had the precocity of those doomed to die in youth.
+I am convinced that when I met him he had a vague premonition of the
+shortness of his working day, and in the heart of the man there was
+that which said, "That thou doest, do quickly."
+
+At twenty-one this son of an obscure New Jersey rector, with but a
+scant reading knowledge of French and no training, had rivaled in
+technique the foremost craftsmen of the Latin races. In the six
+years since I met him, a stranded reporter, he stood in the firing
+line during two wars, knew hairbreadth 'scapes on land and sea, and
+established himself as the first writer of his time in the picturing
+of episodic, fragmentary life. His friends have charged him with
+fickleness, but he was a man who was in the preoccupation of haste.
+He went from country to country, from man to man, absorbing all that
+was in them for him. He had no time to look backward. He had no
+leisure for _camaraderie_. He drank life to the lees, but at the
+banquet table where other men took their ease and jested over their
+wine, he stood a dark and silent figure, sombre as Poe himself, not
+wishing to be understood; and he took his portion in haste, with his
+loins girded, and his shoes on his feet, and his staff in his hand,
+like one who must depart quickly.
+
+                                    _The Library_, June 23, 1900
+
+
+
+
+_On the Art of Fiction_
+
+
+One is sometimes asked about the "obstacles" that confront young
+writers who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest
+obstacles that writers today have to get over, are the dazzling
+journalistic successes of twenty years ago, stories that surprised
+and delighted by their sharp photographic detail and that were
+really nothing more than lively pieces of reporting. The whole aim
+of that school of writing was novelty--never a very important thing
+in art. They gave us, altogether, poor standards--taught us to
+multiply our ideas instead of to condense them. They tried to make a
+story out of every theme that occurred to them and to get returns on
+every situation that suggested itself. They got returns, of a kind.
+But their work, when one looks back on it, now that the novelty upon
+which they counted so much is gone, is journalistic and thin. The
+especial merit of a good reportorial story is that it shall be
+intensely interesting and pertinent today and shall have lost its
+point by tomorrow.
+
+Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly
+the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions
+of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the
+spirit of the whole--so that all that one has suppressed and cut
+away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in
+type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants
+sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but
+when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, "The
+Sower," the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All
+the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it
+finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying,
+of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was
+better and more universal.
+
+Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a
+dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good
+workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting
+material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the
+manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand--a
+business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast
+foods--or it should be an art, which is always a search for
+something for which there is no market demand, something new and
+untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with
+standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does
+not come to a writer all at once--nor, for that matter, does the
+ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning
+the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and
+his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to
+recapture.
+
+                                              _The Borzoi_, 1920
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Collection of Stories, Reviews and
+Essays, by Willa Cather
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+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays, 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: A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays
+
+Author: Willa Cather
+
+Release Date: May 24, 2008 [EBook #25586]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COLLECTION OF STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Barbara Tozier and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+	<div id="frontmatter" class="section">
+		<h1><span class="stopword">A</span><br />
+			 Collection<br />
+			 <span class="stopword">of</span><br />
+			 Stories, Reviews and Essays</h1>
+		<p class="author"><span class="stopword">by</span><br />  Willa Cather</p>
+	</div>
+	<div id="contents" class="section">
+		<h2 class="section_title">CONTENTS</h2>
+		<ul>
+			<li><a href="#parti">Part I: Stories</a>
+				<ul>
+					<li><a href="#peter">Peter</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#divide">On the Divide</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#hermannson">Eric Hermannson&#8217;s Soul</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#tavener">The Sentimentality of William Tavener</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#namesake">The Namesake</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#bluff">The Enchanted Bluff</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#nelly">The Joy of Nelly Deane</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#bohemian">The Bohemian Girl</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#consequences">Consequences</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#bookkeeper">The Bookkeeper&#8217;s Wife</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#ardessa">Ardessa</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#boss">Her Boss</a></li>
+				</ul>
+			</li>
+			<li><a href="#partii">Part II: Reviews and Essays</a>
+				<ul>
+					<li><a href="#twain">Mark Twain</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#howells">William Dean Howells</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#poe">Edgar Allan Poe</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#whitman">Walt Whitman</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#james">Henry James</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#frederic">Harold Frederic</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#chopin">Kate Chopin</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#crane">Stephen Crane</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#norris">Frank Norris</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#knew">When I Knew Stephen Crane</a></li>
+					<li><a href="#fiction">On the Art of Fiction</a></li>
+				</ul>
+			</li>
+		</ul>
+	</div>
+	<div id="parti" class="section">
+		<h2 class="section_title">Part I<br /> Stories</h2>
+		<div id="peter" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page1" title="1">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">Peter <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+
+			<p class="return_toc"></p>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">&#8220;No, Antone, I have told thee many times, no, thou shalt
+			not sell it until I am gone.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;But I need money; what good is that old fiddle to thee?
+			The very crows laugh at thee when thou art trying to play.
+			Thy hand trembles so thou canst scarce hold the bow. Thou
+			shalt go with me to the Blue to cut wood to-morrow. See to
+			it thou art up early.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What, on the Sabbath, Antone, when it is so cold? I get
+			so very cold, my son, let us not go to-morrow.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, to-morrow, thou lazy old man. Do not I cut wood
+			upon the Sabbath? Care I how cold it is? Wood thou shalt
+			cut, and haul it too, and as for the fiddle, I tell thee I will sell
+			it yet.&#8221; Antone pulled his ragged cap down over his low
+			heavy brow, and went out. The old man drew his stool up
+			nearer the fire, and sat stroking his violin with trembling fingers
+			and muttering, &#8220;Not while I live, not while I live.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Five years ago they had come here, Peter Sadelack, and his
+			wife, and oldest son Antone, and countless smaller Sadelacks,
+			here to the dreariest part of south-western Nebraska, and had
+			taken up a homestead. Antone was the acknowledged master
+			of the premises, and people said he was a likely youth, and
+			would do well. That he was mean and untrustworthy every
+			one knew, but that made little difference. His corn was better
+			tended than any in the county, and his wheat always yielded
+			more than other men&#8217;s.</p>
+
+			<p>Of Peter no one knew much, nor had any one a good word
+			to say for him. He drank whenever he could get out of Antone&#8217;s
+			sight long enough to pawn his hat or coat for whiskey.
+			Indeed there were but two things he would not pawn, his
+			pipe and his violin. He was a lazy, absent minded old fellow,
+			who liked to fiddle better than to plow, though Antone surely
+			got work enough out of them all, for that matter. In the
+			house of which Antone was master there was no one, from
+			the little boy three years old, to the old man of sixty, who did
+			not earn his bread. Still people said that Peter was worthless,
+			and was a great drag on Antone, his son, who never drank,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page2" title="2">&nbsp;</a>and was a much better man than his father had ever been.
+			Peter did not care what people said. He did not like the country,
+			nor the people, least of all he liked the plowing. He was
+			very homesick for Bohemia. Long ago, only eight years ago
+			by the calendar, but it seemed eight centuries to Peter, he had
+			been a second violinist in the great theatre at Prague. He had
+			gone into the theatre very young, and had been there all his
+			life, until he had a stroke of paralysis, which made his arm so
+			weak that his bowing was uncertain. Then they told him he
+			could go. Those were great days at the theatre. He had plenty
+			to drink then, and wore a dress coat every evening, and there
+			were always parties after the play. He could play in those
+			days, ay, that he could! He could never read the notes well, so
+			he did not play first; but his touch, he had a touch indeed, so
+			Herr Mikilsdoff, who led the orchestra, had said. Sometimes
+			now Peter thought he could plow better if he could only bow
+			as he used to. He had seen all the lovely women in the world
+			there, all the great singers and the great players. He was in the
+			orchestra when Rachel played, and he heard Liszt play when
+			the Countess d&#8217;Agoult sat in the stage box and threw the master
+			white lilies. Once, a French woman came and played for
+			weeks, he did not remember her name now. He did not remember
+			her face very well either, for it changed so, it was
+			never twice the same. But the beauty of it, and the great hunger
+			men felt at the sight of it, that he remembered. Most of all
+			he remembered her voice. He did not know French, and
+			could not understand a word she said, but it seemed to him
+			that she must be talking the music of Chopin. And her voice,
+			he thought he should know that in the other world. The last
+			night she played a play in which a man touched her arm, and
+			she stabbed him. As Peter sat among the smoking gas jets
+			down below the footlights with his fiddle on his knee, and
+			looked up at her, he thought he would like to die too, if he
+			could touch her arm once, and have her stab him so. Peter
+			went home to his wife very drunk that night. Even in those
+			days he was a foolish fellow, who cared for nothing but music
+			and pretty faces.</p>
+
+			<p>It was all different now. He had nothing to drink and little
+			to eat, and here, there was nothing but sun, and grass, and
+			sky. He had forgotten almost everything, but some things he
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page3" title="3">&nbsp;</a>remembered well enough. He loved his violin and the holy
+			Mary, and above all else he feared the Evil One, and his son
+			Antone.</p>
+
+			<p>The fire was low, and it grew cold. Still Peter sat by the fire
+			remembering. He dared not throw more cobs on the fire; Antone
+			would be angry. He did not want to cut wood tomorrow,
+			it would be Sunday, and he wanted to go to mass.
+			Antone might let him do that. He held his violin under his
+			wrinkled chin, his white hair fell over it, and he began to play
+			&#8220;Ave Maria.&#8221; His hand shook more than ever before, and at
+			last refused to work the bow at all. He sat stupefied for a
+			while, then arose, and taking his violin with him, stole out
+			into the old sod stable. He took Antone&#8217;s shot-gun down
+			from its peg, and loaded it by the moonlight which streamed
+			in through the door. He sat down on the dirt floor, and
+			leaned back against the dirt wall. He heard the wolves howling
+			in the distance, and the night wind screaming as it swept
+			over the snow. Near him he heard the regular breathing of
+			the horses in the dark. He put his crucifix above his heart, and
+			folding his hands said brokenly all the Latin he had ever
+			known, &#8220;<em lang="la" xml:lang="la">Pater noster, qui in cælum est.</em>&#8221; Then he raised his
+			head and sighed, &#8220;Not one kreutzer will Antone pay them to
+			pray for my soul, not one kreutzer, he is so careful of his
+			money, is Antone, he does not waste it in drink, he is a better
+			man than I, but hard sometimes. He works the girls too hard,
+			women were not made to work so. But he shall not sell thee,
+			my fiddle, I can play thee no more, but they shall not part us.
+			We have seen it all together, and we will forget it together,
+			the French woman and all.&#8221; He held his fiddle under his chin
+			a moment, where it had lain so often, then put it across his
+			knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off his old
+			boot, held the gun between his knees with the muzzle against
+			his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe.</p>
+
+			<p>In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a
+			pool of blood. They could not straighten him out enough to
+			fit a coffin, so they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral
+			Antone carried to town the fiddle-bow which Peter had
+			forgotten to break. Antone was very thrifty, and a better man
+			than his father had been.</p>
+			<p class="source"><cite>The Mahogany Tree</cite>, May 21, 1892</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="divide" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page4" title="4">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">On the Divide <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw
+			stood Canute&#8217;s shanty. North, east, south, stretched the
+			level Nebraska plain of long rust-red grass that undulated
+			constantly in the wind. To the west the ground was broken
+			and rough, and a narrow strip of timber wound along the
+			turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely ambition enough
+			to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been for the few
+			stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks,
+			Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians
+			are a timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond
+			with a few plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn
+			toward it.</p>
+
+			<p>As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of
+			any kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake
+			Creek there was not a human being within twenty
+			miles. It was built of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped
+			with mud and plaster. The roof was covered with earth and
+			was supported by one gigantic beam curved in the shape of a
+			round arch. It was almost impossible that any tree had ever
+			grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to say that Canute
+			had taken the log across his knee and bent it into the shape
+			he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one
+			room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and
+			bound together like big straw basket work. In one corner
+			there was a cook stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed
+			made of unplaned planks and poles. It was fully eight feet
+			long, and upon it was a heap of dark bed clothing. There was
+			a chair and a bench of colossal proportions. There was an
+			ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few cracked dirty dishes in
+			it, and beside it on a tall box a tin wash-basin. Under the bed
+			was a pile of pint flasks, some broken, some whole, all empty.
+			On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost incredible
+			dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some
+			ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark
+			cloth, apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped
+			in a red silk handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page5" title="5">&nbsp;</a>door hung a wolf and a badger skin, and on the door itself a
+			brace of thirty or forty snake skins whose noisy tails rattled
+			ominously every time it opened. The strangest things in the
+			shanty were the wide window-sills. At first glance they looked
+			as though they had been ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with
+			a hatchet, but on closer inspection all the notches and holes
+			in the wood took form and shape. There seemed to be a series
+			of pictures. They were, in a rough way, artistic, but the
+			figures were heavy and labored, as though they had been cut
+			very slowly and with very awkward instruments. There were
+			men plowing with little horned imps sitting on their shoulders
+			and on their horses&#8217; heads. There were men praying with
+			a skull hanging over their heads and little demons behind
+			them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with
+			big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these
+			pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew
+			in this world, and coiled among the branches of the vines
+			there was always the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every
+			flower there was a serpent&#8217;s head. It was a veritable Dance of
+			Death by one who had felt its sting. In the wood box lay
+			some boards, and every inch of them was cut up in the same
+			manner. Sometimes the work was very rude and careless, and
+			looked as though the hand of the workman had trembled. It
+			would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men from
+			their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave
+			and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were always
+			smiling and dancing. Several of these boards had been
+			split for kindling and it was evident that the artist did not
+			value his work highly.</p>
+
+			<p>It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled
+			into his shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling
+			the stove, sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot
+			frame over the fire, staring drearily out of the window at the
+			wide gray sky. He knew by heart every individual clump of
+			bunch grass in the miles of red shaggy prairie that stretched
+			before his cabin. He knew it in all the deceitful loveliness of
+			its early summer, in all the bitter barrenness of its autumn.
+			He had seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had
+			seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by
+			hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he had
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page6" title="6">&nbsp;</a>seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have
+			left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and
+			miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.</p>
+
+			<p>He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet
+			heavily as though they were burdens to him. He looked out
+			of the window into the hog corral and saw the pigs burying
+			themselves in the straw before the shed. The leaden gray
+			clouds were beginning to spill themselves, and the snowflakes
+			were settling down over the white leprous patches of
+			frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the sod away.
+			He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his
+			ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide
+			and he knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the
+			Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North Seas fear
+			the still dark cold of the polar twilight.</p>
+
+			<p>His eyes fell upon his gun, and he took it down from the
+			wall and looked it over. He sat down on the edge of his bed
+			and held the barrel towards his face, letting his forehead rest
+			upon it, and laid his finger on the trigger. He was perfectly
+			calm, there was neither passion nor despair in his face, but
+			the thoughtful look of a man who is considering. Presently
+			he laid down the gun, and reaching into the cupboard, drew
+			out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol. Lifting it to his lips,
+			he drank greedily. He washed his face in the tin basin and
+			combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he
+			stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung
+			on the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands
+			and tried to summon courage to put them on. He took the
+			paper collar that was pinned to the sleeve of the coat and
+			cautiously slipped it under his rough beard, looking with
+			timid expectancy into the cracked, splashed glass that hung
+			over the bench. With a short laugh he threw it down on the
+			bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out, striking
+			off across the level.</p>
+
+			<p>It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his
+			cabin once in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging
+			and plowing and sowing, and reaping what little the hail
+			and the hot winds and the frosts left him to reap. Insanity
+			and suicide are very common things on the Divide. They
+			come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season. Those
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page7" title="7">&nbsp;</a>scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from
+			Kansas seem to dry up the blood in men&#8217;s veins as they do
+			the sap in the corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch
+			creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear, then
+			the coroners prepare for active duty; for the oil of the country
+			is burned out and it does not take long for the flame to
+			eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation there when a
+			Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and
+			most of the Poles after they have become too careless and
+			discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut
+			their throats with.</p>
+
+			<p>It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be
+			very happy, but the present one came too late in life. It is
+			useless for men that have cut hemlocks among the mountains
+			of Sweden for forty years to try to be happy in a country
+			as flat and gray and as naked as the sea. It is not easy for
+			men that have spent their youths fishing in the Northern
+			seas to be content with following a plow, and men that have
+			served in the Austrian army hate hard work and coarse
+			clothing and the loneliness of the plains, and long for
+			marches and excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids.
+			After a man has passed his fortieth birthday it is not
+			easy for him to change the habits and conditions of his life.
+			Most men bring with them to the Divide only the dregs of
+			the lives that they have squandered in other lands and
+			among other peoples.</p>
+
+			<p>Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his
+			madness did not take the form of suicide or religion but of
+			alcohol. He had always taken liquor when he wanted it, as all
+			Norwegians do, but after his first year of solitary life he settled
+			down to it steadily. He exhausted whisky after a while,
+			and went to alcohol, because its effects were speedier and
+			surer. He was a big man with a terrible amount of resistant
+			force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even to move him.
+			After nine years of drinking, the quantities he could take
+			would seem fabulous to an ordinary drinking man. He never
+			let it interfere with his work, he generally drank at night and
+			on Sundays. Every night, as soon as his chores were done, he
+			began to drink. While he was able to sit up he would play on
+			his mouth harp or hack away at his window sills with his jack
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page8" title="8">&nbsp;</a>knife. When the liquor went to his head he would lie down
+			on his bed and stare out of the window until he went to
+			sleep. He drank alone and in solitude not for pleasure or
+			good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness and level of the
+			Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put mountains
+			in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All mountain
+			peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains that,
+			because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice
+			of their vice, were cursed of God.</p>
+
+			<p>Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man.
+			Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk
+			becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man,
+			vulgar. Canute was none of these, but he was morose and
+			gloomy, and liquor took him through all the hells of Dante.
+			As he lay on his giant&#8217;s bed all the horrors of this world and
+			every other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a man
+			who knew no joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness.
+			The skull and the serpent were always before him, the symbols
+			of eternal futileness and of eternal hate.</p>
+
+			<p>When the first Norwegians near enough to be called
+			neighbors came, Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape
+			from his bosom vice. But he was not a social man by nature
+			and had not the power of drawing out the social side of
+			other people. His new neighbors rather feared him because
+			of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering
+			brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from
+			the eternal treachery of the plains, which every spring stretch
+			green and rustle with the promises of Eden, showing long
+			grassy lagoons full of clear water and cattle whose hoofs are
+			stained with wild roses. Before autumn the lagoons are dried
+			up, and the ground is burnt dry and hard until it blisters
+			and cracks open.</p>
+
+			<p>So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men
+			that settled about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror.
+			They told awful stories of his size and strength and of the
+			alcohol he drank. They said that one night, when he went out
+			to see to his horses just before he went to bed, his steps were
+			unsteady and the rotten planks of the floor gave way and
+			threw him behind the feet of a fiery young stallion. His foot
+			was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous horse began
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page9" title="9">&nbsp;</a>kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood trickling down
+			in his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused himself
+			from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical courage
+			of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms
+			about the horse&#8217;s hind legs and held them against his breast
+			with crushing embrace. All through the darkness and cold of
+			the night he lay there, matching strength against strength.
+			When little Jim Peterson went over the next morning at four
+			o&#8217;clock to go with him to the Blue to cut wood, he found him
+			so, and the horse was on its fore knees, trembling and
+			whinnying with fear. This is the story the Norwegians tell of
+			him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they feared and
+			hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.</p>
+
+			<p>One spring there moved to the next &#8220;eighty&#8221; a family that
+			made a great change in Canute&#8217;s life. Ole Yensen was too
+			drunk most of the time to be afraid of any one, and his wife
+			Mary was too garrulous to be afraid of any one who listened
+			to her talk, and Lena, their pretty daughter, was not afraid of
+			man nor devil. So it came about that Canute went over to
+			take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he took it alone. After
+			a while the report spread that he was going to marry Yensen&#8217;s
+			daughter, and the Norwegian girls began to tease Lena about
+			the great bear she was going to keep house for. No one could
+			quite see how the affair had come about, for Canute&#8217;s tactics
+			of courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently never
+			spoke to her at all: he would sit for hours with Mary chattering
+			on one side of him and Ole drinking on the other and
+			watch Lena at her work. She teased him, and threw flour in
+			his face and put vinegar in his coffee, but he took her rough
+			jokes with silent wonder, never even smiling. He took her to
+			church occasionally, but the most watchful and curious people
+			never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring at her
+			while she giggled and flirted with the other men.</p>
+
+			<p>Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam
+			laundry. She came home every Sunday, and always ran across
+			to Yensens to startle Lena with stories of ten cent theaters,
+			firemen&#8217;s dances, and all the other esthetic delights of metropolitan
+			life. In a few weeks Lena&#8217;s head was completely
+			turned, and she gave her father no rest until he let her go to
+			town to seek her fortune at the ironing board. From the time
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page10" title="10">&nbsp;</a>she came home on her first visit she began to treat Canute
+			with contempt. She had bought a plush cloak and kid gloves,
+			had her clothes made by the dress-maker, and assumed airs
+			and graces that made the other women of the neighborhood
+			cordially detest her. She generally brought with her a young
+			man from town who waxed his mustache and wore a red
+			necktie, and she did not even introduce him to Canute.</p>
+
+			<p>The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he
+			knocked one of them down. He gave no sign of suffering
+			from her neglect except that he drank more and avoided the
+			other Norwegians more carefully than ever. He lay around
+			in his den and no one knew what he felt or thought, but
+			little Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at Lena in
+			church one Sunday when she was there with the town man,
+			said that he would not give an acre of his wheat for Lena&#8217;s
+			life or the town chap&#8217;s either; and Jim&#8217;s wheat was so wondrously
+			worthless that the statement was an exceedingly
+			strong one.</p>
+
+			<p>Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as
+			nearly like the town man&#8217;s as possible. They had cost him half
+			a millet crop; for tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants
+			and they charge for it. He had hung those clothes in his
+			shanty two months ago and had never put them on, partly
+			from fear of ridicule, partly from discouragement, and partly
+			because there was something in his own soul that revolted at
+			the littleness of the device.</p>
+
+			<p>Lena was at home just at this time. Work was slack in the
+			laundry and Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home,
+			glad enough to get an opportunity to torment Canute once
+			more.</p>
+
+			<p>She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as she
+			worked. Mary was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding
+			violently about the young man who was coming out from
+			town that night. The young man had committed the fatal
+			error of laughing at Mary&#8217;s ceaseless babble and had never
+			been forgiven.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running
+			with him! I do not see why a daughter of mine should
+			act so. I do not see why the Lord should visit such a punishment
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page11" title="11">&nbsp;</a>upon me as to give me such a daughter. There are
+			plenty of good men you can marry.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, &#8220;I don&#8217;t happen
+			to want to marry any man right away, and so long as Dick
+			dresses nice and has plenty of money to spend, there is no
+			harm in my going with him.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Money to spend? Yes, and that is all he does with it I&#8217;ll be
+			bound. You think it very fine now, but you will change your
+			tune when you have been married five years and see your children
+			running naked and your cupboard empty. Did Anne
+			Hermanson come to any good end by marrying a town man?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I
+			know any of the laundry girls would have Dick quick enough
+			if they could get him.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too.
+			Now there is Canuteson who has an &#8216;eighty&#8217; proved up and
+			fifty head of cattle and&#8212;&#8212;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;And hair that ain&#8217;t been cut since he was a baby, and a big
+			dirty beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like
+			a pig. Besides he will keep. I can have all the fun I want, and
+			when I am old and ugly like you he can have me and take care
+			of me. The Lord knows there ain&#8217;t nobody else going to
+			marry him.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it
+			were red hot. He was not the kind of a man to make a good
+			eavesdropper, and he wished he had knocked sooner. He
+			pulled himself together and struck the door like a battering
+			ram. Mary jumped and opened it with a screech.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;God! Canute, how you scared us! I thought it was crazy
+			Lou,&#8212;he has been tearing around the neighborhood trying
+			to convert folks. I am afraid as death of him. He ought to be
+			sent off, I think. He is just as liable as not to kill us all, or
+			burn the barn, or poison the dogs. He has been worrying
+			even the poor minister to death, and he laid up with the rheumatism,
+			too! Did you notice that he was too sick to preach
+			last Sunday? But don&#8217;t stand there in the cold,&#8212;come in.
+			Yensen isn&#8217;t here, but he just went over to Sorenson&#8217;s for the
+			mail; he won&#8217;t be gone long. Walk right in the other room
+			and sit down.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page12" title="12">&nbsp;</a>Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and
+			not noticing Lena as he passed her. But Lena&#8217;s vanity would
+			not allow him to pass unmolested. She took the wet sheet
+			she was wringing out and cracked him across the face with it,
+			and ran giggling to the other side of the room. The blow
+			stung his cheeks and the soapy water flew in his eyes, and he
+			involuntarily began rubbing them with his hands. Lena giggled
+			with delight at his discomfiture, and the wrath in Canute&#8217;s
+			face grew blacker than ever. A big man humiliated is
+			vastly more undignified than a little one. He forgot the sting
+			of his face in the bitter consciousness that he had made a
+			fool of himself. He stumbled blindly into the living room,
+			knocking his head against the door jamb because he forgot
+			to stoop. He dropped into a chair behind the stove, thrusting
+			his big feet back helplessly on either side of him.</p>
+
+			<p>Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still
+			and silent, with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin
+			of his face seemed to have shriveled up into little wrinkles that
+			trembled when he lowered his brows. His life had been one
+			long lethargy of solitude and alcohol, but now he was awakening,
+			and it was as when the dumb stagnant heat of summer
+			breaks out into thunder.</p>
+
+			<p>When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute
+			rose at once.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yensen,&#8221; he said quietly, &#8220;I have come to see if you will let
+			me marry your daughter today.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Today!&#8221; gasped Ole.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow. I am tired of living
+			alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and
+			stammered eloquently: &#8220;Do you think I will marry my daughter
+			to a drunkard? a man who drinks raw alcohol? a man who
+			sleeps with rattle snakes? Get out of my house or I will kick
+			you out for your impudence.&#8221; And Ole began looking anxiously
+			for his feet.</p>
+
+			<p>Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and
+			went out into the kitchen. He went up to Lena and said without
+			looking at her, &#8220;Get your things on and come with me!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily,
+			dropping the soap, &#8220;Are you drunk?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page13" title="13">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;If you do not come with me, I will take you,&#8212;you had
+			better come,&#8221; said Canute quietly.</p>
+
+			<p>She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm
+			roughly and wrenched the sheet from her. He turned to the
+			wall and took down a hood and shawl that hung there, and
+			began wrapping her up. Lena scratched and fought like a wild
+			thing. Ole stood in the door, cursing, and Mary howled and
+			screeched at the top of her voice. As for Canute, he lifted the
+			girl in his arms and went out of the house. She kicked and
+			struggled, but the helpless wailing of Mary and Ole soon died
+			away in the distance, and her face was held down tightly on
+			Canute&#8217;s shoulder so that she could not see whither he was
+			taking her. She was conscious only of the north wind whistling
+			in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and of a great
+			breast that heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths. The
+			harder she struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held
+			the heels of horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they
+			would crush the breath from her, and lay still with fear.
+			Canute was striding across the level fields at a pace at which
+			man never went before, drawing the stinging north wind into
+			his lungs in great gulps. He walked with his eyes half closed
+			and looking straight in front of him, only lowering them
+			when he bent his head to blow away the snow flakes that
+			settled on her hair. So it was that Canute took her to his
+			home, even as his bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair
+			frivolous women of the South in their hairy arms and bore
+			them down to their war ships. For ever and anon the soul
+			becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and
+			with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is
+			unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by
+			force what it cannot win by cunning.</p>
+
+			<p>When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a
+			chair, where she sat sobbing. He stayed only a few minutes.
+			He filled the stove with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge
+			swallow of alcohol and put the bottle in his pocket. He
+			paused a moment, staring heavily at the weeping girl, then he
+			went off and locked the door and disappeared in the gathering
+			gloom of the night.</p>
+
+			<p>Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little
+			Norwegian preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page14" title="14">&nbsp;</a>thundering knock at his door, and Canute entered, covered
+			with snow and with his beard frozen fast to his coat.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Come in, Canute, you must be frozen,&#8221; said the little man,
+			shoving a chair towards his visitor.</p>
+
+			<p>Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly,
+			&#8220;I want you to come over to my house tonight to marry me
+			to Lena Yensen.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Have you got a license, Canute?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, I don&#8217;t want a license. I want to be married.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;But I can&#8217;t marry you without a license, man. It would
+			not be legal.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian&#8217;s eye. &#8220;I
+			want you to come over to my house to marry me to Lena
+			Yensen.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, I can&#8217;t, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like
+			this, and my rheumatism is bad tonight.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Then if you will not go I must take you,&#8221; said Canute
+			with a sigh.</p>
+
+			<p>He took down the preacher&#8217;s bearskin coat and bade him
+			put it on while he hitched up his buggy. He went out and
+			closed the door softly after him. Presently he returned and
+			found the frightened minister crouching before the fire with
+			his coat lying beside him. Canute helped him put it on and
+			gently wrapped his head in his big muffler. Then he picked
+			him up and carried him out and placed him in his buggy. As
+			he tucked the buffalo robes around him he said: &#8220;Your horse
+			is old, he might flounder or lose his way in this storm. I will
+			lead him.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat
+			shivering with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in
+			the wind, he could see the horse struggling through the snow
+			with the man plodding steadily beside him. Again the blowing
+			snow would hide them from him altogether. He had no
+			idea where they were or what direction they were going. He
+			felt as though he were being whirled away in the heart of the
+			storm, and he said all the prayers he knew. But at last the
+			long four miles were over, and Canute set him down in the
+			snow while he unlocked the door. He saw the bride sitting
+			by the fire with her eyes red and swollen as though she had
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page15" title="15">&nbsp;</a>been weeping. Canute placed a huge chair for him, and said
+			roughly,&#8212;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Warm yourself.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister
+			to take her home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute
+			said simply,&#8212;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;If you are warm now, you can marry us.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?&#8221;
+			asked the minister in a trembling voice.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No sir, I don&#8217;t, and it is disgraceful he should force me
+			into it! I won&#8217;t marry him.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Then, Canute, I cannot marry you,&#8221; said the minister,
+			standing as straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Are you ready to marry us now, sir?&#8221; said Canute, laying
+			one iron hand on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher
+			was a good man, but like most men of weak body he was a
+			coward and had a horror of physical suffering, although he
+			had known so much of it. So with many qualms of conscience
+			he began to repeat the marriage service. Lena sat sullenly in
+			her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood beside her, listening
+			with his head bent reverently and his hands folded on his
+			breast. When the little man had prayed and said amen, Canute
+			began bundling him up again.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I will take you home, now,&#8221; he said as he carried him
+			out and placed him in his buggy, and started off with him
+			through the fury of the storm, floundering among the snow
+			drifts that brought even the giant himself to his knees.</p>
+
+			<p>After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She
+			was not of a particularly sensitive temperament, and had little
+			pride beyond that of vanity. After the first bitter anger wore
+			itself out, she felt nothing more than a healthy sense of
+			humiliation and defeat. She had no inclination to run away,
+			for she was married now, and in her eyes that was final and
+			all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about a license,
+			but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled herself
+			by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute
+			some day, any way.</p>
+
+			<p>She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she
+			got up and began to look about her. She had heard queer
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page16" title="16">&nbsp;</a>tales about the inside of Canute&#8217;s shanty, and her curiosity
+			soon got the better of her rage. One of the first things she
+			noticed was the new black suit of clothes hanging on the wall.
+			She was dull, but it did not take a vain woman long to interpret
+			anything so decidedly flattering, and she was pleased in
+			spite of herself. As she looked through the cupboard, the
+			general air of neglect and discomfort made her pity the man
+			who lived there.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get
+			somebody to wash up his dishes. Batchin&#8217;s pretty hard on a
+			man.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>It is easy to pity when once one&#8217;s vanity has been tickled.
+			She looked at the window sill and gave a little shudder and
+			wondered if the man were crazy. Then she sat down again and
+			sat a long time wondering what her Dick and Ole would do.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It is queer Dick didn&#8217;t come right over after me. He
+			surely came, for he would have left town before the storm
+			began and he might just as well come right on as go back. If
+			he&#8217;d hurried he would have gotten here before the preacher
+			came. I suppose he was afraid to come, for he knew Canuteson
+			could pound him to jelly, the coward!&#8221; Her eyes flashed
+			angrily.</p>
+
+			<p>The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly
+			lonesome. It was an uncanny night and this was an uncanny
+			place to be in. She could hear the coyotes howling hungrily a
+			little way from the cabin, and more terrible still were all the
+			unknown noises of the storm. She remembered the tales they
+			told of the big log overhead and she was afraid of those snaky
+			things on the window sills. She remembered the man who
+			had been killed in the draw, and she wondered what she
+			would do if she saw crazy Lou&#8217;s white face glaring into the
+			window. The rattling of the door became unbearable, she
+			thought the latch must be loose and took the lamp to look at
+			it. Then for the first time she saw the ugly brown snake skins
+			whose death rattle sounded every time the wind jarred the
+			door.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Canute, Canute!&#8221; she screamed in terror.</p>
+
+			<p>Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog
+			getting up and shaking himself. The door opened and Canute
+			stood before her, white as a snow drift.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page17" title="17">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;What is it?&#8221; he asked kindly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I am cold,&#8221; she faltered.</p>
+
+			<p>He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of
+			cobs and filled the stove. Then he went out and lay in the
+			snow before the door. Presently he heard her calling again.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What is it?&#8221; he said, sitting up.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m so lonesome, I&#8217;m afraid to stay in here all alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I will go over and get your mother.&#8221; And he got up.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;She won&#8217;t come.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll bring her,&#8221; said Canute grimly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, no. I don&#8217;t want her, she will scold all the time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, I will bring your father.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was
+			close up to the key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever
+			heard her speak before, so low that he had to put his ear up to
+			the lock to hear her.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t want him either, Canute,&#8212;I&#8217;d rather have you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something
+			like a groan. With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw
+			Canute stretched in the snow at her feet, his face in his hands,
+			sobbing on the door step.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Overland Monthly</cite>, January 1896</p>
+		</div>
+		<div id="hermannson" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page18" title="18">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">Eric Hermannson&#8217;s Soul <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<h4>I.</h4>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse&#8212;a night
+			when the Spirit was present with power and when God
+			was very near to man. So it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of
+			God and Free Gospeller. The schoolhouse was crowded with
+			the saved and sanctified, robust men and women, trembling
+			and quailing before the power of some mysterious psychic
+			force. Here and there among this cowering, sweating multitude
+			crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs of an
+			awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete
+			divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion
+			of the mind, which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is
+			termed &#8220;the Light.&#8221; On the floor, before the mourners&#8217;
+			bench, lay the unconscious figure of a man in whom outraged
+			nature had sought her last resort. This &#8220;trance&#8221; state is the
+			highest evidence of grace among the Free Gospellers, and indicates
+			a close walking with God.</p>
+
+			<p>Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy
+			and vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness,
+			an almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train
+			gambler who used to run between Omaha and Denver. He
+			was a man made for the extremes of life; from the most debauched
+			of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a
+			bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of Nature&#8217;s eternal
+			injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and
+			the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then brushed
+			back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, the nostrils
+			were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely except in
+			his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like a
+			steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep,
+			rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle
+			with the weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip
+			were sharp, strenuous lines that had conquered it and taught
+			it to pray. Over those seamed cheeks there was a certain pallor,
+			a grayness caught from many a vigil. It was as though,
+			after Nature had done her worst with that face, some fine
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page19" title="19">&nbsp;</a>chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost transfiguring it.
+			To-night, as his muscles twitched with emotion, and the perspiration
+			dropped from his hair and chin, there was a certain
+			convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man
+			possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before
+			which all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction
+			which seems superior to all laws of condition, under which
+			debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist
+			and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with
+			Asa Skinner to-night, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance
+			of God.</p>
+
+			<p>It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa
+			Skinner&#8217;s God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve
+			vengeance for those of his creatures who were packed into the
+			Lone Star schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations;
+			men from the south and the north, peasants from almost every
+			country of Europe, most of them from the mountainous,
+			night-bound coast of Norway. Honest men for the most part,
+			but men with whom the world had dealt hardly; the failures
+			of all countries, men sobered by toil and saddened by exile,
+			who had been driven to fight for the dominion of an untoward
+			soil, to sow where others should gather, the advance-guard
+			of a mighty civilization to be.</p>
+
+			<p>Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now.
+			He felt that the Lord had this night a special work for him to
+			do. To-night Eric Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide,
+			sat in his audience with a fiddle on his knee, just as he
+			had dropped in on his way to play for some dance. The violin
+			is an object of particular abhorrence to the Free Gospellers.
+			Their antagonism to the church organ is bitter enough, but
+			the fiddle they regard as a very incarnation of evil desires,
+			singing forever of worldly pleasures and inseparably associated
+			with all forbidden things.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers
+			of the revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit
+			weeks ago, and special prayer-meetings had been held at her
+			house for her son. But Eric had only gone his ways laughing,
+			the ways of youth, which are short enough at best, and none
+			too flowery on the Divide. He slipped away from the prayer-meetings
+			to meet the Campbell boys in Genereau&#8217;s saloon, or
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page20" title="20">&nbsp;</a>hug the plump little French girls at Chevalier&#8217;s dances, and
+			sometimes, of a summer night, he even went across the dewy
+			cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play the fiddle
+			for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all
+			the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain
+			and too busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue.
+			On such occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk
+			stockings and tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying
+			herself on a battered guitar. It gave him a delicious
+			sense of freedom and experience to be with a woman who, no
+			matter how, had lived in big cities and knew the ways of
+			town-folk, who had never worked in the fields and had kept
+			her hands white and soft, her throat fair and tender, who had
+			heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who knew
+			the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.</p>
+
+			<p>Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother
+			were not altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days
+			he had been fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers,
+			and over his pleasures had fallen the shadow of something
+			dark and terrible that dogged his steps. The harder he danced,
+			the louder he sang, the more was he conscious that this phantom
+			was gaining upon him, that in time it would track him
+			down. One Sunday afternoon, late in the fall, when he had
+			been drinking beer with Lena Hanson and listening to a song
+			which made his cheeks burn, a rattlesnake had crawled out of
+			the side of the sod house and thrust its ugly head in under the
+			screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he knew
+			enough of Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile
+			lying coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when
+			he kissed Lena good-by, and he went there no more.</p>
+
+			<p>The final barrier between Eric and his mother&#8217;s faith was
+			his violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling
+			to his dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than
+			all his strength. In the great world beauty comes to men in
+			many guises, and art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there
+			was only his violin. It stood, to him, for all the manifestations
+			of art; it was his only bridge into the kingdom of the soul.</p>
+
+			<p>It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his
+			impassioned pleading that night.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;<em>Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?</em> Is there a Saul here
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page21" title="21">&nbsp;</a>to-night who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading,
+			who has thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my
+			brother; you are offered this wonderful love and you prefer
+			the worm that dieth not and the fire which will not be
+			quenched. What right have you to lose one of God&#8217;s precious
+			souls? <em>Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?</em>&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner&#8217;s pale face, for he saw
+			that Eric Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The
+			minister fell upon his knees and threw his long arms up over
+			his head.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have
+			prayed for. I tell you the Spirit is coming! Just a little more
+			prayer, brothers, a little more zeal, and he will be here. I can
+			feel his cooling wing upon my brow. Glory be to God forever
+			and ever, amen!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this
+			spiritual panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip.
+			Another figure fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners&#8217;
+			bench rose a chant of terror and rapture:</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="poem">
+				<p>&#8220;Eating honey and drinking wine,</p>
+				<p class="i2"><em>Glory to the bleeding Lamb!</em></p>
+				<p>I am my Lord&#8217;s and he is mine,</p>
+				<p class="i2"><em>Glory to the bleeding Lamb!</em>&#8221;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+
+			<p>The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the
+			vague yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had
+			starved all the passions so long, only to fall victims to the
+			basest of them all, fear.</p>
+
+			<p>A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson&#8217;s
+			bowed head, and the sound was like the groan of a great tree
+			when it falls in the forest.</p>
+
+			<p>The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his
+			head, crying in a loud voice:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;<em>Lazarus, come forth!</em> Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going
+			down at sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I
+			throw you the life-line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for
+			his!&#8221; The minister threw his arms out and lifted his quivering
+			face.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page22" title="22">&nbsp;</a>lightning was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and
+			crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the
+			sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.</p>
+
+			<h4>II.</h4>
+
+			<p>For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere
+			faith to which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from
+			the East came to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She
+			was a girl of other manners and conditions, and there were
+			greater distances between her life and Eric&#8217;s than all the miles
+			which separated Rattlesnake Creek from New York city. Indeed,
+			she had no business to be in the West at all; but ah!
+			across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable
+			chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!</p>
+
+			<p>It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot
+			came to Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country
+			where he had spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated
+			from Harvard it was still customary for moneyed gentlemen
+			to send their scapegrace sons to rough it on ranches in
+			the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to a
+			living death in the sage-brush of the Black Hills. These young
+			men did not always return to the ways of civilized life. But
+			Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a
+			cow-punchers&#8217; brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated
+			by a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from
+			these things by a girl, his sister, who had been very near to his
+			life ever since the days when they read fairy tales together and
+			dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his first
+			visit to his father&#8217;s ranch since he left it six years before, he
+			brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter
+			from a sprain received while skating, and had had too much
+			time for reflection during those months. She was restless and
+			filled with a desire to see something of the wild country of
+			which her brother had told her so much. She was to be married
+			the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she
+			begged him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt
+			across the continent, to taste the last of their freedom together.
+			It comes to all women of her type&#8212;that desire to
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page23" title="23">&nbsp;</a>taste the unknown which allures and terrifies, to run one&#8217;s
+			whole soul&#8217;s length out to the wind&#8212;just once.</p>
+
+			<p>It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood
+			that strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew
+			where to take her. They had slept in sod houses on the
+			Platte River, made the acquaintance of the personnel of a
+			third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined in
+			a camp of railroad constructors at the world&#8217;s end beyond
+			New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on horseback,
+			fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple
+			Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for
+			their besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return
+			to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the
+			windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming
+			sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air
+			and blinding sunlight.</p>
+
+			<p>Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there
+			are so many in this day, when old order, passing, giveth place
+			to new; beautiful, talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the
+			world at twenty-four. For the moment the life and people of
+			the Divide interested her. She was there but a week; perhaps
+			had she stayed longer, that inexorable ennui which travels
+			faster even than the Vestibule Limited would have overtaken
+			her. The week she tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson
+			was helping Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or
+			a week later, and there would have been no story to write.</p>
+
+			<p>It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday.
+			Wyllis and his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the
+			ranchhouse, staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting
+			against the gusts of hot wind that blew up from the
+			sandy river-bottom twenty miles to the southward.</p>
+
+			<p>The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;This wind is the real thing; you don&#8217;t strike it anywhere
+			else. You remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told
+			you it came from Kansas. It&#8217;s the key-note of this country.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued
+			gently:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I hope it&#8217;s paid you, Sis. Roughing it&#8217;s dangerous business;
+			it takes the taste out of things.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page24" title="24">&nbsp;</a>She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so
+			like her own.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven&#8217;t been so happy since we were
+			children and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together
+			some day. Do you know, I believe I could just stay on
+			here forever and let the world go on its own gait. It seems as
+			though the tension and strain we used to talk of last winter
+			were gone for good, as though one could never give one&#8217;s
+			strength out to such petty things any more.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk
+			handkerchief that was knotted about his neck and stared
+			moodily off at the sky-line.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, you&#8217;re mistaken. This would bore you after a while.
+			You can&#8217;t shake the fever of the other life. I&#8217;ve tried it. There
+			was a time when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down
+			into the Thebaid and burrow into the sandhills and get rid of
+			it. But it&#8217;s all too complex now. You see we&#8217;ve made our dissipations
+			so dainty and respectable that they&#8217;ve gone further
+			in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You
+			couldn&#8217;t rest, even here. The war-cry would follow you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You don&#8217;t waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I
+			talk more than you do, without saying half so much. You
+			must have learned the art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians.
+			I think I like silent men.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Naturally,&#8221; said Wyllis, &#8220;since you have decided to marry
+			the most brilliant talker you know.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the
+			hot wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret
+			spoke first.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to
+			know as interesting as Eric Hermannson?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the
+			Norwegian youth in my day, and he&#8217;s rather an exception,
+			even now. He has retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil
+			have tightened on him, I fancy.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Siegfried? Come, that&#8217;s rather good, Wyllis. He looks like
+			a dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from
+			the others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human
+			being.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; said Wyllis, meditatively, &#8220;I don&#8217;t read Bourget as
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page25" title="25">&nbsp;</a>much as my cultured sister, and I&#8217;m not so well up in analysis,
+			but I fancy it&#8217;s because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted
+			suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of
+			his, he may conceal a soul somewhere. Nicht wahr?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Something like that,&#8221; said Margaret, thoughtfully, &#8220;except
+			that it&#8217;s more than a suspicion, and it isn&#8217;t groundless. He has
+			one, and he makes it known, somehow, without speaking.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I always have my doubts about loquacious souls,&#8221; Wyllis
+			remarked, with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual
+			with him.</p>
+
+			<p>Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. &#8220;I knew it
+			from the first, when he told me about the suicide of his
+			cousin, the Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can&#8217;t be
+			summoned at will in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it,
+			sometimes, unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him
+			I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven&#8217;t told you about that yet!
+			Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in
+			the dark when I was pumping away at that old parlor organ
+			to please Mrs. Lockhart. It&#8217;s her household fetish and I&#8217;ve
+			forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and sold to
+			buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate manner
+			made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I
+			sang just the old things, of course. It&#8217;s queer to sing familiar
+			things here at the world&#8217;s end. It makes one think how the
+			hearts of men have carried them around the world, into the
+			wastes of Iceland and the jungles of Africa and the islands of
+			the Pacific. I think if one lived here long enough one would
+			quite forget how to be trivial, and would read only the great
+			books that we never get time to read in the world, and would
+			remember only the great music, and the things that are really
+			worth while would stand out clearly against that horizon over
+			there. And of course I played the intermezzo from &#8216;Cavalleria
+			Rusticana&#8217; for him; it goes rather better on an organ than
+			most things do. He shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands
+			up into knots and blurted out that he didn&#8217;t know there was
+			any music like that in the world. Why, there were tears in his
+			voice, Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I <em>heard</em> his tears. Then it
+			dawned upon me that it was probably the first good music he
+			had ever heard in all his life. Think of it, to care for music as
+			he does and never to hear it, never to know that it exists on
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page26" title="26">&nbsp;</a>earth! To long for it as we long for other perfect experiences
+			that never come. I can&#8217;t tell you what music means to that
+			man. I never saw any one so susceptible to it. It gave
+			him speech, he became alive. When I had finished the intermezzo,
+			he began telling me about a little crippled brother
+			who died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere
+			in his arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He took
+			up the story and told it slowly, as if to himself, just sort of
+			rose up and told his own woe to answer Mascagni&#8217;s. It overcame
+			me.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Poor devil,&#8221; said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious
+			eyes, &#8220;and so you&#8217;ve given him a new woe. Now he&#8217;ll go on
+			wanting Grieg and Schubert the rest of his days and never
+			getting them. That&#8217;s a girl&#8217;s philanthropy for you!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin
+			over the unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife
+			insisted upon as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot
+			was at the house. Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his
+			broad, red smile at Margaret.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, I&#8217;ve got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf
+			Oleson will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ,
+			when she isn&#8217;t lookin&#8217; after the grub, and a little chap
+			from Frenchtown will bring his fiddle&#8212;though the French
+			don&#8217;t mix with the Norwegians much.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature
+			of our trip, and it&#8217;s so nice of you to get it up for us. We&#8217;ll
+			see the Norwegians in character at last,&#8221; cried Margaret,
+			cordially.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;See here, Lockhart, I&#8217;ll settle with you for backing her in
+			this scheme,&#8221; said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes
+			out of his pipe. &#8220;She&#8217;s done crazy things enough on this trip,
+			but to talk of dancing all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians
+			and taking the carriage at four to catch the six o&#8217;clock
+			train out of Riverton&#8212;well, it&#8217;s tommy-rot, that&#8217;s what
+			it is!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to
+			decide whether it isn&#8217;t easier to stay up all night than to get
+			up at three in the morning. To get up at three, think what
+			that means! No, sir, I prefer to keep my vigil and then get
+			into a sleeper.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page27" title="27">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought
+			you were tired of dancing.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian
+			dance, and I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how
+			seldom it is that one really wants to do anything nowadays. I
+			wonder when I have really wanted to go to a party before. It
+			will be something to remember next month at Newport,
+			when we have to and don&#8217;t want to. Remember your own
+			theory that contrast is about the only thing that makes life
+			endurable. This is my party and Mr. Lockhart&#8217;s; your whole
+			duty to-morrow night will consist in being nice to the Norwegian
+			girls. I&#8217;ll warrant you were adept enough at it once.
+			And you&#8217;d better be very nice indeed, for if there are many
+			such young valkyrs as Eric&#8217;s sister among them, they would
+			simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying
+			them.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider
+			his fate, while his sister went on.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the
+			sole of his plowshoe.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, I guess we&#8217;ll have a couple dozen. You see it&#8217;s pretty
+			hard to get a crowd together here any more. Most of &#8217;em
+			have gone over to the Free Gospellers, and they&#8217;d rather put
+			their feet in the fire than shake &#8217;em to a fiddle.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Margaret made a gesture of impatience.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Those Free Gospellers have just cast an evil spell over this
+			country, haven&#8217;t they?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well,&#8221; said Lockhart, cautiously, &#8220;I don&#8217;t just like to pass
+			judgment on any Christian sect, but if you&#8217;re to know the
+			chosen by their works, the Gospellers can&#8217;t make a very proud
+			showin&#8217;, an&#8217; that&#8217;s a fact. They&#8217;re responsible for a few suicides,
+			and they&#8217;ve sent a good-sized delegation to the state
+			insane asylum, an&#8217; I don&#8217;t see as they&#8217;ve made the rest of us
+			much better than we were before. I had a little herdboy last
+			spring, as square a little Dane as I want to work for me, but
+			after the Gospellers got hold of him and sanctified him, the
+			little beggar used to get down on his knees out on the prairie
+			and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the corn, an&#8217; I
+			had to fire him. That&#8217;s about the way it goes. Now there&#8217;s
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page28" title="28">&nbsp;</a>Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer in
+			all this section&#8212;called all the dances. Now he&#8217;s got no ambition
+			and he&#8217;s glum as a preacher. I don&#8217;t suppose we can even
+			get him to come in to-morrow night.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Eric? Why, he must dance, we can&#8217;t let him off,&#8221; said Margaret,
+			quickly. &#8220;Why, I intend to dance with him myself!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m afraid he won&#8217;t dance. I asked him this morning if
+			he&#8217;d help us out and he said, &#8216;I don&#8217;t dance now, any more,&#8217;&#8221;
+			said Lockhart, imitating the labored English of the Norwegian.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;The Miller of Hoffbau, the Miller of Hoffbau, O my
+			Princess!&#8217;&#8221; chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.</p>
+
+			<p>The red on his sister&#8217;s cheek deepened a little, and she
+			laughed mischievously. &#8220;We&#8217;ll see about that, sir. I&#8217;ll not admit
+			that I am beaten until I have asked him myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village
+			in the heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the
+			road lay through the most attractive part of the Divide country,
+			on several occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother
+			had accompanied him. To-night Wyllis had business with
+			Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a
+			frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the
+			side-saddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as she
+			did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides
+			at home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She
+			was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric was
+			wrestling with more thoughts than had ever been crowded
+			into his head before. He rode with his eyes riveted on that
+			slight figure before him, as though he wished to absorb it
+			through the optic nerves and hold it in his brain forever.
+			He understood the situation perfectly. His brain worked
+			slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
+			girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him,
+			but he knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when
+			an angel first appeared unto them, never doubted its high
+			origin.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life,
+			but he was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely
+			lost its self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men
+			who were not afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page29" title="29">&nbsp;</a>he had prospects before him when his father went down off
+			the North Cape in the long Arctic night, and his mother,
+			seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had followed her
+			brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as
+			young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure
+			and delicate, like a Swede&#8217;s; hair as yellow as the locks of
+			Tennyson&#8217;s amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue,
+			whose flash was most dangerous to women. He had in those
+			days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of approach,
+			that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was
+			even said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined
+			to levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the
+			sad history of those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid
+			soil and under a scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case.
+			Toil and isolation had sobered him, and he grew more and
+			more like the clods among which he labored. It was as though
+			some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those
+			delicate fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or
+			pleasure, in which lies the power of exquisite sensation, and
+			had seared them quite away. It is a painful thing to watch the
+			light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen, leaving an expression
+			of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite hopeless,
+			a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change
+			comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness,
+			with others it comes more slowly, according to the time it
+			takes each man&#8217;s heart to die.</p>
+
+			<p>Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead
+			many a year before they are put to rest in the little graveyard
+			on the windy hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.</p>
+
+			<p>The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of
+			his people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric
+			until that night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had
+			broken his violin across his knee. After that, the gloom of his
+			people settled down upon him, and the gospel of maceration
+			began its work. &#8220;<em>If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out</em>,&#8221; et cetera.
+			The pagan smile that once hovered about his lips was gone,
+			and he was one with sorrow. Religion heals a hundred hearts
+			for one that it embitters, but when it destroys, its work is
+			quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross has been,
+			joy will not come again. This man understood things literally:
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page30" title="30">&nbsp;</a>one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the
+			soul it was necessary to starve the soul.</p>
+
+			<p>The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and
+			her cavalier left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch
+			of road that runs for some three miles through the French
+			settlement, where the prairie is as level as the surface of a lake.
+			There the fields of flax and wheat and rye are bordered by
+			precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard poplars. It was a
+			yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide light of
+			the setting sun.</p>
+
+			<p>The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, &#8220;It
+			will be safe to run the horses here, won&#8217;t it?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, I think so, now,&#8221; he answered, touching his spur to
+			his pony&#8217;s flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old
+			saying in the West that new-comers always ride a horse or
+			two to death before they get broken in to the country. They
+			are tempted by the great open spaces and try to outride the
+			horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped
+			over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil
+			fluttering in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams
+			last night and the night before. With a sudden inspiration of
+			courage he overtook her and rode beside her, looking intently
+			at her half-averted face. Before, he had only stolen occasional
+			glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes, always with
+			more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let
+			every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world
+			would have said that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely
+			cut, with clear, elegant lines that betokened ancestry. Men of
+			letters would have called it a historic face, and would have
+			conjectured at what old passions, long asleep, what old sorrows
+			forgotten time out of mind, doing battle together in
+			ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their unconscious
+			memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning
+			in these details. To him this beauty was something more
+			than color and line; it was as a flash of white light, in which
+			one cannot distinguish color because all colors are there. To
+			him it was a complete revelation, an embodiment of those
+			dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a young man&#8217;s
+			pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something
+			more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page31" title="31">&nbsp;</a>it troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths
+			before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing
+			whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like uncovering
+			his head before it, again the fury seized him to
+			break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing and
+			stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with
+			his arms, and take and hold; it maddened him that this
+			woman whom he could break in his hands should be so
+			much stronger than he. But near her, he never questioned
+			this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted the
+			miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him. To-night,
+			when he rode so close to her that he could have
+			touched her, he knew that he might as well reach out his
+			hand to take a star.</p>
+
+			<p>Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly
+			in her saddle.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride
+			fast,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric turned his eyes away.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe
+			hear music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand
+			to work,&#8221; he asked, timidly.</p>
+
+			<p>Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she
+			studied the outline of his face, pityingly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, you might&#8212;but you&#8217;d lose a good deal else. I
+			shouldn&#8217;t like you to go to New York&#8212;and be poor, you&#8217;d
+			be out of atmosphere, some way,&#8221; she said, slowly. Inwardly
+			she was thinking: &#8220;There he would be altogether sordid,
+			impossible&#8212;a machine who would carry one&#8217;s trunks upstairs,
+			perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque;
+			why is it?&#8221; &#8220;No,&#8221; she added aloud, &#8220;I shouldn&#8217;t like
+			that.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Then I not go,&#8221; said Eric, decidedly.</p>
+
+			<p>Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle
+			amused and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;But I&#8217;ll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want
+			you to dance with us to-morrow night and teach me some of
+			the Norwegian dances; they say you know them all. Won&#8217;t
+			you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page32" title="32">&nbsp;</a>as they had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke
+			his violin across his knee.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, I will,&#8221; he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered
+			his soul to hell as he said it.</p>
+
+			<p>They had reached the rougher country now, where the
+			road wound through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along
+			the creek, when a beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing
+			of horses made the ponies start and Eric rose in his stirrups.
+			Then down the gulch in front of them and over the steep clay
+			banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys
+			and wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the
+			plains of Montana to sell in the farming country. Margaret&#8217;s
+			pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that was almost a scream,
+			and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild blood
+			of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret called to
+			Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her
+			pony&#8217;s bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was
+			kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range
+			were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking
+			her with their fore feet and snapping at her flanks. It was
+			the old liberty of the range that the little beast fought for.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!&#8221; Eric called, throwing
+			all his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic
+			fore feet that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the
+			wild mustangs that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded
+			in wrenching the pony&#8217;s head toward him and crowding
+			her withers against the clay bank, so that she could not
+			roll.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Hold tight, tight!&#8221; he shouted again, launching a kick at
+			a snorting animal that reared back against Margaret&#8217;s saddle.
+			If she should lose her courage and fall now, under those
+			hoofs&#8212;&#8212;He struck out again and again, kicking right and
+			left with all his might. Already the negligent drivers had galloped
+			into the cut, and their long quirts were whistling over
+			the heads of the herd. As suddenly as it had come, the struggling,
+			frantic wave of wild life swept up out of the gulch and
+			on across the open prairie, and with a long despairing whinny
+			of farewell the pony dropped her head and stood trembling in
+			her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from her bit.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric stepped close to Margaret&#8217;s side and laid his hand on
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page33" title="33">&nbsp;</a>her saddle. &#8220;You are not hurt?&#8221; he asked, hoarsely. As he
+			raised his face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white
+			and drawn and that his lips were working nervously.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck
+			you!&#8221; she cried in sharp alarm.</p>
+
+			<p>He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, it is not that,&#8221; he spoke rapidly now, with his hands
+			clenched at his side. &#8220;But if they had hurt you, I would beat
+			their brains out with my hands, I would kill them all. I was
+			never afraid before. You are the only beautiful thing that has
+			ever come close to me. You came like an angel out of the sky.
+			You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the
+			snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little
+			boy. You are like all that I wanted once and never had, you
+			are all that they have killed in me. I die for you to-night,
+			to-morrow, for all eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid
+			because I love you more than Christ who died for me, more
+			than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid
+			before. If you had fallen&#8212;oh, my God!&#8221; he threw his arms
+			out blindly and dropped his head upon the pony&#8217;s mane,
+			leaning limply against the animal like a man struck by some
+			sickness. His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his
+			labored breathing. The horse stood cowed with exhaustion
+			and fear. Presently Margaret laid her hand on Eric&#8217;s head and
+			said gently:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your
+			horse?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not
+			safe. I will not frighten you again.&#8221; His voice was still husky,
+			but it was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped
+			home in silence.</p>
+
+			<p>When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the
+			pony&#8217;s head until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was
+			pretty thoroughly scared myself,&#8221; she said as she took her
+			brother&#8217;s arm and went slowly up the hill toward the house.
+			&#8220;No, I&#8217;m not hurt, thanks to Eric. You must thank him for
+			taking such good care of me. He&#8217;s a mighty fine fellow. I&#8217;ll
+			tell you all about it in the morning, dear. I was pretty well
+			shaken up and I&#8217;m going right to bed now. Good-night.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page34" title="34">&nbsp;</a>When she reached the low room in which she slept, she
+			sank upon the bed in her riding-dress face downward.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I pity him! I pity him!&#8221; she murmured, with a long
+			sigh of exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose
+			again, she took from her dress a letter that had been waiting
+			for her at the village post-office. It was closely written in a
+			long, angular hand, covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper,
+			and began:&#8212;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;My Dearest Margaret: If I should attempt to say <em>how like a
+			winter hath thine absence been</em>, I should incur the risk of being
+			tedious. Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having
+			nothing better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in
+			particular without you, I remained in the city until Jack
+			Courtwell noted my general despondency and brought me
+			down here to his place on the sound to manage some open-air
+			theatricals he is getting up. &#8216;As You Like It&#8217; is of course
+			the piece selected. Miss Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you
+			had been here to take the part. Miss Harrison reads her lines
+			well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy; insists
+			on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings and
+			highly colored suggestions wholly out of harmony with the
+			pastoral setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates
+			the emotional element and quite fails to do justice to
+			Rosalind&#8217;s facile wit and really brilliant mental qualities.
+			Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor says he is épris of your
+			sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his memory is treacherous
+			and his interest fitful.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;My new pictures arrived last week on the &#8216;Gascogne.&#8217; The
+			Puvis de Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it
+			in Paris. A pale dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow, and a
+			stream of anemic water flows at her feet. The Constant, you
+			will remember, I got because you admired it. It is here in all
+			its florid splendor, the whole dominated by a glowing sensuosity.
+			The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as you
+			said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an
+			easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line
+			of African coast in the background recalls memories of you
+			very precious to me. But it is useless to deny that Constant
+			irritates me. Though I cannot prove the charge against him,
+			his brilliancy always makes me suspect him of cheapness.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page35" title="35">&nbsp;</a>Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages
+			of this strange love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly
+			with discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile
+			she laid them by.</p>
+
+			<p>She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she
+			went to open the window. With her hand on the sill, she
+			hesitated, feeling suddenly as though some danger were lurking
+			outside, some inordinate desire waiting to spring upon
+			her in the darkness. She stood there for a long time, gazing at
+			the infinite sweep of the sky.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, it is all so little, so little there,&#8221; she murmured.
+			&#8220;When everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect
+			love to be great? Why should one try to read highly colored
+			suggestions into a life like that? If only I could find one thing
+			in it all that mattered greatly, one thing that would warm
+			me when I am alone! Will life never give me that one great
+			moment?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum-bushes
+			outside. It was only the house-dog roused from his
+			sleep, but Margaret started violently and trembled so that she
+			caught the foot of the bed for support. Again she felt herself
+			pursued by some overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity
+			for herself, like the outstretching of helpless, unseen
+			arms in the darkness, and the air seemed heavy with sighs of
+			yearning. She fled to her bed with the words, &#8220;I love you
+			more than Christ, who died for me!&#8221; ringing in her ears.</p>
+
+			<h4>III.</h4>
+
+			<p>About midnight the dance at Lockhart&#8217;s was at its height.
+			Even the old men who had come to &#8220;look on&#8221; caught the
+			spirit of revelry and stamped the floor with the vigor of old
+			Silenus. Eric took the violin from the Frenchman, and Minna
+			Oleson sat at the organ, and the music grew more and more
+			characteristic&#8212;rude, half-mournful music, made up of the
+			folk-songs of the North, that the villagers sing through the
+			long night in hamlets by the sea, when they are thinking of
+			the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so long away. To
+			Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg&#8217;s Peer Gynt music.
+			She found something irresistibly infectious in the mirth of
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page36" title="36">&nbsp;</a>these people who were so seldom merry, and she felt almost
+			one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom in
+			them to-night, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
+			which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous
+			with delight. Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it
+			came, they caught at it wildly and crushed its fluttering wings
+			in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life enough,
+			most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labor and
+			drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a
+			short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity,
+			thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of
+			their womanhood. But what matter? To-night there was hot
+			liquor in the glass and hot blood in the heart; to-night they
+			danced.</p>
+
+			<p>To-night Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was
+			no longer the big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret&#8217;s
+			feet and looked hopelessly into her eyes. To-night he
+			was a man, with a man&#8217;s rights and a man&#8217;s power. To-night
+			he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was yellow as the heavy
+			wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes flashed like the blue
+			water between the ice-packs in the North Seas. He was not
+			afraid of Margaret to-night, and when he danced with her he
+			held her firmly. She was tired and dragged on his arm a little,
+			but the strength of the man was like an all-pervading fluid,
+			stealing through her veins, awakening under her heart some
+			nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all
+			these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips
+			to his that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish
+			blood of some lawless ancestor, long asleep, were calling out
+			in her to-night, some drop of a hotter fluid that the centuries
+			had failed to cool, and why, if this curse were in her, it had
+			not spoken before. But was it a curse, this awakening, this
+			wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For the first
+			time in her life her heart held something stronger than herself,
+			was not this worth while? Then she ceased to wonder.
+			She lost sight of the lights and the faces, and the music was
+			drowned by the beating of her own arteries. She saw only the
+			blue eyes that flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that
+			throbbing hand which held hers and which the blood of his
+			heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping shoulders,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page37" title="37">&nbsp;</a>high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man
+			she was to marry in December. For an hour she had been
+			crowding back the memory of that face with all her strength.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Let us stop, this is enough,&#8221; she whispered. His only
+			answer was to tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let
+			that masterful strength bear her where it would. She forgot
+			that this man was little more than a savage, that they would
+			part at dawn. The blood has no memories, no reflections, no
+			regrets for the past, no consideration of the future.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Let us go out where it is cooler,&#8221; she said when the music
+			stopped; thinking, &#8220;I am growing faint here, I shall be all
+			right in the open air.&#8221; They stepped out into the cool, blue air
+			of the night.</p>
+
+			<p>Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians
+			had been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill
+			tower into the cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You like to go up?&#8221; asked Eric, close to her ear.</p>
+
+			<p>She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement.
+			&#8220;How high is it?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Forty feet, about. I not let you fall.&#8221; There was a note of
+			irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously
+			wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of
+			the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an
+			unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the
+			Vestibule Limited and the world.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, if you&#8217;ll take good care of me. I used to be able to
+			climb, when I was a little girl.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent.
+			Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that
+			scene all her life, through all the routine of the days to come.
+			Above them stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue,
+			even in the night, with its big, burning stars, never so cold
+			and dead and far away as in denser atmospheres. The moon
+			would not be up for twenty minutes yet, and all about the
+			horizon, that wide horizon, which seemed to reach around
+			the world, lingered a pale, white light, as of a universal dawn.
+			The weary wind brought up to them the heavy odors of the
+			cornfields. The music of the dance sounded faintly from below.
+			Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs swinging
+			down on the ladder. His great shoulders looked more than
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page38" title="38">&nbsp;</a>ever like those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his
+			perfect, reposeful strength in the Louvre, and had often made
+			her wonder if such men died forever with the youth of
+			Greece.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How sweet the corn smells at night,&#8221; said Margaret nervously.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled
+			when this taciturn man spoke again.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You go away to-morrow?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You not come back any more?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip; half-way across
+			the continent.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You soon forget about this country, I guess.&#8221; It seemed to
+			him now a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but
+			that she should utterly forget this night into which he threw
+			all his life and all his eternity, that was a bitter thought.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to
+			me for that. And you won&#8217;t be sorry you danced this one
+			night, will you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be
+			so happy again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I
+			only this one. I will dream sometimes, maybe.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched
+			her. It was as when some great animal composes itself for
+			death, as when a great ship goes down at sea.</p>
+
+			<p>She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer
+			and looked into her eyes.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You are not always happy, too?&#8221; he asked.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You have a trouble?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do
+			that, I could cure it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do
+			when they pray, and said falteringly, &#8220;If I own all the world, I
+			give him you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her
+			hand on his.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page39" title="39">&nbsp;</a>then I should not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it
+			already.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She did not take her hand away from him; she did not
+			dare. She sat still and waited for the traditions in which she
+			had always believed to speak and save her. But they were
+			dumb. She belonged to an ultra-refined civilization which
+			tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat nature?
+			Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the
+			third&#8212;&#8212; Can we ever rise above nature or sink below her?
+			Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony
+			in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not
+			always cry in brutal triumph: &#8220;I am here still, at the bottom of
+			things, warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor
+			tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am
+			its destiny.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>This woman, on a windmill tower at the world&#8217;s end with a
+			giant barbarian, heard that cry to-night, and she was afraid!
+			Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we
+			fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music
+			has begun again,&#8221; she said.</p>
+
+			<p>He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting
+			his arm about her to help her. That arm could have thrown
+			Thor&#8217;s hammer out in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely
+			touched her, and his hand trembled as it had done in the
+			dance. His face was level with hers now and the moonlight
+			fell sharply upon it. All her life she had searched the faces of
+			men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that that look
+			had never shone for her before, would never shine for her on
+			earth again, that such love comes to one only in dreams or in
+			impossible places like this, unattainable always. This was
+			Love&#8217;s self, in a moment it would die. Stung by the agonized
+			appeal that emanated from the man&#8217;s whole being, she leaned
+			forward and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and again she
+			heard the deep respirations rattle in his throat while she held
+			them there, and the riotous force under her heart became an
+			engulfing weakness. He drew her up to him until he felt all
+			the resistance go out of her body, until every nerve relaxed
+			and yielded. When she drew her face back from his, it was
+			white with fear.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page40" title="40">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!&#8221; she
+			muttered. And the drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling
+			to some appointed doom as she clung to the rounds of the
+			ladder. All that she was to know of love she had left upon
+			his lips.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;The devil is loose again,&#8221; whispered Olaf Oleson, as he
+			saw Eric dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.</p>
+
+			<p>But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of
+			the time when he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no
+			quailing then! If ever a soul went fearlessly, proudly down to
+			the gates infernal, his should go. For a moment he fancied he
+			was there already, treading down the tempest of flame, hugging
+			the fiery hurricane to his breast. He wondered whether
+			in ages gone, all the countless years of sinning in which men
+			had sold and lost and flung their souls away, any man had
+			ever so cheated Satan, had ever bartered his soul for so great a
+			price.</p>
+
+			<p>It seemed but a little while till dawn.</p>
+
+			<p>The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and
+			his sister said good-by. She could not meet Eric&#8217;s eyes as she
+			gave him her hand, but as he stood by the horse&#8217;s head, just
+			as the carriage moved off, she gave him one swift glance that
+			said, &#8220;I will not forget.&#8221; In a moment the carriage was gone.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the watertank
+			and went to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his
+			horses to the door, a shadow fell across his path, and he saw
+			Skinner rising in his stirrups. His rugged face was pale and
+			worn with looking after his wayward flock, with dragging
+			men into the way of salvation.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Good-morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?&#8221;
+			he asked, sternly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;A dance? Oh, yes, a dance,&#8221; replied Eric, cheerfully.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Certainly you did not dance, Eric?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, I danced. I danced all the time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The minister&#8217;s shoulders drooped, and an expression of
+			profound discouragement settled over his haggard face. There
+			was almost anguish in the yearning he felt for this soul.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Eric, I didn&#8217;t look for this from you. I thought God had
+			set his mark on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page41" title="41">&nbsp;</a>things like this that you set your soul back a thousand years
+			from God. O foolish and perverse generation!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to
+			where the new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding
+			the uplands with light. As his nostrils drew in the breath of
+			the dew and the morning, something from the only poetry he
+			had ever read flashed across his mind, and he murmured, half
+			to himself, with dreamy exultation:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand
+			years as a day.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Cosmopolitan</cite>, April 1900</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="tavener" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page42" title="42">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">The Sentimentality of William Tavener <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success of
+			living in the West, and Hester undoubtedly was that.
+			When people spoke of William Tavener as the most prosperous
+			farmer in McPherson County, they usually added that his
+			wife was a &#8220;good manager.&#8221; She was an executive woman,
+			quick of tongue and something of an imperatrix. The only
+			reason her husband did not consult her about his business
+			was that she did not wait to be consulted.</p>
+
+			<p>It would have been quite impossible for one man, within
+			the limited sphere of human action, to follow all Hester&#8217;s advice,
+			but in the end William usually acted upon some of her
+			suggestions. When she incessantly denounced the &#8220;shiftlessness&#8221;
+			of letting a new threshing machine stand unprotected in
+			the open, he eventually built a shed for it. When she sniffed
+			contemptuously at his notion of fencing a hog corral with
+			sod walls, he made a spiritless beginning on the structure&#8212;merely
+			to &#8220;show his temper,&#8221; as she put it&#8212;but in the end he
+			went off quietly to town and bought enough barbed wire to
+			complete the fence. When the first heavy rains came on, and
+			the pigs rooted down the sod wall and made little paths all
+			over it to facilitate their ascent, he heard his wife relate with
+			relish the story of the little pig that built a mud house, to the
+			minister at the dinner table, and William&#8217;s gravity never relaxed
+			for an instant. Silence, indeed, was William&#8217;s refuge and
+			his strength.</p>
+
+			<p>William set his boys a wholesome example to respect their
+			mother. People who knew him very well suspected that he
+			even admired her. He was a hard man towards his neighbors,
+			and even towards his sons; grasping, determined and
+			ambitious.</p>
+
+			<p>There was an occasional blue day about the house when
+			William went over the store bills, but he never objected to
+			items relating to his wife&#8217;s gowns or bonnets. So it came
+			about that many of the foolish, unnecessary little things that
+			Hester bought for boys, she had charged to her personal
+			account.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page43" title="43">&nbsp;</a>One spring night Hester sat in a rocking chair by the sitting
+			room window, darning socks. She rocked violently and
+			sent her long needle vigorously back and forth over her
+			gourd, and it took only a very casual glance to see that she
+			was wrought up over something. William sat on the other
+			side of the table reading his farm paper. If he had noticed his
+			wife&#8217;s agitation, his calm, clean-shaven face betrayed no sign
+			of concern. He must have noticed the sarcastic turn of her
+			remarks at the supper table, and he must have noticed the
+			moody silence of the older boys as they ate. When supper was
+			but half over little Billy, the youngest, had suddenly pushed
+			back his plate and slipped away from the table, manfully
+			trying to swallow a sob. But William Tavener never heeded
+			ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never
+			looked for a storm until it broke.</p>
+
+			<p>After supper the boys had gone to the pond under the willows
+			in the big cattle corral, to get rid of the dust of plowing.
+			Hester could hear an occasional splash and a laugh ringing
+			clear through the stillness of the night, as she sat by the open
+			window. She sat silent for almost an hour reviewing in her
+			mind many plans of attack. But she was too vigorous a
+			woman to be much of a strategist, and she usually came to her
+			point with directness. At last she cut her thread and suddenly
+			put her darning down, saying emphatically:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;William, I don&#8217;t think it would hurt you to let the boys go
+			to that circus in town to-morrow.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>William continued to read his farm paper, but it was not
+			Hester&#8217;s custom to wait for an answer. She usually divined
+			his arguments and assailed them one by one before he uttered
+			them.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve been short of hands all summer, and you&#8217;ve
+			worked the boys hard, and a man ought use his own flesh and
+			blood as well as he does his hired hands. We&#8217;re plenty able to
+			afford it, and it&#8217;s little enough our boys ever spend. I don&#8217;t
+			see how you can expect &#8217;em to be steady and hard workin&#8217;,
+			unless you encourage &#8217;em a little. I never could see much
+			harm in circuses, and our boys have never been to one. Oh, I
+			know Jim Howley&#8217;s boys get drunk an&#8217; carry on when they
+			go, but our boys ain&#8217;t that sort, an&#8217; you know it, William. The
+			animals are real instructive, an&#8217; our boys don&#8217;t get to see
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page44" title="44">&nbsp;</a>much out here on the prairie. It was different where we were
+			raised, but the boys have got no advantages here, an&#8217; if you
+			don&#8217;t take care, they&#8217;ll grow up to be greenhorns.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Hester paused a moment, and William folded up his paper,
+			but vouchsafed no remark. His sisters in Virginia had often
+			said that only a quiet man like William could ever have lived
+			with Hester Perkins. Secretly, William was rather proud of his
+			wife&#8217;s &#8220;gift of speech,&#8221; and of the fact that she could talk in
+			prayer meeting as fluently as a man. He confined his own
+			efforts in that line to a brief prayer at Covenant meetings.</p>
+
+			<p>Hester shook out another sock and went on.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Nobody was ever hurt by goin&#8217; to a circus. Why, law me!
+			I remember I went to one myself once, when I was little. I
+			had most forgot about it. It was over at Pewtown, an&#8217; I remember
+			how I had set my heart on going. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;d
+			ever forgiven my father if he hadn&#8217;t taken me, though that red
+			clay road was in a frightful way after the rain. I mind they had
+			an elephant and six poll parrots, an&#8217; a Rocky Mountain lion,
+			an&#8217; a cage of monkeys, an&#8217; two camels. My! but they were a
+			sight to me then!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Hester dropped the black sock and shook her head and
+			smiled at the recollection. She was not expecting anything
+			from William yet, and she was fairly startled when he said
+			gravely, in much the same tone in which he announced the
+			hymns in prayer meeting:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, there was only one camel. The other was a dromedary.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She peered around the lamp and looked at him keenly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Why, William, how come you to know?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>William folded his paper and answered with some hesitation,
+			&#8220;I was there, too.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Hester&#8217;s interest flashed up.&#8212;&#8220;Well, I never, William! To
+			think of my finding it out after all these years! Why, you
+			couldn&#8217;t have been much bigger&#8217;n our Billy then. It seems
+			queer I never saw you when you was little, to remember
+			about you. But then you Back Creek folks never have anything
+			to do with us Gap people. But how come you to go?
+			Your father was stricter with you than you are with your
+			boys.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I reckon I shouldn&#8217;t &#8217;a gone,&#8221; he said slowly, &#8220;but boys
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page45" title="45">&nbsp;</a>will do foolish things. I had done a good deal of fox hunting
+			the winter before, and father let me keep the bounty money. I
+			hired Tom Smith&#8217;s Tap to weed the corn for me, an&#8217; I slipped
+			off unbeknownst to father an&#8217; went to the show.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Hester spoke up warmly: &#8220;Nonsense, William! It didn&#8217;t do
+			you no harm, I guess. You was always worked hard enough.
+			It must have been a big sight for a little fellow. That clown
+			must have just tickled you to death.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>William crossed his knees and leaned back in his chair.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I reckon I could tell all that fool&#8217;s jokes now. Sometimes I
+			can&#8217;t help thinkin&#8217; about &#8217;em in meetin&#8217; when the sermon&#8217;s
+			long. I mind I had on a pair of new boots that hurt me like
+			the mischief, but I forgot all about &#8217;em when that fellow rode
+			the donkey. I recall I had to take them boots off as soon as I
+			got out of sight o&#8217; town, and walked home in the mud barefoot.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;O poor little fellow!&#8221; Hester ejaculated, drawing her chair
+			nearer and leaning her elbows on the table. &#8220;What cruel shoes
+			they did use to make for children. I remember I went up to
+			Back Creek to see the circus wagons go by. They came down
+			from Romney, you know. The circus men stopped at the
+			creek to water the animals, an&#8217; the elephant got stubborn an&#8217;
+			broke a big limb off the yellow willow tree that grew there by
+			the toll house porch, an&#8217; the Scribners were &#8217;fraid as death
+			he&#8217;d pull the house down. But this much I saw him do; he
+			waded in the creek an&#8217; filled his trunk with water, and
+			squirted it in at the window and nearly ruined Ellen Scribner&#8217;s
+			pink lawn dress that she had just ironed an&#8217; laid out on
+			the bed ready to wear to the circus.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I reckon that must have been a trial to Ellen,&#8221; chuckled
+			William, &#8220;for she was mighty prim in them days.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Hester drew her chair still nearer William&#8217;s. Since the
+			children had begun growing up, her conversation with her
+			husband had been almost wholly confined to questions of
+			economy and expense. Their relationship had become purely
+			a business one, like that between landlord and tenant. In her
+			desire to indulge her boys she had unconsciously assumed a
+			defensive and almost hostile attitude towards her husband.
+			No debtor ever haggled with his usurer more doggedly than
+			did Hester with her husband in behalf of her sons. The strategic
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page46" title="46">&nbsp;</a>contest had gone on so long that it had almost crowded
+			out the memory of a closer relationship. This exchange of
+			confidences to-night, when common recollections took them
+			unawares and opened their hearts, had all the miracle of romance.
+			They talked on and on; of old neighbors, of old familiar
+			faces in the valley where they had grown up, of long
+			forgotten incidents of their youth&#8212;weddings, picnics, sleighing
+			parties and baptizings. For years they had talked of nothing
+			else but butter and eggs and the prices of things, and now
+			they had as much to say to each other as people who meet
+			after a long separation.</p>
+
+			<p>When the clock struck ten, William rose and went over to
+			his walnut secretary and unlocked it. From his red leather
+			wallet he took out a ten dollar bill and laid it on the table
+			beside Hester.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Tell the boys not to stay late, an&#8217; not to drive the horses
+			hard,&#8221; he said quietly, and went off to bed.</p>
+
+			<p>Hester blew out the lamp and sat still in the dark a long
+			time. She left the bill lying on the table where William had
+			placed it. She had a painful sense of having missed something,
+			or lost something; she felt that somehow the years had
+			cheated her.</p>
+
+			<p>The little locust trees that grew by the fence were white
+			with blossoms. Their heavy odor floated in to her on the
+			night wind and recalled a night long ago, when the first whip-poor-Will
+			of the Spring was heard, and the rough, buxom
+			girls of Hawkins Gap had held her laughing and struggling
+			under the locust trees, and searched in her bosom for a lock
+			of her sweetheart&#8217;s hair, which is supposed to be on every
+			girl&#8217;s breast when the first whip-poor-Will sings. Two of
+			those same girls had been her bridesmaids. Hester had been a
+			very happy bride. She rose and went softly into the room
+			where William lay. He was sleeping heavily, but occasionally
+			moved his hand before his face to ward off the flies. Hester
+			went into the parlor and took the piece of mosquito net from
+			the basket of wax apples and pears that her sister had made
+			before she died. One of the boys had brought it all the way
+			from Virginia, packed in a tin pail, since Hester would not
+			risk shipping so precious an ornament by freight. She went
+			back to the bed room and spread the net over William&#8217;s head.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page47" title="47">&nbsp;</a>Then she sat down by the bed and listened to his deep, regular
+			breathing until she heard the boys returning. She went out
+			to meet them and warn them not to waken their father.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll be up early to get your breakfast, boys. Your father says
+			you can go to the show.&#8221; As she handed the money to the
+			eldest, she felt a sudden throb of allegiance to her husband
+			and said sharply, &#8220;And you be careful of that, an&#8217; don&#8217;t waste
+			it. Your father works hard for his money.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The boys looked at each other in astonishment and felt that
+			they had lost a powerful ally.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Library</cite>, May 12, 1900</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="namesake" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page48" title="48">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">The Namesake <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Hartwell&#8217;s
+			studio on the Boulevard St. Michel. We were all fellow-countrymen;
+			one from New Hampshire, one from Colorado,
+			another from Nevada, several from the farm lands of the
+			Middle West, and I myself from California. Lyon Hartwell,
+			though born abroad, was simply, as every one knew, &#8220;from
+			America.&#8221; He seemed, almost more than any other one living
+			man, to mean all of it&#8212;from ocean to ocean. When he was in
+			Paris, his studio was always open to the seven of us who were
+			there that evening, and we intruded upon his leisure as often
+			as we thought permissible.</p>
+
+			<p>Although we were within the terms of the easiest of all
+			intimacies, and although the great sculptor, even when he was
+			more than usually silent, was at all times the most gravely
+			cordial of hosts, yet, on that long remembered evening, as the
+			sunlight died on the burnished brown of the horse-chestnuts
+			below the windows, a perceptible dullness yawned through
+			our conversation.</p>
+
+			<p>We were, indeed, somewhat low in spirit, for one of our
+			number, Charley Bentley, was leaving us indefinitely, in response
+			to an imperative summons from home. To-morrow his
+			studio, just across the hall from Hartwell&#8217;s, was to pass into
+			other hands, and Bentley&#8217;s luggage was even now piled in
+			discouraged resignation before his door. The various bales
+			and boxes seemed literally to weigh upon us as we sat in his
+			neighbor&#8217;s hospitable rooms, drearily putting in the time until
+			he should leave us to catch the ten o&#8217;clock express for
+			Dieppe.</p>
+
+			<p>The day we had got through very comfortably, for Bentley
+			made it the occasion of a somewhat pretentious luncheon at
+			Maxim&#8217;s. There had been twelve of us at table, and the two
+			young Poles were thirsty, the Gascon so fabulously entertaining,
+			that it was near upon five o&#8217;clock when we put down our
+			liqueur glasses for the last time, and the red, perspiring
+			waiter, having pocketed the reward of his arduous and protracted
+			services, bowed us affably to the door, flourishing his
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page49" title="49">&nbsp;</a>napkin and brushing back the streaks of wet, black hair from
+			his rosy forehead. Our guests having betaken themselves belated
+			to their respective engagements, the rest of us returned
+			with Bentley&#8212;only to be confronted by the depressing array
+			before his door. A glance about his denuded rooms had sufficed
+			to chill the glow of the afternoon, and we fled across the
+			hall in a body and begged Lyon Hartwell to take us in.</p>
+
+			<p>Bentley had said very little about it, but we all knew what it
+			meant to him to be called home. Each of us knew what it
+			would mean to himself, and each had felt something of that
+			quickened sense of opportunity which comes at seeing another
+			man in any way counted out of the race. Never had the
+			game seemed so enchanting, the chance to play it such a piece
+			of unmerited, unbelievable good fortune.</p>
+
+			<p>It must have been, I think, about the middle of October,
+			for I remember that the sycamores were almost bare in the
+			Luxembourg Gardens that morning, and the terrace about the
+			queens of France were strewn with crackling brown leaves.
+			The fat red roses, out the summer long on the stand of the
+			old flower woman at the corner, had given place to dahlias
+			and purple asters. First glimpses of autumn toilettes flashed
+			from the carriages; wonderful little bonnets nodded at one
+			along the Champs-Elysées; and in the Quarter an occasional
+			feather boa, red or black or white, brushed one&#8217;s coat sleeve
+			in the gay twilight of the early evening. The crisp, sunny autumn
+			air was all day full of the stir of people and carriages and
+			of the cheer of salutations; greetings of the students, returned
+			brown and bearded from their holiday, gossip of people come
+			back from Trouville, from St. Valery, from Dieppe, from all
+			over Brittany and the Norman coast. Everywhere was the joyousness
+			of return, the taking up again of life and work and
+			play.</p>
+
+			<p>I had felt ever since early morning that this was the saddest
+			of all possible seasons for saying good-by to that old, old city
+			of youth, and to that little corner of it on the south shore
+			which since the Dark Ages themselves&#8212;yes, and before&#8212;has
+			been so peculiarly the land of the young.</p>
+
+			<p>I can recall our very postures as we lounged about Hartwell&#8217;s
+			rooms that evening, with Bentley making occasional
+			hurried trips to his desolated workrooms across the hall&#8212;as
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page50" title="50">&nbsp;</a>if haunted by a feeling of having forgotten something&#8212;or
+			stopping to poke nervously at his <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">perroquets</em>, which he had
+			bequeathed to Hartwell, gilt cage and all. Our host himself
+			sat on the couch, his big, bronze-like shoulders backed up
+			against the window, his shaggy head, beaked nose, and long
+			chin cut clean against the gray light.</p>
+
+			<p>Our drowsing interest, in so far as it could be said to be
+			fixed upon anything, was centered upon Hartwell&#8217;s new figure,
+			which stood on the block ready to be cast in bronze,
+			intended as a monument for some American battlefield. He
+			called it &#8220;The Color Sergeant.&#8221; It was the figure of a young
+			soldier running, clutching the folds of a flag, the staff of
+			which had been shot away. We had known it in all the stages
+			of its growth, and the splendid action and feeling of the thing
+			had come to have a kind of special significance for the half
+			dozen of us who often gathered at Hartwell&#8217;s rooms&#8212;though,
+			in truth, there was as much to dishearten one as to
+			inflame, in the case of a man who had done so much in a field
+			so amazingly difficult; who had thrown up in bronze all the
+			restless, teeming force of that adventurous wave still climbing
+			westward in our own land across the waters. We recalled his
+			&#8220;Scout,&#8221; his &#8220;Pioneer,&#8221; his &#8220;Gold Seekers,&#8221; and those monuments
+			in which he had invested one and another of the heroes
+			of the Civil War with such convincing dignity and power.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Where in the world does he get the heat to make an idea
+			like that carry?&#8221; Bentley remarked morosely, scowling at the
+			clay figure. &#8220;Hang me, Hartwell, if I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s just because
+			you&#8217;re not really an American at all, that you can look at
+			it like that.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The big man shifted uneasily against the window. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; he
+			replied smiling, &#8220;perhaps there is something in that. My citizenship
+			was somewhat belated and emotional in its flowering.
+			I&#8217;ve half a mind to tell you about it, Bentley.&#8221; He rose uncertainly,
+			and, after hesitating a moment, went back into his
+			workroom, where he began fumbling among the litter in the
+			corners.</p>
+
+			<p>At the prospect of any sort of personal expression from
+			Hartwell, we glanced questioningly at one another; for although
+			he made us feel that he liked to have us about, we
+			were always held at a distance by a certain diffidence of his.
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page51" title="51">&nbsp;</a>There were rare occasions&#8212;when he was in the heat of work
+			or of ideas&#8212;when he forgot to be shy, but they were so exceptional
+			that no flattery was quite so seductive as being taken
+			for a moment into Hartwell&#8217;s confidence. Even in the matter
+			of opinions&#8212;the commonest of currency in our circle&#8212;he
+			was niggardly and prone to qualify. No man ever guarded his
+			mystery more effectually. There was a singular, intense spell,
+			therefore, about those few evenings when he had broken
+			through this excessive modesty, or shyness, or melancholy,
+			and had, as it were, committed himself.</p>
+
+			<p>When Hartwell returned from the back room, he brought
+			with him an unframed canvas which he put on an easel near
+			his clay figure. We drew close about it, for the darkness was
+			rapidly coming on. Despite the dullness of the light, we instantly
+			recognized the boy of Hartwell&#8217;s &#8220;Color Sergeant.&#8221; It
+			was the portrait of a very handsome lad in uniform, standing
+			beside a charger impossibly rearing. Not only in his radiant
+			countenance and flashing eyes, but in every line of his young
+			body there was an energy, a gallantry, a joy of life, that arrested
+			and challenged one.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, that&#8217;s where I got the notion,&#8221; Hartwell remarked,
+			wandering back to his seat in the window. &#8220;I&#8217;ve wanted to do
+			it for years, but I&#8217;ve never felt quite sure of myself. I was
+			afraid of missing it. He was an uncle of mine, my father&#8217;s
+			half-brother, and I was named for him. He was killed in one
+			of the big battles of Sixty-four, when I was a child. I never
+			saw him&#8212;never knew him until he had been dead for twenty
+			years. And then, one night, I came to know him as we sometimes
+			do living persons&#8212;intimately, in a single moment.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He paused to knock the ashes out of his short pipe, refilled
+			it, and puffed at it thoughtfully for a few moments with his
+			hands on his knees. Then, settling back heavily among the
+			cushions and looking absently out of the window, he began
+			his story. As he proceeded further and further into the experience
+			which he was trying to convey to us, his voice sank so
+			low and was sometimes so charged with feeling, that I almost
+			thought he had forgotten our presence and was remembering
+			aloud. Even Bentley forgot his nervousness in astonishment
+			and sat breathless under the spell of the man&#8217;s thus breathing
+			his memories out into the dusk.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page52" title="52">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;It was just fifteen years ago this last spring that I first went
+			home, and Bentley&#8217;s having to cut away like this brings it all
+			back to me.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I was born, you know, in Italy. My father was a sculptor,
+			though I dare say you&#8217;ve not heard of him. He was one of
+			those first fellows who went over after Story and Powers,&#8212;went
+			to Italy for &#8216;Art,&#8217; quite simply; to lift from its native
+			bough the willing, iridescent bird. Their story is told, informingly
+			enough, by some of those ingenuous marble things at
+			the Metropolitan. My father came over some time before the
+			outbreak of the Civil War, and was regarded as a renegade by
+			his family because he did not go home to enter the army. His
+			half-brother, the only child of my grandfather&#8217;s second marriage,
+			enlisted at fifteen and was killed the next year. I was ten
+			years old when the news of his death reached us. My mother
+			died the following winter, and I was sent away to a Jesuit
+			school, while my father, already ill himself, stayed on at
+			Rome, chipping away at his Indian maidens and marble goddesses,
+			still gloomily seeking the thing for which he had made
+			himself the most unhappy of exiles.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He died when I was fourteen, but even before that I had
+			been put to work under an Italian sculptor. He had an almost
+			morbid desire that I should carry on his work, under, as he
+			often pointed out to me, conditions so much more auspicious.
+			He left me in the charge of his one intimate friend, an
+			American gentleman in the consulate at Rome, and his instructions
+			were that I was to be educated there and to live
+			there until I was twenty-one. After I was of age, I came to
+			Paris and studied under one master after another until I was
+			nearly thirty. Then, almost for the first time, I was confronted
+			by a duty which was not my pleasure.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;My grandfather&#8217;s death, at an advanced age, left an invalid
+			maiden sister of my father&#8217;s quite alone in the world. She had
+			suffered for years from a cerebral disease, a slow decay of the
+			faculties which rendered her almost helpless. I decided to go
+			to America and, if possible, bring her back to Paris, where I
+			seemed on my way toward what my poor father had wished
+			for me.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;On my arrival at my father&#8217;s birthplace, however, I found
+			that this was not to be thought of. To tear this timid, feeble,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page53" title="53">&nbsp;</a>shrinking creature, doubly aged by years and illness, from the
+			spot where she had been rooted for a lifetime, would have
+			been little short of brutality. To leave her to the care of
+			strangers seemed equally heartless. There was clearly nothing
+			for me to do but to remain and wait for that slow and painless
+			malady to run its course. I was there something over two
+			years.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;My grandfather&#8217;s home, his father&#8217;s homestead before
+			him, lay on the high banks of a river in Western Pennsylvania.
+			The little town twelve miles down the stream, whither my
+			great-grandfather used to drive his ox-wagon on market days,
+			had become, in two generations, one of the largest manufacturing
+			cities in the world. For hundreds of miles about us the
+			gentle hill slopes were honeycombed with gas wells and coal
+			shafts; oil derricks creaked in every valley and meadow; the
+			brooks were sluggish and discolored with crude petroleum,
+			and the air was impregnated by its searching odor. The great
+			glass and iron manufactories had come up and up the river
+			almost to our very door; their smoky exhalations brooded
+			over us, and their crashing was always in our ears. I was
+			plunged into the very incandescence of human energy. But,
+			though my nerves tingled with the feverish, passionate endeavor
+			which snapped in the very air about me, none of these
+			great arteries seemed to feed me; this tumultuous life did not
+			warm me. On every side were the great muddy rivers, the
+			ragged mountains from which the timber was being ruthlessly
+			torn away, the vast tracts of wild country, and the gulches
+			that were like wounds in the earth; everywhere the glare of
+			that relentless energy which followed me like a searchlight
+			and seemed to scorch and consume me. I could only hide
+			myself in the tangled garden, where the dropping of a leaf or
+			the whistle of a bird was the only incident.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;The Hartwell homestead had been sold away little by
+			little, until all that remained of it was garden and orchard.
+			The house, a square brick structure, stood in the midst of a
+			great garden which sloped toward the river, ending in a
+			grassy bank which fell some forty feet to the water&#8217;s edge.
+			The garden was now little more than a tangle of neglected
+			shrubbery; damp, rank, and of that intense blue-green peculiar
+			to vegetation in smoky places where the sun shines but
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page54" title="54">&nbsp;</a>rarely, and the mists form early in the evening and hang late
+			in the morning.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I shall never forget it as I saw it first, when I arrived there
+			in the chill of a backward June. The long, rank grass, thick
+			and soft and falling in billows, was always wet until midday.
+			The gravel walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes,
+			mock-orange, and bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected
+			rose garden, surrounded by a low stone wall over
+			which the long suckers trailed and matted. They had wound
+			their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon layer, about the lock
+			and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even the porches of the
+			house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy with
+			growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet vine.
+			The garden was grown up with trees, especially that part of it
+			which lay above the river. The bark of the old locusts was
+			blackened by the smoke that crept continually up the valley,
+			and their feathery foliage, so merry in its movement and so
+			yellow and joyous in its color, seemed peculiarly precious
+			under that somber sky. There were sycamores and copper
+			beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear; and fall pear-trees,
+			hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all with a
+			leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid in
+			color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my
+			great-grandfather built his cabin there, more than a century
+			before, and this garden was almost the only spot for miles
+			along the river where any of the original forest growth still
+			survived. The smoke from the mills was fatal to trees of the
+			larger sort, and even these had the look of doomed things&#8212;bent
+			a little toward the town and seemed to wait with head
+			inclined before that on-coming, shrieking force.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;About the river, too, there was a strange hush, a tragic
+			submission&#8212;it was so leaden and sullen in its color, and it
+			flowed so soundlessly forever past our door.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I sat there every evening, on the high veranda overlooking
+			it, watching the dim outlines of the steep hills on the other
+			shore, the flicker of the lights on the island, where there was a
+			boat-house, and listening to the call of the boatmen through
+			the mist. The mist came as certainly as night, whitened by
+			moonshine or starshine. The tin water-pipes went splash,
+			splash, with it all evening, and the wind, when it rose at all,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page55" title="55">&nbsp;</a>was little more than a sighing of the old boughs and a troubled
+			breath in the heavy grasses.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;At first it was to think of my distant friends and my old
+			life that I used to sit there; but after awhile it was simply to
+			watch the days and weeks go by, like the river which seemed
+			to carry them away.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Within the house I was never at home. Month followed
+			month, and yet I could feel no sense of kinship with anything
+			there. Under the roof where my father and grandfather were
+			born, I remained utterly detached. The somber rooms never
+			spoke to me, the old furniture never seemed tinctured with
+			race. This portrait of my boy uncle was the only thing to
+			which I could draw near, the only link with anything I had
+			ever known before.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;There is a good deal of my father in the face, but it is my
+			father transformed and glorified; his hesitating discontent
+			drowned in a kind of triumph. From my first day in that
+			house, I continually turned to this handsome kinsman of
+			mine, wondering in what terms he had lived and had his
+			hope; what he had found there to look like that, to bound at
+			one, after all those years, so joyously out of the canvas.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;From the timid, clouded old woman over whose life I had
+			come to watch, I learned that in the backyard, near the old
+			rose garden, there was a locust-tree which my uncle had
+			planted. After his death, while it was still a slender sapling, his
+			mother had a seat built round it, and she used to sit there on
+			summer evenings. His grave was under the apple-trees in the
+			old orchard.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;My aunt could tell me little more than this. There were
+			days when she seemed not to remember him at all.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It was from an old soldier in the village that I learned
+			the boy&#8217;s story. Lyon was, the old man told me, but fourteen
+			when the first enlistment occurred, but was even then
+			eager to go. He was in the court-house square every evening
+			to watch the recruits at their drill, and when the home company
+			was ordered off he rode into the city on his pony to
+			see the men board the train and to wave them good-by. The
+			next year he spent at home with a tutor, but when he was
+			fifteen he held his parents to their promise and went into the
+			army. He was color sergeant of his regiment and fell in a
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page56" title="56">&nbsp;</a>charge upon the breastworks of a fort about a year after his
+			enlistment.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;The veteran showed me an account of this charge which
+			had been written for the village paper by one of my uncle&#8217;s
+			comrades who had seen his part in the engagement. It seems
+			that as his company were running at full speed across the bottom
+			lands toward the fortified hill, a shell burst over them.
+			This comrade, running beside my uncle, saw the colors waver
+			and sink as if falling, and looked to see that the boy&#8217;s hand
+			and forearm had been torn away by the exploding shrapnel.
+			The boy, he thought, did not realize the extent of his injury,
+			for he laughed, shouted something which his comrade did
+			not catch, caught the flag in his left hand, and ran on up the
+			hill. They went splendidly up over the breastworks, but just
+			as my uncle, his colors flying, reached the top of the embankment,
+			a second shell carried away his left arm at the
+			arm-pit, and he fell over the wall with the flag settling about
+			him.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It was because this story was ever present with me, because
+			I was unable to shake it off, that I began to read such
+			books as my grandfather had collected upon the Civil War. I
+			found that this war was fought largely by boys, that more
+			men enlisted at eighteen than at any other age. When I
+			thought of those battlefields&#8212;and I thought of them much
+			in those days&#8212;there was always that glory of youth above
+			them, that impetuous, generous passion stirring the long lines
+			on the march, the blue battalions in the plain. The bugle,
+			whenever I have heard it since, has always seemed to me the
+			very golden throat of that boyhood which spent itself so
+			gaily, so incredibly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I used often to wonder how it was that this uncle of mine,
+			who seemed to have possessed all the charm and brilliancy
+			allotted to his family and to have lived up its vitality in one
+			splendid hour, had left so little trace in the house where he
+			was born and where he had awaited his destiny. Look as I
+			would, I could find no letters from him, no clothing or books
+			that might have been his. He had been dead but twenty years,
+			and yet nothing seemed to have survived except the tree he
+			had planted. It seemed incredible and cruel that no physical
+			memory of him should linger to be cherished among his
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page57" title="57">&nbsp;</a>kindred,&#8212;nothing but the dull image in the brain of that
+			aged sister. I used to pace the garden walks in the evening,
+			wondering that no breath of his, no echo of his laugh, of his
+			call to his pony or his whistle to his dogs, should linger about
+			those shaded paths where the pale roses exhaled their dewy,
+			country smell. Sometimes, in the dim starlight, I have
+			thought that I heard on the grasses beside me the stir of a
+			footfall lighter than my own, and under the black arch of the
+			lilacs I have fancied that he bore me company.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;There was, I found, one day in the year for which my old
+			aunt waited, and which stood out from the months that were
+			all of a sameness to her. On the thirtieth of May she insisted
+			that I should bring down the big flag from the attic and run it
+			up upon the tall flagstaff beside Lyon&#8217;s tree in the garden.
+			Later in the morning she went with me to carry some of the
+			garden flowers to the grave in the orchard,&#8212;a grave scarcely
+			larger than a child&#8217;s.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I had noticed, when I was hunting for the flag in the attic,
+			a leather trunk with my own name stamped upon it, but was
+			unable to find the key. My aunt was all day less apathetic than
+			usual; she seemed to realize more clearly who I was, and to
+			wish me to be with her. I did not have an opportunity to
+			return to the attic until after dinner that evening, when I carried
+			a lamp up-stairs and easily forced the lock of the trunk. I
+			found all the things that I had looked for; put away, doubtless,
+			by his mother, and still smelling faintly of lavender and
+			rose leaves; his clothes, his exercise books, his letters from the
+			army, his first boots, his riding-whip, some of his toys, even. I
+			took them out and replaced them gently. As I was about to
+			shut the lid, I picked up a copy of the Æneid, on the fly-leaf
+			of which was written in a slanting, boyish hand,</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="call-out"><p>Lyon Hartwell, January, 1862.</p></blockquote>
+
+			<p class="continued_paragraph">He had gone to the wars in Sixty-three, I remembered.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;My uncle, I gathered, was none too apt at his Latin, for
+			the pages were dog-eared and rubbed and interlined, the margins
+			mottled with pencil sketches&#8212;bugles, stacked bayonets,
+			and artillery carriages. In the act of putting the book down, I
+			happened to run over the pages to the end, and on the fly-leaf
+			at the back I saw his name again, and a drawing&#8212;with his
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page58" title="58">&nbsp;</a>initials and a date&#8212;of the Federal flag; above it, written in a
+			kind of arch and in the same unformed hand:</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="poem">
+				<p>&#8216;Oh, say, can you see by the dawn&#8217;s early light</p>
+				<p>What so proudly we hailed at the twilight&#8217;s last gleaming?&#8217;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+
+			<p>It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some
+			Egyptian inscription, but, the moment I saw it, wind and
+			color seemed to touch it. I caught up the book, blew out the
+			lamp, and rushed down into the garden.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I seemed, somehow, at last to have known him; to have
+			been with him in that careless, unconscious moment and to
+			have known him as he was then.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;As I sat there in the rush of this realization, the wind began
+			to rise, stirring the light foliage of the locust over my
+			head and bringing, fresher than before, the woody odor of
+			the pale roses that overran the little neglected garden. Then,
+			as it grew stronger, it brought the sound of something sighing
+			and stirring over my head in the perfumed darkness.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the
+			Greeks believed, watched from birth over those marked for a
+			violent or untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the
+			shine of the morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing
+			eyes looking straight before him, and at his side that grave
+			figure, hidden in her draperies, her eyes following his, but
+			seeing so much farther&#8212;seeing what he never saw, that great
+			moment at the end, when he swayed above his comrades on
+			the earthen wall.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;All the while, the bunting I had run up in the morning
+			flapped fold against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the
+			dark&#8212;against a sky so black with rain clouds that I could
+			see above me only the blur of something in soft, troubled
+			motion.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly
+			to a man so dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same
+			feeling that artists know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our
+			work; the feeling of union with some great force, of purpose
+			and security, of being glad that we have lived. For the first
+			time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, and felt
+			beating within me things that had not begun with me. It was
+			as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page59" title="59">&nbsp;</a>were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until the dawn of
+			morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring out
+			of me and running into the ground.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak "/>
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">Hartwell drew a long breath that lifted his heavy shoulders,
+			and then let them fall again. He shifted a little and faced more
+			squarely the scattered, silent company before him. The darkness
+			had made us almost invisible to each other, and, except
+			for the occasional red circuit of a cigarette end traveling upward
+			from the arm of a chair, he might have supposed us all
+			asleep.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;And so,&#8221; Hartwell added thoughtfully, &#8220;I naturally feel
+			an interest in fellows who are going home. It&#8217;s always an experience.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>No one said anything, and in a moment there was a loud
+			rap at the door,&#8212;the concierge, come to take down Bentley&#8217;s
+			luggage and to announce that the cab was below. Bentley got
+			his hat and coat, enjoined Hartwell to take good care of his
+			<em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">perroquets</em>, gave each of us a grip of the hand, and went
+			briskly down the long flights of stairs. We followed him into
+			the street, calling our good wishes, and saw him start on his
+			drive across the lighted city to the Gare St. Lazare.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>McClure&#8217;s</cite>, March 1907</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="bluff" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page60" title="60">&nbsp;</a>
+
+			<h3 class="story_title">The Enchanted Bluff  <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Harper&#8217;s</cite>, April 1909</p>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">We had our swim before sundown, and while we were
+			cooking our supper the oblique rays of light made a
+			dazzling glare on the white sand about us. The translucent
+			red ball itself sank behind the brown stretches of corn field as
+			we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of air that had rested
+			over the water and our clean sand-bar grew fresher and
+			smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on the
+			flatter shore. The river was brown and sluggish, like any other
+			of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraska corn lands.
+			On one shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffs where a
+			few scrub-oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops threw
+			light shadows on the long grass. The western shore was low
+			and level, with corn fields that stretched to the sky-line, and
+			all along the water&#8217;s edge were little sandy coves and beaches
+			where slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.</p>
+
+			<p>The turbulence of the river in spring-time discouraged milling,
+			and, beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the
+			busy farmers did not concern themselves with the stream; so
+			the Sandtown boys were left in undisputed possession. In the
+			autumn we hunted quail through the miles of stubble and
+			fodder land along the flat shore, and, after the winter skating
+			season was over and the ice had gone out, the spring freshets
+			and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement of the year.
+			The channel was never the same for two successive seasons.
+			Every spring the swollen stream undermined a bluff to the
+			east, or bit out a few acres of corn field to the west and
+			whirled the soil away to deposit it in spumy mud banks somewhere
+			else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new
+			sand-bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August
+			sun. Sometimes these were banked so firmly that the fury of
+			the next freshet failed to unseat them; the little willow seedlings
+			emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth, broke into
+			spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and with their mesh
+			of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them against
+			the batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood
+			soon glittered among them, quivering in the low current of
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page61" title="61">&nbsp;</a>air that, even on breathless days when the dust hung like
+			smoke above the wagon road, trembled along the face of the
+			water.</p>
+
+			<p>It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow
+			green, that we built our watch-fire; not in the thicket of dancing
+			willow wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which
+			had been added that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully
+			ridged with ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons
+			of turtles and fish, all as white and dry as if they had
+			been expertly cured. We had been careful not to mar the freshness
+			of the place, although we often swam out to it on summer
+			evenings and lay on the sand to rest.</p>
+
+			<p>This was our last watch-fire of the year, and there were
+			reasons why I should remember it better than any of the others.
+			Next week the other boys were to file back to their old
+			places in the Sandtown High School, but I was to go up to
+			the Divide to teach my first country school in the Norwegian
+			district. I was already homesick at the thought of quitting the
+			boys with whom I had always played; of leaving the river, and
+			going up into a windy plain that was all windmills and corn
+			fields and big pastures; where there was nothing wilful or unmanageable
+			in the landscape, no new islands, and no chance
+			of unfamiliar birds&#8212;such as often followed the watercourses.</p>
+
+			<p>Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or
+			skating, but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and
+			we were friends mainly because of the river. There were the
+			two Hassler boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German
+			tailor. They were the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and
+			twelve, with sunburned hair, weather-stained faces, and pale
+			blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best mathematician in
+			school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in
+			the spring term as if the river could not get on without him.
+			He and Fritz caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them
+			about the town, and they lived so much in the water that they
+			were as brown and sandy as the river itself.</p>
+
+			<p>There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby
+			cheeks, who took half a dozen boys&#8217; story-papers and was always
+			being kept in for reading detective stories behind his
+			desk. There was Tip Smith, destined by his freckles and red
+			hair to be the buffoon in all our games, though he walked like
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page62" title="62">&nbsp;</a>a timid little old man and had a funny, cracked laugh. Tip
+			worked hard in his father&#8217;s grocery store every afternoon, and
+			swept it out before school in the morning. Even his recreations
+			were laborious. He collected cigarette cards and tin
+			tobacco-tags indefatigably, and would sit for hours humped
+			up over a snarling little scroll-saw which he kept in his attic.
+			His dearest possessions were some little pill-bottles that purported
+			to contain grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water
+			from the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount
+			of Olives. His father had bought these dull things from a
+			Baptist missionary who peddled them, and Tip seemed to derive
+			great satisfaction from their remote origin.</p>
+
+			<p>The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that
+			were almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and
+			such a pleasant voice that we all loved to hear him read aloud.
+			Even when he had to read poetry aloud at school, no one ever
+			thought of laughing. To be sure, he was not at school very
+			much of the time. He was seventeen and should have finished
+			the High School the year before, but he was always off somewhere
+			with his gun. Arthur&#8217;s mother was dead, and his
+			father, who was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes,
+			wanted to send the boy away to school and get him off his
+			hands; but Arthur always begged off for another year and
+			promised to study. I remember him as a tall, brown boy with
+			an intelligent face, always lounging among a lot of us little
+			fellows, laughing at us oftener than with us, but such a soft,
+			satisfied laugh that we felt rather flattered when we provoked
+			it. In after-years people said that Arthur had been given to
+			evil ways even as a lad, and it is true that we often saw him
+			with the gambler&#8217;s sons and with old Spanish Fanny&#8217;s boy,
+			but if he learned anything ugly in their company he never
+			betrayed it to us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere,
+			and I am bound to say that he led us into no worse places
+			than the cattail marshes and the stubble fields. These, then,
+			were the boys who camped with me that summer night upon
+			the sand-bar.</p>
+
+			<p>After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for
+			driftwood. By the time we had collected enough, night had
+			fallen, and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased
+			with the coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page63" title="63">&nbsp;</a>and made another futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little
+			Dipper. We had tried it often before, but he could never be
+			got past the big one.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You see those three big stars just below the handle, with
+			the bright one in the middle?&#8221; said Otto Hassler; &#8220;that&#8217;s
+			Orion&#8217;s belt, and the bright one is the clasp.&#8221; I crawled behind
+			Otto&#8217;s shoulder and sighted up his arm to the star that
+			seemed perched upon the tip of his steady forefinger. The
+			Hassler boys did seine-fishing at night, and they knew a good
+			many stars.</p>
+
+			<p>Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand,
+			his hands clasped under his head. &#8220;I can see the North Star,&#8221;
+			he announced, contentedly, pointing toward it with his big
+			toe. &#8220;Any one might get lost and need to know that.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>We all looked up at it.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass
+			didn&#8217;t point north any more?&#8221; Tip asked.</p>
+
+			<p>Otto shook his head. &#8220;My father says that there was another
+			North Star once, and that maybe this one won&#8217;t last
+			always. I wonder what would happen to us down here if anything
+			went wrong with it?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Arthur chuckled. &#8220;I wouldn&#8217;t worry, Ott. Nothing&#8217;s apt to
+			happen to it in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There
+			must be lots of good dead Indians.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover
+			of the world. The gurgle of the water had become heavier.
+			We had often noticed a mutinous, complaining note in it at
+			night, quite different from its cheerful daytime chuckle, and
+			seeming like the voice of a much deeper and more powerful
+			stream. Our water had always these two moods: the one of
+			sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate
+			regret.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams,&#8221; remarked
+			Otto. &#8220;You could do most any proposition in geometry with
+			&#8217;em. They always look as if they meant something. Some folks
+			say everybody&#8217;s fortune is all written out in the stars, don&#8217;t
+			they?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;They believe so in the old country,&#8221; Fritz affirmed.</p>
+
+			<p>But Arthur only laughed at him. &#8220;You&#8217;re thinking of Napoleon,
+			Fritzey. He had a star that went out when he began to
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page64" title="64">&nbsp;</a>lose battles. I guess the stars don&#8217;t keep any close tally on
+			Sandtown folks.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>We were speculating on how many times we could count a
+			hundred before the evening star went down behind the corn
+			fields, when some one cried, &#8220;There comes the moon, and it&#8217;s
+			as big as a cart wheel!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs
+			behind us. It came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous,
+			barbaric thing, red as an angry heathen god.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to
+			sacrifice their prisoners on the temple top,&#8221; Percy announced.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Go on, Perce. You got that out of <cite>Golden Days</cite>. Do you
+			believe that, Arthur?&#8221; I appealed.</p>
+
+			<p>Arthur answered, quite seriously: &#8220;Like as not. The moon
+			was one of their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he
+			saw the stone where they used to sacrifice their prisoners.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked
+			whether the Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs.
+			When we once got upon the Mound-Builders we never willingly
+			got away from them, and we were still conjecturing
+			when we heard a loud splash in the water.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Must have been a big cat jumping,&#8221; said Fritz. &#8220;They do
+			sometimes. They must see bugs in the dark. Look what a
+			track the moon makes!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where
+			the current fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold
+			pieces.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Suppose there ever <em>was</em> any gold hid away in this old
+			river?&#8221; Fritz asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close
+			to the fire, his chin on his hand and his bare feet in the air.
+			His brother laughed at him, but Arthur took his suggestion
+			seriously.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here
+			somewhere. Seven cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and
+			Coronado and his men came up to hunt it. The Spaniards
+			were all over this country once.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Percy looked interested. &#8220;Was that before the Mormons
+			went through?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>We all laughed at this.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce.
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page65" title="65">&nbsp;</a>Maybe they came along this very river. They always followed
+			the watercourses.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I wonder where this river really does begin?&#8221; Tip mused.
+			That was an old and a favorite mystery which the map did not
+			clearly explain. On the map the little black line stopped somewhere
+			in western Kansas; but since rivers generally rose in
+			mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose that ours came
+			from the Rockies. Its destination, we knew, was the Missouri,
+			and the Hassler boys always maintained that we could embark
+			at Sandtown in flood-time, follow our noses, and eventually
+			arrive at New Orleans. Now they took up their old argument.
+			&#8220;If us boys had grit enough to try it, it wouldn&#8217;t take no time
+			to get to Kansas City and St. Joe.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The
+			Hassler boys wanted to see the stock-yards in Kansas City,
+			and Percy wanted to see a big store in Chicago. Arthur was
+			interlocutor and did not betray himself.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Now it&#8217;s your turn, Tip.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his
+			eyes looked shyly out of his queer, tight little face. &#8220;My place
+			is awful far away. My uncle Bill told me about it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Tip&#8217;s Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever,
+			who had drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when
+			it was well had drifted out again.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Where is it?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Aw, it&#8217;s down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren&#8217;t
+			no railroads or anything. You have to go on mules, and you
+			run out of water before you get there and have to drink
+			canned tomatoes.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, go on, kid. What&#8217;s it like when you do get there?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s a big red rock there that goes right up out of
+			the sand for about nine hundred feet. The country&#8217;s flat all
+			around it, and this here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument.
+			They call it the Enchanted Bluff down there, because
+			no white man has ever been on top of it. The sides are
+			smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall. The Indians say that
+			hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards came, there was a
+			village away up there in the air. The tribe that lived there had
+			some sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, hung down
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page66" title="66">&nbsp;</a>over the face of the bluff, and the braves went down to hunt
+			and carried water up in big jars swung on their backs. They
+			kept a big supply of water and dried meat up there, and never
+			went down except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe that
+			made cloth and pottery, and they went up there to get out of
+			the wars. You see, they could pick off any war party that tried
+			to get up their little steps. The Indians say they were a handsome
+			people, and they had some sort of a queer religion.
+			Uncle Bill thinks they were Cliff-Dwellers who had got into
+			trouble and left home. They weren&#8217;t fighters, anyhow.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;One time the braves were down hunting and an awful
+			storm came up&#8212;a kind of waterspout&#8212;and when they got
+			back to their rock they found their little staircase had been all
+			broken to pieces, and only a few steps were left hanging away
+			up in the air. While they were camped at the foot of the rock,
+			wondering what to do, a war party from the north came
+			along and massacred &#8217;em to a man, with all the old folks and
+			women looking on from the rock. Then the war party went
+			on south and left the village to get down the best way they
+			could. Of course they never got down. They starved to death
+			up there, and when the war party came back on their way
+			north, they could hear the children crying from the edge of
+			the bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn&#8217;t see a
+			sign of a grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there
+			since.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;There couldn&#8217;t have been many people up there,&#8221; Percy
+			demurred. &#8220;How big is the top, Tip?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn&#8217;t look
+			nearly as tall as it is. The top&#8217;s bigger than the base. The bluff
+			is sort of worn away for several hundred feet up. That&#8217;s one
+			reason it&#8217;s so hard to climb.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting
+			party came along once and saw that there was a town up
+			there, and that was all.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. &#8220;Of course
+			there must be some way to get up there. Couldn&#8217;t people get
+			a rope over someway and pull a ladder up?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Tip&#8217;s little eyes were shining with excitement. &#8220;I know a
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page67" title="67">&nbsp;</a>way. Me and Uncle Bill talked it all over. There&#8217;s a kind of
+			rocket that would take a rope over&#8212;life-savers use &#8217;em&#8212;and
+			then you could hoist a rope-ladder and peg it down at the
+			bottom and make it tight with guy-ropes on the other side.
+			I&#8217;m going to climb that there bluff, and I&#8217;ve got it all planned
+			out.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or
+			some of their idols. There might be &#8217;most anything up there.
+			Anyhow, I want to see.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?&#8221; Arthur asked.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some
+			hunters tried to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn&#8217;t get
+			higher than a man can reach. The Bluff&#8217;s all red granite, and
+			Uncle Bill thinks it&#8217;s a boulder the glaciers left. It&#8217;s a queer
+			place, anyhow. Nothing but cactus and desert for hundreds of
+			miles, and yet right under the bluff there&#8217;s good water and
+			plenty of grass. That&#8217;s why the bison used to go down there.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up
+			to see a dark, slim bird floating southward far above us&#8212;a
+			whooping-crane, we knew by her cry and her long neck. We
+			ran to the edge of the island, hoping we might see her alight,
+			but she wavered southward along the rivercourse until we lost
+			her. The Hassler boys declared that by the look of the heavens
+			it must be after midnight, so we threw more wood on our
+			fire, put on our jackets, and curled down in the warm sand.
+			Several of us pretended to doze, but I fancy we were really
+			thinking about Tip&#8217;s Bluff and the extinct people. Over in the
+			wood the ring-doves were calling mournfully to one another,
+			and once we heard a dog bark, far away. &#8220;Somebody getting
+			into old Tommy&#8217;s melon patch,&#8221; Fritz murmured, sleepily,
+			but nobody answered him. By and by Percy spoke out of the
+			shadow.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with
+			you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Maybe.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell
+			the rest of us exactly what he finds,&#8221; remarked one of the
+			Hassler boys, and to this we all readily assented.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page68" title="68">&nbsp;</a>Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have
+			dreamed about a race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of
+			fear that other people were getting ahead of me and that I
+			was losing my chance. I sat up in my damp clothes and
+			looked at the other boys, who lay tumbled in uneasy attitudes
+			about the dead fire. It was still dark, but the sky was blue
+			with the last wonderful azure of night. The stars glistened like
+			crystal globes, and trembled as if they shone through a depth
+			of clear water. Even as I watched, they began to pale and the
+			sky brightened. Day came suddenly, almost instantaneously. I
+			turned for another look at the blue night, and it was gone.
+			Everywhere the birds began to call, and all manner of little
+			insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows. A breeze
+			sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened
+			corn. The boys rolled over and shook themselves. We
+			stripped and plunged into the river just as the sun came up
+			over the windy bluffs.</p>
+
+			<p>When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we
+			skated out to our island and talked over the whole project of
+			the Enchanted Bluff, renewing our resolution to find it.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever
+			climbed the Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in
+			Kansas City and will go nowhere that his red touring-car cannot
+			carry him. Otto Hassler went on the railroad and lost his
+			foot braking; after which he and Fritz succeeded their father
+			as the town tailors.</p>
+
+			<p>Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life&#8212;he died
+			before he was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I
+			was home on one of my college vacations, he was sitting in a
+			steamer-chair under a cottonwood tree in the little yard behind
+			one of the two Sandtown saloons. He was very untidy
+			and his hand was not steady, but when he rose, unabashed, to
+			greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as ever. When I had
+			talked with him for an hour and heard him laugh again, I
+			wondered how it was that when Nature had taken such pains
+			with a man, from his hands to the arch of his long foot, she
+			had ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about Tip Smith&#8217;s
+			Bluff, and declared he was going down there just as soon as
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page69" title="69">&nbsp;</a>the weather got cooler; he thought the Grand Cañon might
+			be worth while, too.</p>
+
+			<p>I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get
+			beyond the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the
+			cottonwood. And, indeed, it was under that very tree that he
+			died one summer morning.</p>
+
+			<p>Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married
+			a slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to
+			a perambulator, and has grown stooped and gray from irregular
+			meals and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties
+			are now over, and he has, as he says, come into easy
+			water. When I was last in Sandtown I walked home with him
+			late one moonlight night, after he had balanced his cash and
+			shut up his store. We took the long way around and sat down
+			on the schoolhouse steps, and between us we quite revived
+			the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct people. Tip
+			insists that he still means to go down there, but he thinks
+			now he will wait until his boy, Bert, is old enough to go with
+			him. Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing
+			but the Enchanted Bluff.</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="nelly" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page70" title="70">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">The Joy of Nelly Deane</h3>
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Nell and I were almost ready to go on for the last act of
+			&#8220;Queen Esther,&#8221; and we had for the moment got rid of
+			our three patient dressers, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs.
+			Spinny. Nell was peering over my shoulder into the little
+			cracked looking-glass that Mrs. Dow had taken from its nail
+			on her kitchen wall and brought down to the church under
+			her shawl that morning. When she realized that we were
+			alone, Nell whispered to me in the quick, fierce way she had:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Say, Peggy, won&#8217;t you go up and stay with me to-night?
+			Scott Spinny&#8217;s asked to take me home, and I don&#8217;t want to
+			walk up with him alone.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I guess so, if you&#8217;ll ask my mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ll fix her!&#8221; Nell laughed, with a toss of her head
+			which meant that she usually got what she wanted, even from
+			people much less tractable than my mother.</p>
+
+			<p>In a moment our tiring-women were back again. The three
+			old ladies&#8212;at least they seemed old to us&#8212;fluttered about
+			us, more agitated than we were ourselves. It seemed as
+			though they would never leave off patting Nell and touching
+			her up. They kept trying things this way and that, never able
+			in the end to decide which way was best. They wouldn&#8217;t hear
+			to her using rouge, and as they powdered her neck and arms,
+			Mrs. Freeze murmured that she hoped we wouldn&#8217;t get into
+			the habit of using such things. Mrs. Spinny divided her time
+			between pulling up and tucking down the &#8220;illusion&#8221; that filled
+			in the square neck of Nelly&#8217;s dress. She didn&#8217;t like things
+			much low, she said; but after she had pulled it up, she stood
+			back and looked at Nell thoughtfully through her glasses.
+			While the excited girl was reaching for this and that, buttoning
+			a slipper, pinning down a curl, Mrs. Spinny&#8217;s smile softened
+			more and more until, just before <em>Esther</em> made her
+			entrance, the old lady tiptoed up to her and softly tucked the
+			illusion down as far as it would go.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s so pink; it seems a pity not,&#8221; she whispered apologetically
+			to Mrs. Dow.</p>
+
+			<p>Every one admitted that Nelly was the prettiest girl in
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page71" title="71">&nbsp;</a>Riverbend, and the gayest&#8212;oh, the gayest! When she was
+			not singing, she was laughing. When she was not laid up with
+			a broken arm, the outcome of a foolhardy coasting feat, or
+			suspended from school because she ran away at recess to go
+			buggy-riding with Guy Franklin, she was sure to be up to
+			mischief of some sort. Twice she broke through the ice and
+			got soused in the river because she never looked where she
+			skated or cared what happened so long as she went fast
+			enough. After the second of these duckings our three dressers
+			declared that she was trying to be a Baptist despite herself.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Spinny and Mrs. Freeze and Mrs. Dow, who were
+			always hovering about Nelly, often whispered to me their
+			hope that she would eventually come into our church and not
+			&#8220;go with the Methodists&#8221;; her family were Wesleyans. But to
+			me these artless plans of theirs never wholly explained their
+			watchful affection. They had good daughters themselves,&#8212;except
+			Mrs. Spinny, who had only the sullen Scott,&#8212;and
+			they loved their plain girls and thanked God for them. But
+			they loved Nelly differently. They were proud of her pretty
+			figure and yellow-brown eyes, which dilated so easily and
+			sparkled with a kind of golden effervescence. They were always
+			making pretty things for her, always coaxing her to
+			come to the sewing-circle, where she knotted her thread, and
+			put in the wrong sleeve, and laughed and chattered and said a
+			great many things that she should not have said, and somehow
+			always warmed their hearts. I think they loved her for
+			her unquenchable joy.</p>
+
+			<p>All the Baptist ladies liked Nell, even those who criticized
+			her most severely, but the three who were first in fighting the
+			battles of our little church, who held it together by their
+			prayers and the labor of their hands, watched over her as they
+			did over Mrs. Dow&#8217;s century-plant before it blossomed. They
+			looked for her on Sunday morning and smiled at her as she
+			hurried, always a little late, up to the choir. When she rose
+			and stood behind the organ and sang &#8220;There Is a Green
+			Hill,&#8221; one could see Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Freeze settle back in
+			their accustomed seats and look up at her as if she had just
+			come from that hill and had brought them glad tidings.</p>
+
+			<p>It was because I sang contralto, or, as we said, alto, in the
+			Baptist choir that Nell and I became friends. She was so gay
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page72" title="72">&nbsp;</a>and grown up, so busy with parties and dances and picnics,
+			that I would scarcely have seen much of her had we not sung
+			together. She liked me better than she did any of the older
+			girls, who tried clumsily to be like her, and I felt almost as
+			solicitous and admiring as did Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Spinny. I
+			think even then I must have loved to see her bloom and glow,
+			and I loved to hear her sing, in &#8220;The Ninety and Nine,&#8221;</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="call-out"><p>But one was out on the hills away</p></blockquote>
+
+			<p class="continued_paragraph">in her sweet, strong voice. Nell had never had a singing lesson,
+			but she had sung from the time she could talk, and Mrs.
+			Dow used fondly to say that it was singing so much that
+			made her figure so pretty.</p>
+
+			<p>After I went into the choir it was found to be easier to get
+			Nelly to choir practice. If I stopped outside her gate on my
+			way to church and coaxed her, she usually laughed, ran in for
+			her hat and jacket, and went along with me. The three old
+			ladies fostered our friendship, and because I was &#8220;quiet,&#8221; they
+			esteemed me a good influence for Nelly. This view was propounded
+			in a sewing-circle discussion and, leaking down to
+			us through our mothers, greatly amused us. Dear old ladies!
+			It was so manifestly for what Nell was that they loved her,
+			and yet they were always looking for &#8220;influences&#8221; to change
+			her.</p>
+
+			<p>The &#8220;Queen Esther&#8221; performance had cost us three months
+			of hard practice, and it was not easy to keep Nell up to attending
+			the tedious rehearsals. Some of the boys we knew
+			were in the chorus of Assyrian youths, but the solo cast was
+			made up of older people, and Nell found them very poky. We
+			gave the cantata in the Baptist church on Christmas eve, &#8220;to a
+			crowded house,&#8221; as the Riverbend &#8220;Messenger&#8221; truly chronicled.
+			The country folk for miles about had come in through a
+			deep snow, and their teams and wagons stood in a long row
+			at the hitch-bars on each side of the church door. It was certainly
+			Nelly&#8217;s night, for however much the tenor&#8212;he was
+			her schoolmaster, and naturally thought poorly of her&#8212;might
+			try to eclipse her in his dolorous solos about the rivers
+			of Babylon, there could be no doubt as to whom the people
+			had come to hear&#8212;and to see.</p>
+
+			<p>After the performance was over, our fathers and mothers
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page73" title="73">&nbsp;</a>came back to the dressing-rooms&#8212;the little rooms behind
+			the baptistry where the candidates for baptism were robed&#8212;to
+			congratulate us, and Nell persuaded my mother to let
+			me go home with her. This arrangement may not have been
+			wholly agreeable to Scott Spinny, who stood glumly waiting
+			at the baptistry door; though I used to think he dogged Nell&#8217;s
+			steps not so much for any pleasure he got from being with
+			her as for the pleasure of keeping other people away. Dear
+			little Mrs. Spinny was perpetually in a state of humiliation on
+			account of his bad manners, and she tried by a very special
+			tenderness to make up to Nelly for the remissness of her ungracious
+			son.</p>
+
+			<p>Scott was a spare, muscular fellow, good-looking, but with
+			a face so set and dark that I used to think it very like the
+			castings he sold. He was taciturn and domineering, and Nell
+			rather liked to provoke him. Her father was so easy with her
+			that she seemed to enjoy being ordered about now and then.
+			That night, when every one was praising her and telling her
+			how well she sang and how pretty she looked, Scott only said,
+			as we came out of the dressing-room:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Have you got your high shoes on?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No; but I&#8217;ve got rubbers on over my low ones. Mother
+			doesn&#8217;t care.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, you just go back and put &#8217;em on as fast as you can.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nell made a face at him and ran back, laughing. Her
+			mother, fat, comfortable Mrs. Deane, was immensely amused
+			at this.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s right, Scott,&#8221; she chuckled. &#8220;You can do enough
+			more with her than I can. She walks right over me an&#8217; Jud.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Scott grinned. If he was proud of Nelly, the last thing he
+			wished to do was to show it. When she came back he began
+			to nag again. &#8220;What are you going to do with all those flowers?
+			They&#8217;ll freeze stiff as pokers.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, there won&#8217;t none of <em>your</em> flowers freeze, Scott
+			Spinny, so there!&#8221; Nell snapped. She had the best of him that
+			time, and the Assyrian youths rejoiced. They were most of
+			them high-school boys, and the poorest of them had &#8220;chipped
+			in&#8221; and sent all the way to Denver for <em>Queen Esther&#8217;s</em> flowers.
+			There were bouquets from half a dozen townspeople, too, but
+			none from Scott. Scott was a prosperous hardware merchant
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page74" title="74">&nbsp;</a>and notoriously penurious, though he saved his face, as the
+			boys said, by giving liberally to the church.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s no use freezing the fool things, anyhow. You get
+			me some newspapers, and I&#8217;ll wrap &#8217;em up.&#8221; Scott took
+			from his pocket a folded copy of the Riverbend &#8220;Messenger&#8221;
+			and began laboriously to wrap up one of the bouquets.
+			When we left the church door he bore three large newspaper
+			bundles, carrying them as carefully as if they had been so
+			many newly frosted wedding-cakes, and left Nell and me to
+			shift for ourselves as we floundered along the snow-burdened
+			sidewalk.</p>
+
+			<p>Although it was after midnight, lights were shining from
+			many of the little wooden houses, and the roofs and shrubbery
+			were so deep in snow that Riverbend looked as if it had
+			been tucked down into a warm bed. The companies of
+			people, all coming from church, tramping this way and that
+			toward their homes and calling &#8220;Good night&#8221; and &#8220;Merry
+			Christmas&#8221; as they parted company, all seemed to us very unusual
+			and exciting.</p>
+
+			<p>When we got home, Mrs. Deane had a cold supper ready,
+			and Jud Deane had already taken off his shoes and fallen to on
+			his fried chicken and pie. He was so proud of his pretty
+			daughter that he must give her her Christmas presents then
+			and there, and he went into the sleeping-chamber behind the
+			dining-room and from the depths of his wife&#8217;s closet brought
+			out a short sealskin jacket and a round cap and made Nelly
+			put them on.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Deane, who sat busy between a plate of spice cake and
+			a tray piled with her famous whipped-cream tarts, laughed
+			inordinately at his behavior.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Ain&#8217;t he worse than any kid you ever see? He&#8217;s been running
+			to that closet like a cat shut away from her kittens. I
+			wonder Nell ain&#8217;t caught on before this. I did think he&#8217;d
+			make out now to keep &#8217;em till Christmas morning; but he&#8217;s
+			never made out to keep anything yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>That was true enough, and fortunately Jud&#8217;s inability to
+			keep anything seemed always to present a highly humorous
+			aspect to his wife. Mrs. Deane put her heart into her cooking,
+			and said that so long as a man was a good provider she had
+			no cause to complain. Other people were not so charitable
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page75" title="75">&nbsp;</a>toward Jud&#8217;s failing. I remember how many strictures were
+			passed upon that little sealskin and how he was censured for
+			his extravagance. But what a public-spirited thing, after all, it
+			was for him to do! How, the winter through, we all enjoyed
+			seeing Nell skating on the river or running about the town
+			with the brown collar turned up about her bright cheeks and
+			her hair blowing out from under the round cap! &#8220;No seal,&#8221;
+			Mrs. Dow said, &#8220;would have begrudged it to her. Why
+			should we?&#8221; This was at the sewing-circle, when the new coat
+			was under grave discussion.</p>
+
+			<p>At last Nelly and I got up-stairs and undressed, and the pad
+			of Jud&#8217;s slippered feet about the kitchen premises&#8212;where he
+			was carrying up from the cellar things that might freeze&#8212;ceased.
+			He called &#8220;Good night, daughter,&#8221; from the foot of
+			the stairs, and the house grew quiet. But one is not a prima
+			donna the first time for nothing, and it seemed as if we could
+			not go to bed. Our light must have burned long after every
+			other in Riverbend was out. The muslin curtains of Nell&#8217;s bed
+			were drawn back; Mrs. Deane had turned down the white
+			counterpane and taken off the shams and smoothed the pillows
+			for us. But their fair plumpness offered no temptation to
+			two such hot young heads. We could not let go of life even
+			for a little while. We sat and talked in Nell&#8217;s cozy room, where
+			there was a tiny, white fur rug&#8212;the only one in Riverbend&#8212;before
+			the bed; and there were white sash curtains, and the
+			prettiest little desk and dressing-table I had ever seen. It was a
+			warm, gay little room, flooded all day long with sunlight
+			from east and south windows that had climbing-roses all
+			about them in summer. About the dresser were photographs
+			of adoring high-school boys; and one of Guy Franklin, much
+			groomed and barbered, in a dress-coat and a boutonnière. I
+			never liked to see that photograph there. The home boys
+			looked properly modest and bashful on the dresser, but he
+			seemed to be staring impudently all the time.</p>
+
+			<p>I knew nothing definite against Guy, but in Riverbend all
+			&#8220;traveling-men&#8221; were considered worldly and wicked. He
+			traveled for a Chicago dry-goods firm, and our fathers didn&#8217;t
+			like him because he put extravagant ideas into our mothers&#8217;
+			heads. He had very smooth and nattering ways, and he introduced
+			into our simple community a great variety of perfumes
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page76" title="76">&nbsp;</a>and scented soaps, and he always reminded me of the merchants
+			in Cæsar, who brought into Gaul &#8220;those things which
+			effeminate the mind,&#8221; as we translated that delightfully easy
+			passage.</p>
+
+			<p>Nell was silting before the dressing-table in her nightgown,
+			holding the new fur coat and rubbing her cheek against it,
+			when I saw a sudden gleam of tears in her eyes. &#8220;You know,
+			Peggy,&#8221; she said in her quick, impetuous way, &#8220;this makes me
+			feel bad. I&#8217;ve got a secret from my daddy.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>I can see her now, so pink and eager, her brown hair in two
+			springy braids down her back, and her eyes shining with tears
+			and with something even softer and more tremulous.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m engaged, Peggy,&#8221; she whispered, &#8220;really and truly.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She leaned forward, unbuttoning her nightgown, and there
+			on her breast, hung by a little gold chain about her neck, was
+			a diamond ring&#8212;Guy Franklin&#8217;s solitaire; every one in Riverbend
+			knew it well.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m going to live in Chicago, and take singing lessons,
+			and go to operas, and do all those nice things&#8212;oh, everything!
+			I know you don&#8217;t like him, Peggy, but you know you
+			<em>are</em> a kid. You&#8217;ll see how it is yourself when you grow up.
+			He&#8217;s so <em>different</em> from our boys, and he&#8217;s just terribly in love
+			with me. And then, Peggy,&#8221;&#8212;flushing all down over her soft
+			shoulders,&#8212;&#8220;I&#8217;m awfully fond of him, too. Awfully.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Are you, Nell, truly?&#8221; I whispered. She seemed so changed
+			to me by the warm light in her eyes and that delicate suffusion
+			of color. I felt as I did when I got up early on picnic
+			mornings in summer, and saw the dawn come up in the
+			breathless sky above the river meadows and make all the cornfields
+			golden.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Sure I do, Peggy; don&#8217;t look so solemn. It&#8217;s nothing to
+			look that way about, kid. It&#8217;s nice.&#8221; She threw her arms about
+			me suddenly and hugged me.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I hate to think about your going so far away from us all,
+			Nell.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, you&#8217;ll love to come and visit me. Just you wait.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She began breathlessly to go over things Guy Franklin had
+			told her about Chicago, until I seemed to see it all looming
+			up out there under the stars that kept watch over our little
+			sleeping town. We had neither of us ever been to a city, but
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page77" title="77">&nbsp;</a>we knew what it would be like. We heard it throbbing like
+			great engines, and calling to us, that far-away world. Even
+			after we had opened the windows and scurried into bed, we
+			seemed to feel a pulsation across all the miles of snow. The
+			winter silence trembled with it, and the air was full of something
+			new that seemed to break over us in soft waves. In that
+			snug, warm little bed I had a sense of imminent change and
+			danger. I was somehow afraid for Nelly when I heard her
+			breathing so quickly beside me, and I put my arm about her
+			protectingly as we drifted toward sleep.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">In the following spring we were both graduated from the
+			Riverbend high school, and I went away to college. My family
+			moved to Denver, and during the next four years I heard
+			very little of Nelly Deane. My life was crowded with new
+			people and new experiences, and I am afraid I held her little
+			in mind. I heard indirectly that Jud Deane had lost what little
+			property he owned in a luckless venture in Cripple Creek, and
+			that he had been able to keep his house in Riverbend only
+			through the clemency of his creditors. Guy Franklin had his
+			route changed and did not go to Riverbend any more. He
+			married the daughter of a rich cattle-man out near Long Pine,
+			and ran a dry-goods store of his own. Mrs. Dow wrote me a
+			long letter about once a year, and in one of these she told me
+			that Nelly was teaching in the sixth grade in the Riverbend
+			school.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Dear Nelly does not like teaching very well. The children
+			try her, and she is so pretty it seems a pity for her to be tied
+			down to uncongenial employment. Scott is still very attentive,
+			and I have noticed him look up at the window of Nelly&#8217;s
+			room in a very determined way as he goes home to dinner.
+			Scott continues prosperous; he has made money during these
+			hard times and now owns both our hardware stores. He is
+			close, but a very honorable fellow. Nelly seems to hold off,
+			but I think Mrs. Spinny has hopes. Nothing would please her
+			more. If Scott were more careful about his appearance, it
+			would help. He of course gets black about his business, and
+			Nelly, you know, is very dainty. People do say his mother
+			does his courting for him, she is so eager. If only Scott does
+			not turn out hard and penurious like his father! We must all
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page78" title="78">&nbsp;</a>have our schooling in this life, but I don&#8217;t want Nelly&#8217;s to be
+			too severe. She is a dear girl, and keeps her color.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Dow&#8217;s own schooling had been none too easy. Her
+			husband had long been crippled with rheumatism, and was
+			bitter and faultfinding. Her daughters had married poorly,
+			and one of her sons had fallen into evil ways. But her letters
+			were always cheerful, and in one of them she gently remonstrated
+			with me because I &#8220;seemed inclined to take a sad view
+			of life.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>In the winter vacation of my senior year I stopped on my
+			way home to visit Mrs. Dow. The first thing she told me
+			when I got into her old buckboard at the station was that
+			&#8220;Scott had at last prevailed,&#8221; and that Nelly was to marry him
+			in the spring. As a preliminary step, Nelly was about to join
+			the Baptist church. &#8220;Just think, you will be here for her baptizing!
+			How that will please Nelly! She is to be immersed to-morrow night.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>I met Scott Spinny in the post-office that morning, and he
+			gave me a hard grip with one black hand. There was something
+			grim and saturnine about his powerful body and
+			bearded face and his strong, cold hands. I wondered what
+			perverse fate had driven him for eight years to dog the footsteps
+			of a girl whose charm was due to qualities naturally distasteful
+			to him. It still seems strange to me that in easy-going
+			Riverbend, where there were so many boys who could have
+			lived contentedly enough with my little grasshopper, it was
+			the pushing ant who must have her and all her careless ways.</p>
+
+			<p>By a kind of unformulated etiquette one did not call upon
+			candidates for baptism on the day of the ceremony, so I had
+			my first glimpse of Nelly that evening. The baptistry was a
+			cemented pit directly under the pulpit rostrum, over which
+			we had our stage when we sang &#8220;Queen Esther.&#8221; I sat
+			through the sermon somewhat nervously. After the minister,
+			in his long, black gown, had gone down into the water and
+			the choir had finished singing, the door from the dressing-room
+			opened, and, led by one of the deacons, Nelly came
+			down the steps into the pool. Oh, she looked so little and
+			meek and chastened! Her white cashmere robe clung about
+			her, and her brown hair was brushed straight back and hung
+			in two soft braids from a little head bent humbly. As she
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page79" title="79">&nbsp;</a>stepped down into the water I shivered with the cold of it,
+			and I remembered sharply how much I had loved her. She
+			went down until the water was well above her waist, and
+			stood white and small, with her hands crossed on her breast,
+			while the minister said the words about being buried with
+			Christ in baptism. Then, lying in his arm, she disappeared
+			under the dark water. &#8220;It will be like that when she dies,&#8221; I
+			thought, and a quick pain caught my heart. The choir began
+			to sing &#8220;Washed in the Blood of the Lamb&#8221; as she rose again,
+			the door behind the baptistry opened, revealing those three
+			dear guardians, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny,
+			and she went up into their arms.</p>
+
+			<p>I went to see Nell next day, up in the little room of many
+			memories. Such a sad, sad visit! She seemed changed&#8212;a little
+			embarrassed and quietly despairing. We talked of many of the
+			old Riverbend girls and boys, but she did not mention Guy
+			Franklin or Scott Spinny, except to say that her father had got
+			work in Scott&#8217;s hardware store. She begged me, putting her
+			hands on my shoulders with something of her old impulsiveness,
+			to come and stay a few days with her. But I was afraid&#8212;afraid
+			of what she might tell me and of what I might say.
+			When I sat in that room with all her trinkets, the foolish harvest
+			of her girlhood, lying about, and the white curtains
+			and the little white rug, I thought of Scott Spinny with positive
+			terror and could feel his hard grip on my hand again. I
+			made the best excuse I could about having to hurry on to
+			Denver; but she gave me one quick look, and her eyes ceased
+			to plead. I saw that she understood me perfectly. We had
+			known each other so well. Just once, when I got up to go and
+			had trouble with my veil, she laughed her old merry laugh
+			and told me there were some things I would never learn, for
+			all my schooling.</p>
+
+			<p>The next day, when Mrs. Dow drove me down to the
+			station to catch the morning train for Denver, I saw Nelly
+			hurrying to school with several books under her arm. She
+			had been working up her lessons at home, I thought. She was
+			never quick at her books, dear Nell.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">It was ten years before I again visited Riverbend. I had
+			been in Rome for a long time, and had fallen into bitter
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page80" title="80">&nbsp;</a>homesickness. One morning, sitting among the dahlias and
+			asters that bloom so bravely upon those gigantic heaps of
+			earth-red ruins that were once the palaces of the Cæsars, I
+			broke the seal of one of Mrs. Dow&#8217;s long yearly letters. It
+			brought so much sad news that I resolved then and there to
+			go home to Riverbend, the only place that had ever really
+			been home to me. Mrs. Dow wrote me that her husband,
+			after years of illness, had died in the cold spell last March. &#8220;So
+			good and patient toward the last,&#8221; she wrote, &#8220;and so afraid
+			of giving extra trouble.&#8221; There was another thing she saved
+			until the last. She wrote on and on, dear woman, about new
+			babies and village improvements, as if she could not bear to
+			tell me; and then it came:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You will be sad to hear that two months ago our dear
+			Nelly left us. It was a terrible blow to us all. I cannot write
+			about it yet, I fear. I wake up every morning feeling that I
+			ought to go to her. She went three days after her little boy
+			was born. The baby is a fine child and will live, I think, in
+			spite of everything. He and her little girl, now eight years old,
+			whom she named Margaret, after you, have gone to Mrs.
+			Spinny&#8217;s. She loves them more than if they were her own. It
+			seems as if already they had made her quite young again. I
+			wish you could see Nelly&#8217;s children.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ah, that was what I wanted, to see Nelly&#8217;s children! The
+			wish came aching from my heart along with the bitter homesick
+			tears; along with a quick, torturing recollection that
+			flashed upon me, as I looked about and tried to collect myself,
+			of how we two had sat in our sunny seat in the corner of the
+			old bare school-room one September afternoon and learned
+			the names of the seven hills together. In that place, at that
+			moment, after so many years, how it all came back to me&#8212;the
+			warm sun on my back, the chattering girl beside me, the
+			curly hair, the laughing yellow eyes, the stubby little finger on
+			the page! I felt as if even then, when we sat in the sun with
+			our heads together, it was all arranged, written out like a
+			story, that at this moment I should be sitting among the
+			crumbling bricks and drying grass, and she should be lying in
+			the place I knew so well, on that green hill far away.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">Mrs. Dow sat with her Christmas sewing in the familiar
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page81" title="81">&nbsp;</a>sitting-room, where the carpet and the wall-paper and the
+			table-cover had all faded into soft, dull colors, and even the
+			chromo of Hagar and Ishmael had been toned to the sobriety
+			of age. In the bay-window the tall wire flower-stand still bore
+			its little terraces of potted plants, and the big fuchsia and the
+			Martha Washington geranium had blossomed for Christmas-tide.
+			Mrs. Dow herself did not look greatly changed to me.
+			Her hair, thin ever since I could remember it, was now quite
+			white, but her spare, wiry little person had all its old activity,
+			and her eyes gleamed with the old friendliness behind her
+			silver-bowed glasses. Her gray house-dress seemed just like
+			those she used to wear when I ran in after school to take her
+			angel-food cake down to the church supper.</p>
+
+			<p>The house sat on a hill, and from behind the geraniums I
+			could see pretty much all of Riverbend, tucked down in the
+			soft snow, and the air above was full of big, loose flakes, falling
+			from a gray sky which betokened settled weather. Indoors
+			the hard-coal burner made a tropical temperature, and glowed
+			a warm orange from its isinglass sides. We sat and visited, the
+			two of us, with a great sense of comfort and completeness. I
+			had reached Riverbend only that morning, and Mrs. Dow,
+			who had been haunted by thoughts of shipwreck and suffering
+			upon wintry seas, kept urging me to draw nearer to the
+			fire and suggesting incidental refreshment. We had chattered
+			all through the winter morning and most of the afternoon,
+			taking up one after another of the Riverbend girls and boys,
+			and agreeing that we had reason to be well satisfied with most
+			of them. Finally, after a long pause in which I had listened to
+			the contented ticking of the clock and the crackle of the coal,
+			I put the question I had until then held back:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;And now, Mrs. Dow, tell me about the one we loved best
+			of all. Since I got your letter I&#8217;ve thought of her every day.
+			Tell me all about Scott and Nelly.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The tears flashed behind her glasses, and she smoothed the
+			little pink bag on her knee.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, dear, I&#8217;m afraid Scott proved to be a hard man, like
+			his father. But we must remember that Nelly always had Mrs.
+			Spinny. I never saw anything like the love there was between
+			those two. After Nelly lost her own father and mother, she
+			looked to Mrs. Spinny for everything. When Scott was too
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page82" title="82">&nbsp;</a>unreasonable, his mother could &#8217;most always prevail upon
+			him. She never lifted a hand to fight her own battles with
+			Scott&#8217;s father, but she was never afraid to speak up for Nelly.
+			And then Nelly took great comfort of her little girl. Such a
+			lovely child!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Had she been very ill before the little baby came?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, Margaret; I&#8217;m afraid &#8217;t was all because they had the
+			wrong doctor. I feel confident that either Doctor Tom or
+			Doctor Jones could have brought her through. But, you see,
+			Scott had offended them both, and they&#8217;d stopped trading at
+			his store, so he would have young Doctor Fox, a boy just out
+			of college and a stranger. He got scared and didn&#8217;t know
+			what to do. Mrs. Spinny felt he wasn&#8217;t doing right, so she
+			sent for Mrs. Freeze and me. It seemed like Nelly had got
+			discouraged. Scott would move into their big new house before
+			the plastering was dry, and though &#8217;t was summer, she
+			had taken a terrible cold that seemed to have drained her, and
+			she took no interest in fixing the place up. Mrs. Spinny had
+			been down with her back again and wasn&#8217;t able to help, and
+			things was just anyway. We won&#8217;t talk about that, Margaret; I
+			think &#8217;t would hurt Mrs. Spinny to have you know. She
+			nearly died of mortification when she sent for us, and blamed
+			her poor back. We did get Nelly fixed up nicely before she
+			died. I prevailed upon Doctor Tom to come in at the last, and
+			it &#8217;most broke his heart. &#8216;Why, Mis&#8217; Dow,&#8217; he said, &#8216;if you&#8217;d
+			only have come and told me how &#8217;t was, I&#8217;d have come and
+			carried her right off in my arms.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, Mrs. Dow,&#8221; I cried, &#8220;then it needn&#8217;t have been?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Dow dropped her needle and clasped her hands
+			quickly. &#8220;We mustn&#8217;t look at it that way, dear,&#8221; she said tremulously
+			and a little sternly; &#8220;we mustn&#8217;t let ourselves. We
+			must just feel that our Lord wanted her <em>then</em>, and took her to
+			Himself. When it was all over, she did look so like a child of
+			God, young and trusting, like she did on her baptizing night,
+			you remember?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>I felt that Mrs. Dow did not want to talk any more about
+			Nelly then, and, indeed, I had little heart to listen; so I told
+			her I would go for a walk, and suggested that I might stop at
+			Mrs. Spinny&#8217;s to see the children.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Dow looked up thoughtfully at the clock. &#8220;I doubt if
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page83" title="83">&nbsp;</a>you&#8217;ll find little Margaret there now. It&#8217;s half-past four, and
+			she&#8217;ll have been out of school an hour and more. She&#8217;ll be
+			most likely coasting on Lupton&#8217;s Hill. She usually makes for it
+			with her sled the minute she is out of the school-house door.
+			You know, it&#8217;s the old hill where you all used to slide. If you
+			stop in at the church about six o&#8217;clock, you&#8217;ll likely find Mrs.
+			Spinny there with the baby. I promised to go down and help
+			Mrs. Freeze finish up the tree, and Mrs. Spinny said she&#8217;d run
+			in with the baby, if &#8217;t wasn&#8217;t too bitter. She won&#8217;t leave him
+			alone with the Swede girl. She&#8217;s like a young woman with
+			her first.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Lupton&#8217;s Hill was at the other end of town, and when I got
+			there the dusk was thickening, drawing blue shadows over the
+			snowy fields. There were perhaps twenty children creeping up
+			the hill or whizzing down the packed sled-track. When I had
+			been watching them for some minutes, I heard a lusty shout,
+			and a little red sled shot past me into the deep snow-drift
+			beyond. The child was quite buried for a moment, then she
+			struggled out and stood dusting the snow from her short coat
+			and red woolen comforter. She wore a brown fur cap, which
+			was too big for her and of an old-fashioned shape, such as
+			girls wore long ago, but I would have known her without the
+			cap. Mrs. Dow had said a beautiful child, and there would
+			not be two like this in Riverbend. She was off before I had
+			time to speak to her, going up the hill at a trot, her sturdy
+			little legs plowing through the trampled snow. When she
+			reached the top she never paused to take breath, but threw
+			herself upon her sled and came down with a whoop that was
+			quenched only by the deep drift at the end.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Are you Margaret Spinny?&#8221; I asked as she struggled out in
+			a cloud of snow.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, &#8217;m.&#8221; She approached me with frank curiosity, pulling
+			her little sled behind her. &#8220;Are you the strange lady staying at
+			Mrs. Dow&#8217;s?&#8221; I nodded, and she began to look my clothes
+			over with respectful interest.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Your grandmother is to be at the church at six o&#8217;clock,
+			isn&#8217;t she?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, &#8217;m.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, suppose we walk up there now. It&#8217;s nearly six, and
+			all the other children are going home.&#8221; She hesitated, and
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page84" title="84">&nbsp;</a>looked up at the faintly gleaming track on the hill-slope. &#8220;Do
+			you want another slide? Is that it?&#8221; I asked.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Do you mind?&#8221; she asked shyly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No. I&#8217;ll wait for you. Take your time; don&#8217;t run.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Two little boys were still hanging about the slide, and they
+			cheered her as she came down, her comforter streaming in the
+			wind.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Now,&#8221; she announced, getting up out of the drift, &#8220;I&#8217;ll
+			show you where the church is.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Shall I tie your comforter again?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, &#8217;m, thanks. I&#8217;m plenty warm.&#8221; She put her mittened
+			hand confidingly in mine and trudged along beside me.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Dow must have heard us tramping up the snowy steps
+			of the church, for she met us at the door. Every one had gone
+			except the old ladies. A kerosene lamp flickered over the
+			Sunday-school chart, with the lesson-picture of the Wise
+			Men, and the little barrel-stove threw out a deep glow over
+			the three white heads that bent above the baby. There the
+			three friends sat, patting him, and smoothing his dress, and
+			playing with his hands, which made theirs look so brown.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You ain&#8217;t seen nothing finer in all your travels,&#8221; said Mrs.
+			Spinny, and they all laughed.</p>
+
+			<p>They showed me his full chest and how strong his back
+			was; had me feel the golden fuzz on his head, and made him
+			look at me with his round, bright eyes. He laughed and
+			reared himself in my arms as I took him up and held him
+			close to me. He was so warm and tingling with life, and he
+			had the flush of new beginnings, of the new morning and the
+			new rose. He seemed to have come so lately from his mother&#8217;s
+			heart! It was as if I held her youth and all her young joy.
+			As I put my cheek down against his, he spied a pink flower in
+			my hat, and making a gleeful sound, he lunged at it with both
+			fists.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t let him spoil it,&#8221; murmured Mrs. Spinny. &#8220;He loves
+			color so&#8212;like Nelly.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Century</cite>, October 1911</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="bohemian" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page85" title="85">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">The Bohemian Girl <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<h4>I</h4>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">The Trans-continental Express swung along the
+			windings of the Sand River Valley, and in the rear seat of
+			the observation car a young man sat greatly at his ease, not in
+			the least discomfited by the fierce sunlight which beat in upon
+			his brown face and neck and strong back. There was a look of
+			relaxation and of great passivity about his broad shoulders,
+			which seemed almost too heavy until he stood up and squared
+			them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue silk necktie with
+			loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at the waist,
+			and his short sack-coat hung open. His heavy shoes had seen
+			good service. His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had a
+			foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish
+			eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close shaving,
+			and even the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the
+			smooth brown of his skin. His teeth and the palms of his
+			hands were very white. His head, which looked hard and
+			stubborn, lay indolently in the green cushion of the wicker
+			chair, and as he looked out at the ripe summer country a
+			teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. Once, as he
+			basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes,
+			curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard,
+			straight line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather
+			kindly mockery. He told himself, apparently, that there was
+			no point in getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at
+			taking his ease when he could. Neither the sharp whistle of
+			the locomotive nor the brakeman&#8217;s call disturbed him. It was
+			not until after the train had stopped that he rose, put on a
+			Panama hat, took from the rack a small valise and a flute-case,
+			and stepped deliberately to the station platform. The baggage
+			was already unloaded, and the stranger presented a check for
+			a battered sole-leather steamer-trunk.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Can you keep it here for a day or two?&#8221; he asked the
+			agent. &#8220;I may send for it, and I may not.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?&#8221; demanded
+			the agent in a challenging tone.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Just so.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page86" title="86">&nbsp;</a>The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the
+			small trunk, which was marked &#8220;N.E.,&#8221; and handed out a
+			claim check without further comment. The stranger watched
+			him as he caught one end of the trunk and dragged it into the
+			express room. The agent&#8217;s manner seemed to remind him of
+			something amusing. &#8220;Doesn&#8217;t seem to be a very big place,&#8221; he
+			remarked, looking about.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s big enough for us,&#8221; snapped the agent, as he banged
+			the trunk into a corner.</p>
+
+			<p>That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had
+			wanted. He chuckled quietly as he took a leather strap from
+			his pocket and swung his valise around his shoulder. Then he
+			settled his Panama securely on his head, turned up his trousers,
+			tucked the flute-case under his arm, and started off across
+			the fields. He gave the town, as he would have said, a wide
+			berth, and cut through a great fenced pasture, emerging,
+			when he rolled under the barbed wire at the farther corner,
+			upon a white dusty road which ran straight up from the river
+			valley to the high prairies, where the ripe wheat stood yellow
+			and the tin roofs and weather-cocks were twinkling in the
+			fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles, the sun
+			was sinking and the farm-wagons on their way home from
+			town came rattling by, covering him with dust and making
+			him sneeze. When one of the farmers pulled up and offered to
+			give him a lift, he clambered in willingly. The driver was a
+			thin, grizzled old man with a long lean neck and a foolish sort
+			of beard, like a goat&#8217;s. &#8220;How fur ye goin&#8217;?&#8221; he asked, as he
+			clucked to his horses and started off.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Do you go by the Ericson place?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Which Ericson?&#8221; The old man drew in his reins as if he
+			expected to stop again.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Preacher Ericson&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, the Old Lady Ericson&#8217;s!&#8221; He turned and looked at
+			Nils. &#8220;La, me! If you&#8217;re goin&#8217; out there you might &#8217;a&#8217; rid out
+			in the automobile. That&#8217;s a pity, now. The Old Lady Ericson
+			was in town with her auto. You might &#8217;a&#8217; heard it snortin&#8217;
+			anywhere about the post-office er the butcher-shop.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Has she a motor?&#8221; asked the stranger absently.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;Deed an&#8217; she has! She runs into town every night about
+			this time for her mail and meat for supper. Some folks say
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page87" title="87">&nbsp;</a>she&#8217;s afraid her auto won&#8217;t get exercise enough, but I say
+			that&#8217;s jealousy.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Aren&#8217;t there any other motors about here?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all. But nobody else gets
+			around like the Old Lady Ericson. She&#8217;s out, rain er shine,
+			over the whole county, chargin&#8217; into town and out amongst
+			her farms, an&#8217; up to her sons&#8217; places. Sure you ain&#8217;t goin&#8217; to
+			the wrong place?&#8221; He craned his neck and looked at Nils&#8217;
+			flute-case with eager curiosity. &#8220;The old woman ain&#8217;t got any
+			piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand. His wife&#8217;s musical;
+			took lessons in Chicago.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m going up there to-morrow,&#8221; said Nils imperturbably.
+			He saw that the driver took him for a piano-tuner.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I see!&#8221; The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously.
+			He was a little dashed by the stranger&#8217;s non-communicativeness,
+			but he soon broke out again.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m one o&#8217; Mis&#8217; Ericson&#8217;s tenants. Look after one of her
+			places. I did own the place myself oncet, but I lost it a while
+			back, in the bad years just after the World&#8217;s Fair. Just as well,
+			too, I say. Lets you out o&#8217; payin&#8217; taxes. The Ericsons do own
+			most of the county now. I remember the old preacher&#8217;s
+			fav&#8217;rite text used to be, &#8216;To them that hath shall be given.&#8217;
+			They&#8217;ve spread something wonderful&#8212;run over this here
+			country like bindweed. But I ain&#8217;t one that begretches it to
+			&#8217;em. Folks is entitled to what they kin git; and they&#8217;re hustlers.
+			Olaf, he&#8217;s in the Legislature now, and a likely man fur
+			Congress. Listen, if that ain&#8217;t the old woman comin&#8217; now.
+			Want I should stop her?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils shook his head. He heard the deep chug-chug of a
+			motor vibrating steadily in the clear twilight behind them.
+			The pale lights of the car swam over the hill, and the old man
+			slapped his reins and turned clear out of the road, ducking his
+			head at the first of three angry snorts from behind. The motor
+			was running at a hot, even speed, and passed without turning
+			an inch from its course. The driver was a stalwart woman
+			who sat at ease in the front seat and drove her car bareheaded.
+			She left a cloud of dust and a trail of gasoline behind
+			her. Her tenant threw back his head and sneezed.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Whew! I sometimes say I&#8217;d as lief be <em>before</em> Mrs. Ericson as
+			behind her. She does beat all! Nearly seventy, and never lets
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page88" title="88">&nbsp;</a>another soul touch that car. Puts it into commission herself
+			every morning, and keeps it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day.
+			I never stop work for a drink o&#8217; water that I don&#8217;t hear her
+			a-churnin&#8217; up the road. I reckon her darter-in-laws never sets
+			down easy nowadays. Never know when she&#8217;ll pop in. Mis&#8217;
+			Otto, she says to me: &#8216;We&#8217;re so afraid that thing&#8217;ll blow up
+			and do Ma some injury yet, she&#8217;s so turrible venturesome.&#8217;
+			Says I: &#8216;I wouldn&#8217;t stew, Mis&#8217; Otto; the old lady&#8217;ll drive that
+			car to the funeral of every darter-in-law she&#8217;s got.&#8217; That was
+			after the old woman had jumped a turrible bad culvert.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying.
+			Just now he was experiencing something very much like
+			homesickness, and he was wondering what had brought it
+			about. The mention of a name or two, perhaps; the rattle of a
+			wagon along a dusty road; the rank, resinous smell of sunflowers
+			and ironweed, which the night damp brought up
+			from the draws and low places; perhaps, more than all, the
+			dancing lights of the motor that had plunged by. He squared
+			his shoulders with a comfortable sense of strength.</p>
+
+			<p>The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady
+			upgrade. The country, receding from the rough river valley,
+			swelled more and more gently, as if it had been smoothed out
+			by the wind. On one of the last of the rugged ridges, at the
+			end of a branch road, stood a grim square house with a tin
+			roof and double porches. Behind the house stretched a row of
+			broken, wind-racked poplars, and down the hill-slope to the
+			left straggled the sheds and stables. The old man stopped his
+			horses where the Ericsons&#8217; road branched across a dry sand
+			creek that wound about the foot of the hill.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the old lady&#8217;s place. Want I should drive in?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, thank you. I&#8217;ll roll out here. Much obliged to you.
+			Good night.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the
+			old man drove on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like
+			to see how the stranger would be received.</p>
+
+			<p>As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive
+			tramp of a horse coming toward him down the hill. Instantly
+			he flashed out of the road and stood behind a thicket of wild
+			plum bushes that grew in the sandy bed. Peering through the
+			dusk, he saw a light horse, under tight rein, descending the
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page89" title="89">&nbsp;</a>hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a slender woman&#8212;barely
+			visible against the dark hillside&#8212;wearing an old-fashioned
+			derby hat and a long riding-skirt. She sat lightly in the saddle,
+			with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the distance.
+			As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air
+			and shied. She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an
+			angry exclamation, &#8220;<em>Blázne!</em>&#8221; in Bohemian. Once in the main
+			road, she let him out into a lope, and they soon emerged
+			upon the crest of high land, where they moved along the skyline,
+			silhouetted against the band of faint color that lingered
+			in the west. This horse and rider, with their free, rhythmical
+			gallop, were the only moving things to be seen on the face of
+			the flat country. They seemed, in the last sad light of evening,
+			not to be there accidentally, but as an inevitable detail of the
+			landscape.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving
+			speck against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and
+			climbed the hill. When he reached the gate the front of the
+			house was dark, but a light was shining from the side windows.
+			The pigs were squealing in the hog corral, and Nils
+			could see a tall boy, who carried two big wooden buckets,
+			moving about among them. Half way between the barn and
+			the house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path
+			that ran around to the back porch, Nils stopped to look
+			through the screen door into the lamp-lit kitchen. The
+			kitchen was the largest room in the house; Nils remembered
+			that his older brothers used to give dances there when he was
+			a boy. Beside the stove stood a little girl with two light yellow
+			braids and a broad, flushed face, peering anxiously into a
+			frying-pan. In the dining-room beyond, a large, broad-shouldered
+			woman was moving about the table. She walked
+			with an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and florid,
+			almost without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy.
+			Nils felt proud of her as he watched her deliberate activity;
+			never a momentary hesitation, or a movement that did not
+			tell. He waited until she came out into the kitchen and,
+			brushing the child aside, took her place at the stove. Then he
+			tapped on the screen door and entered.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren&#8217;t looking
+			for me.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page90" title="90">&nbsp;</a>Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring
+			at him. &#8220;Bring the lamp, Hilda, and let me look.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils laughed and unslung his valise. &#8220;What&#8217;s the matter,
+			Mother? Don&#8217;t you know me?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp. &#8220;You must be Nils. You
+			don&#8217;t look very different, anyway.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Nor you, Mother. You hold your own. Don&#8217;t you wear
+			glasses yet?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Only to read by. Where&#8217;s your trunk, Nils?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I left that in town. I thought it might not be convenient
+			for you to have company so near threshing-time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t be foolish, Nils.&#8221; Mrs. Ericson turned back to the
+			stove. &#8220;I don&#8217;t thresh now. I hitched the wheat land onto the
+			next farm and have a tenant. Hilda, take some hot water up to
+			the company room, and go call little Eric.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute
+			amazement, took up the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils
+			a long, admiring look from the door of the kitchen stairs.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Who&#8217;s the youngster?&#8221; Nils asked, dropping down on the
+			bench behind the kitchen stove.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;One of your Cousin Henrik&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Six years. There are two boys. One stays with Peter and
+			one with Anders. Olaf is their guardeen.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky
+			boy peered wonderingly in through the screen door. He had
+			a fair, gentle face and big gray eyes, and wisps of soft yellow
+			hair hung down under his cap. Nils sprang up and pulled him
+			into the kitchen, hugging him and slapping him on the shoulders.
+			&#8220;Well, if it isn&#8217;t my kid! Look at the size of him! Don&#8217;t
+			you know me, Eric?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The boy reddened under his sunburn and freckles, and
+			hung his head. &#8220;I guess it&#8217;s Nils,&#8221; he said shyly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re a good guesser,&#8221; laughed Nils, giving the lad&#8217;s
+			hand a swing. To himself he was thinking: &#8220;That&#8217;s why the
+			little girl looked so friendly. He&#8217;s taught her to like me. He
+			was only six when I went away, and he&#8217;s remembered for
+			twelve years.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling. &#8220;You look
+			just like I thought you would,&#8221; he ventured.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page91" title="91">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;Go wash your hands, Eric,&#8221; called Mrs. Ericson. &#8220;I&#8217;ve got
+			cob corn for supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you
+			don&#8217;t get much of that in the old country. Here&#8217;s Hilda; she&#8217;ll
+			take you up to your room. You&#8217;ll want to get the dust off you
+			before you eat.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another
+			plate, and the little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to
+			let him know that his room was ready. He put out his hand
+			and she took it, with a startled glance up at his face. Little
+			Eric dropped his towel, threw an arm about Nils and one
+			about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze, and then stumbled
+			out to the porch.</p>
+
+			<p>During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of
+			his eight grown brothers farmed, how their crops were coming
+			on, and how much live stock they were feeding. His
+			mother watched him narrowly as she talked. &#8220;You&#8217;ve got
+			better looking, Nils,&#8221; she remarked abruptly, whereupon he
+			grinned and the children giggled. Eric, although he was eighteen
+			and as tall as Nils, was always accounted a child, being
+			the last of so many sons. His face seemed childlike, too, Nils
+			thought, and he had the open, wandering eyes of a little boy.
+			All the others had been men at his age.</p>
+
+			<p>After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down
+			on the step to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair
+			up near him and began to knit busily. It was one of the
+			few old-world customs she had kept up, for she could not
+			bear to sit with idle hands.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Where&#8217;s little Eric, Mother?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own
+			will; I don&#8217;t like a boy to be too handy about the house.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He seems like a nice kid.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He&#8217;s very obedient.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils smiled a little in the dark. It was just as well to shift
+			the line of conversation. &#8220;What are you knitting there,
+			Mother?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Baby stockings. The boys keep me busy.&#8221; Mrs. Ericson
+			chuckled and clicked her needles.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How many grandchildren have you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Only thirty-one now. Olaf lost his three. They were sickly,
+			like their mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page92" title="92">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;I supposed he had a second crop by this time!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;His second wife has no children. She&#8217;s too proud. She
+			tears about on horseback all the time. But she&#8217;ll get caught up
+			with, yet. She sets herself very high, though nobody knows
+			what for. They were low enough Bohemians she came of. I
+			never thought much of Bohemians; always drinking.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson
+			knitted on. In a few moments she added grimly: &#8220;She was
+			down here to-night, just before you came. She&#8217;d like to quarrel
+			with me and come between me and Olaf, but I don&#8217;t give
+			her the chance. I suppose you&#8217;ll be bringing a wife home
+			some day.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;ve never thought much about it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, perhaps it&#8217;s best as it is,&#8221; suggested Mrs. Ericson
+			hopefully. &#8220;You&#8217;d never be contented tied down to the land.
+			There was roving blood in your father&#8217;s family, and it&#8217;s
+			come out in you. I expect your own way of life suits you
+			best.&#8221; Mrs. Ericson had dropped into a blandly agreeable
+			tone which Nils well remembered. It seemed to amuse him
+			a good deal and his white teeth flashed behind his pipe.
+			His mother&#8217;s strategies had always diverted him, even when
+			he was a boy&#8212;they were so flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned
+			to her vigor and force. &#8220;They&#8217;ve been waiting
+			to see which way I&#8217;d jump,&#8221; he reflected. He felt that Mrs.
+			Ericson was pondering his case deeply as she sat clicking her
+			needles.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t suppose you&#8217;ve ever got used to steady work,&#8221; she
+			went on presently. &#8220;Men ain&#8217;t apt to if they roam around too
+			long. It&#8217;s a pity you didn&#8217;t come back the year after the
+			World&#8217;s Fair. Your father picked up a good bit of land cheap
+			then, in the hard times, and I expect maybe he&#8217;d have give
+			you a farm. It&#8217;s too bad you put off comin&#8217; back so long, for
+			I always thought he meant to do something by you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. &#8220;I&#8217;d have
+			missed a lot if I had come back then. But I&#8217;m sorry I didn&#8217;t
+			get back to see father.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the
+			other. Perhaps you are as well satisfied with your own doings,
+			now, as you&#8217;d have been with a farm,&#8221; said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page93" title="93">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;Land&#8217;s a good thing to have,&#8221; Nils commented, as he lit
+			another match and sheltered it with his hand.</p>
+
+			<p>His mother looked sharply at his face until the match
+			burned out. &#8220;Only when you stay on it!&#8221; she hastened to say.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils
+			rose, with a yawn. &#8220;Mother, if you don&#8217;t mind, Eric and I will
+			take a little tramp before bed-time. It will make me sleep.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Very well; only don&#8217;t stay long. I&#8217;ll sit up and wait for you.
+			I like to lock up myself.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils put his hand on Eric&#8217;s shoulder, and the two tramped
+			down the hill and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad
+			beyond. Neither spoke. They swung along at an even
+			gait, Nils puffing at his pipe. There was no moon, and the
+			white road and the wide fields lay faint in the starlight. Over
+			everything was darkness and thick silence, and the smell of
+			dust and sunflowers. The brothers followed the road for a
+			mile or more without finding a place to sit down. Finally Nils
+			perched on a stile over the wire fence, and Eric sat on the
+			lower step.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I began to think you never would come back, Nils,&#8221; said
+			the boy softly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Didn&#8217;t I promise you I would?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes; but people don&#8217;t bother about promises they make to
+			babies. Did you really know you were going away for good
+			when you went to Chicago with the cattle that time?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I thought it very likely, if I could make my way.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could.&#8221;
+			Eric rubbed his shoulder against his brother&#8217;s knee.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;The hard thing was leaving home&#8212;you and father. It was
+			easy enough, once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got
+			awful homesick; used to cry myself to sleep. But I&#8217;d burned
+			my bridges.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You had always wanted to go, hadn&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood
+			still by the window?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the
+			gray darkness.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering
+			when they rustled at night? Well, they always whispered
+			to me about the sea. Sometimes they said names out of
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page94" title="94">&nbsp;</a>the geography books. In a high wind they had a desperate
+			sound, like something trying to tear loose.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How funny, Nils,&#8221; said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on
+			his hand. &#8220;That tree still talks like that, and &#8217;most always it
+			talks to me about you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric
+			whispered anxiously: &#8220;Hadn&#8217;t we better go back now?
+			Mother will get tired waiting for us.&#8221; They rose and took a
+			short cut home, through the pasture.</p>
+
+			<h4>II</h4>
+
+			<p>The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light
+			that came with dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room
+			reflected the glare that shone through the thin window-shades,
+			and he found it impossible to sleep. He dressed hurriedly
+			and slipped down the hall and up the back stairs to the
+			half-story room which he used to share with his little brother.
+			Eric, in a skimpy night-shirt, was sitting on the edge of the
+			bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair standing up in tufts
+			all over his head. When he saw Nils, he murmured something
+			confusedly and hustled his long legs into his trousers. &#8220;I
+			didn&#8217;t expect you&#8217;d be up so early, Nils,&#8221; he said, as his head
+			emerged from his blue shirt.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?&#8221; Nils gave him a
+			playful tap which bent the tall boy up like a clasp-knife. &#8220;See
+			here; I must teach you to box.&#8221; Nils thrust his hands into his
+			pockets and walked about. &#8220;You haven&#8217;t changed things much
+			up here. Got most of my old traps, haven&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung
+			over the dresser. &#8220;If this isn&#8217;t the stick Lou Sandberg killed
+			himself with!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did
+			he do it, Nils? You were with father when he found Lou,
+			weren&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as
+			we drove along, Lou&#8217;s place looked sort of forlorn, and we
+			thought we&#8217;d stop and cheer him up. When we found him
+			father said he&#8217;d been dead a couple days. He&#8217;d tied a piece of
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page95" title="95">&nbsp;</a>binding twine round his neck, made a noose in each end,
+			fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick, and let the stick
+			spring straight; strangled himself.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What made him kill himself such a silly way?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The simplicity of the boy&#8217;s question set Nils laughing. He
+			clapped little Eric on the shoulder. &#8220;What made him such a
+			silly as to kill himself at all, I should say!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and
+			died on him, didn&#8217;t they?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Sure they did; but he didn&#8217;t have cholera; and there were
+			plenty of hogs left in the world, weren&#8217;t there?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, but, if they weren&#8217;t his, how could they do him any
+			good?&#8221; Eric asked, in astonishment.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people&#8217;s
+			hogs. He was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself
+			for a pig&#8212;think of that, now!&#8221; Nils laughed all the way
+			downstairs, and quite embarrassed little Eric, who fell to
+			scrubbing his face and hands at the tin basin. While he was
+			patting his wet hair at the kitchen looking-glass, a heavy tread
+			sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped his comb. &#8220;Gracious,
+			there&#8217;s Mother. We must have talked too long.&#8221; He hurried
+			out to the shed, slipped on his overalls, and disappeared with
+			the milking-pails.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her
+			black hair shining from the application of a wet brush.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Good morning, Mother. Can&#8217;t I make the fire for you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, thank you, Nils. It&#8217;s no trouble to make a cob fire,
+			and I like to manage the kitchen stove myself.&#8221; Mrs. Ericson
+			paused with a shovel full of ashes in her hand. &#8220;I expect you
+			will be wanting to see your brothers as soon as possible. I&#8217;ll
+			take you up to Anders&#8217; place this morning. He&#8217;s threshing,
+			and most of our boys are over there.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Will Olaf be there?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between
+			shovels. &#8220;No; Olaf&#8217;s wheat is all in, put away in his
+			new barn. He got six thousand bushel this year. He&#8217;s going to
+			town to-day to get men to finish roofing his barn.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;So Olaf is building a new barn?&#8221; Nils asked absently.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Biggest one in the county, and almost done. You&#8217;ll likely
+			be here for the barn-raising. He&#8217;s going to have a supper and
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page96" title="96">&nbsp;</a>a dance as soon as everybody&#8217;s done threshing. Says it keeps
+			the voters in a good humor. I tell him that&#8217;s all nonsense; but
+			Olaf has a long head for politics.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik&#8217;s land?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke
+			curling up about the cobs. &#8220;Yes; he holds it in trust for the
+			children, Hilda and her brothers. He keeps strict account of
+			everything he raises on it, and puts the proceeds out at compound
+			interest for them.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up. The
+			door of the back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms
+			behind her, buttoning up her long gingham apron as she
+			came. He nodded to her gaily, and she twinkled at him out of
+			her little blue eyes, set far apart over her wide cheek-bones.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;There, Hilda, you grind the coffee&#8212;and just put in an
+			extra handful; I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong,&#8221; said
+			Mrs. Ericson, as she went out to the shed.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the
+			coffee-grinder between her knees and ground so hard that her
+			two braids bobbed and her face flushed under its broad spattering
+			of freckles. He noticed on her middle finger something
+			that had not been there last night, and that had evidently
+			been put on for company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set
+			garnet stone. As her hand went round and round he touched
+			the ring with the tip of his finger, smiling.</p>
+
+			<p>Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs.
+			Ericson had disappeared. &#8220;My Cousin Clara gave me that,&#8221;
+			she whispered bashfully. &#8220;She&#8217;s Cousin Olaf&#8217;s wife.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<h4>III</h4>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Olaf Ericson&#8212;Clara Vavrika, as many people still
+			called her&#8212;was moving restlessly about her big bare house
+			that morning. Her husband had left for the county town before
+			his wife was out of bed&#8212;her lateness in rising was one
+			of the many things the Ericson family had against her. Clara
+			seldom came downstairs before eight o&#8217;clock, and this morning
+			she was even later, for she had dressed with unusual care.
+			She put on, however, only a tight-fitting black dress, which
+			people thereabouts thought very plain. She was a tall, dark
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page97" title="97">&nbsp;</a>woman of thirty, with a rather sallow complexion and a touch
+			of dull salmon red in her cheeks, where the blood seemed to
+			burn under her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly above her
+			low forehead, was so black that there were distinctly blue
+			lights in it. Her black eyebrows were delicate half-moons and
+			her lashes were long and heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if
+			she had a strain of Tartar or gypsy blood, and were sometimes
+			full of fiery determination and sometimes dull and opaque.
+			Her expression was never altogether amiable; was often, indeed,
+			distinctly sullen, or, when she was animated, sarcastic.
+			She was most attractive in profile, for then one saw to advantage
+			her small, well-shaped head and delicate ears, and
+			felt at once that here was a very positive, if not an altogether
+			pleasing, personality.</p>
+
+			<p>The entire management of Mrs. Olaf&#8217;s household devolved
+			upon her aunt, Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting
+			woman of fifty. When Clara was a little girl her mother died,
+			and Johanna&#8217;s life had been spent in ungrudging service to her
+			niece. Clara, like many self-willed and discontented persons,
+			was really very apt, without knowing it, to do as other people
+			told her, and to let her destiny be decided for her by intelligences
+			much below her own. It was her Aunt Johanna who
+			had humored and spoiled her in her girlhood, who had got
+			her off to Chicago to study piano, and who had finally persuaded
+			her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match she would
+			be likely to make in that part of the country. Johanna Vavrika
+			had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country. She
+			was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental. She was
+			so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her
+			brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored
+			her niece because of her talent, because of her good looks and
+			masterful ways, but most of all because of her selfishness.</p>
+
+			<p>Clara&#8217;s marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna&#8217;s particular
+			triumph. She was inordinately proud of Olaf&#8217;s position, and
+			she found a sufficiently exciting career in managing Clara&#8217;s
+			house, in keeping it above the criticism of the Ericsons, in
+			pampering Olaf to keep him from finding fault with his wife,
+			and in concealing from every one Clara&#8217;s domestic infelicities.
+			While Clara slept of a morning, Johanna Vavrika was bustling
+			about, seeing that Olaf and the men had their breakfast, and
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page98" title="98">&nbsp;</a>that the cleaning or the butter-making or the washing was
+			properly begun by the two girls in the kitchen. Then, at about
+			eight o&#8217;clock, she would take Clara&#8217;s coffee up to her, and
+			chat with her while she drank it, telling her what was going
+			on in the house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently said that her
+			daughter-in-law would not know what day of the week it was
+			if Johanna did not tell her every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised
+			and pitied Johanna, but did not wholly dislike her. The
+			one thing she hated in her daughter-in-law above everything
+			else was the way in which Clara could come it over people. It
+			enraged her that the affairs of her son&#8217;s big, barnlike house
+			went on as well as they did, and she used to feel that in this
+			world we have to wait over-long to see the guilty punished.
+			&#8220;Suppose Johanna Vavrika died or got sick?&#8221; the old lady used
+			to say to Olaf. &#8220;Your wife wouldn&#8217;t know where to look for
+			her own dish-cloth.&#8221; Olaf only shrugged his shoulders. The
+			fact remained that Johanna did not die, and, although Mrs.
+			Ericson often told her she was looking poorly, she was never
+			ill. She seldom left the house, and she slept in a little room off
+			the kitchen. No Ericson, by night or day, could come prying
+			about there to find fault without her knowing it. Her one
+			weakness was that she was an incurable talker, and she sometimes
+			made trouble without meaning to.</p>
+
+			<p>This morning Clara was tying a wine-colored ribbon about
+			her throat when Johanna appeared with her coffee. After putting
+			the tray on a sewing-table, she began to make Clara&#8217;s
+			bed, chattering the while in Bohemian.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking. I&#8217;m going
+			down presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf.
+			He asked for prune preserves at breakfast, and I told him I
+			was out of them, and to bring some prunes and honey and
+			cloves from town.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara poured her coffee. &#8220;Ugh! I don&#8217;t see how men can eat
+			so much sweet stuff. In the morning, too!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Her aunt chuckled knowingly. &#8220;Bait a bear with honey, as
+			we say in the old country.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Was he cross?&#8221; her niece asked indifferently.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Olaf? Oh, no! He was in fine spirits. He&#8217;s never cross if
+			you know how to take him. I never knew a man to make so
+			little fuss about bills. I gave him a list of things to get a yard
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page99" title="99">&nbsp;</a>long, and he didn&#8217;t say a word; just folded it up and put it in
+			his pocket.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I can well believe he didn&#8217;t say a word,&#8221; Clara remarked
+			with a shrug. &#8220;Some day he&#8217;ll forget how to talk.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, but they say he&#8217;s a grand speaker in the Legislature.
+			He knows when to keep quiet. That&#8217;s why he&#8217;s got such influence
+			in politics. The people have confidence in him.&#8221; Johanna
+			beat up a pillow and held it under her fat chin while
+			she slipped on the case. Her niece laughed.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Maybe we could make people believe we were wise,
+			Aunty, if we held our tongues. Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson
+			that Norman threw me again last Saturday and turned my
+			foot? She&#8217;s been talking to Olaf.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Johanna fell into great confusion. &#8220;Oh, but, my precious,
+			the old lady asked for you, and she&#8217;s always so angry if I can&#8217;t
+			give an excuse. Anyhow, she needn&#8217;t talk; she&#8217;s always tearing
+			up something with that motor of hers.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went
+			to dust the parlor. Since there was not much there to dust,
+			this did not take very long. Olaf had built the house new for
+			her before their marriage, but her interest in furnishing it had
+			been short-lived. It went, indeed, little beyond a bath-tub and
+			her piano. They had disagreed about almost every other article
+			of furniture, and Clara had said she would rather have her
+			house empty than full of things she didn&#8217;t want. The house
+			was set in a hillside, and the west windows of the parlor
+			looked out above the kitchen yard thirty feet below. The east
+			windows opened directly into the front yard. At one of the
+			latter, Clara, while she was dusting, heard a low whistle. She
+			did not turn at once, but listened intently as she drew her
+			cloth slowly along the round of a chair. Yes, there it was:</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="call-out"><p>&#8220;<em>I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,</em>&#8221;</p></blockquote>
+
+			<p>She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight,
+			his hat in his hand, just outside the window. As she crossed
+			the room he leaned against the wire screen. &#8220;Aren&#8217;t you at all
+			surprised to see me, Clara Vavrika?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No; I was expecting to see you. Mother Ericson telephoned
+			Olaf last night that you were here.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils squinted and gave a long whistle. &#8220;Telephoned? That
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page100" title="100">&nbsp;</a>must have been while Eric and I were out walking. Isn&#8217;t she
+			enterprising? Lift this screen, won&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the
+			window-sill. As he stepped into the room she said: &#8220;You
+			didn&#8217;t think you were going to get ahead of your mother, did
+			you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He threw his hat on the piano. &#8220;Oh, I do sometimes. You
+			see, I&#8217;m ahead of her now. I&#8217;m supposed to be in Anders&#8217;
+			wheat-field. But, as we were leaving, Mother ran her car into
+			a soft place beside the road and sank up to the hubs. While
+			they were going for horses to pull her out, I cut away behind
+			the stacks and escaped.&#8221; Nils chuckled. Clara&#8217;s dull eyes lit up
+			as she looked at him admiringly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ve got them guessing already. I don&#8217;t know what your
+			mother said to Olaf over the telephone, but he came back
+			looking as if he&#8217;d seen a ghost, and he didn&#8217;t go to bed until a
+			dreadful hour&#8212;ten o&#8217;clock, I should think. He sat out on the
+			porch in the dark like a graven image. It had been one of his
+			talkative days, too.&#8221; They both laughed, easily and lightly, like
+			people who have laughed a great deal together; but they remained
+			standing.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen
+			ghosts, too, over in the threshing-field. What&#8217;s the matter
+			with them all?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara gave him a quick, searching look. &#8220;Well, for one
+			thing, they&#8217;ve always been afraid you have the other will.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils looked interested. &#8220;The other will?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another,
+			but they never knew what he did with it. They almost tore
+			the old house to pieces looking for it. They always suspected
+			that he carried on a clandestine correspondence with you, for
+			the one thing he would do was to get his own mail himself.
+			So they thought he might have sent the new will to you for
+			safekeeping. The old one, leaving everything to your mother,
+			was made long before you went away, and it&#8217;s understood
+			among them that it cuts you out&#8212;that she will leave all the
+			property to the others. Your father made the second will to
+			prevent that. I&#8217;ve been hoping you had it. It would be such
+			fun to spring it on them.&#8221; Clara laughed mirthfully, a thing
+			she did not often do now.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page101" title="101">&nbsp;</a>Nils shook his head reprovingly. &#8220;Come, now, you&#8217;re malicious.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, I&#8217;m not. But I&#8217;d like something to happen to stir them
+			all up, just for once. There never was such a family for having
+			nothing ever happen to them but dinner and threshing. I&#8217;d
+			almost be willing to die, just to have a funeral. <em>You</em> wouldn&#8217;t
+			stand it for three weeks.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys
+			with the finger of one hand. &#8220;I wouldn&#8217;t? My dear young
+			lady, how do you know what I can stand? <em>You</em> wouldn&#8217;t wait
+			to find out.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara flushed darkly and frowned. &#8220;I didn&#8217;t believe you
+			would ever come back&#8212;&#8221; she said defiantly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I
+			went away. However, all&#8217;s well that ends well, and I haven&#8217;t
+			come back to be a skeleton at the feast. We mustn&#8217;t quarrel.
+			Mother will be here with a search-warrant pretty soon.&#8221; He
+			swung round and faced her, thrusting his hands into his coat
+			pockets. &#8220;Come, you ought to be glad to see me, if you want
+			something to happen. I&#8217;m something, even without a will. We
+			can have a little fun, can&#8217;t we? I think we can!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She echoed him, &#8220;I think we can!&#8221; They both laughed and
+			their eyes sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger
+			than when she had put the velvet ribbon about her throat that
+			morning.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You know, I&#8217;m so tickled to see mother,&#8221; Nils went on. &#8220;I
+			didn&#8217;t know I was so proud of her. A regular pile-driver.
+			How about little pigtails, down at the house? Is Olaf doing
+			the square thing by those children?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara frowned pensively. &#8220;Olaf has to do something that
+			looks like the square thing, now that he&#8217;s a public man!&#8221; She
+			glanced drolly at Nils. &#8220;But he makes a good commission out
+			of it. On Sundays they all get together here and figure. He
+			lets Peter and Anders put in big bills for the keep of the two
+			boys, and he pays them out of the estate. They are always
+			having what they call accountings. Olaf gets something out of
+			it, too. I don&#8217;t know just how they do it, but it&#8217;s entirely a
+			family matter, as they say. And when the Ericsons say that&#8212;&#8221;
+			Clara lifted her eyebrows.</p>
+
+			<p>Just then the angry <em>honk-honk</em> of an approaching motor
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page102" title="102">&nbsp;</a>sounded from down the road. Their eyes met and they began
+			to laugh. They laughed as children do when they can not contain
+			themselves, and can not explain the cause of their mirth
+			to grown people, but share it perfectly together. When Clara
+			Vavrika sat down at the piano after he was gone, she felt that
+			she had laughed away a dozen years. She practised as if the
+			house were burning over her head.</p>
+
+			<p>When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front
+			seat of the motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but
+			she made no comment upon his truancy until she had turned
+			her car and was retracing her revolutions along the road that
+			ran by Olaf&#8217;s big pasture. Then she remarked dryly:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;If I were you I wouldn&#8217;t see too much of Olaf&#8217;s wife while
+			you are here. She&#8217;s the kind of woman who can&#8217;t see much of
+			men without getting herself talked about. She was a good
+			deal talked about before he married her.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Hasn&#8217;t Olaf tamed her?&#8221; Nils asked indifferently.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. &#8220;Olaf don&#8217;t
+			seem to have much luck, when it comes to wives. The first
+			one was meek enough, but she was always ailing. And this
+			one has her own way. He says if he quarreled with her she&#8217;d
+			go back to her father, and then he&#8217;d lose the Bohemian vote.
+			There are a great many Bohunks in this district. But when
+			you find a man under his wife&#8217;s thumb you can always be sure
+			there&#8217;s a soft spot in him somewhere.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. &#8220;She brought
+			him a good deal of money, didn&#8217;t she, besides the Bohemian
+			vote?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Ericson sniffed. &#8220;Well, she has a fair half section in her
+			own name, but I can&#8217;t see as that does Olaf much good. She
+			will have a good deal of property some day, if old Vavrika
+			don&#8217;t marry again. But I don&#8217;t consider a saloonkeeper&#8217;s
+			money as good as other people&#8217;s money.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils laughed outright. &#8220;Come, Mother, don&#8217;t let your prejudices
+			carry you that far. Money&#8217;s money. Old Vavrika&#8217;s a
+			mighty decent sort of saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about
+			him.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily: &#8220;Oh, I know you always
+			stood up for them! But hanging around there when you were
+			a boy never did you any good, Nils, nor any of the other boys
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page103" title="103">&nbsp;</a>who went there. There weren&#8217;t so many after her when she
+			married Olaf, let me tell you. She knew enough to grab her
+			chance.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils settled back in his seat. &#8220;Of course I liked to go there,
+			Mother, and you were always cross about it. You never took
+			the trouble to find out that it was the one jolly house in this
+			country for a boy to go to. All the rest of you were working
+			yourselves to death, and the houses were mostly a mess, full
+			of babies and washing and flies. Oh, it was all right&#8212;I understand
+			that; but you are young only once, and I happened
+			to be young then. Now, Vavrika&#8217;s was always jolly. He played
+			the violin, and I used to take my flute, and Clara played the
+			piano, and Johanna used to sing Bohemian songs. She always
+			had a big supper for us&#8212;herrings and pickles and poppyseed
+			bread, and lots of cake and preserves. Old Joe had been
+			in the army in the old country, and he could tell lots of good
+			stories. I can see him cutting bread, at the head of the table,
+			now. I don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;d have done when I was a kid if it
+			hadn&#8217;t been for the Vavrikas, really.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;And all the time he was taking money that other people
+			had worked hard in the fields for,&#8221; Mrs. Ericson observed.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;So do the circuses, Mother, and they&#8217;re a good thing.
+			People ought to get fun for some of their money. Even
+			father liked old Joe.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Your father,&#8221; Mrs. Ericson said grimly, &#8220;liked everybody.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own
+			place, Mrs. Ericson observed, &#8220;There&#8217;s Olaf&#8217;s buggy. He&#8217;s
+			stopped on his way from town.&#8221; Nils shook himself and prepared
+			to greet his brother, who was waiting on the porch.</p>
+
+			<p>Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and
+			movement. His head was large and square, like a block of
+			wood. When Nils, at a distance, tried to remember what his
+			brother looked like, he could recall only his heavy head, high
+			forehead, large nostrils, and pale-blue eyes, set far apart.
+			Olaf&#8217;s features were rudimentary: the thing one noticed was
+			the face itself, wide and flat and pale, devoid of any expression,
+			betraying his fifty years as little as it betrayed anything
+			else, and powerful by reason of its very stolidness. When Olaf
+			shook hands with Nils he looked at him from under his light
+			eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could ever say what that
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page104" title="104">&nbsp;</a>pale look might mean. The one thing he had always felt in
+			Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness
+			of wet loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the
+			most difficult of his brothers.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I may stay forever,&#8221; Nils answered gaily. &#8220;I like this
+			country better than I used to.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s been some work put into it since you left,&#8221; Olaf
+			remarked.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Exactly. I think it&#8217;s about ready to live in now&#8212;and I&#8217;m
+			about ready to settle down.&#8221; Nils saw his brother lower his
+			big head. (&#8220;Exactly like a bull,&#8221; he thought.) &#8220;Mother&#8217;s been
+			persuading me to slow down now, and go in for farming,&#8221; he
+			went on lightly.</p>
+
+			<p>Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. &#8220;Farming ain&#8217;t
+			learned in a day,&#8221; he brought out, still looking at the ground.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly.&#8221; Nils had not
+			meant to antagonize his brother, and he did not know now
+			why he was doing it. &#8220;Of course,&#8221; he went on, &#8220;I shouldn&#8217;t
+			expect to make a big success, as you fellows have done. But
+			then, I&#8217;m not ambitious. I won&#8217;t want much. A little land,
+			and some cattle, maybe.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted
+			to ask Nils what he had been doing all these years, that he
+			didn&#8217;t have a business somewhere he couldn&#8217;t afford to leave;
+			why he hadn&#8217;t more pride than to come back with only a little
+			sole-leather trunk to show for himself, and to present himself
+			as the only failure in the family. He did not ask one of these
+			questions, but he made them all felt distinctly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Humph!&#8221; Nils thought. &#8220;No wonder the man never talks,
+			when he can butt his ideas into you like that without ever
+			saying a word. I suppose he uses that kind of smokeless powder
+			on his wife all the time. But I guess she has her innings.&#8221;
+			He chuckled, and Olaf looked up. &#8220;Never mind me, Olaf. I
+			laugh without knowing why, like little Eric. He&#8217;s another
+			cheerful dog.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Eric,&#8221; said Olaf slowly, &#8220;is a spoiled kid. He&#8217;s just let his
+			mother&#8217;s best cow go dry because he don&#8217;t milk her right. I
+			was hoping you&#8217;d take him away somewhere and put him
+			into business. If he don&#8217;t do any good among strangers, he
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page105" title="105">&nbsp;</a>never will.&#8221; This was a long speech for Olaf, and as he finished
+			it he climbed into his buggy.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;Same old tricks,&#8221; he thought.
+			&#8220;Hits from behind you every time. What a whale of a man!&#8221;
+			He turned and went round to the kitchen, where his mother
+			was scolding little Eric for letting the gasoline get low.</p>
+
+			<h4>IV</h4>
+
+			<p>Joe Vavrika&#8217;s saloon was not in the county-seat, where Olaf
+			and Mrs. Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place,
+			a little Bohemian settlement which lay at the other end of the
+			county, ten level miles north of Olaf&#8217;s farm. Clara rode up to
+			see her father almost every day. Vavrika&#8217;s house was, so to
+			speak, in the back yard of his saloon. The garden between the
+			two buildings was inclosed by a high board fence as tight as a
+			partition, and in summer Joe kept beer-tables and wooden
+			benches among the gooseberry bushes under his little cherry
+			tree. At one of these tables Nils Ericson was seated in the late
+			afternoon, three days after his return home. Joe had gone in
+			to serve a customer, and Nils was lounging on his elbows,
+			looking rather mournfully into his half-emptied pitcher, when
+			he heard a laugh across the little garden. Clara, in her riding-habit,
+			was standing at the back door of the house, under the
+			grapevine trellis that old Joe had grown there long ago. Nils
+			rose.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Come out and keep your father and me company. We&#8217;ve
+			been gossiping all afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the
+			flies.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She shook her head. &#8220;No, I never come out here any
+			more. Olaf doesn&#8217;t like it. I must live up to my position, you
+			know.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with
+			the boys, as you used to? He <em>has</em> tamed you! Who keeps up
+			these flower-beds?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the
+			Bohemian papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is
+			open. What have you two been doing?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Talking, as I told you. I&#8217;ve been telling him about my
+			travels. I find I can&#8217;t talk much at home, not even to Eric.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page106" title="106">&nbsp;</a>Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a
+			white moth that was fluttering in the sunlight among the vine
+			leaves. &#8220;I suppose you will never tell me about all those
+			things.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf&#8217;s house, certainly.
+			What&#8217;s the matter with our talking here?&#8221; He pointed persuasively
+			with his hat to the bushes and the green table, where
+			the flies were singing lazily above the empty beer-glasses.</p>
+
+			<p>Clara shook her head weakly. &#8220;No, it wouldn&#8217;t do. Besides,
+			I am going now.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m on Eric&#8217;s mare. Would you be angry if I overtook
+			you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara looked back and laughed. &#8220;You might try and see. I
+			can leave you if I don&#8217;t want you. Eric&#8217;s mare can&#8217;t keep up
+			with Norman.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big
+			Joe, six feet four, with curly yellow hair and mustache,
+			clapped him on the shoulder. &#8220;Not a God-damn a your
+			money go in my drawer, you hear? Only next time you bring
+			your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty.&#8221; Joe wagged his fingers in imitation
+			of the flute-player&#8217;s position. &#8220;My Clara, she come all-a-time
+			Sundays an&#8217; play for me. She not like to play at Ericson&#8217;s
+			place.&#8221; He shook his yellow curls and laughed. &#8220;Not a God-damn
+			a fun at Ericson&#8217;s. You come a Sunday. You like-a fun.
+			No forget de flute.&#8221; Joe talked very rapidly and always tumbled
+			over his English. He seldom spoke it to his customers,
+			and had never learned much.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west
+			end of the village, where the houses and gardens scattered
+			into prairie-land and the road turned south. Far ahead of
+			him, in the declining light, he saw Clara Vavrika&#8217;s slender figure,
+			loitering on horseback. He touched his mare with the
+			whip, and shot along the white, level road, under the reddening
+			sky. When he overtook Olaf&#8217;s wife he saw that she had
+			been crying. &#8220;What&#8217;s the matter, Clara Vavrika?&#8221; he asked
+			kindly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there
+			with father. I wonder why I ever went away.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with
+			women: &#8220;That&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been wondering these many years.
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page107" title="107">&nbsp;</a>You were the last girl in the country I&#8217;d have picked for a wife
+			for Olaf. What made you do it, Clara?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbors&#8221;&#8212;Clara
+			tossed her head. &#8220;People were beginning to wonder.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;To wonder?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes&#8212;why I didn&#8217;t get married. I suppose I didn&#8217;t like to
+			keep them in suspense. I&#8217;ve discovered that most girls marry
+			out of consideration for the neighborhood.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed.
+			&#8220;I&#8217;d have gambled that one girl I knew would say, &#8216;Let the
+			neighborhood be damned.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara shook her head mournfully. &#8220;You see, they have it on
+			you, Nils; that is, if you&#8217;re a woman. They say you&#8217;re beginning
+			to go off. That&#8217;s what makes us get married: we can&#8217;t
+			stand the laugh.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils looked sidewise at her. He had never seen her head
+			droop before. Resignation was the last thing he would have
+			expected of her. &#8220;In your case, there wasn&#8217;t something else?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Something else?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I mean, you didn&#8217;t do it to spite somebody? Somebody
+			who didn&#8217;t come back?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara drew herself up. &#8220;Oh, I never thought you&#8217;d come
+			back. Not after I stopped writing to you, at least. <em>That</em> was all
+			over, long before I married Olaf.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It never occurred to you, then, that the meanest thing you
+			could do to me was to marry Olaf?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara laughed. &#8220;No; I didn&#8217;t know you were so fond of
+			Olaf.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils smoothed his horse&#8217;s mane with his glove. &#8220;You know,
+			Clara Vavrika, you are never going to stick it out. You&#8217;ll cut
+			away some day, and I&#8217;ve been thinking you might as well cut
+			away with me.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara threw up her chin. &#8220;Oh, you don&#8217;t know me as well
+			as you think. I won&#8217;t cut away. Sometimes, when I&#8217;m with
+			father, I feel like it. But I can hold out as long as the Ericsons
+			can. They&#8217;ve never got the best of me yet, and one can live, so
+			long as one isn&#8217;t beaten. If I go back to father, it&#8217;s all up with
+			Olaf in politics. He knows that, and he never goes much beyond
+			sulking. I&#8217;ve as much wit as the Ericsons. I&#8217;ll never leave
+			them unless I can show them a thing or two.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page108" title="108">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;You mean unless you can come it over them?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes&#8212;unless I go away with a man who is cleverer than
+			they are, and who has more money.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils whistled. &#8220;Dear me, you are demanding a good deal.
+			The Ericsons, take the lot of them, are a bunch to beat. But I
+			should think the excitement of tormenting them would have
+			worn off by this time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It has, I&#8217;m afraid,&#8221; Clara admitted mournfully.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Then why don&#8217;t you cut away? There are more amusing
+			games than this in the world. When I came home I thought it
+			might amuse me to bully a few quarter sections out of the
+			Ericsons; but I&#8217;ve almost decided I can get more fun for my
+			money somewhere else.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara took in her breath sharply. &#8220;Ah, you have got the
+			other will! That was why you came home!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, it wasn&#8217;t. I came home to see how you were getting
+			on with Olaf.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara struck her horse with the whip, and in a bound she
+			was far ahead of him. Nils dropped one word, &#8220;Damn!&#8221; and
+			whipped after her; but she leaned forward in her saddle and
+			fairly cut the wind. Her long riding-skirt rippled in the still
+			air behind her. The sun was just sinking behind the stubble in
+			a vast, clear sky, and the shadows drew across the fields so
+			rapidly that Nils could scarcely keep in sight the dark figure
+			on the road. When he overtook her he caught her horse by
+			the bridle. Norman reared, and Nils was frightened for her;
+			but Clara kept her seat.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Let me go, Nils Ericson!&#8221; she cried. &#8220;I hate you more than
+			any of them. You were created to torture me, the whole tribe
+			of you&#8212;to make me suffer in every possible way.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She struck her horse again and galloped away from him.
+			Nils set his teeth and looked thoughtful. He rode slowly
+			home along the deserted road, watching the stars come out in
+			the clear violet sky. They flashed softly into the limpid heavens,
+			like jewels let fall into clear water. They were a reproach,
+			he felt, to a sordid world. As he turned across the sand creek,
+			he looked up at the North Star and smiled, as if there were an
+			understanding between them. His mother scolded him for
+			being late for supper.</p>
+
+			<h4><a class="pagenum" id="page109" title="109">&nbsp;</a>V</h4>
+
+			<p>On Sunday afternoon Joe Vavrika, in his shirt-sleeves
+			and carpet-slippers, was sitting in his garden, smoking a long-tasseled
+			porcelain pipe with a hunting scene painted on
+			the bowl. Clara sat under the cherry tree, reading aloud to
+			him from the weekly Bohemian papers. She had worn a
+			white muslin dress under her riding-habit, and the leaves of
+			the cherry tree threw a pattern of sharp shadows over her
+			skirt. The black cat was dozing in the sunlight at her feet, and
+			Joe&#8217;s dachshund was scratching a hole under the scarlet geraniums
+			and dreaming of badgers. Joe was filling his pipe for
+			the third time since dinner, when he heard a knocking on the
+			fence. He broke into a loud guffaw and unlatched the little
+			door that led into the street. He did not call Nils by name,
+			but caught him by the hand and dragged him in. Clara stiffened
+			and the color deepened under her dark skin. Nils, too,
+			felt a little awkward. He had not seen her since the night
+			when she rode away from him and left him alone on the level
+			road between the fields. Joe dragged him to the wooden
+			bench beside the green table.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You bring de flute,&#8221; he cried, tapping the leather case under
+			Nils&#8217; arm. &#8220;Ah, das-a good! Now we have some liddle fun
+			like old times. I got somet&#8217;ing good for you.&#8221; Joe shook his
+			finger at Nils and winked his blue eyes, a bright clear eye, full
+			of fire, though the tiny blood-vessels on the ball were always a
+			little distended. &#8220;I got somet&#8217;ing for you from&#8221;&#8212;he paused
+			and waved his hand&#8212;&#8220;Hongarie. You know Hongarie? You
+			wait!&#8221; He pushed Nils down on the bench, and went through
+			the back door of his saloon.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils looked at Clara, who sat frigidly with her white
+			skirts drawn tight about her. &#8220;He didn&#8217;t tell you he had asked
+			me to come, did he? He wanted a party and proceeded to
+			arrange it. Isn&#8217;t he fun? Don&#8217;t be cross; let&#8217;s give him a good
+			time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara smiled and shook out her skirt. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t that like father?
+			And he has sat here so meekly all day. Well, I won&#8217;t pout. I&#8217;m
+			glad you came. He doesn&#8217;t have very many good times now
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page110" title="110">&nbsp;</a>any more. There are so few of his kind left. The second generation
+			are a tame lot.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Joe came back with a flask in one hand and three wine-glasses
+			caught by the stems between the fingers of the other.
+			These he placed on the table with an air of ceremony, and,
+			going behind Nils, held the flask between him and the sun,
+			squinting into it admiringly. &#8220;You know dis, Tokai? A great
+			friend of mine, he bring dis to me, a present out of Hongarie.
+			You know how much it cost, dis wine? Chust so much what it
+			weigh in gold. Nobody but de nobles drink him in Bohemie.
+			Many, many years I save him up, dis Tokai.&#8221; Joe whipped out
+			his official cork-screw and delicately removed the cork. &#8220;De
+			old man die what bring him to me, an&#8217; dis wine he lay on his
+			belly in my cellar an&#8217; sleep. An&#8217; now,&#8221; carefully pouring out
+			the heavy yellow wine, &#8220;an&#8217; now he wake up; and maybe he
+			wake us up, too!&#8221; He carried one of the glasses to his daughter
+			and presented it with great gallantry.</p>
+
+			<p>Clara shook her head, but, seeing her father&#8217;s disappointment,
+			relented. &#8220;You taste it first. I don&#8217;t want so much.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Joe sampled it with a beatific expression, and turned to
+			Nils. &#8220;You drink him slow, dis wine. He very soft, but he go
+			down hot. You see!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>After a second glass Nils declared that he couldn&#8217;t take any
+			more without getting sleepy. &#8220;Now get your fiddle, Vavrika,&#8221;
+			he said as he opened his flute-case.</p>
+
+			<p>But Joe settled back in his wooden rocker and wagged his
+			big carpet-slipper. &#8220;No-no-no-no-no-no-no! No play fiddle
+			now any more: too much ache in de finger,&#8221; waving them,
+			&#8220;all-a-time rheumatiz. You play de flute, te-tety-te-tety-te. Bohemie
+			songs.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve forgotten all the Bohemian songs I used to play with
+			you and Johanna. But here&#8217;s one that will make Clara pout.
+			You remember how her eyes used to snap when we called her
+			the Bohemian Girl?&#8221; Nils lifted his flute and began &#8220;When
+			Other Lips and Other Hearts,&#8221; and Joe hummed the air in a
+			husky baritone, waving his carpet-slipper. &#8220;Oh-h-h, das-a fine
+			music,&#8221; he cried, clapping his hands as Nils finished. &#8220;Now
+			&#8216;Marble Halls, Marble Halls&#8217;! Clara, you sing him.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara smiled and leaned back in her chair, beginning softly:</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="poem">
+				<p><a class="pagenum" id="page111" title="111">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;<em>I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,</em></p>
+				<p><em>With vassals and serfs at my knee,</em>&#8221;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+
+			<p class="continued_paragraph">and Joe hummed like a big bumble-bee.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;There&#8217;s one more you always played,&#8221; Clara said quietly;
+			&#8220;I remember that best.&#8221; She locked her hands over her knee
+			and began &#8220;The Heart Bowed Down,&#8221; and sang it through
+			without groping for the words. She was singing with a good
+			deal of warmth when she came to the end of the old song:</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="poem">
+				<p>&#8220;<em>For memory is the only friend</em></p>
+				<p><em>That grief can call its own.</em>&#8221;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+
+			<p>Joe flashed out his red silk handkerchief and blew his nose,
+			shaking his head. &#8220;No-no-no-no-no-no-no! Too sad, too sad!
+			I not like-a dat. Play quick somet&#8217;ing gay now.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils put his lips to the instrument, and Joe lay back in his
+			chair, laughing and singing, &#8220;Oh, Evelina, Sweet Evelina!&#8221;
+			Clara laughed, too. Long ago, when she and Nils went to
+			high school, the model student of their class was a very
+			homely girl in thick spectacles. Her name was Evelina Oleson;
+			she had a long, swinging walk which somehow suggested the
+			measure of that song, and they used mercilessly to sing it at
+			her.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Dat ugly Oleson girl, she teach in de school,&#8221; Joe gasped,
+			&#8220;an&#8217; she still walk chust like dat, yup-a, yup-a, yup-a, chust
+			like a camel she go! Now, Nils, we have some more li&#8217;l drink.
+			Oh, yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-<em>yes!</em> Dis time you haf to drink, and
+			Clara she haf to, so she show she not jealous. So, we all drink
+			to your girl. You not tell her name, eh? No-no-no, I no make
+			you tell. She pretty, eh? She make good sweetheart? I bet!&#8221;
+			Joe winked and lifted his glass. &#8220;How soon you get married?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils screwed up his eyes. &#8220;That I don&#8217;t know. When she
+			says.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Joe threw out his chest. &#8220;Das-a way boys talks. No way for
+			mans. Mans say, &#8216;You come to de church, an&#8217; get a hurry on
+			you.&#8217; Das-a way mans talks.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Maybe Nils hasn&#8217;t got enough to keep a wife,&#8221; put in
+			Clara ironically. &#8220;How about that, Nils?&#8221; she asked him
+			frankly, as if she wanted to know.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page112" title="112">&nbsp;</a>Nils looked at her coolly, raising one eyebrow. &#8220;Oh, I can
+			keep her, all right.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;The way she wants to be kept?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;With my wife, I&#8217;ll decide that,&#8221; replied Nils calmly. &#8220;I&#8217;ll
+			give her what&#8217;s good for her.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara made a wry face. &#8220;You&#8217;ll give her the strap, I expect,
+			like old Peter Oleson gave his wife.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;When she needs it,&#8221; said Nils lazily, locking his hands behind
+			his head and squinting up through the leaves of the
+			cherry tree. &#8220;Do you remember the time I squeezed the cherries
+			all over your clean dress, and Aunt Johanna boxed my
+			ears for me? My gracious, weren&#8217;t you mad! You had both
+			hands full of cherries, and I squeezed &#8217;em and made the juice
+			fly all over you. I liked to have fun with you; you&#8217;d get so mad.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;We <em>did</em> have fun, didn&#8217;t we? None of the other kids ever
+			had so much fun. We knew how to play.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils dropped his elbows on the table and looked steadily
+			across at her. &#8220;I&#8217;ve played with lots of girls since, but I haven&#8217;t
+			found one who was such good fun.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara laughed. The late afternoon sun was shining full in
+			her face, and deep in the back of her eyes there shone something
+			fiery, like the yellow drops of Tokai in the brown glass
+			bottle. &#8220;Can you still play, or are you only pretending?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I can play better than I used to, and harder.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you ever work, then?&#8221; She had not intended to say
+			it. It slipped out because she was confused enough to say just
+			the wrong thing.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I work between times.&#8221; Nils&#8217; steady gaze still beat upon
+			her. &#8220;Don&#8217;t you worry about my working, Mrs. Ericson.
+			You&#8217;re getting like all the rest of them.&#8221; He reached his
+			brown, warm hand across the table and dropped it on Clara&#8217;s,
+			which was cold as an icicle. &#8220;Last call for play, Mrs. Ericson!&#8221;
+			Clara shivered, and suddenly her hands and cheeks grew
+			warm. Her fingers lingered in his a moment, and they looked
+			at each other earnestly. Joe Vavrika had put the mouth of the
+			bottle to his lips and was swallowing the last drops of the
+			Tokai, standing. The sun, just about to sink behind his shop,
+			glistened on the bright glass, on his flushed face and curly
+			yellow hair. &#8220;Look,&#8221; Clara whispered; &#8220;that&#8217;s the way I want
+			to grow old.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<h4><a class="pagenum" id="page113" title="113">&nbsp;</a>VI</h4>
+
+			<p>On the day of Olaf Ericson&#8217;s barn-raising, his wife, for once
+			in a way, rose early. Johanna Vavrika had been baking cakes
+			and frying and boiling and spicing meats for a week beforehand,
+			but it was not until the day before the party was to take
+			place that Clara showed any interest in it. Then she was seized
+			with one of her fitful spasms of energy, and took the wagon
+			and little Eric and spent the day on Plum Creek, gathering
+			vines and swamp goldenrod to decorate the barn.</p>
+
+			<p>By four o&#8217;clock in the afternoon buggies and wagons began
+			to arrive at the big unpainted building in front of Olaf&#8217;s
+			house. When Nils and his mother came at five, there were
+			more than fifty people in the barn, and a great drove of children.
+			On the ground floor stood six long tables, set with the
+			crockery of seven flourishing Ericson families, lent for the occasion.
+			In the middle of each table was a big yellow pumpkin,
+			hollowed out and filled with woodbine. In one corner of the
+			barn, behind a pile of green-and-white-striped watermelons,
+			was a circle of chairs for the old people; the younger guests
+			sat on bushel measures or barbed-wire spools, and the children
+			tumbled about in the haymow. The box-stalls Clara had
+			converted into booths. The framework was hidden by goldenrod
+			and sheaves of wheat, and the partitions were covered
+			with wild grapevines full of fruit. At one of these Johanna
+			Vavrika watched over her cooked meats, enough to provision
+			an army; and at the next her kitchen girls had ranged the
+			ice-cream freezers, and Clara was already cutting pies and
+			cakes against the hour of serving. At the third stall, little
+			Hilda, in a bright pink lawn dress, dispensed lemonade
+			throughout the afternoon. Olaf, as a public man, had thought
+			it inadvisable to serve beer in his barn; but Joe Vavrika had
+			come over with two demijohns concealed in his buggy, and
+			after his arrival the wagon-shed was much frequented by the
+			men.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Hasn&#8217;t Cousin Clara fixed things lovely?&#8221; little Hilda whispered,
+			when Nils went up to her stall and asked for lemonade.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils leaned against the booth, talking to the excited little
+			girl and watching the people. The barn faced the west, and
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page114" title="114">&nbsp;</a>the sun, pouring in at the big doors, filled the whole interior
+			with a golden light, through which filtered fine particles of
+			dust from the haymow, where the children were romping.
+			There was a great chattering from the stall where Johanna
+			Vavrika exhibited to the admiring women her platters heaped
+			with fried chicken, her roasts of beef, boiled tongues, and
+			baked hams with cloves stuck in the crisp brown fat and garnished
+			with tansy and parsley. The older women, having
+			assured themselves that there were twenty kinds of cake,
+			not counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies, repaired to the
+			corner behind the pile of watermelons, put on their white
+			aprons, and fell to their knitting and fancy-work. They were
+			a fine company of old women, and a Dutch painter would
+			have loved to find them there together, where the sun made
+			bright patches on the floor and sent long, quivering shafts of
+			gold through the dusky shade up among the rafters. There
+			were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best black
+			dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined
+			hands; and several of almost heroic frame, not less massive
+			than old Mrs. Ericson herself. Few of them wore glasses,
+			and old Mrs. Svendsen, a Danish woman, who was quite
+			bald, wore the only cap among them. Mrs. Oleson, who had
+			twelve big grandchildren, could still show two braids of yellow
+			hair as thick as her own wrists. Among all these grandmothers
+			there were more brown heads than white. They all
+			had a pleased, prosperous air, as if they were more than satisfied
+			with themselves and with life. Nils, leaning against
+			Hilda&#8217;s lemonade-stand, watched them as they sat chattering
+			in four languages, their fingers never lagging behind their
+			tongues.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Look at them over there,&#8221; he whispered, detaining Clara
+			as she passed him. &#8220;Aren&#8217;t they the Old Guard? I&#8217;ve just
+			counted thirty hands. I guess they&#8217;ve wrung many a chicken&#8217;s
+			neck and warmed many a boy&#8217;s jacket for him in their time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the
+			Herculean labors those fifteen pairs of hands had performed:
+			of the cows they had milked, the butter they had made, the
+			gardens they had planted, the children and grandchildren they
+			had tended, the brooms they had worn out, the mountains of
+			food they had cooked. It made him dizzy. Clara Vavrika
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page115" title="115">&nbsp;</a>smiled a hard, enigmatical smile at him and walked rapidly
+			away. Nils&#8217; eyes followed her white figure as she went toward
+			the house. He watched her walking alone in the sunlight,
+			looked at her slender, defiant shoulders and her little hard-set
+			head with its coils of blue-black hair. &#8220;No,&#8221; he reflected;
+			&#8220;she&#8217;d never be like them, not if she lived here a hundred
+			years. She&#8217;d only grow more bitter. You can&#8217;t tame a wild
+			thing; you can only chain it. People aren&#8217;t all alike. I mustn&#8217;t
+			lose my nerve.&#8221; He gave Hilda&#8217;s pigtail a parting tweak and
+			set out after Clara. &#8220;Where to?&#8221; he asked, as he came upon
+			her in the kitchen.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m going to the cellar for preserves.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Let me go with you. I never get a moment alone with
+			you. Why do you keep out of my way?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara laughed. &#8220;I don&#8217;t usually get in anybody&#8217;s way.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils followed her down the stairs and to the far corner of
+			the cellar, where a basement window let in a stream of light.
+			From a swinging shelf Clara selected several glass jars, each
+			labeled in Johanna&#8217;s careful hand. Nils took up a brown flask.
+			&#8220;What&#8217;s this? It looks good.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It is. It&#8217;s some French brandy father gave me when I was
+			married. Would you like some? Have you a corkscrew? I&#8217;ll get
+			glasses.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>When she brought them, Nils took them from her and put
+			them down on the window-sill. &#8220;Clara Vavrika, do you remember
+			how crazy I used to be about you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara shrugged her shoulders. &#8220;Boys are always crazy about
+			somebody or other. I dare say some silly has been crazy about
+			Evelina Oleson. You got over it in a hurry.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Because I didn&#8217;t come back, you mean? I had to get on,
+			you know, and it was hard sledding at first. Then I heard
+			you&#8217;d married Olaf.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;And then you stayed away from a broken heart,&#8221; Clara
+			laughed.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;And then I began to think about you more than I had
+			since I first went away. I began to wonder if you were really
+			as you had seemed to me when I was a boy. I thought I&#8217;d like
+			to see. I&#8217;ve had lots of girls, but no one ever pulled me the
+			same way. The more I thought about you, the more I remembered
+			how it used to be&#8212;like hearing a wild tune you can&#8217;t
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page116" title="116">&nbsp;</a>resist, calling you out at night. It had been a long while since
+			anything had pulled me out of my boots, and I wondered
+			whether anything ever could again.&#8221; Nils thrust his hands
+			into his coat pockets and squared his shoulders, as his mother
+			sometimes squared hers, as Olaf, in a clumsier manner,
+			squared his. &#8220;So I thought I&#8217;d come back and see. Of course
+			the family have tried to do me, and I rather thought I&#8217;d bring
+			out father&#8217;s will and make a fuss. But they can have their old
+			land; they&#8217;ve put enough sweat into it.&#8221; He took the flask and
+			filled the two glasses carefully to the brim. &#8220;I&#8217;ve found out
+			what I want from the Ericsons. Drink <em>skoal</em>, Clara.&#8221; He lifted
+			his glass, and Clara took hers with downcast eyes. &#8220;Look at
+			me, Clara Vavrika. <em>Skoal!</em>&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She raised her burning eyes and answered fiercely: &#8220;<em>Skoal!</em>&#8221;</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">The barn supper began at six o&#8217;clock and lasted for two
+			hilarious hours. Yense Nelson had made a wager that he could
+			eat two whole fried chickens, and he did. Eli Swanson stowed
+			away two whole custard pies, and Nick Hermanson ate a
+			chocolate layer cake to the last crumb. There was even a
+			cooky contest among the children, and one thin, slablike Bohemian
+			boy consumed sixteen and won the prize, a ginger-bread
+			pig which Johanna Vavrika had carefully decorated with
+			red candies and burnt sugar. Fritz Sweiheart, the German carpenter,
+			won in the pickle contest, but he disappeared soon
+			after supper and was not seen for the rest of the evening. Joe
+			Vavrika said that Fritz could have managed the pickles all
+			right, but he had sampled the demijohn in his buggy too
+			often before sitting down to the table.</p>
+
+			<p>While the supper was being cleared away the two fiddlers
+			began to tune up for the dance. Clara was to accompany them
+			on her old upright piano, which had been brought down
+			from her father&#8217;s. By this time Nils had renewed old acquaintances.
+			Since his interview with Clara in the cellar, he had
+			been busy telling all the old women how young they looked,
+			and all the young ones how pretty they were, and assuring the
+			men that they had here the best farm-land in the world. He
+			had made himself so agreeable that old Mrs. Ericson&#8217;s friends
+			began to come up to her and tell how lucky she was to get her
+			smart son back again, and please to get him to play his flute.
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page117" title="117">&nbsp;</a>Joe Vavrika, who could still play very well when he forgot that
+			he had rheumatism, caught up a fiddle from Johnny Oleson
+			and played a crazy Bohemian dance tune that set the wheels
+			going. When he dropped the bow every one was ready to
+			dance.</p>
+
+			<p>Olaf, in a frock-coat and a solemn made-up necktie, led the
+			grand march with his mother. Clara had kept well out of <em>that</em>
+			by sticking to the piano. She played the march with a pompous
+			solemnity which greatly amused the prodigal son, who
+			went over and stood behind her.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, aren&#8217;t you rubbing it into them, Clara Vavrika? And
+			aren&#8217;t you lucky to have me here, or all your wit would be
+			thrown away.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m used to being witty for myself. It saves my life.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The fiddles struck up a polka, and Nils convulsed Joe
+			Vavrika by leading out Evelina Oleson, the homely school-teacher.
+			His next partner was a very fat Swedish girl, who,
+			although she was an heiress, had not been asked for the first
+			dance, but had stood against the wall in her tight, high-heeled
+			shoes, nervously fingering a lace handkerchief. She was soon
+			out of breath, so Nils led her, pleased and panting, to her
+			seat, and went over to the piano, from which Clara had been
+			watching his gallantry. &#8220;Ask Olena Yenson,&#8221; she whispered.
+			&#8220;She waltzes beautifully.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Olena, too, was rather inconveniently plump, handsome in
+			a smooth, heavy way, with a fine color and good-natured,
+			sleepy eyes. She was redolent of violet sachet powder, and
+			had warm, soft, white hands, but she danced divinely, moving
+			as smoothly as the tide coming in. &#8220;There, that&#8217;s something
+			like,&#8221; Nils said as he released her. &#8220;You&#8217;ll give me the next
+			waltz, won&#8217;t you? Now I must go and dance with my little
+			cousin.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Hilda was greatly excited when Nils went up to her stall
+			and held out his arm. Her little eyes sparkled, but she declared
+			that she could not leave her lemonade. Old Mrs. Ericson,
+			who happened along at this moment, said she would
+			attend to that, and Hilda came out, as pink as her pink dress.
+			The dance was a schottische, and in a moment her yellow
+			braids were fairly standing on end. &#8220;Bravo!&#8221; Nils cried encouragingly.
+			&#8220;Where did you learn to dance so nicely?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page118" title="118">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;My Cousin Clara taught me,&#8221; the little girl panted.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils found Eric sitting with a group of boys who were too
+			awkward or too shy to dance, and told him that he must
+			dance the next waltz with Hilda.</p>
+
+			<p>The boy screwed up his shoulders. &#8220;Aw, Nils, I can&#8217;t dance.
+			My feet are too big; I look silly.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t be thinking about yourself. It doesn&#8217;t matter how
+			boys look.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils had never spoken to him so sharply before, and Eric
+			made haste to scramble out of his corner and brush the straw
+			from his coat.</p>
+
+			<p>Clara nodded approvingly. &#8220;Good for you, Nils. I&#8217;ve been
+			trying to get hold of him. They dance very nicely together; I
+			sometimes play for them.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m obliged to you for teaching him. There&#8217;s no reason
+			why he should grow up to be a lout.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He&#8217;ll never be that. He&#8217;s more like you than any of them.
+			Only he hasn&#8217;t your courage.&#8221; From her slanting eyes Clara
+			shot forth one of those keen glances, admiring and at the
+			same time challenging, which she seldom bestowed on any
+			one, and which seemed to say, &#8220;Yes, I admire you, but I am
+			your equal.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara was proving a much better host than Olaf, who, once
+			the supper was over, seemed to feel no interest in anything
+			but the lanterns. He had brought a locomotive headlight
+			from town to light the revels, and he kept skulking about it as
+			if he feared the mere light from it might set his new barn on
+			fire. His wife, on the contrary, was cordial to every one, was
+			animated and even gay. The deep salmon color in her cheeks
+			burned vividly, and her eyes were full of life. She gave the
+			piano over to the fat Swedish heiress, pulled her father away
+			from the corner where he sat gossiping with his cronies, and
+			made him dance a Bohemian dance with her. In his youth Joe
+			had been a famous dancer, and his daughter got him so
+			limbered up that every one sat round and applauded them.
+			The old ladies were particularly delighted, and made them
+			go through the dance again. From their corner where they
+			watched and commented, the old women kept time with their
+			feet and hands, and whenever the fiddles struck up a new air
+			old Mrs. Svendsen&#8217;s white cap would begin to bob.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page119" title="119">&nbsp;</a>Clara was waltzing with little Eric when Nils came up to
+			them, brushed his brother aside, and swung her out among
+			the dancers. &#8220;Remember how we used to waltz on rollers at
+			the old skating-rink in town? I suppose people don&#8217;t do that
+			any more. We used to keep it up for hours. You know, we
+			never did moon around as other boys and girls did. It was
+			dead serious with us from the beginning. When we were
+			most in love with each other, we used to fight. You were
+			always pinching people; your fingers were like little nippers.
+			A regular snapping-turtle, you were. Lord, how you&#8217;d like
+			Stockholm! Sit out in the streets in front of cafés and talk all
+			night in summer. Just like a reception&#8212;officers and ladies
+			and funny English people. Jolliest people in the world, the
+			Swedes, once you get them going. Always drinking things&#8212;champagne
+			and stout mixed, half-and-half; serve it out of big
+			pitchers, and serve plenty. Slow pulse, you know; they can
+			stand a lot. Once they light up, they&#8217;re glow-worms, I can tell
+			you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;All the same, you don&#8217;t really like gay people.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;<em>I</em> don&#8217;t?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No; I could see that when you were looking at the old
+			women there this afternoon. They&#8217;re the kind you really admire,
+			after all; women like your mother. And that&#8217;s the kind
+			you&#8217;ll marry.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Is it, Miss Wisdom? You&#8217;ll see who I&#8217;ll marry, and she
+			won&#8217;t have a domestic virtue to bless herself with. She&#8217;ll be a
+			snapping-turtle, and she&#8217;ll be a match for me. All the same,
+			they&#8217;re a fine bunch of old dames over there. You admire
+			them yourself.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, I don&#8217;t; I detest them.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You won&#8217;t, when you look back on them from Stockholm
+			or Budapest. Freedom settles all that. Oh, but you&#8217;re the real
+			Bohemian Girl, Clara Vavrika!&#8221; Nils laughed down at her sullen
+			frown and began mockingly to sing:</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="poem">
+				<p>&#8220;<em>Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me</em></p>
+				<p><em>Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?</em>&#8221;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+
+			<p>Clara clutched his shoulder. &#8220;Hush, Nils; every one is looking
+			at you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page120" title="120">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;I don&#8217;t care. They can&#8217;t gossip. It&#8217;s all in the family, as the
+			Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda&#8217;s patrimony
+			amongst them. Besides, we&#8217;ll give them something to talk
+			about when we hit the trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to
+			them! They haven&#8217;t had anything so interesting to chatter
+			about since the grasshopper year. It&#8217;ll give them a new lease
+			of life. And Olaf won&#8217;t lose the Bohemian vote, either.
+			They&#8217;ll have the laugh on him so that they&#8217;ll vote two apiece.
+			They&#8217;ll send him to Congress. They&#8217;ll never forget his barn
+			party, or us. They&#8217;ll always remember us as we&#8217;re dancing
+			together now. We&#8217;re making a legend. Where&#8217;s my waltz,
+			boys?&#8221; he called as they whirled past the fiddlers.</p>
+
+			<p>The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and
+			began a new air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell
+			from a quick waltz to a long, slow glide:</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="poem">
+				<p>&#8220;<em>When other lips and other hearts</em></p>
+				<p class="i2"><em>Their tale of love shall tell,</em></p>
+				<p><em>In language whose excess imparts</em></p>
+				<p class="i2"><em>The power they feel so well,</em>&#8221;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+
+			<p>The old women applauded vigorously. &#8220;What a gay one he
+			is, that Nils!&#8221; And old Mrs. Svendsen&#8217;s cap lurched dreamily
+			from side to side to the flowing measure of the dance.</p>
+
+			<blockquote class="poem">
+				<p>&#8220;<em>Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,</em></p>
+				<p class="i2"><em>And you&#8217;ll remember me.</em>&#8221;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+
+			<h4>VII</h4>
+
+			<p>The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped
+			fields lay yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks
+			threw sharp black shadows. The roads were white rivers of
+			dust. The sky was a deep, crystalline blue, and the stars were
+			few and faint. Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have
+			sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer
+			moon. The splendor of it seemed to transcend human life and
+			human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every
+			time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one
+			were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river of melody.
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page121" title="121">&nbsp;</a>Near the road, Nils Ericson was lying against a straw stack in
+			Olaf&#8217;s wheat-field. His own life seemed strange and unfamiliar
+			to him, as if it were something he had read about, or
+			dreamed, and forgotten. He lay very still, watching the white
+			road that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields, and
+			then, at a distance, reappeared over a little hill. At last, against
+			this white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got
+			up and walked to the edge of the field. &#8220;She is passing the
+			row of poplars now,&#8221; he thought. He heard the padded beat
+			of hoofs along the dusty road, and as she came into sight he
+			stepped out and waved his arms. Then, for fear of frightening
+			the horse, he drew back and waited. Clara had seen him, and
+			she came up at a walk. Nils took the horse by the bit and
+			stroked his neck.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What are you doing out so late, Clara Vavrika? I went
+			to the house, but Johanna told me you had gone to your
+			father&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Who can stay in the house on a night like this? Aren&#8217;t you
+			out yourself?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Ah, but that&#8217;s another matter.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils turned the horse into the field.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What are you doing? Where are you taking Norman?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Not far, but I want to talk to you to-night; I have something
+			to say to you. I can&#8217;t talk to you at the house, with Olaf
+			sitting there on the porch, weighing a thousand tons.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara laughed. &#8220;He won&#8217;t be sitting there now. He&#8217;s in bed
+			by this time, and asleep&#8212;weighing a thousand tons.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils plodded on across the stubble. &#8220;Are you really going
+			to spend the rest of your life like this, night after night, summer
+			after summer? Haven&#8217;t you anything better to do on a
+			night like this than to wear yourself and Norman out tearing
+			across the country to your father&#8217;s and back? Besides, your
+			father won&#8217;t live forever, you know. His little place will be
+			shut up or sold, and then you&#8217;ll have nobody but the Ericsons.
+			You&#8217;ll have to fasten down the hatches for the winter
+			then.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara moved her head restlessly. &#8220;Don&#8217;t talk about that. I
+			try never to think of it. If I lost father I&#8217;d lose everything,
+			even my hold over the Ericsons.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page122" title="122">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;Bah! You&#8217;d lose a good deal more than that. You&#8217;d lose
+			your race, everything that makes you yourself. You&#8217;ve lost a
+			good deal of it now.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Of what?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Of your love of life, your capacity for delight.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara put her hands up to her face. &#8220;I haven&#8217;t, Nils Ericson,
+			I haven&#8217;t! Say anything to me but that. I won&#8217;t have it!&#8221; she
+			declared vehemently.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils led the horse up to a straw stack, and turned to Clara,
+			looking at her intently, as he had looked at her that
+			Sunday afternoon at Vavrika&#8217;s. &#8220;But why do you fight for that
+			so? What good is the power to enjoy, if you never enjoy?
+			Your hands are cold again; what are you afraid of all the time?
+			Ah, you&#8217;re afraid of losing it; that&#8217;s what&#8217;s the matter with
+			you! And you will, Clara Vavrika, you will! When I used to
+			know you&#8212;listen; you&#8217;ve caught a wild bird in your hand,
+			haven&#8217;t you, and felt its heart beat so hard that you were
+			afraid it would shatter its little body to pieces? Well, you used
+			to be just like that, a slender, eager thing with a wild delight
+			inside you. That is how I remembered you. And I come back
+			and find you&#8212;a bitter woman. This is a perfect ferret fight
+			here; you live by biting and being bitten. Can&#8217;t you remember
+			what life used to be? Can&#8217;t you remember that old delight?
+			I&#8217;ve never forgotten it, or known its like, on land or
+			sea.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He drew the horse under the shadow of the straw stack.
+			Clara felt him take her foot out of the stirrup, and she slid
+			softly down into his arms. He kissed her slowly. He was a
+			deliberate man, but his nerves were steel when he wanted
+			anything. Something flashed out from him like a knife out of
+			a sheath. Clara felt everything slipping away from her; she
+			was flooded by the summer night. He thrust his hand into his
+			pocket, and then held it out at arm&#8217;s length. &#8220;Look,&#8221; he said.
+			The shadow of the straw stack fell sharp across his wrist, and
+			in the palm of his hand she saw a silver dollar shining.
+			&#8220;That&#8217;s my pile,&#8221; he muttered; &#8220;will you go with me?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara nodded, and dropped her forehead on his shoulder.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils took a deep breath. &#8220;Will you go with me to-night?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Where?&#8221; she whispered softly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;To town, to catch the midnight flyer.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page123" title="123">&nbsp;</a>Clara lifted her head and pulled herself together. &#8220;Are you
+			crazy, Nils? We couldn&#8217;t go away like that.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the only way we ever will go. You can&#8217;t sit on the
+			bank and think about it. You have to plunge. That&#8217;s the way
+			I&#8217;ve always done, and it&#8217;s the right way for people like you
+			and me. There&#8217;s nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You&#8217;ve
+			only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through
+			your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do
+			that. You&#8217;d be better off tramping the roads with me than you
+			are here.&#8221; Nils held back her head and looked into her eyes.
+			&#8220;But I&#8217;m not that kind of a tramp, Clara. You won&#8217;t have to
+			take in sewing. I&#8217;m with a Norwegian shipping line; came
+			over on business with the New York offices, but now I&#8217;m going
+			straight back to Bergen. I expect I&#8217;ve got as much money
+			as the Ericsons. Father sent me a little to get started. They
+			never knew about that. There, I hadn&#8217;t meant to tell you; I
+			wanted you to come on your own nerve.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara looked off across the fields. &#8220;It isn&#8217;t that, Nils, but
+			something seems to hold me. I&#8217;m afraid to pull against it. It
+			comes out of the ground, I think.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I know all about that. One has to tear loose. You&#8217;re not
+			needed here. Your father will understand; he&#8217;s made like us.
+			As for Olaf, Johanna will take better care of him than ever you
+			could. It&#8217;s now or never, Clara Vavrika. My bag&#8217;s at the station;
+			I smuggled it there yesterday.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara clung to him and hid her face against his shoulder.
+			&#8220;Not to-night,&#8221; she whispered. &#8220;Sit here and talk to me to-night.
+			I don&#8217;t want to go anywhere to-night. I may never love
+			you like this again.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Nils laughed through his teeth. &#8220;You can&#8217;t come that on
+			me. That&#8217;s not my way, Clara Vavrika. Eric&#8217;s mare is over
+			there behind the stacks, and I&#8217;m off on the midnight. It&#8217;s
+			good-by, or off across the world with me. My carriage won&#8217;t
+			wait. I&#8217;ve written a letter to Olaf; I&#8217;ll mail it in town. When
+			he reads it he won&#8217;t bother us&#8212;not if I know him. He&#8217;d
+			rather have the land. Besides, I could demand an investigation
+			of his administration of Cousin Henrik&#8217;s estate, and that
+			would be bad for a public man. You&#8217;ve no clothes, I know;
+			but you can sit up to-night, and we can get everything on the
+			way. Where&#8217;s your old dash, Clara Vavrika? What&#8217;s become of
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page124" title="124">&nbsp;</a>your Bohemian blood? I used to think you had courage
+			enough for anything. Where&#8217;s your nerve&#8212;what are you
+			waiting for?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara drew back her head, and he saw the slumberous fire
+			in her eyes. &#8220;For you to say one thing, Nils Ericson.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I never say that thing to any woman, Clara Vavrika.&#8221; He
+			leaned back, lifted her gently from the ground, and whispered
+			through his teeth: &#8220;But I&#8217;ll never, never let you go, not to any
+			man on earth but me! Do you understand me? Now, wait
+			here.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Clara sank down on a sheaf of wheat and covered her face
+			with her hands. She did not know what she was going to
+			do&#8212;whether she would go or stay. The great, silent country
+			seemed to lay a spell upon her. The ground seemed to hold
+			her as if by roots. Her knees were soft under her. She felt as if
+			she could not bear separation from her old sorrows, from her
+			old discontent. They were dear to her, they had kept her alive,
+			they were a part of her. There would be nothing left of her if
+			she were wrenched away from them. Never could she pass
+			beyond that sky-line against which her restlessness had beat so
+			many times. She felt as if her soul had built itself a nest there
+			on that horizon at which she looked every morning and every
+			evening, and it was dear to her, inexpressibly dear. She
+			pressed her fingers against her eyeballs to shut it out. Beside
+			her she heard the tramping of horses in the soft earth. Nils
+			said nothing to her. He put his hands under her arms and
+			lifted her lightly to her saddle. Then he swung himself into
+			his own.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;We shall have to ride fast to catch the midnight train. A
+			last gallop, Clara Vavrika. Forward!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>There was a start, a thud of hoofs along the moonlit road,
+			two dark shadows going over the hill; and then the great, still
+			land stretched untroubled under the azure night. Two shadows
+			had passed.</p>
+
+			<h4>VIII</h4>
+
+			<p>A year after the flight of Olaf Ericson&#8217;s wife, the night train
+			was steaming across the plains of Iowa. The conductor was
+			hurrying through one of the day-coaches, his lantern on his
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page125" title="125">&nbsp;</a>arm, when a lank, fair-haired boy sat up in one of the plush
+			seats and tweaked him by the coat.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What is the next stop, please, sir?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Red Oak, Iowa. But you go through to Chicago, don&#8217;t
+			you?&#8221; He looked down, and noticed that the boy&#8217;s eyes were
+			red and his face was drawn, as if he were in trouble.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes. But I was wondering whether I could get off at the
+			next place and get a train back to Omaha.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, I suppose you could. Live in Omaha?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No. In the western part of the State. How soon do we get
+			to Red Oak?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Forty minutes. You&#8217;d better make up your mind, so I can
+			tell the baggageman to put your trunk off.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, never mind about that! I mean, I haven&#8217;t got any,&#8221;
+			the boy added, blushing.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Run away,&#8221; the conductor thought, as he slammed the
+			coach door behind him.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric Ericson crumpled down in his seat and put his brown
+			hand to his forehead. He had been crying, and he had had no
+			supper, and his head was aching violently. &#8220;Oh, what shall I
+			do?&#8221; he thought, as he looked dully down at his big shoes.
+			&#8220;Nils will be ashamed of me; I haven&#8217;t got any spunk.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ever since Nils had run away with his brother&#8217;s wife, life at
+			home had been hard for little Eric. His mother and Olaf both
+			suspected him of complicity. Mrs. Ericson was harsh and
+			fault-finding, constantly wounding the boy&#8217;s pride; and Olaf
+			was always getting her against him.</p>
+
+			<p>Joe Vavrika heard often from his daughter. Clara had always
+			been fond of her father, and happiness made her kinder. She
+			wrote him long accounts of the voyage to Bergen, and of the
+			trip she and Nils took through Bohemia to the little town
+			where her father had grown up and where she herself was
+			born. She visited all her kinsmen there, and sent her father
+			news of his brother, who was a priest; of his sister, who had
+			married a horse-breeder&#8212;of their big farm and their many
+			children. These letters Joe always managed to read to little
+			Eric. They contained messages for Eric and Hilda. Clara sent
+			presents, too, which Eric never dared to take home and which
+			poor little Hilda never even saw, though she loved to hear
+			Eric tell about them when they were out getting the eggs
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page126" title="126">&nbsp;</a>together. But Olaf once saw Eric coming out of Vavrika&#8217;s
+			house,&#8212;the old man had never asked the boy to come into
+			his saloon,&#8212;and Olaf went straight to his mother and told
+			her. That night Mrs. Ericson came to Eric&#8217;s room after he was
+			in bed and made a terrible scene. She could be very terrifying
+			when she was really angry. She forbade him ever to speak to
+			Vavrika again, and after that night she would not allow him
+			to go to town alone. So it was a long while before Eric got
+			any more news of his brother. But old Joe suspected what was
+			going on, and he carried Clara&#8217;s letters about in his pocket.
+			One Sunday he drove out to see a German friend of his, and
+			chanced to catch sight of Eric, sitting by the cattle-pond in
+			the big pasture. They went together into Fritz Oberlies&#8217; barn,
+			and read the letters and talked things over. Eric admitted that
+			things were getting hard for him at home. That very night old
+			Joe sat down and laboriously penned a statement of the case
+			to his daughter.</p>
+
+			<p>Things got no better for Eric. His mother and Olaf felt
+			that, however closely he was watched, he still, as they said,
+			&#8220;heard.&#8221; Mrs. Ericson could not admit neutrality. She had
+			sent Johanna Vavrika packing back to her brother&#8217;s, though
+			Olaf would much rather have kept her than Anders&#8217; eldest
+			daughter, whom Mrs. Ericson installed in her place. He was
+			not so high-handed as his mother, and he once sulkily told
+			her that she might better have taught her granddaughter to
+			cook before she sent Johanna away. Olaf could have borne a
+			good deal for the sake of prunes spiced in honey, the secret of
+			which Johanna had taken away with her.</p>
+
+			<p>At last two letters came to Joe Vavrika: one from Nils, inclosing
+			a postal order for money to pay Eric&#8217;s passage to Bergen,
+			and one from Clara, saying that Nils had a place for Eric
+			in the offices of his company, that he was to live with them,
+			and that they were only waiting for him to come. He was to
+			leave New York on one of the boats of Nils&#8217; own line; the
+			captain was one of their friends, and Eric was to make himself
+			known at once.</p>
+
+			<p>Nils&#8217; directions were so explicit that a baby could have followed
+			them, Eric felt. And here he was, nearing Red Oak,
+			Iowa, and rocking backward and forward in despair. Never
+			had he loved his brother so much, and never had the big
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page127" title="127">&nbsp;</a>world called to him so hard. But there was a lump in his
+			throat which would not go down. Ever since nightfall he had
+			been tormented by the thought of his mother, alone in that
+			big house that had sent forth so many men. Her unkindness
+			now seemed so little, and her loneliness so great. He remembered
+			everything she had ever done for him: how frightened
+			she had been when he tore his hand in the corn-sheller, and
+			how she wouldn&#8217;t let Olaf scold him. When Nils went away
+			he didn&#8217;t leave his mother all alone, or he would never have
+			gone. Eric felt sure of that.</p>
+
+			<p>The train whistled. The conductor came in, smiling not unkindly.
+			&#8220;Well, young man, what are you going to do? We stop
+			at Red Oak in three minutes.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, thank you. I&#8217;ll let you know.&#8221; The conductor went
+			out, and the boy doubled up with misery. He couldn&#8217;t let his
+			one chance go like this. He felt for his breast pocket and
+			crackled Nils&#8217; kind letter to give him courage. He didn&#8217;t want
+			Nils to be ashamed of him. The train stopped. Suddenly he
+			remembered his brother&#8217;s kind, twinkling eyes, that always
+			looked at you as if from far away. The lump in his throat
+			softened. &#8220;Ah, but Nils, Nils would <em>understand</em>!&#8221; he thought.
+			&#8220;That&#8217;s just it about Nils; he always understands.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>A lank, pale boy with a canvas telescope stumbled off the
+			train to the Red Oak siding, just as the conductor called, &#8220;All
+			aboard!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">The next night Mrs. Ericson was sitting alone in her
+			wooden rocking-chair on the front porch. Little Hilda had
+			been sent to bed and had cried herself to sleep. The old woman&#8217;s
+			knitting was in her lap, but her hands lay motionless on
+			top of it. For more than an hour she had not moved a muscle.
+			She simply sat, as only the Ericsons and the mountains can
+			sit. The house was dark, and there was no sound but the
+			croaking of the frogs down in the pond of the little pasture.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric did not come home by the road, but across the fields,
+			where no one could see him. He set his telescope down softly
+			in the kitchen shed, and slipped noiselessly along the path to
+			the front porch. He sat down on the step without saying anything.
+			Mrs. Ericson made no sign, and the frogs croaked on.
+			At last the boy spoke timidly.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page128" title="128">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;I&#8217;ve come back, Mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Very well,&#8221; said Mrs. Ericson.</p>
+
+			<p>Eric leaned over and picked up a little stick out of the grass.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How about the milking?&#8221; he faltered.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s been done, hours ago.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Who did you get?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Get? I did it myself. I can milk as good as any of you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eric slid along the step nearer to her. &#8220;Oh, Mother, why
+			did you?&#8221; he asked sorrowfully. &#8220;Why didn&#8217;t you get one of
+			Otto&#8217;s boys?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t want anybody to know I was in need of a boy,&#8221;
+			said Mrs. Ericson bitterly. She looked straight in front of her
+			and her mouth tightened. &#8220;I always meant to give you the
+			home farm,&#8221; she added.</p>
+
+			<p>The boy started and slid closer. &#8220;Oh, Mother,&#8221; he faltered,
+			&#8220;I don&#8217;t care about the farm. I came back because I thought
+			you might be needing me, maybe.&#8221; He hung his head and got
+			no further.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Very well,&#8221; said Mrs. Ericson. Her hand went out from
+			her suddenly and rested on his head. Her fingers twined
+			themselves in his soft, pale hair. His tears splashed down on
+			the boards; happiness filled his heart.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>McClure&#8217;s</cite>, August 1912</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="consequences" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page129" title="129">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">Consequences <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Henry Eastman, a lawyer, aged forty, was standing beside
+			the Flatiron building in a driving November rainstorm,
+			signaling frantically for a taxi. It was six-thirty, and
+			everything on wheels was engaged. The streets were in confusion
+			about him, the sky was in turmoil above him, and the
+			Flatiron building, which seemed about to blow down, threw
+			water like a mill-shoot. Suddenly, out of the brutal struggle of
+			men and cars and machines and people tilting at each other
+			with umbrellas, a quiet, well-mannered limousine paused before
+			him, at the curb, and an agreeable, ruddy countenance
+			confronted him through the open window of the car.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t you want me to pick you up, Mr. Eastman? I&#8217;m
+			running directly home now.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman recognized Kier Cavenaugh, a young man of pleasure,
+			who lived in the house on Central Park South, where he
+			himself had an apartment.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t I?&#8221; he exclaimed, bolting into the car. &#8220;I&#8217;ll risk getting
+			your cushions wet without compunction. I came up in a
+			taxi, but I didn&#8217;t hold it. Bad economy. I thought I saw your
+			car down on Fourteenth Street about half an hour ago.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The owner of the car smiled. He had a pleasant, round face
+			and round eyes, and a fringe of smooth, yellow hair showed
+			under the rim of his soft felt hat. &#8220;With a lot of little broilers
+			fluttering into it? You did. I know some girls who work in the
+			cheap shops down there. I happened to be down-town and I
+			stopped and took a load of them home. I do sometimes.
+			Saves their poor little clothes, you know. Their shoes are
+			never any good.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman looked at his rescuer. &#8220;Aren&#8217;t they notoriously
+			afraid of cars and smooth young men?&#8221; he inquired.</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh shook his head. &#8220;They know which cars are safe
+			and which are chancy. They put each other wise. You have to
+			take a bunch at a time, of course. The Italian girls can never
+			come along; their men shoot. The girls understand, all right;
+			but their fathers don&#8217;t. One gets to see queer places, sometimes,
+			taking them home.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page130" title="130">&nbsp;</a>Eastman laughed drily. &#8220;Every time I touch the circle of
+			your acquaintance, Cavenaugh, it&#8217;s a little wider. You must
+			know New York pretty well by this time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, but I&#8217;m on my good behavior below Twenty-third
+			Street,&#8221; the young man replied with simplicity. &#8220;My little
+			friends down there would give me a good character. They&#8217;re
+			wise little girls. They have grand ways with each other, a romantic
+			code of loyalty. You can find a good many of the lost
+			virtues among them.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The car was standing still in a traffic block at Fortieth
+			Street, when Cavenaugh suddenly drew his face away from
+			the window and touched Eastman&#8217;s arm. &#8220;Look, please. You
+			see that hansom with the bony gray horse&#8212;driver has a broken
+			hat and red flannel around his throat. Can you see who is
+			inside?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman peered out. The hansom was just cutting across
+			the line, and the driver was making a great fuss about it, bobbing
+			his head and waving his whip. He jerked his dripping
+			old horse into Fortieth Street and clattered off past the Public
+			Library grounds toward Sixth Avenue. &#8220;No, I couldn&#8217;t see the
+			passenger. Someone you know?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Could you see whether there was a passenger?&#8221; Cavenaugh
+			asked.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Why, yes. A man, I think. I saw his elbow on the apron.
+			No driver ever behaves like that unless he has a passenger.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, I may have been mistaken,&#8221; Cavenaugh murmured
+			absent-mindedly. Ten minutes or so later, after Cavenaugh&#8217;s
+			car had turned off Fifth Avenue into Fifty-eighth Street, Eastman
+			exclaimed, &#8220;There&#8217;s your same cabby, and his cart&#8217;s
+			empty. He&#8217;s headed for a drink now, I suppose.&#8221; The driver
+			in the broken hat and the red flannel neck cloth was still brandishing
+			the whip over his old gray. He was coming from the
+			west now, and turned down Sixth Avenue, under the elevated.</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh&#8217;s car stopped at the bachelor apartment house
+			between Sixth and Seventh Avenues where he and Eastman
+			lived, and they went up in the elevator together. They were
+			still talking when the lift stopped at Cavenaugh&#8217;s floor, and
+			Eastman stepped out with him and walked down the hall,
+			finishing his sentence while Cavenaugh found his latch-key.
+			When he opened the door, a wave of fresh cigarette smoke
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page131" title="131">&nbsp;</a>greeted them. Cavenaugh stopped short and stared into his
+			hallway. &#8220;Now how in the devil&#8212;!&#8221; he exclaimed angrily.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Someone waiting for you? Oh, no, thanks. I wasn&#8217;t coming
+			in. I have to work to-night. Thank you, but I couldn&#8217;t.&#8221;
+			Eastman nodded and went up the two flights to his own
+			rooms.</p>
+
+			<p>Though Eastman did not customarily keep a servant he had
+			this winter a man who had been lent to him by a friend who
+			was abroad. Rollins met him at the door and took his coat
+			and hat.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Put out my dinner clothes, Rollins, and then get out of
+			here until ten o&#8217;clock. I&#8217;ve promised to go to a supper to-night.
+			I shan&#8217;t be dining. I&#8217;ve had a late tea and I&#8217;m going to
+			work until ten. You may put out some kumiss and biscuit for
+			me.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Rollins took himself off, and Eastman settled down at the
+			big table in his sitting-room. He had to read a lot of letters
+			submitted as evidence in a breach of contract case, and before
+			he got very far he found that long paragraphs in some of the
+			letters were written in German. He had a German dictionary
+			at his office, but none here. Rollins had gone, and anyhow,
+			the bookstores would be closed. He remembered having seen
+			a row of dictionaries on the lower shelf of one of Cavenaugh&#8217;s
+			bookcases. Cavenaugh had a lot of books, though he never
+			read anything but new stuff. Eastman prudently turned down
+			his student&#8217;s lamp very low&#8212;the thing had an evil habit of
+			smoking&#8212;and went down two flights to Cavenaugh&#8217;s door.</p>
+
+			<p>The young man himself answered Eastman&#8217;s ring. He was
+			freshly dressed for the evening, except for a brown smoking
+			jacket, and his yellow hair had been brushed until it shone.
+			He hesitated as he confronted his caller, still holding the door
+			knob, and his round eyes and smooth forehead made their
+			best imitation of a frown. When Eastman began to apologize,
+			Cavenaugh&#8217;s manner suddenly changed. He caught his arm
+			and jerked him into the narrow hall. &#8220;Come in, come in.
+			Right along!&#8221; he said excitedly. &#8220;Right along,&#8221; he repeated as
+			he pushed Eastman before him into his sitting-room. &#8220;Well
+			I&#8217;ll&#8212;&#8221; he stopped short at the door and looked about his
+			own room with an air of complete mystification. The back
+			window was wide open and a strong wind was blowing in.
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page132" title="132">&nbsp;</a>Cavenaugh walked over to the window and stuck out his
+			head, looking up and down the fire escape. When he pulled
+			his head in, he drew down the sash.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I had a visitor I wanted you to see,&#8221; he explained with a
+			nervous smile. &#8220;At least I thought I had. He must have gone
+			out that way,&#8221; nodding toward the window.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Call him back. I only came to borrow a German dictionary,
+			if you have one. Can&#8217;t stay. Call him back.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh shook his head despondently. &#8220;No use. He&#8217;s
+			beat it. Nowhere in sight.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He must be active. Has he left something?&#8221; Eastman
+			pointed to a very dirty white glove that lay on the floor under
+			the window.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, that&#8217;s his.&#8221; Cavenaugh reached for his tongs, picked
+			up the glove, and tossed it into the grate, where it quickly
+			shriveled on the coals. Eastman felt that he had happened in
+			upon something disagreeable, possibly something shady, and
+			he wanted to get away at once. Cavenaugh stood staring at
+			the fire and seemed stupid and dazed; so he repeated his
+			request rather sternly, &#8220;I think I&#8217;ve seen a German dictionary
+			down there among your books. May I have it?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh blinked at him. &#8220;A German dictionary? Oh,
+			possibly! Those were my father&#8217;s. I scarcely know what there
+			is.&#8221; He put down the tongs and began to wipe his hands
+			nervously with his handkerchief.</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman went over to the bookcase behind the Chesterfield,
+			opened the door, swooped upon the book he wanted
+			and stuck it under his arm. He felt perfectly certain now that
+			something shady had been going on in Cavenaugh&#8217;s rooms,
+			and he saw no reason why he should come in for any hang-over.
+			&#8220;Thanks. I&#8217;ll send it back to-morrow,&#8221; he said curtly as
+			he made for the door.</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh followed him. &#8220;Wait a moment. I wanted you
+			to see him. You did see his glove,&#8221; glancing at the grate.</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman laughed disagreeably. &#8220;I saw a glove. That&#8217;s not
+			evidence. Do your friends often use that means of exit? Somewhat
+			inconvenient.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh gave him a startled glance. &#8220;Wouldn&#8217;t you think
+			so? For an old man, a very rickety old party? The ladders are
+			steep, you know, and rusty.&#8221; He approached the window
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page133" title="133">&nbsp;</a>again and put it up softly. In a moment he drew his head back
+			with a jerk. He caught Eastman&#8217;s arm and shoved him toward
+			the window. &#8220;Hurry, please. Look! Down there.&#8221; He pointed
+			to the little patch of paved court four flights down.</p>
+
+			<p>The square of pavement was so small and the walls about it
+			were so high, that it was a good deal like looking down a
+			well. Four tall buildings backed upon the same court and
+			made a kind of shaft, with flagstones at the bottom, and at
+			the top a square of dark blue with some stars in it. At the
+			bottom of the shaft Eastman saw a black figure, a man in a
+			caped coat and a tall hat stealing cautiously around, not across
+			the square of pavement, keeping close to the dark wall and
+			avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones from a
+			window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was
+			of course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling
+			and decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with
+			exaggerated care and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet
+			street. When he reached the gate that led into an alley way
+			between two buildings, he felt about for the latch, opened the
+			door a mere crack, and then shot out under the feeble lamp
+			that burned in the brick arch over the gateway. The door
+			closed after him.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He&#8217;ll get run in,&#8221; Eastman remarked curtly, turning away
+			from the window. &#8220;That door shouldn&#8217;t be left unlocked.
+			Any crook could come in. I&#8217;ll speak to the janitor about it, if
+			you don&#8217;t mind,&#8221; he added sarcastically.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Wish you would.&#8221; Cavenaugh stood brushing down the
+			front of his jacket, first with his right hand and then with his
+			left. &#8220;You saw him, didn&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Enough of him. Seems eccentric. I have to see a lot of
+			buggy people. They don&#8217;t take me in any more. But I&#8217;m keeping
+			you and I&#8217;m in a hurry myself. Good night.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh put out his hand detainingly and started to say
+			something; but Eastman rudely turned his back and went
+			down the hall and out of the door. He had never felt anything
+			shady about Cavenaugh before, and he was sorry he had gone
+			down for the dictionary. In five minutes he was deep in his
+			papers; but in the half hour when he was loafing before he
+			dressed to go out, the young man&#8217;s curious behavior came
+			into his mind again.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page134" title="134">&nbsp;</a>Eastman had merely a neighborly acquaintance with Cavenaugh.
+			He had been to a supper at the young man&#8217;s rooms
+			once, but he didn&#8217;t particularly like Cavenaugh&#8217;s friends; so
+			the next time he was asked, he had another engagement. He
+			liked Cavenaugh himself, if for nothing else than because he
+			was so cheerful and trim and ruddy. A good complexion is
+			always at a premium in New York, especially when it shines
+			reassuringly on a man who does everything in the world to
+			lose it. It encourages fellow mortals as to the inherent vigor
+			of the human organism and the amount of bad treatment it
+			will stand for. &#8220;Footprints that perhaps another,&#8221; etc.</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh, he knew, had plenty of money. He was the son
+			of a Pennsylvania preacher, who died soon after he discovered
+			that his ancestral acres were full of petroleum, and Kier had
+			come to New York to burn some of the oil. He was thirty-two
+			and was still at it; spent his life, literally, among the breakers.
+			His motor hit the Park every morning as if it were the first
+			time ever. He took people out to supper every night. He
+			went from restaurant to restaurant, sometimes to half-a-dozen
+			in an evening. The head waiters were his hosts and their cordiality
+			made him happy. They made a life-line for him up
+			Broadway and down Fifth Avenue. Cavenaugh was still fresh
+			and smooth, round and plump, with a lustre to his hair and
+			white teeth and a clear look in his round eyes. He seemed
+			absolutely unwearied and unimpaired; never bored and never
+			carried away.</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman always smiled when he met Cavenaugh in the
+			entrance hall, serenely going forth to or returning from gladiatorial
+			combats with joy, or when he saw him rolling
+			smoothly up to the door in his car in the morning after a
+			restful night in one of the remarkable new roadhouses he was
+			always finding. Eastman had seen a good many young men
+			disappear on Cavenaugh&#8217;s route, and he admired this young
+			man&#8217;s endurance.</p>
+
+			<p>To-night, for the first time, he had got a whiff of something
+			unwholesome about the fellow&#8212;bad nerves, bad company,
+			something on hand that he was ashamed of, a visitor old and
+			vicious, who must have had a key to Cavenaugh&#8217;s apartment,
+			for he was evidently there when Cavenaugh returned at seven
+			o&#8217;clock. Probably it was the same man Cavenaugh had seen in
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page135" title="135">&nbsp;</a>the hansom. He must have been able to let himself in, for
+			Cavenaugh kept no man but his chauffeur; or perhaps the
+			janitor had been instructed to let him in. In either case, and
+			whoever he was, it was clear enough that Cavenaugh was
+			ashamed of him and was mixing up in questionable business
+			of some kind.</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman sent Cavenaugh&#8217;s book back by Rollins, and for
+			the next few weeks he had no word with him beyond a casual
+			greeting when they happened to meet in the hall or the elevator.
+			One Sunday morning Cavenaugh telephoned up to him
+			to ask if he could motor out to a roadhouse in Connecticut
+			that afternoon and have supper; but when Eastman found
+			there were to be other guests he declined.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">On New Year&#8217;s eve Eastman dined at the University Club
+			at six o&#8217;clock and hurried home before the usual manifestations
+			of insanity had begun in the streets. When Rollins
+			brought his smoking coat, he asked him whether he wouldn&#8217;t
+			like to get off early.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, sir. But won&#8217;t you be dressing, Mr. Eastman?&#8221; he inquired.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Not to-night.&#8221; Eastman handed him a bill. &#8220;Bring some
+			change in the morning. There&#8217;ll be fees.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Rollins lost no time in putting everything to rights for the
+			night, and Eastman couldn&#8217;t help wishing that he were in
+			such a hurry to be off somewhere himself. When he heard the
+			hall door close softly, he wondered if there were any place,
+			after all, that he wanted to go. From his window he looked
+			down at the long lines of motors and taxis waiting for a signal
+			to cross Broadway. He thought of some of their probable
+			destinations and decided that none of those places pulled him
+			very hard. The night was warm and wet, the air was drizzly.
+			Vapor hung in clouds about the <cite>Times</cite> Building, half hid the
+			top of it, and made a luminous haze along Broadway. While
+			he was looking down at the army of wet, black carriage-tops
+			and their reflected headlights and tail-lights, Eastman heard a
+			ring at his door. He deliberated. If it were a caller, the hall
+			porter would have telephoned up. It must be the janitor.
+			When he opened the door, there stood a rosy young man in a
+			tuxedo, without a coat or hat.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page136" title="136">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;Pardon. Should I have telephoned? I half thought you
+			wouldn&#8217;t be in.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman laughed. &#8220;Come in, Cavenaugh. You weren&#8217;t sure
+			whether you wanted company or not, eh, and you were trying
+			to let chance decide it? That was exactly my state of mind.
+			Let&#8217;s accept the verdict.&#8221; When they emerged from the narrow
+			hall into his sitting-room, he pointed out a seat by the
+			fire to his guest. He brought a tray of decanters and soda
+			bottles and placed it on his writing table.</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh hesitated, standing by the fire. &#8220;Sure you
+			weren&#8217;t starting for somewhere?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Do I look it? No, I was just making up my mind to stick it
+			out alone when you rang. Have one?&#8221; he picked up a tall
+			tumbler.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, thank you. I always do.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman chuckled. &#8220;Lucky boy! So will I. I had a very early
+			dinner. New York is the most arid place on holidays,&#8221; he continued
+			as he rattled the ice in the glasses. &#8220;When one gets too
+			old to hit the rapids down there, and tired of gobbling food
+			to heathenish dance music, there is absolutely no place where
+			you can get a chop and some milk toast in peace, unless you
+			have strong ties of blood brotherhood on upper Fifth Avenue.
+			But you, why aren&#8217;t you starting for somewhere?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The young man sipped his soda and shook his head as he
+			replied:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I couldn&#8217;t get a chop, either. I know only flashy people,
+			of course.&#8221; He looked up at his host with such a grave
+			and candid expression that Eastman decided there couldn&#8217;t be
+			anything very crooked about the fellow. His smooth cheeks
+			were positively cherubic.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, what&#8217;s the matter with them? Aren&#8217;t they flashing
+			to-night?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Only the very new ones seem to flash on New Year&#8217;s eve.
+			The older ones fade away. Maybe they are hunting a chop,
+			too.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well&#8221;&#8212;Eastman sat down&#8212;&#8220;holidays do dash one. I was
+			just about to write a letter to a pair of maiden aunts in my old
+			home town, up-state; old coasting hill, snow-covered pines,
+			lights in the church windows. That&#8217;s what you&#8217;ve saved me
+			from.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page137" title="137">&nbsp;</a>Cavenaugh shook himself. &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m sure that wouldn&#8217;t
+			have been good for you. Pardon me,&#8221; he rose and took a
+			photograph from the bookcase, a handsome man in shooting
+			clothes. &#8220;Dudley, isn&#8217;t it? Did you know him well?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes. An old friend. Terrible thing, wasn&#8217;t it? I haven&#8217;t got
+			over the jolt yet.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;His suicide? Yes, terrible! Did you know his wife?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Slightly. Well enough to admire her very much. She must
+			be terribly broken up. I wonder Dudley didn&#8217;t think of that.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh replaced the photograph carefully, lit a cigarette,
+			and standing before the fire began to smoke. &#8220;Would
+			you mind telling me about him? I never met him, but of
+			course I&#8217;d read a lot about him, and I can&#8217;t help feeling interested.
+			It was a queer thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman took out his cigar case and leaned back in his deep
+			chair. &#8220;In the days when I knew him best he hadn&#8217;t any story,
+			like the happy nations. Everything was properly arranged for
+			him before he was born. He came into the world happy,
+			healthy, clever, straight, with the right sort of connections
+			and the right kind of fortune, neither too large nor too small.
+			He helped to make the world an agreeable place to live in
+			until he was twenty-six. Then he married as he should have
+			married. His wife was a Californian, educated abroad. Beautiful.
+			You have seen her picture?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh nodded. &#8220;Oh, many of them.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;She was interesting, too. Though she was distinctly a person
+			of the world, she had retained something, just enough of
+			the large Western manner. She had the habit of authority, of
+			calling out a special train if she needed it, of using all our
+			ingenious mechanical contrivances lightly and easily, without
+			over-rating them. She and Dudley knew how to live better
+			than most people. Their house was the most charming one I
+			have ever known in New York. You felt freedom there, and a
+			zest of life, and safety&#8212;absolute sanctuary&#8212;from everything
+			sordid or petty. A whole society like that would justify the
+			creation of man and would make our planet shine with a soft,
+			peculiar radiance among the constellations. You think I&#8217;m
+			putting it on thick?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The young man sighed gently. &#8220;Oh, no! One has always
+			felt there must be people like that. I&#8217;ve never known any.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page138" title="138">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;They had two children, beautiful ones. After they had
+			been married for eight years, Rosina met this Spaniard. He
+			must have amounted to something. She wasn&#8217;t a flighty
+			woman. She came home and told Dudley how matters stood.
+			He persuaded her to stay at home for six months and try to
+			pull up. They were both fair-minded people, and I&#8217;m as sure
+			as if I were the Almighty, that she did try. But at the end of
+			the time, Rosina went quietly off to Spain, and Dudley went
+			to hunt in the Canadian Rockies. I met his party out there. I
+			didn&#8217;t know his wife had left him and talked about her a good
+			deal. I noticed that he never drank anything, and his light
+			used to shine through the log chinks of his room until all
+			hours, even after a hard day&#8217;s hunting. When I got back to
+			New York, rumors were creeping about. Dudley did not come
+			back. He bought a ranch in Wyoming, built a big log house
+			and kept splendid dogs and horses. One of his sisters went
+			out to keep house for him, and the children were there when
+			they were not in school. He had a great many visitors, and
+			everyone who came back talked about how well Dudley kept
+			things going.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He put in two years out there. Then, last month, he had
+			to come back on business. A trust fund had to be settled up,
+			and he was administrator. I saw him at the club; same light,
+			quick step, same gracious handshake. He was getting gray,
+			and there was something softer in his manner; but he had a
+			fine red tan on his face and said he found it delightful to be
+			here in the season when everything is going hard. The Madison
+			Avenue house had been closed since Rosina left it. He
+			went there to get some things his sister wanted. That, of
+			course, was the mistake. He went alone, in the afternoon, and
+			didn&#8217;t go out for dinner&#8212;found some sherry and tins of biscuit
+			in the sideboard. He shot himself sometime that night.
+			There were pistols in his smoking-room. They found burnt
+			out candles beside him in the morning. The gas and electricity
+			were shut off. I suppose there, in his own house, among his
+			own things, it was too much for him. He left no letters.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh blinked and brushed the lapel of his coat. &#8220;I
+			suppose,&#8221; he said slowly, &#8220;that every suicide is logical and
+			reasonable, if one knew all the facts.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman roused himself. &#8220;No, I don&#8217;t think so. I&#8217;ve known
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page139" title="139">&nbsp;</a>too many fellows who went off like that&#8212;more than I deserve,
+			I think&#8212;and some of them were absolutely inexplicable.
+			I can understand Dudley; but I can&#8217;t see why healthy
+			bachelors, with money enough, like ourselves, need such a
+			device. It reminds me of what Dr. Johnson said, that the most
+			discouraging thing about life is the number of fads and hobbies
+			and fake religions it takes to put people through a few
+			years of it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Dr. Johnson? The specialist? Oh, the old fellow!&#8221; said
+			Cavenaugh imperturbably. &#8220;Yes, that&#8217;s interesting. Still, I
+			fancy if one knew the facts&#8212;Did you know about Wyatt?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t think so.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You wouldn&#8217;t, probably. He was just a fellow about town
+			who spent money. He wasn&#8217;t one of the <em lang="it" xml:lang="it">forestieri</em>, though.
+			Had connections here and owned a fine old place over on
+			Staten Island. He went in for botany, and had been all over,
+			hunting things; rusts, I believe. He had a yacht and used to
+			take a gay crowd down about the South Seas, botanizing. He
+			really did botanize, I believe. I never knew such a spender&#8212;only
+			not flashy. He helped a lot of fellows and he was awfully
+			good to girls, the kind who come down here to get a little
+			fun, who don&#8217;t like to work and still aren&#8217;t really tough, the
+			kind you see talking hard for their dinner. Nobody knows
+			what becomes of them, or what they get out of it, and there
+			are hundreds of new ones every year. He helped dozens of
+			&#8217;em; it was he who got me curious about the little shop girls.
+			Well, one afternoon when his tea was brought, he took prussic
+			acid instead. He didn&#8217;t leave any letters, either; people of
+			any taste don&#8217;t. They wouldn&#8217;t leave any material reminder if
+			they could help it. His lawyers found that he had just $314.72
+			above his debts when he died. He had planned to spend all
+			his money, and then take his tea; he had worked it out carefully.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman reached for his pipe and pushed his chair away
+			from the fire. &#8220;That looks like a considered case, but I don&#8217;t
+			think philosophical suicides like that are common. I think
+			they usually come from stress of feeling and are really, as the
+			newspapers call them, desperate acts; done without a motive.
+			You remember when Anna Karenina was under the wheels,
+			she kept saying, &#8216;Why am I here?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page140" title="140">&nbsp;</a>Cavenaugh rubbed his upper lip with his pink finger and
+			made an effort to wrinkle his brows. &#8220;May I, please?&#8221; reaching
+			for the whiskey. &#8220;But have you,&#8221; he asked, blinking as the
+			soda flew at him, &#8220;have you ever known, yourself, cases that
+			were really inexplicable?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;A few too many. I was in Washington just before Captain
+			Jack Purden was married and I saw a good deal of him. Popular
+			army man, fine record in the Philippines, married a
+			charming girl with lots of money; mutual devotion. It was the
+			gayest wedding of the winter, and they started for Japan.
+			They stopped in San Francisco for a week and missed their
+			boat because, as the bride wrote back to Washington, they
+			were too happy to move. They took the next boat, were both
+			good sailors, had exceptional weather. After they had been
+			out for two weeks, Jack got up from his deck chair one afternoon,
+			yawned, put down his book, and stood before his wife.
+			&#8216;Stop reading for a moment and look at me.&#8217; She laughed and
+			asked him why. &#8216;Because you happen to be good to look at.&#8217;
+			He nodded to her, went back to the stern and was never seen
+			again. Must have gone down to the lower deck and slipped
+			overboard, behind the machinery. It was the luncheon hour,
+			not many people about; steamer cutting through a soft green
+			sea. That&#8217;s one of the most baffling cases I know. His friends
+			raked up his past, and it was as trim as a cottage garden. If
+			he&#8217;d so much as dropped an ink spot on his fatigue uniform,
+			they&#8217;d have found it. He wasn&#8217;t emotional or moody; wasn&#8217;t,
+			indeed, very interesting; simply a good soldier, fond of all the
+			pompous little formalities that make up a military man&#8217;s life.
+			What do you make of that, my boy?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh stroked his chin. &#8220;It&#8217;s very puzzling, I admit.
+			Still, if one knew everything&#8212;&#8212;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;But we do know everything. His friends wanted to find
+			something to help them out, to help the girl out, to help the
+			case of the human creature.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t mean things that people could unearth,&#8221; said
+			Cavenaugh uneasily. &#8220;But possibly there were things that
+			couldn&#8217;t be found out.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman shrugged his shoulders. &#8220;It&#8217;s my experience that
+			when there are &#8216;things&#8217; as you call them, they&#8217;re very apt to be
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page141" title="141">&nbsp;</a>found. There is no such thing as a secret. To make any move
+			at all one has to employ human agencies, employ at least one
+			human agent. Even when the pirates killed the men who buried
+			their gold for them, the bones told the story.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny
+			smile.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I like that idea. It&#8217;s reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it
+			means that we can&#8217;t, after all, go so far afield as we might,&#8221; he
+			hesitated, &#8220;yes, as we might.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman looked at him sourly. &#8220;Cavenaugh, when you&#8217;ve
+			practised law in New York for twelve years, you find that people
+			can&#8217;t go far in any direction, except&#8212;&#8221; He thrust his forefinger
+			sharply at the floor. &#8220;Even in that direction, few people
+			can do anything out of the ordinary. Our range is limited.
+			Skip a few baths, and we become personally objectionable.
+			The slightest carelessness can rot a man&#8217;s integrity or give him
+			ptomaine poisoning. We keep up only by incessant cleansing
+			operations, of mind and body. What we call character, is held
+			together by all sorts of tacks and strings and glue.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh looked startled. &#8220;Come now, it&#8217;s not so bad
+			as that, is it? I&#8217;ve always thought that a serious man, like
+			you, must know a lot of Launcelots.&#8221; When Eastman only
+			laughed, the younger man squirmed about in his chair. He
+			spoke again hastily, as if he were embarrassed. &#8220;Your military
+			friend may have had personal experiences, however, that his
+			friends couldn&#8217;t possibly get a line on. He may accidentally
+			have come to a place where he saw himself in too unpleasant
+			a light. I believe people can be chilled by a draft from outside,
+			somewhere.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Outside?&#8221; Eastman echoed. &#8220;Ah, you mean the far outside!
+			Ghosts, delusions, eh?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh winced. &#8220;That&#8217;s putting it strong. Why not say
+			tips from the outside? Delusions belong to a diseased mind,
+			don&#8217;t they? There are some of us who have no minds to speak
+			of, who yet have had experiences. I&#8217;ve had a little something
+			in that line myself and I don&#8217;t look it, do I?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman looked at the bland countenance turned toward
+			him. &#8220;Not exactly. What&#8217;s your delusion?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not a delusion. It&#8217;s a haunt.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page142" title="142">&nbsp;</a>The lawyer chuckled. &#8220;Soul of a lost Casino girl?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No; an old gentleman. A most unattractive old gentleman,
+			who follows me about.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Does he want money?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh sat up straight. &#8220;No. I wish to God he wanted
+			anything&#8212;but the pleasure of my society! I&#8217;d let him clean
+			me out to be rid of him. He&#8217;s a real article. You saw him
+			yourself that night when you came to my rooms to borrow a
+			dictionary, and he went down the fire-escape. You saw him
+			down in the court.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, I saw somebody down in the court, but I&#8217;m too
+			cautious to take it for granted that I saw what you saw.
+			Why, anyhow, should I see your haunt? If it was your friend
+			I saw, he impressed me disagreeably. How did you pick
+			him up?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh looked gloomy. &#8220;That was queer, too. Charley
+			Burke and I had motored out to Long Beach, about a year
+			ago, sometime in October, I think. We had supper and stayed
+			until late. When we were coming home, my car broke
+			down. We had a lot of girls along who had to get back for
+			morning rehearsals and things; so I sent them all into town in
+			Charley&#8217;s car, and he was to send a man back to tow me
+			home. I was driving myself, and didn&#8217;t want to leave my machine.
+			We had not taken a direct road back; so I was stuck in a
+			lonesome, woody place, no houses about. I got chilly and
+			made a fire, and was putting in the time comfortably enough,
+			when this old party steps up. He was in shabby evening
+			clothes and a top hat, and had on his usual white gloves.
+			How he got there, at three o&#8217;clock in the morning, miles from
+			any town or railway, I&#8217;ll leave it to you to figure out. <em>He</em>
+			surely had no car. When I saw him coming up to the fire, I
+			disliked him. He had a silly, apologetic walk. His teeth were
+			chattering, and I asked him to sit down. He got down like a
+			clothes-horse folding up. I offered him a cigarette, and when
+			he took off his gloves I couldn&#8217;t help noticing how knotted
+			and spotty his hands were. He was asthmatic, and took his
+			breath with a wheeze. &#8216;Haven&#8217;t you got anything&#8212;refreshing
+			in there?&#8217; he asked, nodding at the car. When I told him I
+			hadn&#8217;t, he sighed. &#8216;Ah, you young fellows are greedy. You
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page143" title="143">&nbsp;</a>drink it all up. You drink it all up, all up&#8212;up!&#8217; he kept chewing
+			it over.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh paused and looked embarrassed again. &#8220;The
+			thing that was most unpleasant is difficult to explain. The old
+			man sat there by the fire and leered at me with a silly sort of
+			admiration that was&#8212;well, more than humiliating. &#8216;Gay boy,
+			gay dog!&#8217; he would mutter, and when he grinned he showed
+			his teeth, worn and yellow&#8212;shells. I remembered that it was
+			better to talk casually to insane people; so I remarked carelessly
+			that I had been out with a party and got stuck.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;Oh yes, I remember,&#8217; he said, &#8216;Flora and Lottie and Maybelle
+			and Marcelline, and poor Kate.&#8217;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He had named them correctly; so I began to think I had
+			been hitting the bright waters too hard.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Things I drank never had seemed to make me woody; but
+			you can never tell when trouble is going to hit you. I pulled
+			my hat down and tried to look as uncommunicative as possible;
+			but he kept croaking on from time to time, like this:
+			&#8216;Poor Kate! Splendid arms, but dope got her. She took up
+			with Eastern religions after she had her hair dyed. Got to
+			going to a Swami&#8217;s joint, and smoking opium. Temple of the
+			Lotus, it was called, and the police raided it.&#8217;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;This was nonsense, of course; the young woman was in
+			the pink of condition. I let him rave, but I decided that if
+			something didn&#8217;t come out for me pretty soon, I&#8217;d foot it
+			across Long Island. There wasn&#8217;t room enough for the two of
+			us. I got up and took another try at my car. He hopped right
+			after me.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;Good car,&#8217; he wheezed, &#8216;better than the little Ford.&#8217;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;d had a Ford before, but so has everybody; that was a
+			safe guess.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;Still,&#8217; he went on, &#8216;that run in from Huntington Bay in
+			the rain wasn&#8217;t bad. Arrested for speeding, he-he.&#8217;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It was true I had made such a run, under rather unusual
+			circumstances, and had been arrested. When at last I heard
+			my life-boat snorting up the road, my visitor got up, sighed,
+			and stepped back into the shadow of the trees. I didn&#8217;t wait to
+			see what became of him, you may believe. That was visitation
+			number one. What do you think of it?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page144" title="144">&nbsp;</a>Cavenaugh looked at his host defiantly. Eastman smiled.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I think you&#8217;d better change your mode of life, Cavenaugh.
+			Had many returns?&#8221; he inquired.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Too many, by far.&#8221; The young man took a turn about the
+			room and came back to the fire. Standing by the mantel he lit
+			another cigarette before going on with his story:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;The second visitation happened in the street, early in the
+			evening, about eight o&#8217;clock. I was held up in a traffic block
+			before the Plaza. My chauffeur was driving. Old Nibbs steps
+			up out of the crowd, opens the door of my car, gets in and
+			sits down beside me. He had on wilted evening clothes, same
+			as before, and there was some sort of heavy scent about him.
+			Such an unpleasant old party! A thorough-going rotter; you
+			knew it at once. This time he wasn&#8217;t talkative, as he had been
+			when I first saw him. He leaned back in the car as if he owned
+			it, crossed his hands on his stick and looked out at the
+			crowd&#8212;sort of hungrily.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I own I really felt a loathing compassion for him. We got
+			down the avenue slowly. I kept looking out at the mounted
+			police. But what could I do? Have him pulled? I was afraid
+			to. I was awfully afraid of getting him into the papers.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;I&#8217;m going to the New Astor,&#8217; I said at last. &#8216;Can I take
+			you anywhere?&#8217;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;No, thank you,&#8217; says he. &#8216;I get out when you do. I&#8217;m due
+			on West 44th. I&#8217;m dining to-night with Marcelline&#8212;all that
+			is left of her!&#8217;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He put his hand to his hat brim with a grewsome salute.
+			Such a scandalous, foolish old face as he had! When we pulled
+			up at the Astor, I stuck my hand in my pocket and asked him
+			if he&#8217;d like a little loan.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;No, thank you, but&#8217;&#8212;he leaned over and whispered,
+			ugh!&#8212;&#8216;but save a little, save a little. Forty years from now&#8212;a
+			little&#8212;comes in handy. Save a little.&#8217;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;His eyes fairly glittered as he made his remark. I jumped
+			out. I&#8217;d have jumped into the North River. When he tripped
+			off, I asked my chauffeur if he&#8217;d noticed the man who got
+			into the car with me. He said he knew someone was with me,
+			but he hadn&#8217;t noticed just when he got in. Want to hear any
+			more?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh dropped into his chair again. His plump cheeks
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page145" title="145">&nbsp;</a>were a trifle more flushed than usual, but he was perfectly
+			calm. Eastman felt that the young man believed what he was
+			telling him.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Of course I do. It&#8217;s very interesting. I don&#8217;t see quite
+			where you are coming out though.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh sniffed. &#8220;No more do I. I really feel that I&#8217;ve
+			been put upon. I haven&#8217;t deserved it any more than any other
+			fellow of my kind. Doesn&#8217;t it impress you disagreeably?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, rather so. Has anyone else seen your friend?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You saw him.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;We won&#8217;t count that. As I said, there&#8217;s no certainty that
+			you and I saw the same person in the court that night. Has
+			anyone else had a look in?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;People sense him rather than see him. He usually crops up
+			when I&#8217;m alone or in a crowd on the street. He never approaches
+			me when I&#8217;m with people I know, though I&#8217;ve seen
+			him hanging about the doors of theatres when I come out
+			with a party; loafing around the stage exit, under a wall; or
+			across the street, in a doorway. To be frank, I&#8217;m not anxious
+			to introduce him. The third time, it was I who came upon
+			him. In November my driver, Harry, had a sudden attack of
+			appendicitis. I took him to the Presbyterian Hospital in the
+			car, early in the evening. When I came home, I found the old
+			villain in my rooms. I offered him a drink, and he sat down.
+			It was the first time I had seen him in a steady light, with his
+			hat off.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;His face is lined like a railway map, and as to color&#8212;Lord,
+			what a liver! His scalp grows tight to his skull, and his
+			hair is dyed until it&#8217;s perfectly dead, like a piece of black
+			cloth.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh ran his fingers through his own neatly trimmed
+			thatch, and seemed to forget where he was for a moment.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I had a twin brother, Brian, who died when we were
+			sixteen. I have a photograph of him on my wall, an enlargement
+			from a kodak of him, doing a high jump, rather good
+			thing, full of action. It seemed to annoy the old gentleman.
+			He kept looking at it and lifting his eyebrows, and finally he
+			got up, tip-toed across the room, and turned the picture to
+			the wall.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;&#8216;Poor Brian! Fine fellow, but died young,&#8217; says he.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page146" title="146">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;Next morning, there was the picture, still reversed.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Did he stay long?&#8221; Eastman asked interestedly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Half an hour, by the clock.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Did he talk?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, he rambled.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What about?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh rubbed his pale eyebrows before answering.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;About things that an old man ought to want to forget.
+			His conversation is highly objectionable. Of course he knows
+			me like a book; everything I&#8217;ve ever done or thought. But
+			when he recalls them, he throws a bad light on them, somehow.
+			Things that weren&#8217;t much off color, look rotten. He
+			doesn&#8217;t leave one a shred of self-respect, he really doesn&#8217;t.
+			That&#8217;s the amount of it.&#8221; The young man whipped out his
+			handkerchief and wiped his face.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You mean he really talks about things that none of your
+			friends know?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, dear, yes! Recalls things that happened in school.
+			Anything disagreeable. Funny thing, he always turns Brian&#8217;s
+			picture to the wall.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Does he come often?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, oftener, now. Of course I don&#8217;t know how he gets in
+			down-stairs. The hall boys never see him. But he has a key to
+			my door. I don&#8217;t know how he got it, but I can hear him turn
+			it in the lock.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Why don&#8217;t you keep your driver with you, or telephone
+			for me to come down?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He&#8217;d only grin and go down the fire escape as he did
+			before. He&#8217;s often done it when Harry&#8217;s come in suddenly.
+			Everybody has to be alone sometimes, you know. Besides, I
+			don&#8217;t want anybody to see him. He has me there.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;But why not? Why do you feel responsible for him?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh smiled wearily. &#8220;That&#8217;s rather the point, isn&#8217;t
+			it? Why do I? But I absolutely do. That identifies him, more
+			than his knowing all about my life and my affairs.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman looked at Cavenaugh thoughtfully. &#8220;Well, I
+			should advise you to go in for something altogether different
+			and new, and go in for it hard; business, engineering, metallurgy,
+			something this old fellow wouldn&#8217;t be interested in.
+			See if you can make him remember logarithms.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page147" title="147">&nbsp;</a>Cavenaugh sighed. &#8220;No, he has me there, too. People never
+			really change; they go on being themselves. But I would
+			never make much trouble. Why can&#8217;t they let me alone, damn
+			it! I&#8217;d never hurt anybody, except, perhaps&#8212;&#8212;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Except your old gentleman, eh?&#8221; Eastman laughed. &#8220;Seriously,
+			Cavenaugh, if you want to shake him, I think a year on
+			a ranch would do it. He would never be coaxed far from his
+			favorite haunts. He would dread Montana.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh pursed up his lips. &#8220;So do I!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, you think you do. Try it, and you&#8217;ll find out. A gun and
+			a horse beats all this sort of thing. Besides losing your haunt,
+			you&#8217;d be putting ten years in the bank for yourself. I know a
+			good ranch where they take people, if you want to try it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Thank you. I&#8217;ll consider. Do you think I&#8217;m batty?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, but I think you&#8217;ve been doing one sort of thing too
+			long. You need big horizons. Get out of this.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Cavenaugh smiled meekly. He rose lazily and yawned behind
+			his hand. &#8220;It&#8217;s late, and I&#8217;ve taken your whole evening.&#8221;
+			He strolled over to the window and looked out. &#8220;Queer
+			place, New York; rough on the little fellows. Don&#8217;t you feel
+			sorry for them, the girls especially? I do. What a fight they
+			put up for a little fun! Why, even that old goat is sorry for
+			them, the only decent thing he kept.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman followed him to the door and stood in the hall,
+			while Cavenaugh waited for the elevator. When the car came
+			up Cavenaugh extended his pink, warm hand. &#8220;Good night.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The cage sank and his rosy countenance disappeared, his
+			round-eyed smile being the last thing to go.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">Weeks passed before Eastman saw Cavenaugh again. One
+			morning, just as he was starting for Washington to argue a
+			case before the Supreme Court, Cavenaugh telephoned him at
+			his office to ask him about the Montana ranch he had recommended;
+			said he meant to take his advice and go out there for
+			the spring and summer.</p>
+
+			<p>When Eastman got back from Washington, he saw dusty
+			trunks, just up from the trunk room, before Cavenaugh&#8217;s
+			door. Next morning, when he stopped to see what the young
+			man was about, he found Cavenaugh in his shirt sleeves,
+			packing.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page148" title="148">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;I&#8217;m really going; off to-morrow night. You didn&#8217;t think it
+			of me, did you?&#8221; he asked gaily.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ve always had hopes of you!&#8221; Eastman declared.
+			&#8220;But you are in a hurry, it seems to me.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, I am in a hurry.&#8221; Cavenaugh shot a pair of leggings
+			into one of the open trunks. &#8220;I telegraphed your ranch people,
+			used your name, and they said it would be all right. By
+			the way, some of my crowd are giving a little dinner for me at
+			Rector&#8217;s to-night. Couldn&#8217;t you be persuaded, as it&#8217;s a farewell
+			occasion?&#8221; Cavenaugh looked at him hopefully.</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman laughed and shook his head. &#8220;Sorry, Cavenaugh,
+			but that&#8217;s too gay a world for me. I&#8217;ve got too much work
+			lined up before me. I wish I had time to stop and look at your
+			guns, though. You seem to know something about guns.
+			You&#8217;ve more than you&#8217;ll need, but nobody can have too many
+			good ones.&#8221; He put down one of the revolvers regretfully.
+			&#8220;I&#8217;ll drop in to see you in the morning, if you&#8217;re up.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I shall be up, all right. I&#8217;ve warned my crowd that I&#8217;ll cut
+			away before midnight.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You won&#8217;t, though,&#8221; Eastman called back over his shoulder
+			as he hurried down-stairs.</p>
+
+			<p>The next morning, while Eastman was dressing, Rollins
+			came in greatly excited.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m a little late, sir. I was stopped by Harry, Mr. Cavenaugh&#8217;s
+			driver. Mr. Cavenaugh shot himself last night, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman dropped his vest and sat down on his shoe-box.
+			&#8220;You&#8217;re drunk, Rollins,&#8221; he shouted. &#8220;He&#8217;s going away to-day!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, sir. Harry found him this morning. Ah, he&#8217;s quite
+			dead, sir. Harry&#8217;s telephoned for the coroner. Harry don&#8217;t
+			know what to do with the ticket.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman pulled on his coat and ran down the stairway.
+			Cavenaugh&#8217;s trunks were strapped and piled before the door.
+			Harry was walking up and down the hall with a long green
+			railroad ticket in his hand and a look of complete stupidity on
+			his face.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What shall I do about this ticket, Mr. Eastman?&#8221; he whispered.
+			&#8220;And what about his trunks? He had me tell the transfer
+			people to come early. They may be here any minute. Yes,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page149" title="149">&nbsp;</a>sir. I brought him home in the car last night, before twelve, as
+			cheerful as could be.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Be quiet, Harry. Where is he?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;In his bed, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Eastman went into Cavenaugh&#8217;s sleeping-room. When he
+			came back to the sitting-room, he looked over the writing
+			table; railway folders, time-tables, receipted bills, nothing
+			else. He looked up for the photograph of Cavenaugh&#8217;s twin
+			brother. There it was, turned to the wall. Eastman took it
+			down and looked at it; a boy in track clothes, half lying in the
+			air, going over the string shoulders first, above the heads of a
+			crowd of lads who were running and cheering. The face was
+			somewhat blurred by the motion and the bright sunlight.
+			Eastman put the picture back, as he found it. Had Cavenaugh
+			entertained his visitor last night, and had the old man been
+			more convincing than usual? &#8220;Well, at any rate, he&#8217;s seen to it
+			that the old man can&#8217;t establish identity. What a soft lot they
+			are, fellows like poor Cavenaugh!&#8221; Eastman thought of his
+			office as a delightful place.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>McClure&#8217;s</cite>, November 1915</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="bookkeeper" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page150" title="150">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3>The Bookkeeper&#8217;s Wife <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Nobody but the janitor was stirring about the offices of
+			the Remsen Paper Company, and still Percy Bixby sat at
+			his desk, crouched on his high stool and staring out at the
+			tops of the tall buildings flushed with the winter sunset, at the
+			hundreds of windows, so many rectangles of white electric
+			light, flashing against the broad waves of violet that ebbed
+			across the sky. His ledgers were all in their places, his desk
+			was in order, his office coat on its peg, and yet Percy&#8217;s
+			smooth, thin face wore the look of anxiety and strain which
+			usually meant that he was behind in his work. He was trying
+			to persuade himself to accept a loan from the company without
+			the company&#8217;s knowledge. As a matter of fact, he had
+			already accepted it. His books were fixed, the money, in
+			a black-leather bill-book, was already inside his waistcoat
+			pocket.</p>
+
+			<p>He had still time to change his mind, to rectify the false
+			figures in his ledger, and to tell Stella Brown that they
+			couldn&#8217;t possibly get married next month. There he always
+			halted in his reasoning, and went back to the beginning.</p>
+
+			<p>The Remsen Paper Company was a very wealthy concern,
+			with easy, old-fashioned working methods. They did a longtime
+			credit business with safe customers, who never thought
+			of paying up very close on their large indebtedness. From the
+			payments on these large accounts Percy had taken a hundred
+			dollars here and two hundred there until he had made up the
+			thousand he needed. So long as he stayed by the books himself
+			and attended to the mail-orders he couldn&#8217;t possibly be
+			found out. He could move these little shortages about from
+			account to account indefinitely. He could have all the time he
+			needed to pay back the deficit, and more time than he needed.</p>
+
+			<p>Although he was so far along in one course of action, his
+			mind still clung resolutely to the other. He did not believe he
+			was going to do it. He was the least of a sharper in the world.
+			Being scrupulously honest even in the most trifling matters
+			was a pleasure to him. He was the sort of young man that
+			Socialists hate more than they hate capitalists. He loved his
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page151" title="151">&nbsp;</a>desk, he loved his books, which had no handwriting in them
+			but his own. He never thought of resenting the fact that he
+			had written away in those books the good red years between
+			twenty-one and twenty-seven. He would have hated to let any
+			one else put so much as a pen-scratch in them. He liked all
+			the boys about the office; his desk, worn smooth by the
+			sleeves of his alpaca coat; his rulers and inks and pens and
+			calendars. He had a great pride in working economics, and he
+			always got so far ahead when supplies were distributed that
+			he had drawers full of pencils and pens and rubber bands
+			against a rainy day.</p>
+
+			<p>Percy liked regularity: to get his work done on time, to
+			have his half-day off every Saturday, to go to the theater Saturday
+			night, to buy a new necktie twice a month, to appear in
+			a new straw hat on the right day in May, and to know what
+			was going on in New York. He read the morning and evening
+			papers coming and going on the elevated, and preferred journals
+			of approximate reliability. He got excited about ballgames
+			and elections and business failures, was not above an
+			interest in murders and divorce scandals, and he checked the
+			news off as neatly as he checked his mail-orders. In short,
+			Percy Bixby was like the model pupil who is satisfied with his
+			lessons and his teachers and his holidays, and who would
+			gladly go to school all his life. He had never wanted anything
+			outside his routine until he wanted Stella Brown to marry
+			him, and that had upset everything.</p>
+
+			<p>It wasn&#8217;t, he told himself for the hundredth time, that she
+			was extravagant. Not a bit of it. She was like all girls. Moreover,
+			she made good money, and why should she marry unless
+			she could better herself? The trouble was that he had lied
+			to her about his salary. There were a lot of fellows rushing
+			Mrs. Brown&#8217;s five daughters, and they all seemed to have fixed
+			on Stella as first choice and this or that one of the sisters as
+			second. Mrs. Brown thought it proper to drop an occasional
+			hint in the presence of these young men to the effect that she
+			expected Stella to &#8220;do well.&#8221; It went without saying that hair
+			and complexion like Stella&#8217;s could scarcely be expected to
+			do poorly. Most of the boys who went to the house and took
+			the girls out in a bunch to dances and movies seemed to realize
+			this. They merely wanted a whirl with Stella before they
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page152" title="152">&nbsp;</a>settled down to one of her sisters. It was tacitly understood
+			that she came too high for them. Percy had sensed all this
+			through those slumbering instincts which awake in us all to
+			befriend us in love or in danger.</p>
+
+			<p>But there was one of his rivals, he knew, who was a man to
+			be reckoned with. Charley Greengay was a young salesman
+			who wore tailor-made clothes and spotted waistcoats, and
+			had a necktie for every day in the month. His air was that of a
+			young man who is out for things that come high and who is
+			going to get them. Mrs. Brown was ever and again dropping
+			a word before Percy about how the girl that took Charley
+			would have her flat furnished by the best furniture people,
+			and her china-closet stocked with the best ware, and would
+			have nothing to worry about but nicks and scratches. It was
+			because he felt himself pitted against this pulling power of
+			Greengay&#8217;s that Percy had brazenly lied to Mrs. Brown, and
+			told her that his salary had been raised to fifty a week, and
+			that now he wanted to get married.</p>
+
+			<p>When he threw out this challenge to Mother Brown, Percy
+			was getting thirty-five dollars a week, and he knew well
+			enough that there were several hundred thousand young men
+			in New York who would do his work as well as he did for
+			thirty.</p>
+
+			<p>These were the factors in Percy&#8217;s present situation. He
+			went over them again and again as he sat stooping on his tall
+			stool. He had quite lost track of time when he heard the janitor
+			call good night to the watchman. Without thinking what
+			he was doing, he slid into his overcoat, caught his hat, and
+			rushed out to the elevator, which was waiting for the janitor.
+			The moment the car dropped, it occurred to him that the
+			thing was decided without his having made up his mind at all.
+			The familiar floors passed him, ten, nine, eight, seven. By the
+			time he reached the fifth, there was no possibility of going
+			back; the click of the drop-lever seemed to settle that. The
+			money was in his pocket. Now, he told himself as he hurried
+			out into the exciting clamor of the street, he was not going to
+			worry about it any more.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">When Percy reached the Browns&#8217; flat on 123d Street that
+			evening he felt just the slightest chill in Stella&#8217;s greeting. He
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page153" title="153">&nbsp;</a>could make that all right, he told himself, as he kissed her
+			lightly in the dark three-by-four entrance-hall. Percy&#8217;s courting
+			had been prosecuted mainly in the Bronx or in winged
+			pursuit of a Broadway car. When he entered the crowded
+			sitting-room he greeted Mrs. Brown respectfully and the four
+			girls playfully. They were all piled on one couch, reading the
+			continued story in the evening paper, and they didn&#8217;t think it
+			necessary to assume more formal attitudes for Percy. They
+			looked up over the smeary pink sheets of paper, and handed
+			him, as Percy said, the same old jolly:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Hullo, Perc&#8217;! Come to see me, ain&#8217;t you? So flattered!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Any sweet goods on you, Perc&#8217;? Anything doing in the
+			bong-bong line to-night?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Look at his new neckwear! Say, Perc&#8217;, remember me. That
+			tie would go lovely with my new tailored waist.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Quit your kiddin&#8217;, girls!&#8221; called Mrs. Brown, who was
+			drying shirt-waists on the dining-room radiator. &#8220;And, Percy,
+			mind the rugs when you&#8217;re steppin&#8217; round among them gum-drops.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Percy fired his last shot at the recumbent figures, and
+			followed Stella into the dining-room, where the table and
+			two large easy-chairs formed, in Mrs. Brown&#8217;s estimation, a
+			proper background for a serious suitor.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I say, Stell&#8217;,&#8221; he began as he walked about the table with
+			his hands in his pockets, &#8220;seems to me we ought to begin
+			buying our stuff.&#8221; She brightened perceptibly. &#8220;Ah,&#8221; Percy
+			thought, &#8220;so that <em>was</em> the trouble!&#8221; &#8220;To-morrow&#8217;s Saturday;
+			why can&#8217;t we make an afternoon of it?&#8221; he went on cheerfully.
+			&#8220;Shop till we&#8217;re tired, then go to Houtin&#8217;s for dinner, and
+			end up at the theater.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>As they bent over the lists she had made of things needed,
+			Percy glanced at her face. She was very much out of her sisters&#8217;
+			class and out of his, and he kept congratulating himself
+			on his nerve. He was going in for something much too handsome
+			and expensive and distinguished for him, he felt, and it
+			took courage to be a plunger. To begin with, Stella was the
+			sort of girl who had to be well dressed. She had pale primrose
+			hair, with bluish tones in it, very soft and fine, so that it lay
+			smooth however she dressed it, and pale-blue eyes, with
+			blond eyebrows and long, dark lashes. She would have been a
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page154" title="154">&nbsp;</a>little too remote and languid even for the fastidious Percy had
+			it not been for her hard, practical mouth, with lips that always
+			kept their pink even when the rest of her face was pale. Her
+			employers, who at first might be struck by her indifference,
+			understood that anybody with that sort of mouth would get
+			through the work.</p>
+
+			<p>After the shopping-lists had been gone over, Percy took up
+			the question of the honeymoon. Stella said she had been
+			thinking of Atlantic City. Percy met her with firmness. Whatever
+			happened, he couldn&#8217;t leave his books now.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I want to do my traveling right here on Forty-second
+			Street, with a high-price show every night,&#8221; he declared. He
+			made out an itinerary, punctuated by theaters and restaurants,
+			which Stella consented to accept as a substitute for Atlantic
+			City.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;They give your fellows a week off when they&#8217;re married,
+			don&#8217;t they?&#8221; she asked.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, but I&#8217;ll want to drop into the office every morning to
+			look after my mail. That&#8217;s only businesslike.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;d like to have you treated as well as the others, though.&#8221;
+			Stella turned the rings about on her pale hand and looked at
+			her polished finger-tips.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll look out for that. What do you say to a little walk,
+			Stell&#8217;?&#8221; Percy put the question coaxingly. When Stella was
+			pleased with him she went to walk with him, since that was
+			the only way in which Percy could ever see her alone. When
+			she was displeased, she said she was too tired to go out. To-night
+			she smiled at him incredulously, and went to put on her
+			hat and gray fur piece.</p>
+
+			<p>Once they were outside, Percy turned into a shadowy side
+			street that was only partly built up, a dreary waste of derricks
+			and foundation holes, but comparatively solitary. Stella liked
+			Percy&#8217;s steady, sympathetic silences; she was not a chatterbox
+			herself. She often wondered why she was going to marry
+			Bixby instead of Charley Greengay. She knew that Charley
+			would go further in the world. Indeed, she had often coolly
+			told herself that Percy would never go very far. But, as she
+			admitted with a shrug, she was &#8220;weak to Percy.&#8221; In the capable
+			New York stenographer, who estimated values coldly and
+			got the most for the least outlay, there was something left
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page155" title="155">&nbsp;</a>that belonged to another kind of woman&#8212;something that
+			liked the very things in Percy that were not good business
+			assets. However much she dwelt upon the effectiveness of
+			Greengay&#8217;s dash and color and assurance, her mind always
+			came back to Percy&#8217;s neat little head, his clean-cut face, and
+			warm, clear, gray eyes, and she liked them better than Charley&#8217;s
+			fullness and blurred floridness. Having reckoned up their
+			respective chances with no doubtful result, she opposed a
+			mild obstinacy to her own good sense. &#8220;I guess I&#8217;ll take
+			Percy, <em>anyway</em>,&#8221; she said simply, and that was all the good her
+			clever business brain did her.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">Percy spent a night of torment, lying tense on his bed in the
+			dark, and figuring out how long it would take him to pay
+			back the money he was advancing to himself. Any fool could
+			do it in five years, he reasoned, but he was going to do it in
+			three. The trouble was that his expensive courtship had taken
+			every penny of his salary. With competitors like Charley
+			Greengay, you had to spend money or drop out. Certain
+			birds, he reflected ruefully, are supplied with more attractive
+			plumage when they are courting, but nature hadn&#8217;t been so
+			thoughtful for men. When Percy reached the office in the
+			morning he climbed on his tall stool and leaned his arms on
+			his ledger. He was so glad to feel it there that he was faint
+			and weak-kneed.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">Oliver Remsen, Junior, had brought new blood into the
+			Remsen Paper Company. He married shortly after Percy
+			Bixby did, and in the five succeeding years he had considerably
+			enlarged the company&#8217;s business and profits. He had
+			been particularly successful in encouraging efficiency and loyalty
+			in the employees. From the time he came into the office
+			he had stood for shorter hours, longer holidays, and a generous
+			consideration of men&#8217;s necessities. He came out of college
+			on the wave of economic reform, and he continued to read
+			and think a good deal about how the machinery of labor is
+			operated. He knew more about the men who worked for him
+			than their mere office records.</p>
+
+			<p>Young Remsen was troubled about Percy Bixby because he
+			took no summer vacations&#8212;always asked for the two weeks&#8217;
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page156" title="156">&nbsp;</a>extra pay instead. Other men in the office had skipped a vacation
+			now and then, but Percy had stuck to his desk for five
+			years, had tottered to his stool through attacks of grippe and
+			tonsilitis. He seemed to have grown fast to his ledger, and it
+			was to this that Oliver objected. He liked his men to stay
+			men, to look like men and live like men. He remembered how
+			alert and wide-awake Bixby had seemed to him when he himself
+			first came into the office. He had picked Bixby out as the
+			most intelligent and interested of his father&#8217;s employees, and
+			since then had often wondered why he never seemed to see
+			chances to forge ahead. Promotions, of course, went to the
+			men who went after them. When Percy&#8217;s baby died, he went
+			to the funeral, and asked Percy to call on him if he needed
+			money. Once when he chanced to sit down by Bixby on the
+			elevated and found him reading Bryce&#8217;s &#8220;American Commonwealth,&#8221;
+			he asked him to make use of his own large office
+			library. Percy thanked him, but he never came for any books.
+			Oliver wondered whether his bookkeeper really tried to avoid
+			him.</p>
+
+			<p>One evening Oliver met the Bixbys in the lobby of a theater.
+			He introduced Mrs. Remsen to them, and held them for
+			some moments in conversation. When they got into their motor,
+			Mrs. Remsen said:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Is that little man afraid of you, Oliver? He looked like a
+			scared rabbit.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Oliver snapped the door, and said with a shade of irritation:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s the matter with him. He&#8217;s the fellow
+			I&#8217;ve told you about who never takes a vacation. I half believe
+			it&#8217;s his wife. She looks pitiless enough for anything.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;She&#8217;s very pretty of her kind,&#8221; mused Mrs. Remsen, &#8220;but
+			rather chilling. One can see that she has ideas about elegance.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Rather unfortunate ones for a bookkeeper&#8217;s wife. I surmise
+			that Percy felt she was overdressed, and that made him
+			awkward with me. I&#8217;ve always suspected that fellow of good
+			taste.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>After that, when Remsen passed the counting-room and
+			saw Percy screwed up over his ledger, he often remembered
+			Mrs. Bixby, with her cold, pale eyes and long lashes, and her
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page157" title="157">&nbsp;</a>expression that was something between indifference and discontent.
+			She rose behind Percy&#8217;s bent shoulders like an apparition.</p>
+
+			<p>One spring afternoon Remsen was closeted in his private
+			office with his lawyer until a late hour. As he came down the
+			long hall in the dusk he glanced through the glass partition
+			into the counting-room, and saw Percy Bixby huddled up on
+			his tall stool, though it was too dark to work. Indeed, Bixby&#8217;s
+			ledger was closed, and he sat with his two arms resting on the
+			brown cover. He did not move a muscle when young Remsen
+			entered.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You are late, Bixby, and so am I,&#8221; Oliver began genially as
+			he crossed to the front of the room and looked out at the
+			lighted windows of other tall buildings. &#8220;The fact is, I&#8217;ve
+			been doing something that men have a foolish way of putting
+			off. I&#8217;ve been making my will.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, sir.&#8221; Percy brought it out with a deep breath.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Glad to be through with it,&#8221; Oliver went on. &#8220;Mr. Melton
+			will bring the paper back to-morrow, and I&#8217;d like to ask you
+			to be one of the witnesses.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;d be very proud, Mr. Remsen.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Thank you, Bixby. Good night.&#8221; Remsen took up his hat
+			just as Percy slid down from his stool.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Mr. Remsen, I&#8217;m told you&#8217;re going to have the books
+			gone over.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Why, yes, Bixby. Don&#8217;t let that trouble you. I&#8217;m taking in
+			a new partner, you know, an old college friend. Just because
+			he is a friend, I insist upon all the usual formalities. But it is a
+			formality, and I&#8217;ll guarantee the expert won&#8217;t make a scratch
+			on your books. Good night. You&#8217;d better be coming, too.&#8221;
+			Remsen had reached the door when he heard &#8220;Mr. Remsen!&#8221;
+			in a desperate voice behind him. He turned, and saw Bixby
+			standing uncertainly at one end of the desk, his hand still on
+			his ledger, his uneven shoulders drooping forward and his
+			head hanging as if he were seasick. Remsen came back and
+			stood at the other end of the long desk. It was too dark to see
+			Bixby&#8217;s face clearly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What is it, Bixby?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Mr. Remsen, five years ago, just before I was married, I
+			falsified the books a thousand dollars, and I used the money.&#8221;
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page158" title="158">&nbsp;</a>Percy leaned forward against his desk, which took him just
+			across the chest.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What&#8217;s that, Bixby?&#8221; Young Remsen spoke in a tone of
+			polite surprise. He felt painfully embarrassed.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, sir. I thought I&#8217;d get it all paid back before this. I&#8217;ve
+			put back three hundred, but the books are still seven hundred
+			out of true. I&#8217;ve played the shortages about from account to
+			account these five years, but an expert would find &#8217;em in
+			twenty-four hours.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t just understand how&#8212;&#8221; Oliver stopped and shook
+			his head.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I held it out of the Western remittances, Mr. Remsen.
+			They were coming in heavy just then. I was up against it. I
+			hadn&#8217;t saved anything to marry on, and my wife thought I
+			was getting more money than I was. Since we&#8217;ve been married,
+			I&#8217;ve never had the nerve to tell her. I could have paid it
+			all back if it hadn&#8217;t been for the unforeseen expenses.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Remsen sighed.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Being married is largely unforeseen expenses, Percy.
+			There&#8217;s only one way to fix this up: I&#8217;ll give you seven hundred
+			dollars in cash to-morrow, and you can give me your
+			personal note, with the understanding that I hold ten dollars
+			a week out of your pay-check until it is paid. I think you
+			ought to tell your wife exactly how you are fixed, though. You
+			can&#8217;t expect her to help you much when she doesn&#8217;t know.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">That night Mrs. Bixby was sitting in their flat, waiting for
+			her husband. She was dressed for a bridge party, and often
+			looked with impatience from her paper to the Mission clock,
+			as big as a coffin and with nothing but two weights dangling
+			in its hollow framework. Percy had been loath to buy the
+			clock when they got their furniture, and he had hated it ever
+			since. Stella had changed very little since she came into the
+			flat a bride. Then she wore her hair in a Floradora pompadour;
+			now she wore it hooded close about her head like a
+			scarf, in a rather smeary manner, like an Impressionist&#8217;s
+			brush-work. She heard her husband come in and close the
+			door softly. While he was taking off his hat in the narrow
+			tunnel of a hall, she called to him:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I hope you&#8217;ve had something to eat down-town. You&#8217;ll
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page159" title="159">&nbsp;</a>have to dress right away.&#8221; Percy came in and sat down. She
+			looked up from the evening paper she was reading. &#8220;You&#8217;ve
+			no time to sit down. We must start in fifteen minutes.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He shaded his eyes from the glaring overhead light.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m afraid I can&#8217;t go anywhere to-night. I&#8217;m all in.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Bixby rattled her paper, and turned from the theatrical
+			page to the fashions.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You&#8217;ll feel better after you dress. We won&#8217;t stay late.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Her even persistence usually conquered her husband. She
+			never forgot anything she had once decided to do. Her
+			manner of following it up grew more chilly, but never
+			weaker. To-night there was no spring in Percy. He closed his
+			eyes and replied without moving:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I can&#8217;t go. You had better telephone the Burks we aren&#8217;t
+			coming. I have to tell you something disagreeable.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Stella rose.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I certainly am not going to disappoint the Burks and stay
+			at home to talk about anything disagreeable.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re not very sympathetic, Stella.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She turned away.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;If I were, you&#8217;d soon settle down into a pretty dull proposition.
+			We&#8217;d have no social life now if I didn&#8217;t keep at you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Percy roused himself a little.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Social life? Well, we&#8217;ll have to trim that pretty close for a
+			while. I&#8217;m in debt to the company. We&#8217;ve been living beyond
+			our means ever since we were married.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;We can&#8217;t live on less than we do,&#8221; Stella said quietly. &#8220;No
+			use in taking that up again.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Percy sat up, clutching the arms of his chair.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;We&#8217;ll have to take it up. I&#8217;m seven hundred dollars short,
+			and the books are to be audited to-morrow. I told young
+			Remsen and he&#8217;s going to take my note and hold the money
+			out of my pay-checks. He could send me to jail, of course.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Stella turned and looked down at him with a gleam of
+			interest.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, you&#8217;ve been playing solitaire with the books, have
+			you? And he&#8217;s found you out! I hope I&#8217;ll never see that man
+			again. Sugar face!&#8221; She said this with intense acrimony. Her
+			forehead flushed delicately, and her eyes were full of hate.
+			Young Remsen was not her idea of a &#8220;business man.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page160" title="160">&nbsp;</a>Stella went into the other room. When she came back she
+			wore her evening coat and carried long gloves and a black
+			scarf. This she began to arrange over her hair before the mirror
+			above the false fireplace. Percy lay inert in the Morris chair
+			and watched her. Yes, he understood; it was very difficult for
+			a woman with hair like that to be shabby and to go without
+			things. Her hair made her conspicuous, and it had to be lived
+			up to. It had been the deciding factor in his fate.</p>
+
+			<p>Stella caught the lace over one ear with a large gold hairpin.
+			She repeated this until she got a good effect. Then turning
+			to Percy, she began to draw on her gloves.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not worrying any, because I&#8217;m going back into business,&#8221;
+			she said firmly. &#8220;I meant to, anyway, if you didn&#8217;t get a
+			raise the first of the year. I have the offer of a good position,
+			and we can live in an apartment hotel.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Percy was on his feet in an instant.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I won&#8217;t have you grinding in any office. That&#8217;s flat.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Stella&#8217;s lower lip quivered in a commiserating smile. &#8220;Oh, I
+			won&#8217;t lose my health. Charley Greengay&#8217;s a partner in his
+			concern now, and he wants a private secretary.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Percy drew back.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You can&#8217;t work for Greengay. He&#8217;s got too bad a reputation.
+			You&#8217;ve more pride than that, Stella.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The thin sweep of color he knew so well went over Stella&#8217;s
+			face.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;His business reputation seems to be all right,&#8221; she commented,
+			working the kid on with her left hand.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What if it is?&#8221; Percy broke out. &#8220;He&#8217;s the cheapest kind of
+			a skate. He gets into scrapes with the girls in his own office.
+			The last one got into the newspapers, and he had to pay the
+			girl a wad.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He don&#8217;t get into scrapes with his books, anyway, and he
+			seems to be able to stand getting into the papers. I excuse
+			Charley. His wife&#8217;s a pill.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I suppose you think he&#8217;d have been all right if he&#8217;d married
+			you,&#8221; said Percy, bitterly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, I do.&#8221; Stella buttoned her glove with an air of
+			finishing something, and then looked at Percy without animosity.
+			&#8220;Charley and I both have sporty tastes, and we like
+			excitement. You might as well live in Newark if you&#8217;re going
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page161" title="161">&nbsp;</a>to sit at home in the evening. You oughtn&#8217;t to have married a
+			business woman; you need somebody domestic. There&#8217;s
+			nothing in this sort of life for either of us.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That means, I suppose, that you&#8217;re going around with
+			Greengay and his crowd?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, that&#8217;s my sort of crowd, and you never did fit into it.
+			You&#8217;re too intellectual. I&#8217;ve always been proud of you, Percy.
+			You&#8217;re better style than Charley, but that gets tiresome. You
+			will never burn much red fire in New York, now, will you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Percy did not reply. He sat looking at the minute-hand of
+			the eviscerated Mission clock. His wife almost never took the
+			trouble to argue with him.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re old style, Percy,&#8221; she went on. &#8220;Of course everybody
+			marries and wishes they hadn&#8217;t, but nowadays people
+			get over it. Some women go ahead on the quiet, but I&#8217;m
+			giving it to you straight. I&#8217;m going to work for Greengay. I
+			like his line of business, and I meet people well. Now I&#8217;m
+			going to the Burks&#8217;.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Percy dropped his hands limply between his knees.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I suppose,&#8221; he brought out, &#8220;the real trouble is that
+			you&#8217;ve decided my earning power is not very great.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s part of it, and part of it is you&#8217;re old-fashioned.&#8221;
+			Stella paused at the door and looked back. &#8220;What made you
+			rush me, anyway, Percy?&#8221; she asked indulgently. &#8220;What did
+			you go and pretend to be a spender and get tied up with me
+			for?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I guess everybody wants to be a spender when he&#8217;s in
+			love,&#8221; Percy replied.</p>
+
+			<p>Stella shook her head mournfully.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, you&#8217;re a spender or you&#8217;re not. Greengay has been
+			broke three times, fired, down and out, black-listed. But he&#8217;s
+			always come back, and he always will. You will never be fired,
+			but you&#8217;ll always be poor.&#8221; She turned and looked back again
+			before she went out.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">Six months later Bixby came to young Oliver Remsen one
+			afternoon and said he would like to have twenty dollars a
+			week held out of his pay until his debt was cleared off.</p>
+
+			<p>Oliver looked up at his sallow employee and asked him
+			how he could spare as much as that.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page162" title="162">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;My expenses are lighter,&#8221; Bixby replied. &#8220;My wife has
+			gone into business with a ready-to-wear firm. She is not living
+			with me any more.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Oliver looked annoyed, and asked him if nothing could be
+			done to readjust his domestic affairs. Bixby said no; they
+			would probably remain as they were.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;But where are you living, Bixby? How have you arranged
+			things?&#8221; the young man asked impatiently.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m very comfortable. I live in a boarding-house and have
+			my own furniture. There are several fellows there who are
+			fixed the same way. Their wives went back into business, and
+			they drifted apart.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>With a baffled expression Remsen stared at the uneven
+			shoulders under the skin-fitting alpaca desk coat as his bookkeeper
+			went out. He had meant to do something for Percy,
+			but somehow, he reflected, one never did do anything for a
+			fellow who had been stung as hard as that.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Century</cite>, May 1916</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="ardessa" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page163" title="163">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">Ardessa <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<p class="first_paragraph">The grand-mannered old man who sat at a desk in the
+			reception-room of &#8220;The Outcry&#8221; offices to receive visitors
+			and incidentally to keep the time-book of the employees,
+			looked up as Miss Devine entered at ten minutes past ten and
+			condescendingly wished him good morning. He bowed profoundly
+			as she minced past his desk, and with an indifferent
+			air took her course down the corridor that led to the editorial
+			offices. Mechanically he opened the flat, black book at his elbow
+			and placed his finger on D, running his eye along the
+			line of figures after the name Devine. &#8220;It&#8217;s banker&#8217;s hours she
+			keeps, indeed,&#8221; he muttered. What was the use of entering so
+			capricious a record? Nevertheless, with his usual preliminary
+			flourish he wrote 10:10 under this, the fourth day of May.</p>
+
+			<p>The employee who kept banker&#8217;s hours rustled on down
+			the corridor to her private room, hung up her lavender jacket
+			and her trim spring hat, and readjusted her side combs by the
+			mirror inside her closet door. Glancing at her desk, she rang
+			for an office boy, and reproved him because he had not
+			dusted more carefully and because there were lumps in her
+			paste. When he disappeared with the paste-jar, she sat down
+			to decide which of her employer&#8217;s letters he should see and
+			which he should not.</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa was not young and she was certainly not handsome.
+			The coquettish angle at which she carried her head was
+			a mannerism surviving from a time when it was more becoming.
+			She shuddered at the cold candor of the new business
+			woman, and was insinuatingly feminine.</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa&#8217;s employer, like young Lochinvar, had come out of
+			the West, and he had done a great many contradictory things
+			before he became proprietor and editor of &#8220;The Outcry.&#8221;
+			Before he decided to go to New York and make the East
+			take notice of him, O&#8217;Mally had acquired a punctual, reliable
+			silver-mine in South Dakota. This silent friend in the background
+			made his journalistic success comparatively easy. He
+			had figured out, when he was a rich nobody in Nevada, that
+			the quickest way to cut into the known world was through
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page164" title="164">&nbsp;</a>the printing-press. He arrived in New York, bought a highly
+			respectable publication, and turned it into a red-hot magazine
+			of protest, which he called &#8220;The Outcry.&#8221; He knew what the
+			West wanted, and it proved to be what everybody secretly
+			wanted. In six years he had done the thing that had hitherto
+			seemed impossible: built up a national weekly, out on the
+			news-stands the same day in New York and San Francisco; a
+			magazine the people howled for, a moving-picture film of
+			their real tastes and interests.</p>
+
+			<p>O&#8217;Mally bought &#8220;The Outcry&#8221; to make a stir, not to make
+			a career, but he had got built into the thing more than he ever
+			intended. It had made him a public man and put him into
+			politics. He found the publicity game diverting, and it held
+			him longer than any other game had ever done. He had built
+			up about him an organization of which he was somewhat
+			afraid and with which he was vastly bored. On his staff there
+			were five famous men, and he had made every one of them.
+			At first it amused him to manufacture celebrities. He found
+			he could take an average reporter from the daily press, give
+			him a &#8220;line&#8221; to follow, a trust to fight, a vice to expose,&#8212;this
+			was all in that good time when people were eager to read
+			about their own wickedness,&#8212;and in two years the reporter
+			would be recognized as an authority. Other people&#8212;Napoleon,
+			Disraeli, Sarah Bernhardt&#8212;had discovered that advertising
+			would go a long way; but Marcus O&#8217;Mally discovered
+			that in America it would go all the way&#8212;as far as you wished
+			to pay its passage. Any human countenance, plastered in
+			three-sheet posters from sea to sea, would be revered by the
+			American people. The strangest thing was that the owners of
+			these grave countenances, staring at their own faces on newsstands
+			and billboards, fell to venerating themselves; and even
+			he, O&#8217;Mally, was more or less constrained by these reputations
+			that he had created out of cheap paper and cheap ink.</p>
+
+			<p>Constraint was the last thing O&#8217;Mally liked. The most engaging
+			and unusual thing about the man was that he couldn&#8217;t
+			be fooled by the success of his own methods, and no amount
+			of &#8220;recognition&#8221; could make a stuffed shirt of him. No matter
+			how much he was advertised as a great medicine-man in the
+			councils of the nation, he knew that he was a born gambler
+			and a soldier of fortune. He left his dignified office to take
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page165" title="165">&nbsp;</a>care of itself for a good many months of the year while he
+			played about on the outskirts of social order. He liked being a
+			great man from the East in rough-and-tumble Western cities
+			where he had once been merely an unconsidered spender.</p>
+
+			<p>O&#8217;Mally&#8217;s long absences constituted one of the supreme advantages
+			of Ardessa Devine&#8217;s position. When he was at his
+			post her duties were not heavy, but when he was giving balls
+			in Goldfield, Nevada, she lived an ideal life. She came to the
+			office every day, indeed, to forward such of O&#8217;Mally&#8217;s letters
+			as she thought best, to attend to his club notices and tradesmen&#8217;s
+			bills, and to taste the sense of her high connections.
+			The great men of the staff were all about her, as contemplative
+			as Buddhas in their private offices, each meditating upon
+			the particular trust or form of vice confided to his care. Thus
+			surrounded, Ardessa had a pleasant sense of being at the heart
+			of things. It was like a mental massage, exercise without exertion.
+			She read and she embroidered. Her room was pleasant,
+			and she liked to be seen at ladylike tasks and to feel herself a
+			graceful contrast to the crude girls in the advertising and
+			circulation departments across the hall. The younger stenographers,
+			who had to get through with the enormous office
+			correspondence, and who rushed about from one editor to
+			another with wire baskets full of letters, made faces as they
+			passed Ardessa&#8217;s door and saw her cool and cloistered,
+			daintily plying her needle. But no matter how hard the other
+			stenographers were driven, no one, not even one of the
+			five oracles of the staff, dared dictate so much as a letter to
+			Ardessa. Like a sultan&#8217;s bride, she was inviolate in her lord&#8217;s
+			absence; she had to be kept for him.</p>
+
+			<p>Naturally the other young women employed in &#8220;The Outcry&#8221;
+			offices disliked Miss Devine. They were all competent
+			girls, trained in the exacting methods of modern business, and
+			they had to make good every day in the week, had to get
+			through with a great deal of work or lose their position.
+			O&#8217;Mally&#8217;s private secretary was a mystery to them. Her exemptions
+			and privileges, her patronizing remarks, formed an
+			exhaustless subject of conversation at the lunch-hour. Ardessa
+			had, indeed, as they knew she must have, a kind of &#8220;purchase&#8221;
+			on her employer.</p>
+
+			<p>When O&#8217;Mally first came to New York to break into publicity,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page166" title="166">&nbsp;</a>he engaged Miss Devine upon the recommendation of
+			the editor whose ailing publication he bought and rechristened.
+			That editor was a conservative, scholarly gentleman of
+			the old school, who was retiring because he felt out of place
+			in the world of brighter, breezier magazines that had been
+			flowering since the new century came in. He believed that in
+			this vehement world young O&#8217;Mally would make himself
+			heard and that Miss Devine&#8217;s training in an editorial office
+			would be of use to him.</p>
+
+			<p>When O&#8217;Mally first sat down at a desk to be an editor, all
+			the cards that were brought in looked pretty much alike to
+			him. Ardessa was at his elbow. She had long been steeped in
+			literary distinctions and in the social distinctions which used
+			to count for much more than they do now. She knew all the
+			great men, all the nephews and clients of great men. She
+			knew which must be seen, which must be made welcome, and
+			which could safely be sent away. She could give O&#8217;Mally on
+			the instant the former rating in magazine offices of nearly
+			every name that was brought in to him. She could give him
+			an idea of the man&#8217;s connections, of the price his work commanded,
+			and insinuate whether he ought to be met with the
+			old punctiliousness or with the new joviality. She was useful
+			in explaining to her employer the significance of various invitations,
+			and the standing of clubs and associations. At first she
+			was virtually the social mentor of the bullet-headed young
+			Westerner who wanted to break into everything, the solitary
+			person about the office of the humming new magazine who
+			knew anything about the editorial traditions of the eighties
+			and nineties which, antiquated as they now were, gave an
+			editor, as O&#8217;Mally said, a background.</p>
+
+			<p>Despite her indolence, Ardessa was useful to O&#8217;Mally as a
+			social reminder. She was the card catalogue of his ever-changing
+			personal relations. O&#8217;Mally went in for everything
+			and got tired of everything; that was why he made a good
+			editor. After he was through with people, Ardessa was very
+			skilful in covering his retreat. She read and answered the letters
+			of admirers who had begun to bore him. When great
+			authors, who had been dined and fêted the month before,
+			were suddenly left to cool their heels in the reception-room,
+			thrown upon the suave hospitality of the grand old man at
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page167" title="167">&nbsp;</a>the desk, it was Ardessa who went out and made soothing
+			and plausible explanations as to why the editor could not see
+			them. She was the brake that checked the too-eager neophyte,
+			the emollient that eased the severing of relationships, the gentle
+			extinguisher of the lights that failed. When there were no
+			longer messages of hope and cheer to be sent to ardent young
+			writers and reformers, Ardessa delivered, as sweetly as possible,
+			whatever messages were left.</p>
+
+			<p>In handling these people with whom O&#8217;Mally was quite
+			through, Ardessa had gradually developed an industry which
+			was immensely gratifying to her own vanity. Not only did she
+			not crush them; she even fostered them a little. She continued
+			to advise them in the reception-room and &#8220;personally&#8221; received
+			their manuscripts long after O&#8217;Mally had declared that
+			he would never read another line they wrote. She let them
+			outline their plans for stories and articles to her, promising to
+			bring these suggestions to the editor&#8217;s attention. She denied
+			herself to nobody, was gracious even to the Shakspere-Bacon
+			man, the perpetual-motion man, the travel-article man, the
+			ghosts which haunt every magazine office. The writers who
+			had had their happy hour of O&#8217;Mally&#8217;s favor kept feeling that
+			Ardessa might reinstate them. She answered their letters of
+			inquiry in her most polished and elegant style, and even gave
+			them hints as to the subjects in which the restless editor was
+			or was not interested at the moment: she feared it would be
+			useless to send him an article on &#8220;How to Trap Lions,&#8221; because
+			he had just bought an article on &#8220;Elephant-Shooting in
+			Majuba Land,&#8221; etc.</p>
+
+			<p>So when O&#8217;Mally plunged into his office at 11:30 on this,
+			the fourth day of May, having just got back from three-days&#8217;
+			fishing, he found Ardessa in the reception-room, surrounded
+			by a little court of discards. This was annoying, for he always
+			wanted his stenographer at once. Telling the office boy to give
+			her a hint that she was needed, he threw off his hat and topcoat
+			and began to race through the pile of letters Ardessa had
+			put on his desk. When she entered, he did not wait for her
+			polite inquiries about his trip, but broke in at once.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What is that fellow who writes about phossy jaw still
+			hanging round here for? I don&#8217;t want any articles on phossy
+			jaw, and if I did, I wouldn&#8217;t want his.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page168" title="168">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;He has just sold an article on the match industry to &#8216;The
+			New Age,&#8217; Mr. O&#8217;Mally,&#8221; Ardessa replied as she took her seat
+			at the editor&#8217;s right.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Why does he have to come and tell us about it? We&#8217;ve
+			nothing to do with &#8216;The New Age.&#8217; And that prison-reform
+			guy, what&#8217;s he loafing about for?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa bridled.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You remember, Mr. O&#8217;Mally, he brought letters of introduction
+			from Governor Harper, the reform Governor of
+			Mississippi.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>O&#8217;Mally jumped up, kicking over his waste-basket in his
+			impatience.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That was months ago. I went through his letters and went
+			through him, too. He hasn&#8217;t got anything we want. I&#8217;ve been
+			through with Governor Harper a long while. We&#8217;re asleep at
+			the switch in here. And let me tell you, if I catch sight of that
+			causes-of-blindness-in-babies woman around here again, I&#8217;ll
+			do something violent. Clear them out, Miss Devine! Clear
+			them out! We need a traffic policeman in this office. Have you
+			got that article on &#8216;Stealing Our National Water Power&#8217; ready
+			for me?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Mr. Gerrard took it back to make modifications. He gave
+			it to me at noon on Saturday, just before the office closed. I
+			will have it ready for you to-morrow morning, Mr. O&#8217;Mally,
+			if you have not too many letters for me this afternoon,&#8221; Ardessa
+			replied pointedly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Holy Mike!&#8221; muttered O&#8217;Mally, &#8220;we need a traffic policeman
+			for the staff, too. Gerrard&#8217;s modified that thing half a
+			dozen times already. Why don&#8217;t they get accurate information
+			in the first place?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He began to dictate his morning mail, walking briskly up
+			and down the floor by way of giving his stenographer an energetic
+			example. Her indolence and her ladylike deportment
+			weighed on him. He wanted to take her by the elbows and
+			run her around the block. He didn&#8217;t mind that she loafed
+			when he was away, but it was becoming harder and harder to
+			speed her up when he was on the spot. He knew his correspondence
+			was not enough to keep her busy, so when he was
+			in town he made her type his own breezy editorials and various
+			articles by members of his staff.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page169" title="169">&nbsp;</a>Transcribing editorial copy is always laborious, and the
+			only way to make it easy is to farm it out. This Ardessa was
+			usually clever enough to do. When she returned to her own
+			room after O&#8217;Mally had gone out to lunch, Ardessa rang for
+			an office boy and said languidly, &#8220;James, call Becky, please.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>In a moment a thin, tense-faced Hebrew girl of eighteen or
+			nineteen came rushing in, carrying a wire basket full of typewritten
+			sheets. She was as gaunt as a plucked spring chicken,
+			and her cheap, gaudy clothes might have been thrown on her.
+			She looked as if she were running to catch a train and in
+			mortal dread of missing it. While Miss Devine examined the
+			pages in the basket, Becky stood with her shoulders drawn up
+			and her elbows drawn in, apparently trying to hide herself in
+			her insufficient open-work waist. Her wild, black eyes followed
+			Miss Devine&#8217;s hands desperately. Ardessa sighed.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;This seems to be very smeary copy again, Becky. You
+			don&#8217;t keep your mind on your work, and so you have to erase
+			continually.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Becky spoke up in wailing self-vindication.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It ain&#8217;t that, Miss Devine. It&#8217;s so many hard words he uses
+			that I have to be at the dictionary all the time. Look! Look!&#8221;
+			She produced a bunch of manuscript faintly scrawled in pencil,
+			and thrust it under Ardessa&#8217;s eyes. &#8220;He don&#8217;t write out the
+			words at all. He just begins a word, and then makes waves for
+			you to guess.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I see you haven&#8217;t always guessed correctly, Becky,&#8221; said
+			Ardessa, with a weary smile. &#8220;There are a great many words
+			here that would surprise Mr. Gerrard, I am afraid.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;And the inserts,&#8221; Becky persisted. &#8220;How is anybody to tell
+			where they go, Miss Devine? It&#8217;s mostly inserts; see, all over
+			the top and sides and back.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa turned her head away.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t claw the pages like that, Becky. You make me nervous.
+			Mr. Gerrard has not time to dot his i&#8217;s and cross his t&#8217;s.
+			That is what we keep copyists for. I will correct these sheets
+			for you,&#8212;it would be terrible if Mr. O&#8217;Mally saw them,&#8212;and
+			then you can copy them over again. It must be done by
+			to-morrow morning, so you may have to work late. See that
+			your hands are clean and dry, and then you will not smear it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, ma&#8217;am. Thank you, Miss Devine. Will you tell the
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page170" title="170">&nbsp;</a>janitor, please, it&#8217;s all right if I have to stay? He was cross
+			because I was here Saturday afternoon doing this. He said it
+			was a holiday, and when everybody else was gone I ought
+			to&#8212;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That will do, Becky. Yes, I will speak to the janitor for
+			you. You may go to lunch now.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Becky turned on one heel and then swung back.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Miss Devine,&#8221; she said anxiously, &#8220;will it be all right if I
+			get white shoes for now?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa gave her kind consideration.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;For office wear, you mean? No, Becky. With only one
+			pair, you could not keep them properly clean; and black shoes
+			are much less conspicuous. Tan, if you prefer.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Becky looked down at her feet. They were too large, and
+			her skirt was as much too short as her legs were too long.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Nearly all the girls I know wear white shoes to business,&#8221;
+			she pleaded.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;They are probably little girls who work in factories or department
+			stores, and that is quite another matter. Since you
+			raise the question, Becky, I ought to speak to you about your
+			new waist. Don&#8217;t wear it to the office again, please. Those
+			cheap open-work waists are not appropriate in an office like
+			this. They are all very well for little chorus girls.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;But Miss Kalski wears expensive waists to business more
+			open than this, and jewelry&#8212;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa interrupted. Her face grew hard.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Miss Kalski,&#8221; she said coldly, &#8220;works for the business department.
+			You are employed in the editorial offices. There is a
+			great difference. You see, Becky, I might have to call you in
+			here at any time when a scientist or a great writer or the
+			president of a university is here talking over editorial matters,
+			and such clothes as you have on to-day would make a bad
+			impression. Nearly all our connections are with important
+			people of that kind, and we ought to be well, but quietly,
+			dressed.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, Miss Devine. Thank you,&#8221; Becky gasped and disappeared.
+			Heaven knew she had no need to be further impressed
+			with the greatness of &#8220;The Outcry&#8221; office. During
+			the year and a half she had been there she had never ceased to
+			tremble. She knew the prices all the authors got as well as
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page171" title="171">&nbsp;</a>Miss Devine did, and everything seemed to her to be done on
+			a magnificent scale. She hadn&#8217;t a good memory for long technical
+			words, but she never forgot dates or prices or initials or
+			telephone numbers.</p>
+
+			<p>Becky felt that her job depended on Miss Devine, and she
+			was so glad to have it that she scarcely realized she was being
+			bullied. Besides, she was grateful for all that she had learned
+			from Ardessa; Ardessa had taught her to do most of the
+			things that she was supposed to do herself. Becky wanted to
+			learn, she had to learn; that was the train she was always running
+			for. Her father, Isaac Tietelbaum, the tailor, who pressed
+			Miss Devine&#8217;s skirts and kept her ladylike suits in order, had
+			come to his client two years ago and told her he had a bright
+			girl just out of a commercial high school. He implored Ardessa
+			to find some office position for his daughter. Ardessa told
+			an appealing story to O&#8217;Mally, and brought Becky into the
+			office, at a salary of six dollars a week, to help with the copying
+			and to learn business routine. When Becky first came she
+			was as ignorant as a young savage. She was rapid at her shorthand
+			and typing, but a Kafir girl would have known as much
+			about the English language. Nobody ever wanted to learn
+			more than Becky. She fairly wore the dictionary out. She dug
+			up her old school grammar and worked over it at night. She
+			faithfully mastered Miss Devine&#8217;s fussy system of punctuation.</p>
+
+			<p>There were eight children at home, younger than Becky,
+			and they were all eager to learn. They wanted to get their
+			mother out of the three dark rooms behind the tailor shop
+			and to move into a flat up-stairs, where they could, as Becky
+			said, &#8220;live private.&#8221; The young Tietelbaums doubted their father&#8217;s
+			ability to bring this change about, for the more things
+			he declared himself ready to do in his window placards, the
+			fewer were brought to him to be done. &#8220;Dyeing, Cleaning,
+			Ladies&#8217; Furs Remodeled&#8221;&#8212;it did no good.</p>
+
+			<p>Rebecca was out to &#8220;improve herself,&#8221; as her father had
+			told her she must. Ardessa had easy way with her. It was one
+			of those rare relationships from which both persons profit.
+			The more Becky could learn from Ardessa, the happier she
+			was; and the more Ardessa could unload on Becky, the
+			greater was her contentment. She easily broke Becky of the
+			gum-chewing habit, taught her to walk quietly, to efface herself
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page172" title="172">&nbsp;</a>at the proper moment, and to hold her tongue. Becky had
+			been raised to eight dollars a week; but she didn&#8217;t care half so
+			much about that as she did about her own increasing efficiency.
+			The more work Miss Devine handed over to her the
+			happier she was, and the faster she was able to eat it up. She
+			tested and tried herself in every possible way. She now had
+			full confidence that she would surely one day be a high-priced
+			stenographer, a real &#8220;business woman.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Becky would have corrupted a really industrious person,
+			but a bilious temperament like Ardessa&#8217;s couldn&#8217;t make even
+			a feeble stand against such willingness. Ardessa had grown
+			soft and had lost the knack of turning out work. Sometimes,
+			in her importance and serenity, she shivered. What if O&#8217;Mally
+			should die, and she were thrust out into the world to work in
+			competition with the brazen, competent young women she
+			saw about her everywhere? She believed herself indispensable,
+			but she knew that in such a mischanceful world as this the
+			very powers of darkness might rise to separate her from this
+			pearl among jobs.</p>
+
+			<p>When Becky came in from lunch she went down the long hall
+			to the wash-room, where all the little girls who worked in
+			the advertising and circulation departments kept their hats
+			and jackets. There were shelves and shelves of bright spring
+			hats, piled on top of one another, all as stiff as sheet-iron and
+			trimmed with gay flowers. At the marble wash-stand stood
+			Rena Kalski, the right bower of the business manager, polishing
+			her diamond rings with a nail-brush.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Hullo, kid,&#8221; she called over her shoulder to Becky. &#8220;I&#8217;ve
+			got a ticket for you for Thursday afternoon.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Becky&#8217;s black eyes glowed, but the strained look on her
+			face drew tighter than ever.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ll never ask her, Miss Kalski,&#8221; she said rapidly. &#8220;I don&#8217;t
+			dare. I have to stay late to-night again; and I know she&#8217;d be
+			hard to please after, if I was to try to get off on a week-day. I
+			thank you, Miss Kalski, but I&#8217;d better not.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Miss Kalski laughed. She was a slender young Hebrew,
+			handsome in an impudent, Tenderloin sort of way, with a
+			small head, reddish-brown almond eyes, a trifle tilted, a rapacious
+			mouth, and a beautiful chin.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Ain&#8217;t you under that woman&#8217;s thumb, though! Call her
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page173" title="173">&nbsp;</a>bluff. She isn&#8217;t half the prima donna she thinks she is. On my
+			side of the hall we know who&#8217;s who about this place.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The business and editorial departments of &#8220;The Outcry&#8221;
+			were separated by a long corridor and a great contempt. Miss
+			Kalski dried her rings with tissue-paper and studied them
+			with an appraising eye.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, since you&#8217;re such a &#8217;fraidy-calf,&#8217;&#8221; she went on,
+			&#8220;maybe I can get a rise out of her myself. Now I&#8217;ve got you a
+			ticket out of that shirt-front, I want you to go. I&#8217;ll drop in on
+			Devine this afternoon.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>When Miss Kalski went back to her desk in the business
+			manager&#8217;s private office, she turned to him familiarly, but not
+			impertinently.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Mr. Henderson, I want to send a kid over in the editorial
+			stenographers&#8217; to the Palace Thursday afternoon. She&#8217;s a nice
+			kid, only she&#8217;s scared out of her skin all the time. Miss
+			Devine&#8217;s her boss, and she&#8217;ll be just mean enough not to let
+			the young one off. Would you say a word to her?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The business manager lit a cigar.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not saying words to any of the high-brows over there.
+			Try it out with Devine yourself. You&#8217;re not bashful.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Miss Kalski shrugged her shoulders and smiled.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, very well.&#8221; She serpentined out of the room and
+			crossed the Rubicon into the editorial offices. She found Ardessa
+			typing O&#8217;Mally&#8217;s letters and wearing a pained expression.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Good afternoon, Miss Devine,&#8221; she said carelessly. &#8220;Can
+			we borrow Becky over there for Thursday afternoon? We&#8217;re
+			short.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Miss Devine looked piqued and tilted her head.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s customary, Miss Kalski, for the business
+			department to use our people. We never have girls enough
+			here to do the work. Of course if Mr. Henderson feels justified&#8212;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Thanks awfully, Miss Devine,&#8221;&#8212;Miss Kalski interrupted
+			her with the perfectly smooth, good-natured tone which
+			never betrayed a hint of the scorn every line of her sinuous
+			figure expressed,&#8212;&#8220;I will tell Mr. Henderson. Perhaps we
+			can do something for you some day.&#8221; Whether this was a
+			threat, a kind wish, or an insinuation, no mortal could have
+			told. Miss Kalski&#8217;s face was always suggesting insolence without
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page174" title="174">&nbsp;</a>being quite insolent. As she returned to her own domain
+			she met the cashier&#8217;s head clerk in the hall. &#8220;That Devine
+			woman&#8217;s a crime,&#8221; she murmured. The head clerk laughed
+			tolerantly.</p>
+
+			<p>That afternoon as Miss Kalski was leaving the office at 5:15,
+			on her way down the corridor she heard a typewriter clicking
+			away in the empty, echoing editorial offices. She looked in,
+			and found Becky bending forward over the machine as if she
+			were about to swallow it.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Hello, kid. Do you sleep with that?&#8221; she called. She
+			walked up to Becky and glanced at her copy. &#8220;What do you
+			let &#8217;em keep you up nights over that stuff for?&#8221; she asked
+			contemptuously. &#8220;The world wouldn&#8217;t suffer if that stuff
+			never got printed.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Rebecca looked up wildly. Not even Miss Kalski&#8217;s French
+			pansy hat or her ear-rings and landscape veil could loosen
+			Becky&#8217;s tenacious mind from Mr. Gerrard&#8217;s article on water
+			power. She scarcely knew what Miss Kalski had said to her,
+			certainly not what she meant.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;But I must make progress already, Miss Kalski,&#8221; she
+			panted.</p>
+
+			<p>Miss Kalski gave her low, siren laugh.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I should say you must!&#8221; she ejaculated.</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">Ardessa decided to take her vacation in June, and she
+			arranged that Miss Milligan should do O&#8217;Mally&#8217;s work
+			while she was away. Miss Milligan was blunt and noisy,
+			rapid and inaccurate. It would be just as well for O&#8217;Mally to
+			work with a coarse instrument for a time; he would be more
+			appreciative, perhaps, of certain qualities to which he had
+			seemed insensible of late. Ardessa was to leave for East
+			Hampton on Sunday, and she spent Saturday morning instructing
+			her substitute as to the state of the correspondence.
+			At noon O&#8217;Mally burst into her room. All the morning he
+			had been closeted with a new writer of mystery-stories just
+			over from England.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Can you stay and take my letters this afternoon, Miss
+			Devine? You&#8217;re not leaving until to-morrow.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa pouted, and tilted her head at the angle he was
+			tired of.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page175" title="175">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;I&#8217;m sorry, Mr. O&#8217;Mally, but I&#8217;ve left all my shopping for
+			this afternoon. I think Becky Tietelbaum could do them for
+			you. I will tell her to be careful.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, all right.&#8221; O&#8217;Mally bounced out with a reflection of
+			Ardessa&#8217;s disdainful expression on his face. Saturday afternoon
+			was always a half-holiday, to be sure, but since she had
+			weeks of freedom when he was away&#8212;However&#8212;</p>
+
+			<p>At two o&#8217;clock Becky Tietelbaum appeared at his door, clad
+			in the sober office suit which Miss Devine insisted she should
+			wear, her note-book in her hand, and so frightened that her
+			fingers were cold and her lips were pale. She had never taken
+			dictation from the editor before. It was a great and terrifying
+			occasion.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Sit down,&#8221; he said encouragingly. He began dictating
+			while he shook from his bag the manuscripts he had snatched
+			away from the amazed English author that morning. Presently
+			he looked up.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Do I go too fast?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, sir,&#8221; Becky found strength to say.</p>
+
+			<p>At the end of an hour he told her to go and type as many
+			of the letters as she could while he went over the bunch of
+			stuff he had torn from the Englishman. He was with the
+			Hindu detective in an opium den in Shanghai when Becky
+			returned and placed a pile of papers on his desk.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How many?&#8221; he asked, without looking up.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;All you gave me, sir.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;All, so soon? Wait a minute and let me see how many
+			mistakes.&#8221; He went over the letters rapidly, signing them as
+			he read. &#8220;They seem to be all right. I thought you were the
+			girl that made so many mistakes.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Rebecca was never too frightened to vindicate herself.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Mr. O&#8217;Mally, sir, I don&#8217;t make mistakes with letters. It&#8217;s
+			only copying the articles that have so many long words, and
+			when the writing isn&#8217;t plain, like Mr. Gerrard&#8217;s. I never make
+			many mistakes with Mr. Johnson&#8217;s articles, or with yours I
+			don&#8217;t.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>O&#8217;Mally wheeled round in his chair, looked with curiosity
+			at her long, tense face, her black eyes, and straight brows.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, so you sometimes copy articles, do you? How does
+			that happen?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page176" title="176">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;Yes, sir. Always Miss Devine gives me the articles to do.
+			It&#8217;s good practice for me.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I see.&#8221; O&#8217;Mally shrugged his shoulders. He was thinking
+			that he could get a rise out of the whole American public any
+			day easier than he could get a rise out of Ardessa. &#8220;What
+			editorials of mine have you copied lately, for instance?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Rebecca blazed out at him, reciting rapidly:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, &#8216;A Word about the Rosenbaums,&#8217; &#8216;Useless Navy-Yards,&#8217;
+			&#8216;Who Killed Cock Robin&#8217;&#8212;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Wait a minute.&#8221; O&#8217;Mally checked her flow. &#8220;What was
+			that one about&#8212;Cock Robin?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It was all about why the secretary of the interior dismissed&#8212;&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;All right, all right. Copy those letters, and put them down
+			the chute as you go out. Come in here for a minute on Monday
+			morning.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Becky hurried home to tell her father that she had taken the
+			editor&#8217;s letters and had made no mistakes. On Monday she
+			learned that she was to do O&#8217;Mally&#8217;s work for a few days. He
+			disliked Miss Milligan, and he was annoyed with Ardessa for
+			trying to put her over on him when there was better material
+			at hand. With Rebecca he got on very well; she was impersonal,
+			unreproachful, and she fairly panted for work. Everything
+			was done almost before he told her what he wanted.
+			She raced ahead with him; it was like riding a good modern
+			bicycle after pumping along on an old hard tire.</p>
+
+			<p>On the day before Miss Devine&#8217;s return O&#8217;Mally strolled
+			over for a chat with the business office.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Henderson, your people are taking vacations now, I suppose?
+			Could you use an extra girl?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;If it&#8217;s that thin black one, I can.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>O&#8217;Mally gave him a wise smile.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It isn&#8217;t. To be honest, I want to put one over on you. I
+			want you to take Miss Devine over here for a while and speed
+			her up. I can&#8217;t do anything. She&#8217;s got the upper hand of me. I
+			don&#8217;t want to fire her, you understand, but she makes my life
+			too difficult. It&#8217;s my fault, of course. I&#8217;ve pampered her. Give
+			her a chance over here; maybe she&#8217;ll come back. You can be
+			firm with &#8217;em, can&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Henderson glanced toward the desk where Miss Kalski&#8217;s
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page177" title="177">&nbsp;</a>lightning eye was skimming over the printing-house bills that
+			he was supposed to verify himself.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, if I can&#8217;t, I know who can,&#8221; he replied, with a
+			chuckle.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Exactly,&#8221; O&#8217;Mally agreed. &#8220;I&#8217;m counting on the force of
+			Miss Kalski&#8217;s example. Miss Devine&#8217;s all right, Miss Kalski,
+			but she needs regular exercise. She owes it to her complexion.
+			I can&#8217;t discipline people.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Miss Kalski&#8217;s only reply was a low, indulgent laugh.</p>
+
+			<p>O&#8217;Mally braced himself on the morning of Ardessa&#8217;s return.
+			He told the waiter at his club to bring him a second pot of
+			coffee and to bring it hot. He was really afraid of her. When
+			she presented herself at his office at 10:30 he complimented
+			her upon her tan and asked about her vacation. Then he
+			broke the news to her.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;We want to make a few temporary changes about here,
+			Miss Devine, for the summer months. The business department
+			is short of help. Henderson is going to put Miss Kalski
+			on the books for a while to figure out some economies for
+			him, and he is going to take you over. Meantime I&#8217;ll get
+			Becky broken in so that she could take your work if you were
+			sick or anything.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa drew herself up.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve not been accustomed to commercial work, Mr.
+			O&#8217;Mally. I&#8217;ve no interest in it, and I don&#8217;t care to brush up in
+			it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Brushing up is just what we need, Miss Devine.&#8221; O&#8217;Mally
+			began tramping about his room expansively. &#8220;I&#8217;m going to
+			brush everybody up. I&#8217;m going to brush a few people out;
+			but I want you to stay with us, of course. You belong here.
+			Don&#8217;t be hasty now. Go to your room and think it over.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa was beginning to cry, and O&#8217;Mally was afraid he
+			would lose his nerve. He looked out of the window at a new
+			sky-scraper that was building, while she retired without a
+			word.</p>
+
+			<p>At her own desk Ardessa sat down breathless and trembling.
+			The one thing she had never doubted was her unique
+			value to O&#8217;Mally. She had, as she told herself, taught him
+			everything. She would say a few things to Becky Tietelbaum,
+			and to that pigeon-breasted tailor, her father, too! The worst
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page178" title="178">&nbsp;</a>of it was that Ardessa had herself brought it all about; she
+			could see that clearly now. She had carefully trained and qualified
+			her successor. Why had she ever civilized Becky? Why
+			had she taught her manners and deportment, broken her of
+			the gum-chewing habit, and made her presentable? In her
+			original state O&#8217;Mally would never have put up with her, no
+			matter what her ability.</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa told herself that O&#8217;Mally was notoriously fickle;
+			Becky amused him, but he would soon find out her limitations.
+			The wise thing, she knew, was to humor him; but it
+			seemed to her that she could not swallow her pride. Ardessa
+			grew yellower within the hour. Over and over in her mind
+			she bade O&#8217;Mally a cold adieu and minced out past the grand
+			old man at the desk for the last time. But each exit she rehearsed
+			made her feel sorrier for herself. She thought over all
+			the offices she knew, but she realized that she could never
+			meet their inexorable standards of efficiency.</p>
+
+			<p>While she was bitterly deliberating, O&#8217;Mally himself wandered
+			in, rattling his keys nervously in his pocket. He shut the
+			door behind him.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Now, you&#8217;re going to come through with this all right,
+			aren&#8217;t you, Miss Devine? I want Henderson to get over the
+			notion that my people over here are stuck up and think the
+			business department are old shoes. That&#8217;s where we get our
+			money from, as he often reminds me. You&#8217;ll be the best-paid
+			girl over there; no reduction, of course. You don&#8217;t want to go
+			wandering off to some new office where personality doesn&#8217;t
+			count for anything.&#8221; He sat down confidentially on the edge
+			of her desk. &#8220;Do you, now, Miss Devine?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa simpered tearfully as she replied.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Mr. O&#8217;Mally,&#8221; she brought out, &#8220;you&#8217;ll soon find that
+			Becky is not the sort of girl to meet people for you when you
+			are away. I don&#8217;t see how you can think of letting her.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s one thing I want to change, Miss Devine. You&#8217;re
+			too soft-handed with the has-beens and the never-was-ers.
+			You&#8217;re too much of a lady for this rough game. Nearly everybody
+			who comes in here wants to sell us a gold-brick, and
+			you treat them as if they were bringing in wedding presents.
+			Becky is as rough as sandpaper, and she&#8217;ll clear out a lot of
+			dead wood.&#8221; O&#8217;Mally rose, and tapped Ardessa&#8217;s shrinking
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page179" title="179">&nbsp;</a>shoulder. &#8220;Now, be a sport and go through with it, Miss
+			Devine. I&#8217;ll see that you don&#8217;t lose. Henderson thinks you&#8217;ll
+			refuse to do his work, so I want you to get moved in there
+			before he comes back from lunch. I&#8217;ve had a desk put in his
+			office for you. Miss Kalski is in the bookkeeper&#8217;s room half
+			the time now.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Rena Kalski was amazed that afternoon when a line
+			of office boys entered, carrying Miss Devine&#8217;s effects, and
+			when Ardessa herself coldly followed them. After Ardessa
+			had arranged her desk, Miss Kalski went over to her and
+			told her about some matters of routine very good-naturedly.
+			Ardessa looked pretty badly shaken up, and Rena bore no
+			grudges.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;When you want the dope on the correspondence with the
+			paper men, don&#8217;t bother to look it up. I&#8217;ve got it all in my
+			head, and I can save time for you. If he wants you to go over
+			the printing bills every week, you&#8217;d better let me help you
+			with that for a while. I can stay almost any afternoon. It&#8217;s
+			quite a trick to figure out the plates and over-time charges till
+			you get used to it. I&#8217;ve worked out a quick method that saves
+			trouble.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>When Henderson came in at three he found Ardessa, chilly,
+			but civil, awaiting his instructions. He knew she disapproved
+			of his tastes and his manners, but he didn&#8217;t mind. What interested
+			and amused him was that Rena Kalski, whom he
+			had always thought as cold-blooded as an adding-machine,
+			seemed to be making a hair-mattress of herself to break Ardessa&#8217;s
+			fall.</p>
+
+			<p>At five o&#8217;clock, when Ardessa rose to go, the business manager
+			said breezily:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;See you at nine in the morning, Miss Devine. We begin on
+			the stroke.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Ardessa faded out of the door, and Miss Kalski&#8217;s slender
+			back squirmed with amusement.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I never thought to hear such words spoken,&#8221; she admitted;
+			&#8220;but I guess she&#8217;ll limber up all right. The atmosphere is
+			bad over there. They get moldy.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<hr class="thoughtbreak" />
+
+			<p class="post_thoughtbreak">After the next monthly luncheon of the heads of departments,
+			O&#8217;Mally said to Henderson, as he feed the coat-boy:</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page180" title="180">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;By the way, how are you making it with the bartered
+			bride?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Henderson smashed on his Panama as he said:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Any time you want her back, don&#8217;t be delicate.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>But O&#8217;Mally shook his red head and laughed.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m no Indian giver!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Century</cite>, May 1918</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="boss" class="story"><a class="pagenum" id="page181" title="181">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="story_title">Her Boss <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<h4>I</h4>
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Paul Wanning opened the front door of his house in
+			Orange, closed it softly behind him, and stood looking
+			about the hall as he drew off his gloves.</p>
+
+			<p>Nothing was changed there since last night, and yet he
+			stood gazing about him with an interest which a long-married
+			man does not often feel in his own reception hall. The rugs,
+			the two pillars, the Spanish tapestry chairs, were all the same.
+			The Venus di Medici stood on her column as usual and there,
+			at the end of the hall (opposite the front door), was the full-length
+			portrait of Mrs. Wanning, maturely blooming forth in
+			an evening gown, signed with the name of a French painter
+			who seemed purposely to have made his signature indistinct.
+			Though the signature was largely what one paid for, one
+			couldn&#8217;t ask him to do it over.</p>
+
+			<p>In the dining room the colored man was moving about
+			the table set for dinner, under the electric cluster. The candles
+			had not yet been lighted. Wanning watched him with a
+			homesick feeling in his heart. They had had Sam a long
+			while, twelve years, now. His warm hall, the lighted dining-room,
+			the drawing room where only the flicker of the wood
+			fire played upon the shining surfaces of many objects&#8212;they
+			seemed to Wanning like a haven of refuge. It had never
+			occurred to him that his house was too full of things. He
+			often said, and he believed, that the women of his household
+			had &#8220;perfect taste.&#8221; He had paid for these objects, sometimes
+			with difficulty, but always with pride. He carried a
+			heavy life-insurance and permitted himself to spend most of
+			the income from a good law practise. He wished, during his
+			life-time, to enjoy the benefits of his wife&#8217;s discriminating
+			extravagance.</p>
+
+			<p>Yesterday Wanning&#8217;s doctor had sent him to a specialist.
+			Today the specialist, after various laboratory tests, had told
+			him most disconcerting things about the state of very necessary,
+			but hitherto wholly uninteresting, organs of his body.</p>
+
+			<p>The information pointed to something incredible; insinuated
+			that his residence in this house was only temporary; that
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page182" title="182">&nbsp;</a>he, whose time was so full, might have to leave not only his
+			house and his office and his club, but a world with which he
+			was extremely well satisfied&#8212;the only world he knew anything
+			about.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning unbuttoned his overcoat, but did not take it off.
+			He stood folding his muffler slowly and carefully. What he
+			did not understand was, how he could go while other people
+			stayed. Sam would be moving about the table like this, Mrs.
+			Wanning and her daughters would be dressing upstairs, when
+			he would not be coming home to dinner any more; when he
+			would not, indeed, be dining anywhere.</p>
+
+			<p>Sam, coming to turn on the parlor lights, saw Wanning and
+			stepped behind him to take his coat.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Good evening, Mr. Wanning, sah, excuse me. You entahed
+			so quietly, sah, I didn&#8217;t heah you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The master of the house slipped out of his coat and went
+			languidly upstairs.</p>
+
+			<p>He tapped at the door of his wife&#8217;s room, which stood
+			ajar.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Come in, Paul,&#8221; she called from her dressing table.</p>
+
+			<p>She was seated, in a violet dressing gown, giving the last
+			touches to her coiffure, both arms lifted. They were firm and
+			white, like her neck and shoulders. She was a handsome
+			woman of fifty-five,&#8212;still a woman, not an old person, Wanning
+			told himself, as he kissed her cheek. She was heavy in
+			figure, to be sure, but she had kept, on the whole, presentable
+			outlines. Her complexion was good, and she wore less false
+			hair than either of her daughters.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning himself was five years older, but his sandy hair did
+			not show the gray in it, and since his mustache had begun to
+			grow white he kept it clipped so short that it was unobtrusive.
+			His fresh skin made him look younger than he was. Not
+			long ago he had overheard the stenographers in his law office
+			discussing the ages of their employers. They had put him
+			down at fifty, agreeing that his two partners must be considerably
+			older than he&#8212;which was not the case. Wanning had
+			an especially kindly feeling for the little new girl, a copyist,
+			who had exclaimed that &#8220;Mr. Wanning couldn&#8217;t be fifty; he
+			seemed so boyish!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page183" title="183">&nbsp;</a>Wanning lingered behind his wife, looking at her in the
+			mirror.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, did you tell the girls, Julia?&#8221; he asked, trying to speak
+			casually.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Wanning looked up and met his eyes in the glass.
+			&#8220;The girls?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She noticed a strange expression come over his face.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;About your health, you mean? Yes, dear, but I tried not to
+			alarm them. They feel dreadfully. I&#8217;m going to have a talk
+			with Dr. Seares myself. These specialists are all alarmists, and
+			I&#8217;ve often heard of his frightening people.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She rose and took her husband&#8217;s arm, drawing him toward
+			the fireplace.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You are not going to let this upset you, Paul? If you take
+			care of yourself, everything will come out all right. You have
+			always been so strong. One has only to look at you.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Did you,&#8221; Wanning asked, &#8220;say anything to Harold?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, of course. I saw him in town today, and he agrees
+			with me that Seares draws the worst conclusions possible. He
+			says even the young men are always being told the most terrifying
+			things. Usually they laugh at the doctors and do as
+			they please. You certainly don&#8217;t look like a sick man, and you
+			don&#8217;t feel like one, do you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She patted his shoulder, smiled at him encouragingly, and
+			rang for the maid to come and hook her dress.</p>
+
+			<p>When the maid appeared at the door, Wanning went out
+			through the bathroom to his own sleeping chamber. He was
+			too much dispirited to put on a dinner coat, though such
+			remissness was always noticed. He sat down and waited for
+			the sound of the gong, leaving his door open, on the chance
+			that perhaps one of his daughters would come in.</p>
+
+			<p>When Wanning went down to dinner he found his wife
+			already at her chair, and the table laid for four.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Harold,&#8221; she explained, &#8220;is not coming home. He has to
+			attend a first night in town.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>A moment later their two daughters entered, obviously
+			&#8220;dressed.&#8221; They both wore earrings and masses of hair. The
+			daughters&#8217; names were Roma and Florence,&#8212;Roma, Firenze,
+			one of the young men who came to the house often, but
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page184" title="184">&nbsp;</a>not often enough, had called them. Tonight they were going
+			to a rehearsal of &#8220;The Dances of the Nations,&#8221;&#8212;a benefit
+			performance in which Miss Roma was to lead the Spanish
+			dances, her sister the Grecian.</p>
+
+			<p>The elder daughter had often been told that her name
+			suited her admirably. She looked, indeed, as we are apt to
+			think the unrestrained beauties of later Rome must have
+			looked,&#8212;but as their portrait busts emphatically declare they
+			did not. Her head was massive, her lips full and crimson,
+			her eyes large and heavy-lidded, her forehead low. At costume
+			balls and in living pictures she was always Semiramis,
+			or Poppea, or Theodora. Barbaric accessories brought out
+			something cruel and even rather brutal in her handsome
+			face. The men who were attracted to her were somehow
+			afraid of her.</p>
+
+			<p>Florence was slender, with a long, graceful neck, a restless
+			head, and a flexible mouth&#8212;discontent lurked about the corners
+			of it. Her shoulders were pretty, but her neck and arms
+			were too thin. Roma was always struggling to keep within a
+			certain weight&#8212;her chin and upper arms grew persistently
+			more solid&#8212;and Florence was always striving to attain a certain
+			weight. Wanning used sometimes to wonder why these
+			disconcerting fluctuations could not go the other way; why
+			Roma could not melt away as easily as did her sister, who had
+			to be sent to Palm Beach to save the precious pounds.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t see why you ever put Rickie Allen in charge of the
+			English country dances,&#8221; Florence said to her sister, as they
+			sat down. &#8220;He knows the figures, of course, but he has no
+			real style.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Roma looked annoyed. Rickie Allen was one of the men
+			who came to the house almost often enough.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;He is absolutely to be depended upon, that&#8217;s why,&#8221; she
+			said firmly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I think he is just right for it, Florence,&#8221; put in Mrs. Wanning.
+			&#8220;It&#8217;s remarkable he should feel that he can give up the
+			time; such a busy man. He must be very much interested in
+			the movement.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Florence&#8217;s lip curled drolly under her soup spoon. She shot
+			an amused glance at her mother&#8217;s dignity.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Nothing doing,&#8221; her keen eyes seemed to say.</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page185" title="185">&nbsp;</a>Though Florence was nearly thirty and her sister a little
+			beyond, there was, seriously, nothing doing. With so many
+			charms and so much preparation, they never, as Florence vulgarly
+			said, quite pulled it off. They had been rushed, time and
+			again, and Mrs. Wanning had repeatedly steeled herself to
+			bear the blow. But the young men went to follow a career in
+			Mexico or the Philippines, or moved to Yonkers, and escaped
+			without a mortal wound.</p>
+
+			<p>Roma turned graciously to her father.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I met Mr. Lane at the Holland House today, where I was
+			lunching with the Burtons, father. He asked about you, and
+			when I told him you were not so well as usual, he said he
+			would call you up. He wants to tell you about some doctor he
+			discovered in Iowa, who cures everything with massage and
+			hot water. It sounds freakish, but Mr. Lane is a very clever
+			man, isn&#8217;t he?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Very,&#8221; assented Wanning.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I should think he must be!&#8221; sighed Mrs. Wanning. &#8220;How
+			in the world did he make all that money, Paul? He didn&#8217;t
+			seem especially promising years ago, when we used to see so
+			much of them.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Corporation business. He&#8217;s attorney for the P. L. and G.,&#8221;
+			murmured her husband.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What a pile he must have!&#8221; Florence watched the old negro&#8217;s
+			slow movements with restless eyes. &#8220;Here is Jenny, a
+			Contessa, with a glorious palace in Genoa that her father
+			must have bought her. Surely Aldrini had nothing. Have you
+			seen the baby count&#8217;s pictures, Roma? They&#8217;re very cunning.
+			I should think you&#8217;d go to Genoa and visit Jenny.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;We must arrange that, Roma. It&#8217;s such an opportunity.&#8221;
+			Though Mrs. Wanning addressed her daughter, she looked at
+			her husband. &#8220;You would get on so well among their friends.
+			When Count Aldrini was here you spoke Italian much better
+			than poor Jenny. I remember when we entertained him, he
+			could scarcely say anything to her at all.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Florence tried to call up an answering flicker of amusement
+			upon her sister&#8217;s calm, well-bred face. She thought her
+			mother was rather outdoing herself tonight,&#8212;since Aldrini
+			had at least managed to say the one important thing to Jenny,
+			somehow, somewhere. Jenny Lane had been Roma&#8217;s friend
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page186" title="186">&nbsp;</a>and schoolmate, and the Count was an ephemeral hope in
+			Orange. Mrs. Wanning was one of the first matrons to declare
+			that she had no prejudices against foreigners, and at the dinners
+			that were given for the Count, Roma was always put
+			next him to act as interpreter.</p>
+
+			<p>Roma again turned to her father.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;If I were you, dear, I would let Mr. Lane tell me about his
+			doctor. New discoveries are often made by queer people.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Roma&#8217;s voice was low and sympathetic; she never lost her
+			dignity.</p>
+
+			<p>Florence asked if she might have her coffee in her room,
+			while she dashed off a note, and she ran upstairs humming
+			&#8220;Bright Lights&#8221; and wondering how she was going to stand
+			her family until the summer scattering. Why could Roma
+			never throw off her elegant reserve and call things by their
+			names? She sometimes thought she might like her sister, if
+			she would only come out in the open and howl about her
+			disappointments.</p>
+
+			<p>Roma, drinking her coffee deliberately, asked her father if
+			they might have the car early, as they wanted to pick up Mr.
+			Allen and Mr. Rydberg on their way to rehearsal.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning said certainly. Heaven knew he was not stingy
+			about his car, though he could never quite forget that in his
+			day it was the young men who used to call for the girls when
+			they went to rehearsals.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You are going with us, Mother?&#8221; Roma asked as they
+			rose.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I think so dear. Your father will want to go to bed early,
+			and I shall sleep better if I go out. I am going to town tomorrow
+			to pour tea for Harold. We must get him some new
+			silver, Paul. I am quite ashamed of his spoons.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold, the only son, was a playwright&#8212;as yet &#8220;unproduced&#8221;&#8212;and
+			he had a studio in Washington Square.</p>
+
+			<p>A half-hour later, Wanning was alone in his library. He
+			would not permit himself to feel aggrieved. What was more
+			commendable than a mother&#8217;s interest in her children&#8217;s pleasures?
+			Moreover, it was his wife&#8217;s way of following things up,
+			of never letting die grass grow under her feet, that had helped
+			to push him along in the world. She was more ambitious than
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page187" title="187">&nbsp;</a>he,&#8212;that had been good for him. He was naturally indolent,
+			and Julia&#8217;s childlike desire to possess material objects, to buy
+			what other people were buying, had been the spur that made
+			him go after business. It had, moreover, made his house the
+			attractive place he believed it to be.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Suppose,&#8221; his wife sometimes said to him when the bills
+			came in from Céleste or Mme. Blanche, &#8220;suppose you had
+			homely daughters; how would you like that?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He wouldn&#8217;t have liked it. When he went anywhere with
+			his three ladies, Wanning always felt very well done by. He
+			had no complaint to make about them, or about anything.
+			That was why it seemed so unreasonable&#8212;He felt along his
+			back incredulously with his hand. Harold, of course, was a
+			trial; but among all his business friends, he knew scarcely one
+			who had a promising boy.</p>
+
+			<p>The house was so still that Wanning could hear a faint, metallic
+			tinkle from the butler&#8217;s pantry. Old Sam was washing
+			up the silver, which he put away himself every night.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning rose and walked aimlessly down the hall and out
+			through the dining-room.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Any Apollinaris on ice, Sam? I&#8217;m not feeling very well tonight.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The old colored man dried his hands.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yessah, Mistah Wanning. Have a little rye with it, sah?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, thank you, Sam. That&#8217;s one of the things I can&#8217;t do
+			any more. I&#8217;ve been to see a big doctor in the city, and he tells
+			me there&#8217;s something seriously wrong with me. My kidneys
+			have sort of gone back on me.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>It was a satisfaction to Wanning to name the organ that had
+			betrayed him, while all the rest of him was so sound.</p>
+
+			<p>Sam was immediately interested. He shook his grizzled
+			head and looked full of wisdom.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t seem like a gen&#8217;leman of such a temperate life ought
+			to have anything wrong thar, sah.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;No, it doesn&#8217;t, does it?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning leaned against the china closet and talked to Sam
+			for nearly half an hour. The specialist who condemned him
+			hadn&#8217;t seemed half so much interested. There was not a detail
+			about the examination and the laboratory tests in which Sam
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page188" title="188">&nbsp;</a>did not show the deepest concern. He kept asking Wanning if
+			he could remember &#8220;straining himself&#8221; when he was a young
+			man.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I&#8217;ve knowed a strain like that to sleep in a man for yeahs
+			and yeahs, and then come back on him, &#8217;deed I have,&#8221; he said,
+			mysteriously. &#8220;An&#8217; again, it might be you got a floatin&#8217; kidney,
+			sah. Aftah dey once teah loose, dey sometimes don&#8217;t
+			make no trouble for quite a while.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>When Wanning went to his room he did not go to bed. He
+			sat up until he heard the voices of his wife and daughters in
+			the hall below. His own bed somehow frightened him. In all
+			the years he had lived in this house he had never before
+			looked about his room, at that bed, with the thought that he
+			might one day be trapped there, and might not get out again.
+			He had been ill, of course, but his room had seemed a particularly
+			pleasant place for a sick man; sunlight, flowers,&#8212;agreeable,
+			well-dressed women coming in and out.</p>
+
+			<p>Now there was something sinister about the bed itself,
+			about its position, and its relation to the rest of the furniture.</p>
+
+			<h4>II</h4>
+
+			<p>The next morning, on his way downtown, Wanning got off
+			the subway train at Astor Place and walked over to Washington
+			Square. He climbed three flights of stairs and knocked at
+			his son&#8217;s studio. Harold, dressed, with his stick and gloves in
+			his hand, opened the door. He was just going over to the
+			Brevoort for breakfast. He greeted his father with the cordial
+			familiarity practised by all the &#8220;boys&#8221; of his set, clapped him
+			on the shoulder and said in his light, tonsilitis voice:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Come in, Governor, how delightful! I haven&#8217;t had a call
+			from you in a long time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He threw his hat and gloves on the writing table. He was a
+			perfect gentleman, even with his father.</p>
+
+			<p>Florence said the matter with Harold was that he had heard
+			people say he looked like Byron, and stood for it.</p>
+
+			<p>What Harold would stand for in such matters was, indeed,
+			the best definition of him. When he read his play &#8220;The Street
+			Walker&#8221; in drawing rooms and one lady told him it had the
+			poetic symbolism of Tchekhov, and another said that it suggested
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page189" title="189">&nbsp;</a>the biting realism of Brieux, he never, in his most secret
+			thoughts, questioned the acumen of either lady. Harold&#8217;s
+			speech, even if you heard it in the next room and could not
+			see him, told you that he had no sense of the absurd,&#8212;a
+			throaty staccato, with never a downward inflection, trustfully
+			striving to please.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Just going out?&#8221; his father asked. &#8220;I won&#8217;t keep you. Your
+			mother told you I had a discouraging session with Seares?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;So awfully sorry you&#8217;ve had this bother, Governor; just as
+			sorry as I can be. No question about it&#8217;s coming out all right,
+			but it&#8217;s a downright nuisance, your having to diet and that
+			sort of thing. And I suppose you ought to follow directions,
+			just to make us all feel comfortable, oughtn&#8217;t you?&#8221; Harold
+			spoke with fluent sympathy.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning sat down on the arm of a chair and shook his
+			head. &#8220;Yes, they do recommend a diet, but they don&#8217;t promise
+			much from it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold laughed precipitately. &#8220;Delicious! All doctors are,
+			aren&#8217;t they? So profound and oracular! The medicine-man;
+			it&#8217;s quite the same idea, you see; with tom-toms.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning knew that Harold meant something subtle,&#8212;one
+			of the subtleties which he said were only spoiled by being
+			explained&#8212;so he came bluntly to one of the issues he had in
+			mind.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I would like to see you settled before I quit the harness,
+			Harold.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold was absolutely tolerant.</p>
+
+			<p>He took out his cigarette case and burnished it with his
+			handkerchief.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I perfectly understand your point of view, dear Governor,
+			but perhaps you don&#8217;t altogether get mine. Isn&#8217;t it so? I am
+			settled. What you mean by being settled, would unsettle me,
+			completely. I&#8217;m cut out for just such an existence as this; to
+			live four floors up in an attic, get my own breakfast, and have
+			a charwoman to do for me. I should be awfully bored with an
+			establishment. I&#8217;m quite content with a little diggings like
+			this.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning&#8217;s eyes fell. Somebody had to pay the rent of even
+			such modest quarters as contented Harold, but to say so
+			would be rude, and Harold himself was never rude. Wanning
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page190" title="190">&nbsp;</a>did not, this morning, feel equal to hearing a statement of his
+			son&#8217;s uncommercial ideals.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I know,&#8221; he said hastily. &#8220;But now we&#8217;re up against hard
+			facts, my boy. I did not want to alarm your mother, but I&#8217;ve
+			had a time limit put on me, and it&#8217;s not a very long one.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold threw away the cigarette he had just lighted in a
+			burst of indignation.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s the sort of thing I consider criminal, Father, absolutely
+			criminal! What doctor has a right to suggest such a
+			thing? Seares himself may be knocked out tomorrow. What
+			have laboratory tests got to do with a man&#8217;s will to live? The
+			force of that depends upon his entire personality, not on any
+			organ or pair of organs.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold thrust his hands in his pockets and walked up and
+			down, very much stirred. &#8220;Really, I have a very poor opinion
+			of scientists. They ought to be made serve an apprenticeship
+			in art, to get some conception of the power of human motives.
+			Such brutality!&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold&#8217;s plays dealt with the grimmest and most depressing
+			matters, but he himself was always agreeable, and he insisted
+			upon high cheerfulness as the correct tone of human
+			intercourse.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning rose and turned to go. There was, in Harold, simply
+			no reality, to which one could break through. The young
+			man took up his hat and gloves.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Must you go? Let me step along with you to the sub. The
+			walk will do me good.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold talked agreeably all the way to Astor Place. His
+			father heard little of what he said, but he rather liked his
+			company and his wish to be pleasant.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning went to his club for luncheon, meaning to spend
+			the afternoon with some of his friends who had retired from
+			business and who read the papers there in the empty hours
+			between two and seven. He got no satisfaction, however.
+			When he tried to tell these men of his present predicament,
+			they began to describe ills of their own in which he could not
+			feel interested. Each one of them had a treacherous organ of
+			which he spoke with animation, almost with pride, as if it
+			were a crafty business competitor whom he was constantly
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page191" title="191">&nbsp;</a>outwitting. Each had a doctor, too, for whom he was ardently
+			soliciting business. They wanted either to telephone
+			their doctor and make an appointment for Wanning, or to
+			take him then and there to the consulting room. When he did
+			not accept these invitations, they lost interest in him and remembered
+			engagements. He called a taxi and returned to the
+			offices of McQuiston, Wade, and Wanning.</p>
+
+			<p>Settled at his desk, Wanning decided that he would not
+			go home to dinner, but would stay at the office and dictate
+			a long letter to an old college friend who lived in Wyoming.
+			He could tell Douglas Brown things that he had not
+			succeeded in getting to any one else. Brown, out in the
+			Wind River mountains, couldn&#8217;t defend himself, couldn&#8217;t
+			slap Wanning on the back and tell him to gather up the sunbeams.</p>
+
+			<p>He called up his house in Orange to say that he would not
+			be home until late. Roma answered the telephone. He spoke
+			mournfully, but she was not disturbed by it.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Very well, Father. Don&#8217;t get too tired,&#8221; she said in her well
+			modulated voice.</p>
+
+			<p>When Wanning was ready to dictate his letter, he looked
+			out from his private office into the reception room and saw
+			that his stenographer in her hat and gloves, and furs of the
+			newest cut, was just leaving.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Goodnight, Mr. Wanning,&#8221; she said, drawing down her
+			dotted veil.</p>
+
+			<p>Had there been important business letters to be got off on
+			the night mail, he would have felt that he could detain her,
+			but not for anything personal. Miss Doane was an expert
+			legal stenographer, and she knew her value. The slightest
+			delay in dispatching office business annoyed her. Letters that
+			were not signed until the next morning awoke her deepest
+			contempt. She was scrupulous in professional etiquette, and
+			Wanning felt that their relations, though pleasant, were
+			scarcely cordial.</p>
+
+			<p>As Miss Doane&#8217;s trim figure disappeared through the outer
+			door, little Annie Wooley, the copyist, came in from the stenographers&#8217;
+			room. Her hat was pinned over one ear, and she
+			was scrambling into her coat as she came, holding her gloves
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page192" title="192">&nbsp;</a>in her teeth and her battered handbag in the fist that was
+			already through a sleeve.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Annie, I wanted to dictate a letter. You were just leaving,
+			weren&#8217;t you?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t mind!&#8221; she answered cheerfully, and pulling
+			off her old coat, threw it on a chair. &#8220;I&#8217;ll get my book.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>She followed him into his room and sat down by a table,&#8212;though
+			she wrote with her book on her knee.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning had several times kept her after office hours to
+			take his private letters for him, and she had always been good-natured
+			about it. On each occasion, when he gave her a dollar
+			to get her dinner, she protested, laughing, and saying that she
+			could never eat so much as that.</p>
+
+			<p>She seemed a happy sort of little creature, didn&#8217;t pout when
+			she was scolded, and giggled about her own mistakes in spelling.
+			She was plump and undersized, always dodging under
+			the elbows of taller people and clattering about on high heels,
+			much run over. She had bright black eyes and fuzzy black hair
+			in which, despite Miss Doane&#8217;s reprimands, she often stuck
+			her pencil. She was the girl who couldn&#8217;t believe that Wanning
+			was fifty, and he had liked her ever since he overheard
+			that conversation.</p>
+
+			<p>Tilting back his chair&#8212;he never assumed this position
+			when he dictated to Miss Doane&#8212;Wanning began: &#8220;To Mr.
+			D. E. Brown, South Forks, Wyoming.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He shaded his eyes with his hand and talked off a long
+			letter to this man who would be sorry that his mortal frame
+			was breaking up. He recalled to him certain fine months they
+			had spent together on the Wind River when they were young
+			men, and said he sometimes wished that like D. E. Brown, he
+			had claimed his freedom in a big country where the wheels
+			did not grind a man as hard as they did in New York. He had
+			spent all these years hustling about and getting ready to live
+			the way he wanted to live, and now he had a puncture the
+			doctors couldn&#8217;t mend. What was the use of it?</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning&#8217;s thoughts were fixed on the trout streams and
+			the great silver-firs in the canyons of the Wind River Mountains,
+			when he was disturbed by a soft, repeated sniffling. He
+			looked out between his fingers. Little Annie, carried away by
+			his eloquence, was fairly panting to make dots and dashes fast
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page193" title="193">&nbsp;</a>enough, and she was sopping her eyes with an unpresentable,
+			end-of-the-day handkerchief.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning rambled on in his dictation. Why was she crying?
+			What did it matter to her? He was a man who said good-morning
+			to her, who sometimes took an hour of the precious
+			few she had left at the end of the day and then complained
+			about her bad spelling. When the letter was finished, he
+			handed her a new two dollar bill.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I haven&#8217;t got any change tonight; and anyhow, I&#8217;d like
+			you to eat a whole lot. I&#8217;m on a diet, and I want to see everybody
+			else eat.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Annie tucked her notebook under her arm and stood looking
+			at the bill which she had not taken up from the table.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t like to be paid for taking letters to your friends,
+			Mr. Wanning,&#8221; she said impulsively. &#8220;I can run personal letters
+			off between times. It ain&#8217;t as if I needed the money,&#8221; she
+			added carelessly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Get along with you! Anybody who is eighteen years old
+			and has a sweet tooth needs money, all they can get.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Annie giggled and darted out with the bill in her hand.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning strolled aimlessly after her into the reception
+			room.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Let me have that letter before lunch tomorrow, please,
+			and be sure that nobody sees it.&#8221; He stopped and frowned. &#8220;I
+			don&#8217;t look very sick, do I?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I should say you don&#8217;t!&#8221; Annie got her coat on after considerable
+			tugging. &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you call in a specialist? My
+			mother called a specialist for my father before he died.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, is your father dead?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I should say he is! He was a painter by trade, and he fell
+			off a seventy-foot stack into the East River. Mother couldn&#8217;t
+			get anything out of the company, because he wasn&#8217;t buckled.
+			He lingered for four months, so I know all about taking care
+			of sick people. I was attending business college then, and sick
+			as he was, he used to give me dictation for practise. He made
+			us all go into professions; the girls, too. He didn&#8217;t like us to
+			just run.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning would have liked to keep Annie and hear more
+			about her family, but it was nearly seven o&#8217;clock, and he knew
+			he ought, in mercy, to let her go. She was the only person to
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page194" title="194">&nbsp;</a>whom he had talked about his illness who had been frank and
+			honest with him, who had looked at him with eyes that concealed
+			nothing. When he broke the news of his condition to
+			his partners that morning, they shut him off as if he were
+			uttering indecent ravings. All day they had met him with a
+			hurried, abstracted manner. McQuiston and Wade went out
+			to lunch together, and he knew what they were thinking, perhaps
+			talking, about. Wanning had brought into the firm valuable
+			business, but he was less enterprising than either of his
+			partners.</p>
+
+			<h4>III</h4>
+
+			<p>In the early summer Wanning&#8217;s family scattered. Roma
+			swallowed her pride and sailed for Genoa to visit the Contessa
+			Jenny. Harold went to Cornish to be in an artistic atmosphere.
+			Mrs. Wanning and Florence took a cottage at York
+			Harbor where Wanning was supposed to join them whenever
+			he could get away from town. He did not often get away. He
+			felt most at ease among his accustomed surroundings. He
+			kept his car in the city and went back and forth from his office
+			to the club where he was living. Old Sam, his butler, came in
+			from Orange every night to put his clothes in order and make
+			him comfortable.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning began to feel that he would not tire of his office in
+			a hundred years. Although he did very little work, it was
+			pleasant to go down town every morning when the streets
+			were crowded, the sky clear, and the sunshine bright. From
+			the windows of his private office he could see the harbor and
+			watch the ocean liners come down the North River and go
+			out to sea.</p>
+
+			<p>While he read his mail, he often looked out and wondered
+			why he had been so long indifferent to that extraordinary
+			scene of human activity and hopefulness. How had a short-lived
+			race of beings the energy and courage valiantly to begin
+			enterprises which they could follow for only a few years; to
+			throw up towers and build sea-monsters and found great
+			businesses, when the frailest of the materials with which they
+			worked, the paper upon which they wrote, the ink upon their
+			pens, had more permanence in this world than they? All this
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page195" title="195">&nbsp;</a>material rubbish lasted. The linen clothing and cosmetics of
+			the Egyptians had lasted. It was only the human flame that
+			certainly, certainly went out. Other things had a fighting
+			chance; they might meet with mishap and be destroyed, they
+			might not. But the human creature who gathered and shaped
+			and hoarded and foolishly loved these things, he had no
+			chance&#8212;absolutely none. Wanning&#8217;s cane, his hat, his topcoat,
+			might go from beggar to beggar and knock about in this
+			world for another fifty years or so; but not he.</p>
+
+			<p>In the late afternoon he never hurried to leave his office
+			now. Wonderful sunsets burned over the North River, wonderful
+			stars trembled up among the towers; more wonderful
+			than anything he could hurry away to. One of his windows
+			looked directly down upon the spire of Old Trinity, with the
+			green churchyard and the pale sycamores far below. Wanning
+			often dropped into the church when he was going out to
+			lunch; not because he was trying to make his peace with
+			Heaven, but because the church was old and restful and familiar,
+			because it and its gravestones had sat in the same place for
+			a long while. He bought flowers from the street boys and
+			kept them on his desk, which his partners thought strange
+			behavior, and which Miss Doane considered a sign that he
+			was failing.</p>
+
+			<p>But there were graver things than bouquets for Miss Doane
+			and the senior partner to ponder over.</p>
+
+			<p>The senior partner, McQuiston, in spite of his silvery hair
+			and mustache and his important church connections, had rich
+			natural taste for scandal.&#8212;After Mr. Wade went away for his
+			vacation, in May, Wanning took Annie Wooley out of the
+			copying room, put her at a desk in his private office, and
+			raised her pay to eighteen dollars a week, explaining to McQuiston
+			that for the summer months he would need a secretary.
+			This explanation satisfied neither McQuiston nor Miss
+			Doane.</p>
+
+			<p>Annie was also paid for overtime, and although Wanning
+			attended to very little of the office business now, there was a
+			great deal of overtime. Miss Doane was, of course, &#8216;above&#8217;
+			questioning a chit like Annie; but what was he doing with his
+			time and his new secretary, she wanted to know?</p>
+
+			<p>If anyone had told her that Wanning was writing a book,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page196" title="196">&nbsp;</a>she would have said bitterly that it was just like him. In his
+			youth Wanning had hankered for the pen. When he studied
+			law, he had intended to combine that profession with some
+			tempting form of authorship. Had he remained a bachelor, he
+			would have been an unenterprising literary lawyer to the end
+			of his days. It was his wife&#8217;s restlessness and her practical turn
+			of mind that had made him a money-getter. His illness
+			seemed to bring back to him the illusions with which he left
+			college.</p>
+
+			<p>As soon as his family were out of the way and he shut up
+			the Orange house, he began to dictate his autobiography to
+			Annie Wooley. It was not only the story of his life, but an
+			expression of all his theories and opinions, and a commentary
+			on the fifty years of events which he could remember.</p>
+
+			<p>Fortunately, he was able to take great interest in this undertaking.
+			He had the happiest convictions about the clear-cut
+			style he was developing and his increasing felicity in phrasing.
+			He meant to publish the work handsomely, at his own expense
+			and under his own name. He rather enjoyed the
+			thought of how greatly disturbed Harold would be. He and
+			Harold differed in their estimates of books. All the solid
+			works which made up Wanning&#8217;s library, Harold considered
+			beneath contempt. Anybody, he said, could do that sort of
+			thing.</p>
+
+			<p>When Wanning could not sleep at night, he turned on the
+			light beside his bed and made notes on the chapter he meant
+			to dictate the next day.</p>
+
+			<p>When he returned to the office after lunch, he gave instructions
+			that he was not to be interrupted by telephone calls, and
+			shut himself up with his secretary.</p>
+
+			<p>After he had opened all the windows and taken off his coat,
+			he fell to dictating. He found it a delightful occupation, the
+			solace of each day. Often he had sudden fits of tiredness; then
+			he would lie down on the leather sofa and drop asleep, while
+			Annie read &#8220;The Leopard&#8217;s Spots&#8221; until he awoke.</p>
+
+			<p>Like many another business man Wanning had relied so
+			long on stenographers that the operation of writing with a
+			pen had become laborious to him. When he undertook it, he
+			wanted to cut everything short. But walking up and down his
+			private office, with the strong afternoon sun pouring in at his
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page197" title="197">&nbsp;</a>windows, a fresh air stirring, all the people and boats moving
+			restlessly down there, he could say things he wanted to say. It
+			was like living his life over again.</p>
+
+			<p>He did not miss his wife or his daughters. He had become
+			again the mild, contemplative youth he was in college, before
+			he had a profession and a family to grind for, before the two
+			needs which shape our destiny had made of him pretty much
+			what they make of every man.</p>
+
+			<p>At five o&#8217;clock Wanning sometimes went out for a cup of
+			tea and took Annie along. He felt dull and discouraged as
+			soon as he was alone. So long as Annie was with him, he
+			could keep a grip on his own thoughts. They talked about
+			what he had just been dictating to her. She found that he
+			liked to be questioned, and she tried to be greatly interested
+			in it all.</p>
+
+			<p>After tea, they went back to the office. Occasionally Wanning
+			lost track of time and kept Annie until it grew dark. He
+			knew he had old McQuiston guessing, but he didn&#8217;t care.
+			One day the senior partner came to him with a reproving air.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I am afraid Miss Doane is leaving us, Paul. She feels that
+			Miss Wooley&#8217;s promotion is irregular.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;How is that any business of hers, I&#8217;d like to know? She has
+			all my legal work. She is always disagreeable enough about
+			doing anything else.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>McQuiston&#8217;s puffy red face went a shade darker.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Miss Doane has a certain professional pride; a strong feeling
+			for office organization. She doesn&#8217;t care to fill an equivocal
+			position. I don&#8217;t know that I blame her. She feels that
+			there is something not quite regular about the confidence you
+			seem to place in this inexperienced young woman.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning pushed back his chair.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t care a hang about Miss Doane&#8217;s sense of propriety.
+			I need a stenographer who will carry out my instructions. I&#8217;ve
+			carried out Miss Doane&#8217;s long enough. I&#8217;ve let that schoolma&#8217;am
+			hector me for years. She can go when she pleases.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>That night McQuiston wrote to his partner that things
+			were in a bad way, and they would have to keep an eye on
+			Wanning. He had been seen at the theatre with his new
+			stenographer.</p>
+
+			<p>That was true. Wanning had several times taken Annie to
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page198" title="198">&nbsp;</a>the Palace on Saturday afternoon. When all his acquaintances
+			were off motoring or playing golf, when the down-town offices
+			and even the streets were deserted, it amused him to
+			watch a foolish show with a delighted, cheerful little person
+			beside him.</p>
+
+			<p>Beyond her generosity, Annie had no shining merits of
+			character, but she had the gift of thinking well of everything,
+			and wishing well. When she was there Wanning felt as if there
+			were someone who cared whether this was a good or a bad
+			day with him. Old Sam, too, was like that. While the old
+			black man put him to bed and made him comfortable, Wanning
+			could talk to him as he talked to little Annie. Even if he
+			dwelt upon his illness, in plain terms, in detail, he did not feel
+			as if he were imposing on them.</p>
+
+			<p>People like Sam and Annie admitted misfortune,&#8212;admitted
+			it almost cheerfully. Annie and her family did not consider
+			illness or any of its hard facts vulgar or indecent. It had its
+			place in their scheme of life, as it had not in that of Wanning&#8217;s
+			friends.</p>
+
+			<p>Annie came out of a typical poor family of New York. Of
+			eight children, only four lived to grow up. In such families
+			the stream of life is broad enough, but runs shallow. In the
+			children, vitality is exhausted early. The roots do not go down
+			into anything very strong. Illness and deaths and funerals, in
+			her own family and in those of her friends, had come at frequent
+			intervals in Annie&#8217;s life. Since they had to be, she and
+			her sisters made the best of them. There was something to be
+			got out of funerals, even, if they were managed right. They
+			kept people in touch with old friends who had moved uptown,
+			and revived kindly feelings.</p>
+
+			<p>Annie had often given up things she wanted because there
+			was sickness at home, and now she was patient with her boss.
+			What he paid her for overtime work by no means made up to
+			her what she lost.</p>
+
+			<p>Annie was not in the least thrifty, nor were any of her
+			sisters. She had to make a living, but she was not interested
+			in getting all she could for her time, or in laying up for
+			the future. Girls like Annie know that the future is a very uncertain
+			thing, and they feel no responsibility about it. The
+			present is what they have&#8212;and it is all they have. If Annie
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page199" title="199">&nbsp;</a>missed a chance to go sailing with the plumber&#8217;s son on Saturday
+			afternoon, why, she missed it. As for the two dollars
+			her boss gave her, she handed them over to her mother. Now
+			that Annie was getting more money, one of her sisters quit a
+			job she didn&#8217;t like and was staying at home for a rest. That
+			was all promotion meant to Annie.</p>
+
+			<p>The first time Annie&#8217;s boss asked her to work on Saturday
+			afternoon, she could not hide her disappointment. He suggested
+			that they might knock off early and go to a show, or
+			take a run in his car, but she grew tearful and said it would be
+			hard to make her family understand. Wanning thought perhaps
+			he could explain to her mother. He called his motor and
+			took Annie home.</p>
+
+			<p>When his car stopped in front of the tenement house on
+			Eighth Avenue, heads came popping out of the windows for
+			six storys up, and all the neighbor women, in dressing sacks
+			and wrappers, gazed down at the machine and at the couple
+			alighting from it. A motor meant a wedding or the hospital.</p>
+
+			<p>The plumber&#8217;s son, Willy Steen, came over from the corner
+			saloon to see what was going on, and Annie introduced him
+			at the doorstep.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Wooley asked Wanning to come into the parlor and
+			invited him to have a chair of ceremony between the folding
+			bed and the piano.</p>
+
+			<p>Annie, nervous and tearful, escaped to the dining-room&#8212;the
+			cheerful spot where the daughters visited with each other
+			and with their friends. The parlor was a masked sleeping
+			chamber and store room.</p>
+
+			<p>The plumber&#8217;s son sat down on the sofa beside Mrs.
+			Wooley, as if he were accustomed to share in the family councils.
+			Mrs. Wooley waited expectant and kindly. She looked the
+			sensible, hard-working woman that she was, and one could
+			see she hadn&#8217;t lived all her life on Eighth Avenue without
+			learning a great deal.</p>
+
+			<p>Wanning explained to her that he was writing a book which
+			he wanted to finish during the summer months when business
+			was not so heavy. He was ill and could not work regularly.
+			His secretary would have to take his dictation when he felt
+			able to give it; must, in short, be a sort of companion to him.
+			He would like to feel that she could go out in his car with
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page200" title="200">&nbsp;</a>him, or even to the theater, when he felt like it. It might have
+			been better if he had engaged a young man for this work, but
+			since he had begun it with Annie, he would like to keep her if
+			her mother was willing.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Wooley watched him with friendly, searching eyes.
+			She glanced at Willy Steen, who, wise in such distinctions,
+			had decided that there was nothing shady about Annie&#8217;s boss.
+			He nodded his sanction.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t want my girl to conduct herself in any such way as
+			will prejudice her, Mr. Wanning,&#8221; she said thoughtfully. &#8220;If
+			you&#8217;ve got daughters, you know how that is. You&#8217;ve been liberal
+			with Annie, and it&#8217;s a good position for her. It&#8217;s right
+			she should go to business every day, and I want her to do her
+			work right, but I like to have her home after working hours. I
+			always think a young girl&#8217;s time is her own after business
+			hours, and I try not to burden them when they come home.
+			I&#8217;m willing she should do your work as suits you, if it&#8217;s her
+			wish; but I don&#8217;t like to press her. The good times she misses
+			now, it&#8217;s not you nor me, sir, that can make them up to her.
+			These young things has their feelings.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t want to press her, either,&#8221; Wanning said hastily.
+			&#8220;I simply want to know that you understand the situation.
+			I&#8217;ve made her a little present in my will as a recognition that
+			she is doing more for me than she is paid for.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s something above me, sir. We&#8217;ll hope there won&#8217;t be
+			no question of wills for many years yet,&#8221; Mrs. Wooley spoke
+			heartily. &#8220;I&#8217;m glad if my girl can be of any use to you, just so
+			she don&#8217;t prejudice herself.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The plumber&#8217;s son rose as if the interview were over.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s all right, Mama Wooley, don&#8217;t you worry,&#8221; he said.</p>
+
+			<p>He picked up his canvas cap and turned to Wanning. &#8220;You
+			see, Annie ain&#8217;t the sort of girl that would want to be spotted
+			circulating around with a monied party her folks didn&#8217;t know
+			all about. She&#8217;d lose friends by it.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>After this conversation Annie felt a great deal happier. She
+			was still shy and a trifle awkward with poor Wanning when
+			they were outside the office building, and she missed the old
+			freedom of her Saturday afternoons. But she did the best she
+			could, and Willy Steen tried to make it up to her.</p>
+
+			<p>In Annie&#8217;s absence he often came in of an afternoon to have
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page201" title="201">&nbsp;</a>a cup of tea and a sugar-bun with Mrs. Wooley and the
+			daughter who was &#8220;resting.&#8221; As they sat at the dining-room
+			table, they discussed Annie&#8217;s employer, his peculiarities, his
+			health, and what he had told Mrs. Wooley about his will.</p>
+
+			<p>Mrs. Wooley said she sometimes felt afraid he might disinherit
+			his children, as rich people often did, and make talk; but
+			she hoped for the best. Whatever came to Annie, she prayed
+			it might not be in the form of taxable property.</p>
+
+			<h4>IV</h4>
+
+			<p>Late in September Wanning grew suddenly worse. His
+			family hurried home, and he was put to bed in his house
+			in Orange. He kept asking the doctors when he could get
+			back to the office, but he lived only eight days.</p>
+
+			<p>The morning after his father&#8217;s funeral, Harold went to the
+			office to consult Wanning&#8217;s partners and to read the will.
+			Everything in the will was as it should be. There were no
+			surprises except a codicil in the form of a letter to Mrs. Wanning,
+			dated July 8th, requesting that out of the estate she
+			should pay the sum of one thousand dollars to his stenographer,
+			Annie Wooley, &#8220;in recognition of her faithful services.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I thought Miss Doane was my father&#8217;s stenographer,&#8221;
+			Harold exclaimed.</p>
+
+			<p>Alec McQuiston looked embarrassed and spoke in a low,
+			guarded tone.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;She was, for years. But this spring,&#8212;&#8221; he hesitated.</p>
+
+			<p>McQuiston loved a scandal. He leaned across his desk toward
+			Harold.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;This spring your father put this little girl, Miss Wooley, a
+			copyist, utterly inexperienced, in Miss Doane&#8217;s place. Miss
+			Doane was indignant and left us. The change made comment
+			here in the office. It was slightly&#8212;No, I will be frank with
+			you, Harold, it was very irregular.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold also looked grave. &#8220;What could my father have
+			meant by such a request as this to my mother?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The silver haired senior partner flushed and spoke as if he
+			were trying to break something gently.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t understand it, my boy. But I think, indeed I prefer
+			to think, that your father was not quite himself all this
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page202" title="202">&nbsp;</a>summer. A man like your father does not, in his right senses,
+			find pleasure in the society of an ignorant, common little girl.
+			He does not make a practise of keeping her at the office after
+			hours, often until eight o&#8217;clock, or take her to restaurants and
+			to the theater with him; not, at least, in a slanderous city like
+			New York.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Harold flinched before McQuiston&#8217;s meaning gaze and
+			turned aside in pained silence. He knew, as a dramatist, that
+			there are dark chapters in all men&#8217;s lives, and this but too
+			clearly explained why his father had stayed in town all summer
+			instead of joining his family.</p>
+
+			<p>McQuiston asked if he should ring for Annie Wooley.</p>
+
+			<p>Harold drew himself up. &#8220;No. Why should I see her? I
+			prefer not to. But with your permission, Mr. McQuiston, I
+			will take charge of this request to my mother. It could only
+			give her pain, and might awaken doubts in her mind.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;We hardly know,&#8221; murmured the senior partner, &#8220;where
+			an investigation would lead us. Technically, of course, I cannot
+			agree with you. But if, as one of the executors of the will,
+			you wish to assume personal responsibility for this bequest,
+			under the circumstances&#8212;irregularities beget irregularities.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;My first duty to my father,&#8221; said Harold, &#8220;is to protect my
+			mother.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>That afternoon McQuiston called Annie Wooley into his
+			private office and told her that her services would not be
+			needed any longer, and that in lieu of notice the clerk would
+			give her two weeks&#8217; salary.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Can I call up here for references?&#8221; Annie asked.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Certainly. But you had better ask for me, personally. You
+			must know there has been some criticism of you here in the
+			office, Miss Wooley.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;What about?&#8221; Annie asked boldly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Well, a young girl like you cannot render so much personal
+			service to her employer as you did to Mr. Wanning
+			without causing unfavorable comment. To be blunt with you,
+			for your own good, my dear young lady, your services to
+			your employer should terminate in the office, and at the close
+			of office hours. Mr. Wanning was a very sick man and his
+			judgment was at fault, but you should have known what a girl
+			in your station can do and what she cannot do.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page203" title="203">&nbsp;</a>The vague discomfort of months flashed up in little Annie.
+			She had no mind to stand by and be lectured without having
+			a word to say for herself.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Of course he was sick, poor man!&#8221; she burst out. &#8220;Not as
+			anybody seemed much upset about it. I wouldn&#8217;t have given
+			up my half-holidays for anybody if they hadn&#8217;t been sick, no
+			matter what they paid me. There wasn&#8217;t anything in it for
+			me.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>McQuiston raised his hand warningly.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;That will do, young lady. But when you get another
+			place, remember this: it is never your duty to entertain or to
+			provide amusement for your employer.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He gave Annie a look which she did not clearly understand,
+			although she pronounced him a nasty old man as she hustled
+			on her hat and jacket.</p>
+
+			<p>When Annie reached home she found Willy Steen sitting
+			with her mother and sister at the dining-room table. This was
+			the first day that Annie had gone to the office since Wanning&#8217;s
+			death, and her family awaited her return with suspense.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Hello yourself,&#8221; Annie called as she came in and threw her
+			handbag into an empty armchair.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;You&#8217;re off early, Annie,&#8221; said her mother gravely. &#8220;Has the
+			will been read?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I guess so. Yes, I know it has. Miss Wilson got it out of
+			the safe for them. The son came in. He&#8217;s a pill.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Was nothing said to you, daughter?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Yes, a lot. Please give me some tea, mother.&#8221; Annie felt
+			that her swagger was failing.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Don&#8217;t tantalize us, Ann,&#8221; her sister broke in. &#8220;Didn&#8217;t you
+			get anything?&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I got the mit, all right. And some back talk from the old
+			man that I&#8217;m awful sore about.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Annie dashed away the tears and gulped her tea.</p>
+
+			<p>Gradually her mother and Willy drew the story from her.
+			Willy offered at once to go to the office building and take his
+			stand outside the door and never leave it until he had
+			punched old Mr. McQuiston&#8217;s face. He rose as if to attend to
+			it at once, but Mrs. Wooley drew him to his chair again and
+			patted his arm.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;It would only start talk and get the girl in trouble, Willy.
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page204" title="204">&nbsp;</a>When it&#8217;s lawyers, folks in our station is helpless. I certainly
+			believed that man when he sat here; you heard him yourself.
+			Such a gentleman as he looked.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Willy thumped his great fist, still in punching position,
+			down on his knee.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Never you be fooled again, Mama Wooley. You&#8217;ll never
+			get anything out of a rich guy that he ain&#8217;t signed up in the
+			courts for. Rich is tight. There&#8217;s no exceptions.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Annie shook her head.</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I didn&#8217;t want anything out of him. He was a nice, kind
+			man, and he had his troubles, I guess. He wasn&#8217;t tight.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Still,&#8221; said Mrs. Wooley sadly, &#8220;Mr. Wanning had no call
+			to hold out promises. I hate to be disappointed in a gentleman.
+			You&#8217;ve had confining work for some time, daughter; a
+			rest will do you good.&#8221;</p>
+			<p class="source"><cite>Smart Set</cite>, October 1919</p>
+		</div>
+	</div>
+	<div id="partii" class="section">
+		<h2 class="section_title">Part II<br /> Reviews and Essays</h2>
+		<div id="twain" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page207" title="207">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">Mark Twain <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<div id="twain_1" class="review">
+				<p class="first_paragraph">If there is anything which should make an American sick
+				and disgusted at the literary taste of his country, and almost
+				swerve his allegiance to his flag it is that controversy
+				between Mark Twain and Max O&#8217;Rell, in which the Frenchman
+				proves himself a wit and a gentleman and the American
+				shows himself little short of a clown and an all around tough.
+				The squabble arose apropos of Paul Bourget&#8217;s new book on
+				America, &#8220;Outre Mer,&#8221; a book which deals more fairly and
+				generously with this country than any book yet written in a
+				foreign tongue. Mr. Clemens did not like the book, and like
+				all men of his class, and limited mentality, he cannot criticise
+				without becoming personal and insulting. He cannot be
+				scathing without being a blackguard. He tried to demolish a
+				serious and well considered work by publishing a scurrilous,
+				slangy and loosely written article about it. In this article Mr.
+				Clemens proves very little against Mr. Bourget and a very
+				great deal against himself. He demonstrates clearly that he is
+				neither a scholar, a reader or a man of letters and very little of
+				a gentleman. His ignorance of French literature is something
+				appalling. Why, in these days it is as necessary for a literary
+				man to have a wide knowledge of the French masterpieces as
+				it is for him to have read Shakespeare or the Bible. What man
+				who pretends to be an author can afford to neglect those
+				models of style and composition. George Meredith, Thomas
+				Hardy and Henry James excepted, the great living novelists
+				are Frenchmen.</p>
+
+				<p>Mr. Clemens asks what the French sensualists can possibly
+				teach the great American people about novel writing or morality?
+				Well, it would not seriously hurt the art of the classic
+				author of &#8220;Puddin&#8217; Head Wilson&#8221; to study Daudet, De Maupassant,
+				Hugo and George Sand, whatever it might do to his
+				morals. Mark Twain is a humorist of a kind. His humor is
+				always rather broad, so broad that the polite world can justly
+				call it coarse. He is not a reader nor a thinker nor a man who
+				loves art of any kind. He is a clever Yankee who has made a
+				&#8220;good thing&#8221; out of writing. He has been published in the
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page208" title="208">&nbsp;</a>North American Review and in the Century, but he is not
+				and never will be a part of literature. The association and
+				companionship of cultured men has given Mark Twain a sort
+				of professional veneer, but it could not give him fine instincts
+				or nice discriminations or elevated tastes. His works are pure
+				and suitable for children, just as the work of most shallow and
+				mediocre fellows. House dogs and donkeys make the most
+				harmless and chaste companions for young innocence in the
+				world. Mark Twain&#8217;s humor is of the kind that teamsters use
+				in bantering with each other, and his laugh is the gruff &#8220;haw-haw&#8221;
+				of the backwoodsman. He is still the rough, awkward,
+				good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands on the river
+				steamer and chewed uncured tobacco when he was three years
+				old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a
+				man of letters. It is an unfortunate feature of American literature
+				that a hostler with some natural cleverness and a great
+				deal of assertion receives the same recognition as a standard
+				American author that a man like Lowell does. The French
+				academy is a good thing after all. It at least divides the sheep
+				from the goats and gives a sheep the consolation of knowing
+				that he is a sheep.</p>
+
+				<p>It is rather a pity that Paul Bourget should have written
+				&#8220;Outre Mer,&#8221; thoroughly creditable book though it is. Mr.
+				Bourget is a novelist, and he should not content himself with
+				being an essayist, there are far too many of them in the world
+				already. He can develop strong characters, invent strong situations,
+				he can write the truth and he should not drift into
+				penning opinions and platitudes. When God has made a man
+				a creator, it is a great mistake for him to turn critic. It is
+				rather an insult to God and certainly a very great wrong to
+				man.</p>
+				<p class="source"><cite>Nebraska State Journal</cite>, May 5, 1895</p>
+
+			</div>
+			<div id="twain_2" class="review">
+				<p>I got a letter last week from a little boy just half-past seven
+				who had just read &#8220;Huckleberry Finn&#8221; and &#8220;Tom Sawyer.&#8221;
+				He said: &#8220;If there are any more books like them in the world,
+				send them to me quick.&#8221; I had to humbly confess to him that
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page209" title="209">&nbsp;</a>if there were any others I had not the good fortune to know
+				of them. What a red-letter-day it is to a boy, the day he first
+				opens &#8220;Tom Sawyer.&#8221; I would rather sail on the raft down the
+				Missouri again with &#8220;Huck&#8221; Finn and Jim than go down the
+				Nile in December or see Venice from a gondola in May. Certainly
+				Mark Twain is much better when he writes of his Missouri
+				boys than when he makes sickley romances about Joan
+				of Arc. And certainly he never did a better piece of work than
+				&#8220;Prince and Pauper.&#8221; One seems to get at the very heart of old
+				England in that dearest of children&#8217;s books, and in its pages
+				the frail boy king, and his gloomy sister Mary who in her day
+				wrought so much woe for unhappy England, and the dashing
+				Princess Elizabeth who lived to rule so well, seem to live
+				again. A friend of Mr. Clemens&#8217; once told me that he said he
+				wrote that book so that when his little daughters grew up
+				they might know that their tired old jester of a father could be
+				serious and gentle sometimes.</p>
+				<p class="source"><cite>The Home Monthly</cite>, May 1897</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<div id="howells" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page210" title="210">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">William Dean Howells <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Certainly now in his old age Mr. Howells is selecting
+			queer titles for his books. A while ago we had that feeble
+			tale, &#8220;The Coast of Bohemia,&#8221; and now we have &#8220;My
+			Literary Passions.&#8221; &#8220;Passions,&#8221; literary or otherwise, were
+			never Mr. Howells&#8217; forte and surely no man could be further
+			from even the coast of Bohemia.</p>
+
+			<p>Apropos of &#8220;My Literary Passions&#8221; which has so long
+			strung out in the Ladies&#8217; Home Journal along with those
+			thrilling articles about how Henry Ward Beecher tied his
+			necktie and what kind of coffee Mrs. Hall Cain likes, why did
+			Mr. Howells write it? Doesn&#8217;t Mr. Howells know that at one
+			time or another every one raves over Don Quixote, imitates
+			Heine, worships Tourgueneff and calls Tolstoi a prophet?
+			Does Mr. Howells think that no one but he ever had youth
+			and enthusiasm and aspirations? Doesn&#8217;t he know that the
+			only thing that makes the world worth living in at all is that
+			once, when we are young, we all have that great love for
+			books and impersonal things, all reverence and dream? We
+			have all known the time when Porthos, Athos and d&#8217;Artagan
+			were vastly more real and important to us than the folks who
+			lived next door. We have all dwelt in that country where Anna
+			Karenina and the Levins were the only people who mattered
+			much. We have all known that intoxicating period when we
+			thought we &#8220;understood life,&#8221; because we had read Daudet,
+			Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and like Mr. Howells we all
+			looked back rather fondly upon the time when we believed
+			that books were the truth and art was all. After a while books
+			grow matter of fact like everything else and we always think
+			enviously of the days when they were new and wonderful and
+			strange. That&#8217;s a part of existence. We lose our first keen relish
+			for literature just as we lose it for ice-cream and confectionery.
+			The taste grows older, wiser and more subdued. We
+			would all wear out of very enthusiasm if it did not. But why
+			should Mr. Howells tell the world this common experience in
+			detail as though it were his and his alone. He might as well
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page211" title="211">&nbsp;</a>write a detailed account of how he had the measles and the
+			whooping cough. It was all right and proper for Mr. Howells
+			to like Heine and Hugo, but, in the words of the circus
+			clown, &#8220;We&#8217;ve all been there.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Nebraska State Journal</cite>, July 14, 1895</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="poe" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page212" title="212">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">Edgar Allan Poe <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<div id="poe_1" class="review">
+				<blockquote class="poem">
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>My tantalized spirit</p>
+						<p class="i2">Here blandly reposes,</p>
+						<p>Forgetting, or never</p>
+						<p class="i2">Regretting its roses,</p>
+						<p>Its old agitations</p>
+						<p class="i2">Of myrtles and roses.</p>
+					</div>
+
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>For now, while so quietly</p>
+						<p class="i2">Lying, it fancies</p>
+						<p>A holier odor</p>
+						<p class="i2">About it, of pansies&#8212;</p>
+						<p>A rosemary odor</p>
+						<p class="i2">Commingled with pansies.</p>
+						<p>With rue and the beautiful</p>
+						<p class="i2">Puritan pansies.</p>
+					</div>
+			        <p class="signature">&#8212;Edgar Allan Poe.</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p class="first_paragraph">The Shakespeare society of New York, which is really
+				about the only useful literary organization in this country,
+				is making vigorous efforts to redress an old wrong and
+				atone for a long neglect. Sunday, Sept. 22, it held a meeting at
+				the Poe cottage on Kingsbridge road near Fordham, for the
+				purpose of starting an organized movement to buy back the
+				cottage, restore it to its original condition and preserve it as a
+				memorial of Poe. So it has come at last. After helping build
+				monuments to Shelley, Keats and Carlyle we have at last remembered
+				this man, the greatest of our poets and the most
+				unhappy. I am glad that this movement is in the hands of
+				American actors, for it was among them that Poe found his
+				best friends and warmest admirers. Some way he always
+				seemed to belong to the strolling Thespians who were his
+				mother&#8217;s people.</p>
+
+				<p>Among all the thousands of life&#8217;s little ironies that make
+				history so diverting, there is none more paradoxical than that
+				Edgar Poe should have been an American. Look at his face.
+				Had we ever another like it? He must have been a strange
+				figure in his youth, among those genial, courtly Virginians,
+				this handsome, pale fellow, violent in his enthusiasm, ardent
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page213" title="213">&nbsp;</a>in his worship, but spiritually cold in his affections. Now
+				playing heavily for the mere excitement of play, now worshipping
+				at the shrine of a woman old enough to be his mother,
+				merely because her voice was beautiful; now swimming six
+				miles up the James river against a heavy current in the glaring
+				sun of a June midday. He must have seemed to them an unreal
+				figure, a sort of stage man who was wandering about the
+				streets with his mask and buskins on, a theatrical figure who
+				had escaped by some strange mischance into the prosaic daylight.
+				His speech and actions were unconsciously and sincerely
+				dramatic, always as though done for effect. He had that
+				nervous, egotistic, self-centered nature common to stage children
+				who seem to have been dazzled by the footlights and
+				maddened by the applause before they are born. It was in his
+				blood. With the exception of two women who loved him,
+				lived for him, died for him, he went through life friendless,
+				misunderstood, with that dense, complete, hopeless misunderstanding
+				which, as Amiel said, is the secret of that sad
+				smile upon the lips of the great. Men tried to befriend him,
+				but in some way or other he hurt and disappointed them. He
+				tried to mingle and share with other men, but he was always
+				shut from them by that shadow, light as gossamer but unyielding
+				as adamant, by which, from the beginning of the
+				world, art has shielded and guarded and protected her own,
+				that God-concealing mist in which the heroes of old were
+				hidden, immersed in that gloom and solitude which, if we
+				could but know it here, is but the shadow of God&#8217;s hand as it
+				falls upon his elect.</p>
+
+				<p>We lament our dearth of great prose. With the exception of
+				Henry James and Hawthorne, Poe is our only master of pure
+				prose. We lament our dearth of poets. With the exception of
+				Lowell, Poe is our only great poet. Poe found short story
+				writing a bungling makeshift. He left it a perfect art. He
+				wrote the first perfect short stories in the English language.
+				He first gave the short story purpose, method, and artistic
+				form. In a careless reading one can not realize the wonderful
+				literary art, the cunning devices, the masterly effects that
+				those entrancing tales conceal. They are simple and direct
+				enough to delight us when we are children, subtle and artistic
+				enough to be our marvel when we are old. To this day they
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page214" title="214">&nbsp;</a>are the wonder and admiration of the French, who are
+				the acknowledged masters of craft and form. How in his wandering,
+				laborious life, bound to the hack work of the press
+				and crushed by an ever-growing burden of want and debt,
+				did he ever come upon all this deep and mystical lore, this
+				knowledge of all history, of all languages, of all art, this penetration
+				into the hidden things of the East? As Steadman says,
+				&#8220;The self training of genius is always a marvel.&#8221; The past is
+				spread before us all and most of us spend our lives in learning
+				those things which we do not need to know, but genius
+				reaches out instinctively and takes only the vital detail, by
+				some sort of spiritual gravitation goes directly to the right
+				thing.</p>
+
+				<p>Poe belonged to the modern French school of decorative
+				and discriminating prose before it ever existed in France. He
+				rivalled Gautier, Flaubert and de Maupassant before they
+				were born. He clothed his tales in a barbaric splendor and
+				persuasive unreality never before heard of in English. No such
+				profusion of color, oriental splendor of detail, grotesque combinations
+				and mystical effects had ever before been wrought
+				into language. There are tales as grotesque, as monstrous, unearthly
+				as the stone griffens and gargoyles that are cut up
+				among the unvisited niches and towers of Notre Dame, stories
+				as poetic and delicately beautiful as the golden lace work
+				chased upon an Etruscan ring. He fitted his words together as
+				the Byzantine jewelers fitted priceless stones. He found the
+				inner harmony and kinship of words. Where lived another
+				man who could blend the beautiful and the horrible, the gorgeous
+				and the grotesque in such intricate and inexplicable
+				fashion? Who could delight you with his noun and disgust
+				you with his verb, thrill you with his adjective and chill you
+				with his adverb, make you run the whole gamut of human
+				emotions in a single sentence? Sitting in that miserable cottage
+				at Fordham he wrote of the splendor of dream palaces
+				beyond the dreams of art. He hung those grimy walls with
+				dream tapestries, paved those narrow halls with black marble
+				and polished onyx, and into those low-roofed chambers he
+				brought all the treasured imagery of fancy, from the &#8220;huge
+				carvings of untutored Egypt&#8221; to &#8220;mingled and conflicting
+				perfumes, reeking up from strange convolute censers, together
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page215" title="215">&nbsp;</a>with multitudinous, flaring and flickering tongues of
+				purple and violet fire.&#8221; Hungry and ragged he wrote of Epicurean
+				feasts and luxury that would have beggared the
+				purpled pomp of pagan Rome and put Nero and his Golden
+				House to shame.</p>
+
+				<p>And this mighty master of the organ of language, who
+				knew its every stop and pipe, who could awaken at will the
+				thin silver tones of its slenderest reeds or the solemn cadence
+				of its deepest thunder, who could make it sing like a flute or
+				roar like a cataract, he was born into a country without a
+				literature. He was of that ornate school which usually comes
+				last in a national literature, and he came first. American taste
+				had been vitiated by men like Griswold and N. P. Willis until
+				it was at the lowest possible ebb. Willis was considered a
+				genius, that is the worst that could possibly be said. In the
+				North a new race of great philosophers was growing up, but
+				Poe had neither their friendship nor encouragement. He went
+				indeed, sometimes, to the chilly <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">salon</em> of Margaret Fuller, but
+				he was always a discord there. He was a mere artist and he
+				had no business with philosophy, he had no theories as to the
+				&#8220;higher life&#8221; and the &#8220;true happiness.&#8221; He had only his unshapen
+				dreams that battled with him in dark places, the unborn
+				that struggled in his brain for birth. What time has an
+				artist to learn the multiplication table or to talk philosophy?
+				He was not afraid of them. He laughed at Willis, and flung
+				Longfellow&#8217;s lie in his teeth, the lie the rest of the world was
+				twenty years in finding. He scorned the obtrusive learning of
+				the transcendentalists and he disliked their hard talkative
+				women. He left them and went back to his dream women, his
+				<em>Berenice</em>, his <em>Ligeia</em>, his <em>Marchesa Aphrodite</em>, pale and cold as
+				the mist maidens of the North, sad as the Norns who weep
+				for human woe.</p>
+
+				<p>The tragedy of Poe&#8217;s life was not alcohol, but hunger. He
+				died when he was forty, when his work was just beginning.
+				Thackeray had not touched his great novels at forty, George
+				Eliot was almost unknown at that age. Hugo, Goethe, Hawthorne,
+				Lowell and Dumas all did their great work after they
+				were forty years old. Poe never did his great work. He could
+				not endure the hunger. This year the Drexel Institute has put
+				over sixty thousand dollars into a new edition of Poe&#8217;s poems
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page216" title="216">&nbsp;</a>and stories. He himself never got six thousand for them altogether.
+				If one of the great and learned institutions of the land
+				had invested one tenth of that amount in the living author
+				forty years ago we should have had from him such works as
+				would have made the name of this nation great. But he sold
+				&#8220;The Masque of the Red Death&#8221; for a few dollars, and now
+				the Drexel Institute pays a publisher thousands to publish it
+				beautifully. It is enough to make Satan laugh until his ribs
+				ache, and all the little devils laugh and heap on fresh coals. I
+				don&#8217;t wonder they hate humanity. It&#8217;s so dense, so hopelessly
+				stupid.</p>
+
+				<p>Only a few weeks before Poe&#8217;s death he said he had never
+				had time or opportunity to make a serious effort. All his tales
+				were merely experiments, thrown off when his day&#8217;s work as
+				a journalist was over, when he should have been asleep. All
+				those voyages into the mystical unknown, into the gleaming,
+				impalpable kingdom of pure romance from which he brought
+				back such splendid trophies, were but experiments. He was
+				only getting his tools into shape getting ready for his great
+				effort, the effort that never came.</p>
+
+				<p>Bread seems a little thing to stand in the way of genius,
+				but it can. The simple sordid facts were these, that in the
+				bitterest storms of winter Poe seldom wrote by a fire, that
+				after he was twenty-five years old he never knew what it was
+				to have enough to eat without dreading tomorrow&#8217;s hunger.
+				Chatterton had only himself to sacrifice, but Poe saw the
+				woman he loved die of want before his very eyes, die smiling
+				and begging him not to give up his work. They saw the
+				depths together in those long winter nights when she lay in
+				that cold room, wrapped in Poe&#8217;s only coat, he, with one
+				hand holding hers, and with the other dashing off some of
+				the most perfect masterpieces of English prose. And when he
+				would wince and turn white at her coughing, she would
+				always whisper: &#8220;Work on, my poet, and when you have
+				finished read it to me. I am happy when I listen.&#8221; O, the
+				devotion of women and the madness of art! They are the two
+				most awesome things on earth, and surely this man knew
+				both to the full.</p>
+
+				<p>I have wondered so often how he did it. How he kept his
+				purpose always clean and his taste always perfect. How it was
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page217" title="217">&nbsp;</a>that hard labor never wearied nor jaded him, never limited
+				his imagination, that the jarring clamor about him never
+				drowned the fine harmonies of his fancy. His discrimination
+				remained always delicate, and from the constant strain of
+				toil his fancy always rose strong and unfettered. Without
+				encouragement or appreciation of any sort, without models
+				or precedents he built up that pure style of his that is without
+				peer in the language, that style of which every sentence
+				is a drawing by Vedder. Elizabeth Barrett and a few great
+				artists over in France knew what he was doing, they knew
+				that in literature he was making possible a new heaven and a
+				new earth. But he never knew that they knew it. He died
+				without the assurance that he was or ever would be understood.
+				And yet through all this, with the whole world of art
+				and letters against him, betrayed by his own people, he
+				managed to keep that lofty ideal of perfect work. What he
+				suffered never touched or marred his work, but it wrecked his
+				character. Poe&#8217;s character was made by his necessity. He was a
+				liar and an egotist; a man who had to beg for bread at the
+				hands of his publishers and critics could be nothing but a liar,
+				and had he not had the insane egotism and conviction of
+				genius, he would have broken down and written the drivelling
+				trash that his countrymen delighted to read. Poe lied to
+				his publishers sometimes, there is no doubt of that, but there
+				were two to whom he was never false, his wife and his muse.
+				He drank sometimes too, when for very ugly and relentless
+				reasons he could not eat. And then he forgot what he suffered.
+				For Bacchus is the kindest of the gods after all. When
+				Aphrodite has fooled us and left us and Athene has betrayed
+				us in battle, then poor tipsy Bacchus, who covers his head
+				with vine leaves where the curls are getting thin, holds out his
+				cup to us and says, &#8220;forget.&#8221; It&#8217;s poor consolation, but he
+				means it well.</p>
+
+				<p>The Transcendentalists were good conversationalists, that
+				in fact was their principal accomplishment. They used to talk
+				a great deal of genius, that rare and capricious spirit that visits
+				earth so seldom, that is wooed by so many, and won by so
+				few. They had grand theories that all men should be poets,
+				that the visits of that rare spirit should be made as frequent
+				and universal as afternoon calls. O, they had plans to make a
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page218" title="218">&nbsp;</a>whole generation of little geniuses. But she only laughed her
+				scornful laughter, that deathless lady of the immortals, up in
+				her echoing chambers that are floored with dawn and roofed
+				with the spangled stars. And she snatched from them the only
+				man of their nation she had ever deigned to love, whose lips
+				she had touched with music and whose soul with song. In his
+				youth she had shown him the secrets of her beauty and his
+				manhood had been one pursuit of her, blind to all else, like
+				Anchises, who on the night that he knew the love of Venus,
+				was struck sightless, that he might never behold the face of a
+				mortal woman. For Our Lady of Genius has no care for the
+				prayers and groans of mortals, nor for their hecatombs sweet
+				of savor. Many a time of old she has foiled the plans of seers
+				and none may entreat her or take her by force. She favors no
+				one nation or clime. She takes one from the millions, and
+				when she gives herself unto a man it is without his will or that
+				of his fellows, and he pays for it, dear heaven, he pays!</p>
+
+				<blockquote class="poem">
+					<p>&#8220;The sun comes forth and many reptiles spawn,</p>
+					<p>He sets and each ephemeral insect then</p>
+					<p>Is gathered unto death without a dawn,</p>
+					<p>And the immortal stars awake again.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>Yes, &#8220;and the immortal stars awake again.&#8221; None may
+				thwart the unerring justice of the gods, not even the Transcendentalists.
+				What matter that one man&#8217;s life was miserable,
+				that one man was broken on the wheel? His work lives and
+				his crown is eternal. That the work of his age was undone,
+				that is the pity, that the work of his youth was done, that is
+				the glory. The man is nothing. There are millions of men.
+				The work is everything. There is so little perfection. We
+				lament our dearth of poets when we let Poe starve. We are like
+				the Hebrews who stoned their prophets and then marvelled
+				that the voice of God was silent. We will wait a long time for
+				another. There are Griswold and N. P. Willis, our chosen
+				ones, let us turn to them. Their names are forgotten. God is
+				just. They are,</p>
+
+				<blockquote class="poem">
+					<p>&#8220;Gathered unto death without a dawn.</p>
+					<p>And the immortal stars awake again.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p class="source"><cite>The Courier</cite>, October 12, 1895</p>
+			</div>
+			<div id="poe_2" class="review"><a class="pagenum" id="page219" title="219">&nbsp;</a>
+				<p>You can afford to give a little more care and attention to
+				this imaginative boy of yours than to any of your other children.
+				His nerves are more finely strung and all his life he will
+				need your love more than the others. Be careful to get him
+				the books he likes and see that they are good ones. Get him a
+				volume of Poe&#8217;s short stories. I know many people are prejudiced
+				against Poe because of the story that he drank himself to
+				death. But that myth has been exploded long ago. Poe drank
+				less than even the average man of his time. No, the most
+				artistic of all American story tellers did not die because he
+				drank too much, but because he ate too little. And yet we, his
+				own countrymen who should be so proud of him, are not
+				content with having starved him and wronged him while he
+				lived, we must even go on slandering him after he has been
+				dead almost fifty years. But get his works for this imaginative
+				boy of yours and he will tell you how great a man the author
+				of &#8220;The Gold Bug&#8221; and &#8220;The Masque of the Red Death&#8221;
+				was. Children are impartial critics and sometimes very good
+				ones. They do not reason about a book, they just like it or
+				dislike it intensely, and after all that is the conclusion of the
+				whole matter. I am very sure that &#8220;The Fall of the House of
+				Usher,&#8221; &#8220;The Pit and the Pendulum&#8221; and &#8220;The Black Cat&#8221;
+				will give this woolgathering lad of yours more pleasure than a
+				new bicycle could.</p>
+
+				<p class="source"><cite>The Home Monthly</cite>, May 1897</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<div id="whitman" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page220" title="220">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">Walt Whitman <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Speaking of monuments reminds one that there is more
+			talk about a monument to Walt Whitman, &#8220;the good,
+			gray poet.&#8221; Just why the adjective good is always applied to
+			Whitman it is difficult to discover, probably because people
+			who could not understand him at all took it for granted that
+			he meant well. If ever there was a poet who had no literary
+			ethics at all beyond those of nature, it was he. He was neither
+			good nor bad, any more than are the animals he continually
+			admired and envied. He was a poet without an exclusive sense
+			of the poetic, a man without the finer discriminations, enjoying
+			everything with the unreasoning enthusiasm of a boy. He
+			was the poet of the dung hill as well as of the mountains,
+			which is admirable in theory but excruciating in verse. In the
+			same paragraph he informs you that, &#8220;The pure contralto
+			sings in the organ loft,&#8221; and that &#8220;The malformed limbs are
+			tied to the table, what is removed drop horribly into a pail.&#8221;
+			No branch of surgery is poetic, and that hopelessly prosaic
+			word &#8220;pail&#8221; would kill a whole volume of sonnets. Whitman&#8217;s
+			poems are reckless rhapsodies over creation in general, some
+			times sublime, some times ridiculous. He declares that the
+			ocean with its &#8220;imperious waves, commanding&#8221; is beautiful,
+			and that the fly-specks on the walls are also beautiful. Such
+			catholic taste may go in science, but in poetry their results are
+			sad. The poet&#8217;s task is usually to select the poetic. Whitman
+			never bothers to do that, he takes everything in the universe
+			from fly-specks to the fixed stars. His &#8220;Leaves of Grass&#8221; is a
+			sort of dictionary of the English language, and in it is the
+			name of everything in creation set down with great reverence
+			but without any particular connection.</p>
+
+			<p>But however ridiculous Whitman may be there is a primitive
+			elemental force about him. He is so full of hardiness and
+			of the joy of life. He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring
+			way in which the old Greeks and the primitive poets
+			did. He exults so in the red blood in his body and the
+			strength in his arms. He has such a passion for the warmth
+			and dignity of all that is natural. He has no code but to be
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page221" title="221">&nbsp;</a>natural, a code that this complex world has so long outgrown.
+			He is sensual, not after the manner of Swinbourne and Gautier,
+			who are always seeking for perverted and bizarre effects
+			on the senses, but in the frank fashion of the old barbarians
+			who ate and slept and married and smacked their lips over the
+			mead horn. He is rigidly limited to the physical, things that
+			quicken his pulses, please his eyes or delight his nostrils.
+			There is an element of poetry in all this, but it is by no means
+			the highest. If a joyous elephant should break forth into song,
+			his lay would probably be very much like Whitman&#8217;s famous
+			&#8220;song of myself.&#8221; It would have just about as much delicacy
+			and deftness and discriminations. He says:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so
+			placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and
+			long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
+			They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
+			They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not
+			one is dissatisfied nor not one is demented with the mania of
+			many things. Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that
+			lived thousands of years ago. Not one is respectable or
+			unhappy, over the whole earth.&#8221; And that is not irony on
+			nature, he means just that, life meant no more to him.
+			He accepted the world just as it is and glorified it, the seemly
+			and unseemly, the good and the bad. He had no conception
+			of a difference in people or in things. All men had bodies
+			and were alike to him, one about as good as another. To live
+			was to fulfil all natural laws and impulses. To be comfortable
+			was to be happy. To be happy was the ultimatum. He did
+			not realize the existence of a conscience or a responsibility.
+			He had no more thought of good or evil than the folks in
+			Kipling&#8217;s Jungle book.</p>
+
+			<p>And yet there is an undeniable charm about this optimistic
+			vagabond who is made so happy by the warm sunshine and
+			the smell of spring fields. A sort of good fellowship and
+			whole-heartedness in every line he wrote. His veneration for
+			things physical and material, for all that is in water or air or
+			land, is so real that as you read him you think for the moment
+			that you would rather like to live so if you could. For the time
+			you half believe that a sound body and a strong arm are the
+			greatest things in the world. Perhaps no book shows so much
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page222" title="222">&nbsp;</a>as &#8220;Leaves of Grass&#8221; that keen senses do not make a poet.
+			When you read it you realize how spirited a thing poetry
+			really is and how great a part spiritual perceptions play in
+			apparently sensuous verse, if only to select the beautiful from
+			the gross.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Nebraska State Journal</cite>, January 19, 1896</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="james" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page223" title="223">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">Henry James <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<div id="james_1" class="review">
+				<p class="first_paragraph">Their mania for careless and hasty work is not confined
+				to the lesser men. Howells and Hardy have gone with
+				the crowd. Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one
+				English speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect
+				and sticking for perfection. Of course I refer to that mighty
+				master of language and keen student of human actions and
+				motives, Henry James. In the last four years he has published,
+				I believe, just two small volumes, &#8220;The Lesson of the Master&#8221;
+				and &#8220;Terminations,&#8221; and in those two little volumes of short
+				stories he who will may find out something of what it means
+				to be really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish
+				is absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard,
+				always calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I
+				wish James would write about modern society, about &#8220;degeneracy&#8221;
+				and the new woman and all the rest of it. Not that he
+				would throw any light on it. He seldom does; but he would
+				say such awfully clever things about it, and turn on so many
+				side-lights. And then his sentences! If his character novels
+				were all wrong one could read him forever for the mere
+				beauty of his sentences. He never lets his phrases run away
+				with him. They are never dull and never too brilliant. He
+				subjects them to the general tone of his sentence and has his
+				whole paragraph partake of the same predominating color.
+				You are never startled, never surprised, never thrilled or never
+				enraptured; always delighted by that masterly prose that is as
+				correct, as classical, as calm and as subtle as the music of
+				Mozart.</p>
+
+				<p class="source"><cite>The Courier</cite>, November 16, 1895</p>
+			</div>
+			<div id="james_2" class="review">
+				<p>It is strange that from &#8220;Felicia&#8221; down, the stage novel has
+				never been a success. Henry James&#8217; &#8220;Tragic Muse&#8221; is the only
+				theatrical novel that has a particle of the real spirit of the stage
+				in it, a glimpse of the enthusiasm, the devotion, the exaltation
+				and the sordid, the frivolous and the vulgar which are so
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page224" title="224">&nbsp;</a>strangely and inextricably blended in that life of the green
+				room. For although Henry James cannot write plays he can
+				write passing well of the people who enact them. He has put
+				into one book all those inevitable attendants of the drama, the
+				patronizing theatre goer who loves it above all things and yet
+				feels so far superior to it personally; the old tragedienne, the
+				queen of a dying school whose word is law and whose judgments
+				are to a young actor as the judgments of God; and of
+				course there is the girl, the aspirant, the tragic muse who
+				beats and beats upon those brazen doors that guard the unapproachable
+				until one fine morning she beats them down and
+				comes into her kingdom, the kingdom of unborn beauty that
+				is to live through her. It is a great novel, that book of the
+				master&#8217;s, so perfect as a novel that one does not realize what a
+				masterly study it is of the life and ends and aims of the people
+				who make plays live.</p>
+
+				<p><cite>Nebraska State Journal</cite>, March 29, 1896</p>
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<div id="frederic" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page225" title="225">&nbsp;</a>
+
+			<h3 class="essay_title">Harold Frederic <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+
+			<p class="work_reviewed">&#8220;THE MARKET-PLACE.&#8221; Harold Frederic. $1.50. New York:
+			F. A. Stokes &amp; Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin &amp; Co.</p>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">Unusual interest is attached to the posthumous work
+			of that great man whose career ended so prematurely
+			and so tragically. The story is a study in the ethics and purposes
+			of money-getting, in the romantic element in modern
+			business. In it finance is presented not as being merely the
+			province of shrewdness, or greediness, or petty personal gratification,
+			but of great projects, of great brain-battles, a field
+			for the exercising of talent, daring, imagination, appealing to
+			the strength of a strong man, filling the same place in men&#8217;s
+			lives that was once filled by the incentives of war, kindling in
+			man the desire for the leadership of men. The hero of the
+			story, &#8220;Joel Thorpe,&#8221; is one of those men, huge of body, keen
+			of brain, with cast iron nerves, as sound a heart as most men,
+			and a magnificent capacity for bluff. He has lived and risked
+			and lost in a dozen countries, been almost within reach of
+			fortune a dozen times, and always missed her until, finally, in
+			London, by promoting a great rubber syndicate he becomes a
+			multi-millionaire. He marries the most beautiful and one of
+			the most impecunious peeresses in England and retires to his
+			country estate. There, as a gentleman of leisure, he loses his
+			motive in life, loses power for lack of opportunity, and grows
+			less commanding even in the eyes of his wife, who misses the
+			uncompromising, barbaric strength which took her by storm
+			and won her. Finally he evolves a gigantic philanthropic
+			scheme of spending his money as laboriously as he made it.</p>
+
+			<p>Mr. Frederic says:</p>
+
+			<blockquote>
+				<p>&#8220;Napoleon was the greatest man of his age&#8212;one of the
+				greatest men of all ages&#8212;not only in war but in a hundred
+				other ways. He spent the last six years of his life at St. Helena
+				in excellent health, with companions that he talked freely to,
+				and in all the extraordinarily copious reports of his conversations
+				there, we don&#8217;t get a single sentence worth repeating.
+				The greatness had entirely evaporated from him the moment
+				he was put on an island where he had nothing to do.&#8221;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+
+			<p><a class="pagenum" id="page226" title="226">&nbsp;</a>It is very fitting that Mr. Frederic&#8217;s last book should be in
+			praise of action, the thing that makes the world go round; of
+			force, however misspent, which is the sum of life as distinguished
+			from the inertia of death. In the forty-odd years of
+			his life he wrote almost as many pages as Balzac, most of it
+			mere newspaper copy, it is true, read and forgotten, but all of
+			it vigorous and with the stamp of a strong man upon it. And
+			he played just as hard as he worked&#8212;alas, it was the play that
+			killed him! The young artist who illustrated the story gave to
+			the pictures of &#8220;Joel Thorpe&#8221; very much the look of Harold
+			Frederic himself, and they might almost stand for his portraits.
+			I fancy the young man did not select his model carelessly.
+			In this big, burly adventurer who took fortune and
+			women by storm, who bluffed the world by his prowess and
+			fought his way to the front with battle-ax blows, there is a
+			great deal of Harold Frederic, the soldier of fortune, the
+			Utica milk boy who fought his way from the petty slavery of
+			a provincial newspaper to the foremost ranks of the journalists
+			of the world and on into literature, into literature worth
+			the writing. The man won his place in England much as his
+			hero won his, by defiance, by strong shoulder blows, by his
+			self-sufficiency and inexhaustible strength, and when he finished
+			his book he did not know that his end would be so
+			much less glorious than his hero&#8217;s, that it would be his portion
+			not to fall manfully in the thick of the combat and the
+			press of battle, but to die poisoned in the tent of Chryseis.
+			For who could foresee a tragedy so needless, so blind, so
+			brutal in its lack of dignity, or know that such strength could
+			perish through such insidious weakness, that so great a man
+			could be stung to death by a mania born in little minds?</p>
+
+			<p>In point of execution and literary excellence, both &#8220;The
+			Market Place&#8221; and &#8220;Gloria Mundi&#8221; are vastly inferior to &#8220;The
+			Damnation of Theron Ware,&#8221; or that exquisite London idyl,
+			&#8220;March Hares.&#8221; The first 200 pages of &#8220;Theron Ware&#8221; are
+			as good as anything in American fiction, much better than
+			most of it. They are not so much the work of a literary
+			artist as of a vigorous thinker, a man of strong opinions and
+			an intimate and comprehensive knowledge of men. The
+			whole work, despite its irregularities and indifference to form,
+			is full of brain stuff, the kind of active, healthful, masterful
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page227" title="227">&nbsp;</a>intellect that some men put into politics, some into science
+			and a few, a very few, into literature. Both &#8220;Gloria Mundi&#8221;
+			and &#8220;The Market Place&#8221; bear unmistakable evidences of the
+			slack rein and the hasty hand. Both of them contain considerable
+			padding, the stamp of the space writer. They are imperfectly
+			developed, and are not packed with ideas like his earlier
+			novels. Their excellence is in flashes; it is not the searching,
+			evenly distributed light which permeates his more careful
+			work. There were, as we know too well, good reasons why
+			Mr. Frederic should work hastily. He needed a large income
+			and he worked heroically, writing many thousands of words a
+			day to obtain it. From the experience of the ages we have
+			learned to expect to find, coupled with great strength, a proportionate
+			weakness, and usually it devours the greater part,
+			as the seven lean kine devoured the seven fat in Pharaoh&#8217;s
+			vision. Achilles was a god in all his nobler parts, but his feet
+			were of the earth and to the earth they held him down, and
+			he died stung by an arrow in the heel.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Pittsburg Leader</cite>, June 10, 1899</p>
+		</div>
+		<div id="chopin" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page228" title="228">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">Kate Chopin <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<p class="work_reviewed">&#8220;THE AWAKENING.&#8221; Kate Chopin. $1.25. Chicago: H. S.
+			Stone &amp; Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin &amp; Co.</p>
+
+			<p class="first_paragraph">A Creole &#8220;Bovary&#8221; is this little novel of Miss Chopin&#8217;s.
+			Not that the heroine is a creole exactly, or that Miss
+			Chopin is a Flaubert&#8212;save the mark!&#8212;but the theme is similar
+			to that which occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no
+			need that a second &#8220;Madame Bovary&#8221; should be written, but
+			an author&#8217;s choice of themes is frequently as inexplicable as
+			his choice of a wife. It is governed by some innate temperamental
+			bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is particularly so
+			in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say why Miss
+			Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive, well-governed
+			a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes much better
+			than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers is a
+			genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but
+			light, flexible, subtle and capable of producing telling effects
+			directly and simply. The story she has to tell in the present
+			instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. &#8220;Edna Pontellier,&#8221;
+			a Kentucky girl, who, like &#8220;Emma Bovary,&#8221; had been in
+			love with innumerable dream heroes before she was out of
+			short skirts, married &#8220;Leonce Pontellier&#8221; as a sort of reaction
+			from a vague and visionary passion for a tragedian whose unresponsive
+			picture she used to kiss. She acquired the habit of
+			liking her husband in time, and even of liking her children.
+			Though we are not justified in presuming that she ever threw
+			articles from her dressing table at them, as the charming
+			&#8220;Emma&#8221; had a winsome habit of doing, we are told that &#8220;she
+			would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart, she
+			would sometimes forget them.&#8221; At a creole watering place,
+			which is admirably and deftly sketched by Miss Chopin,
+			&#8220;Edna&#8221; met &#8220;Robert Lebrun,&#8221; son of the landlady, who
+			dreamed of a fortune awaiting him in Mexico while he occupied
+			a petty clerical position in New Orleans. &#8220;Robert&#8221; made
+			it his business to be agreeable to his mother&#8217;s boarders, and
+			&#8220;Edna,&#8221; not being a creole, much against his wish and will,
+			took him seriously. &#8220;Robert&#8221; went to Mexico but found that
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page229" title="229">&nbsp;</a>fortunes were no easier to make there than in New Orleans.
+			He returns and does not even call to pay his respects to her.
+			She encounters him at the home of a friend and takes him
+			home with her. She wheedles him into staying for dinner, and
+			we are told she sent the maid off &#8220;in search of some delicacy
+			she had not thought of for herself, and she recommended
+			great care in the dripping of the coffee and having the omelet
+			done to a turn.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Only a few pages back we were informed that the husband,
+			&#8220;M. Pontellier,&#8221; had cold soup and burnt fish for his dinner.
+			Such is life. The lover of course disappointed her, was a coward
+			and ran away from his responsibilities before they began.
+			He was afraid to begin a chapter with so serious and limited a
+			woman. She remembered the sea where she had first met
+			&#8220;Robert.&#8221; Perhaps from the same motive which threw &#8220;Anna
+			Keraninna&#8221; under the engine wheels, she threw herself into
+			the sea, swam until she was tired and then let go.</p>
+
+			<blockquote>
+				<p>&#8220;She looked into the distance, and for a moment the
+				old terror flamed up, then sank again. She heard her
+				father&#8217;s voice, and her sister Margaret&#8217;s. She heard the
+				barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore
+				tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he
+				walked across the porch. There was a hum of bees, and
+				the musky odor of pinks filled the air.&#8221;</p>
+			</blockquote>
+			<p>&#8220;Edna Pontellier&#8221; and &#8220;Emma Bovary&#8221; are studies in the
+			same feminine type; one a finished and complete portrayal,
+			the other a hasty sketch, but the theme is essentially the same.
+			Both women belong to a class, not large, but forever clamoring
+			in our ears, that demands more romance out of life than
+			God put into it. Mr. G. Barnard Shaw would say that they are
+			the victims of the over-idealization of love. They are the spoil
+			of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment. The unfortunate
+			feature of their disease is that it attacks only women of brains,
+			at least of rudimentary brains, but whose development is one-sided;
+			women of strong and fine intuitions, but without the
+			faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about things.
+			Probably, for emotional people, the most convenient thing
+			about being able to think is that it occasionally gives them a
+			rest from feeling. Now with women of the &#8220;Bovary&#8221; type,
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page230" title="230">&nbsp;</a>this relaxation and recreation is impossible. They are not critics
+			of life, but, in the most personal sense, partakers of life.
+			They receive impressions through the fancy. With them
+			everything begins with fancy, and passions rise in the brain
+			rather than in the blood, the poor, neglected, limited one-sided
+			brain that might do so much better things than badgering
+			itself into frantic endeavors to love. For these are the
+			people who pay with their blood for the fine ideals of the
+			poets, as Marie Delclasse paid for Dumas&#8217; great creation,
+			&#8220;Marguerite Gauthier.&#8221; These people really expect the passion
+			of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature
+			only intended that it should meet one of many demands.
+			They insist upon making it stand for all the emotional pleasures
+			of life and art, expecting an individual and self-limited
+			passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure and distraction, to
+			contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable
+			exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense
+			idealists. So this passion, when set up against Shakespeare,
+			Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them. They have staked everything
+			on one hand, and they lose. They have driven the blood
+			until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves up
+			to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation
+			is impossible. Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every
+			sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the
+			nerves get even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then &#8220;the
+			awakening&#8221; comes. Sometimes it comes in the form of arsenic,
+			as it came to &#8220;Emma Bovary,&#8221; sometimes it is carbolic
+			acid taken covertly in the police station, a goal to which unbalanced
+			idealism not infrequently leads. &#8220;Edna Pontellier,&#8221;
+			fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea on a summer
+			night and went down with the sound of her first lover&#8217;s spurs
+			in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time I
+			hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent
+			style of hers to a better cause.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>Pittsburg Leader</cite>, July 8, 1899</p>
+
+		</div>
+		<div id="crane" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page231" title="231">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">Stephen Crane <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<div id="crane_1" class="review">
+				<p class="work_reviewed">&#8220;WAR IS KIND.&#8221; Stephen Crane. $2.50. New York: F. A.
+				Stokes &amp; Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin &amp; Co.</p>
+
+				<p class="first_paragraph">This truly remarkable book is printed on dirty gray
+				blotting paper, on each page of which is a mere dot of
+				print over a large I of vacancy. There are seldom more than
+				ten lines on a page, and it would be better if most of those
+				lines were not there at all. Either Mr. Crane is insulting the
+				public or insulting himself, or he has developed a case of atavism
+				and is chattering the primeval nonsense of the apes. His
+				&#8220;Black Riders,&#8221; uneven as it was, was a casket of polished
+				masterpieces when compared with &#8220;War Is Kind.&#8221; And it is
+				not kind at all, Mr. Crane; when it provokes such verses as
+				these, it is all that Sherman said it was.</p>
+
+				<p>The only production in the volume that is at all coherent is
+				the following, from which the book gets its title:</p>
+
+				<blockquote class="poem">
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind,</p>
+						<p>Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky,</p>
+						<p>And the affrighted steed ran on alone.</p>
+						<p class="i16">Do not weep,</p>
+						<p class="i16">War is kind.</p>
+					</div>
+
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Hoarse booming drums of the regiment,</p>
+						<p>Little souls who thirst for fight,</p>
+						<p class="i4">These men were born to drill and die.</p>
+						<p>The unexplained glory flies above them.</p>
+						<p>Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom&#8212;</p>
+						<p class="i4">A field where a thousand corpses lie.</p>
+					</div>
+
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Do not weep, babe, for war is kind,</p>
+						<p>Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,</p>
+						<p>Raged at the breast, gulped and died.</p>
+						<p class="i16">Do not weep,</p>
+						<p class="i16">War is kind.</p>
+					</div>
+
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Swift-blazing flag of the regiment,</p>
+						<p>Eagle with crest of red and gold,</p>
+						<p class="i4"><a class="pagenum" id="page232" title="232">&nbsp;</a>These men were born to drill and die.</p>
+						<p>Point for them the virtue of slaughter,</p>
+						<p>Make plain to them the excellence of killing,</p>
+						<p class="i4">And a field where a thousand corpses lie.</p>
+					</div>
+
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Mother whose heart hung humble as a button</p>
+						<p>On the bright, splendid shroud of your son,</p>
+						<p class="i16">Do not weep,</p>
+						<p class="i16">War is kind.</p>
+					</div>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>Of course, one may have objections to hearts hanging like
+				humble buttons, or to buttons being humble at all, but one
+				should not stop to quarrel about such trifles with a poet who
+				can perpetrate the following:</p>
+
+				<blockquote class="poem">
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Thou art my love,</p>
+						<p>And thou art the beard</p>
+						<p>On another man&#8217;s face&#8212;</p>
+						<p>Woe is me.</p>
+					</div>
+
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Thou art my love,</p>
+						<p>And thou art a temple,</p>
+						<p>And in this temple is an altar,</p>
+						<p>And on this temple is my heart&#8212;</p>
+						<p>Woe is me.</p>
+					</div>
+
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Thou art my love,</p>
+						<p>And thou art a wretch.</p>
+						<p>Let these sacred love-lies choke thee.</p>
+						<p>For I am come to where I know your lies as truth</p>
+						<p>And your truth as lies&#8212;</p>
+						<p>Woe is me.</p>
+					</div>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>Now, if you please, is the object of these verses animal,
+				mineral or vegetable? Is the expression, &#8220;Thou art the beard
+				on another man&#8217;s face,&#8221; intended as a figure, or was it written
+				by a barber? Certainly, after reading this, &#8220;Simple Simon&#8221; is a
+				ballade of perfect form, and &#8220;Jack and Jill&#8221; or &#8220;Hickity, Pickity,
+				My Black Hen,&#8221; are exquisite lyrics. But of the following
+				what shall be said:</p>
+
+				<blockquote class="poem">
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Now let me crunch you</p>
+						<p>With full weight of affrighted love.</p>
+						<p><a class="pagenum" id="page233" title="233">&nbsp;</a>I doubted you</p>
+						<p>&#8212;I doubted you&#8212;</p>
+						<p>And in this short doubting</p>
+						<p>My love grew like a genie</p>
+						<p>For my further undoing.</p>
+					</div>
+
+					<div class="stanza">
+						<p>Beware of my friends,</p>
+						<p>Be not in speech too civil,</p>
+						<p>For in all courtesy</p>
+						<p>My weak heart sees specters,</p>
+						<p>Mists of desire</p>
+						<p>Arising from the lips of my chosen;</p>
+						<p>Be not civil.</p>
+					</div>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>This is somewhat more lucid as evincing the bard&#8217;s exquisite
+				sensitiveness:</p>
+
+				<blockquote class="poem">
+					<p>Ah, God, the way your little finger moved</p>
+					<p>As you thrust a bare arm backward.</p>
+					<p>And made play with your hair</p>
+					<p>And a comb, a silly gilt comb</p>
+					<p>&#8212;Ah, God, that I should suffer</p>
+					<p>Because of the way a little finger moved.</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>Mr. Crane&#8217;s verselets are illustrated by some Bradley pictures,
+				which are badly drawn, in bad taste, and come with bad
+				grace. On page 33 of the book there are just two lines which
+				seem to completely sum up the efforts of both poet and artist:</p>
+
+				<blockquote>
+					<p style="text-indent:0em;">&#8220;My good friend,&#8221; said a learned bystander,<br />
+					   &#8220;Your operations are mad.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>Yet this fellow Crane has written short stories equal to
+				some of Maupassant&#8217;s.</p>
+
+				<p class="source"><cite>Pittsburg Leader</cite>, June 3, 1899</p>
+			</div>
+			<div id="crane_2" class="review">
+				<p>After reading such a delightful newspaper story as Mr.
+				Frank Norris&#8217; &#8220;Blix,&#8221; it is with assorted sensations of pain and
+				discomfort that one closes the covers of another newspaper
+				novel, &#8220;Active Service,&#8221; by Stephen Crane. If one happens to
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page234" title="234">&nbsp;</a>have some trifling regard for pure English, he does not come
+				forth from the reading of this novel unscathed. The hero of
+				this lurid tale is a newspaper man, and he edits the Sunday
+				edition of the New York &#8220;Eclipse,&#8221; and delights in publishing
+				&#8220;stories&#8221; about deformed and sightless infants. &#8220;The office of
+				the &#8216;Eclipse&#8217; was at the top of an immense building on Broadway.
+				It was a sheer mountain to the heights of which the
+				interminable thunder of the streets rose faintly. The Hudson
+				was a broad path of silver in the distance.&#8221; This leaves little
+				doubt as to the fortunate journal which had secured Rufus
+				Coleman as its Sunday editor. Mr. Coleman&#8217;s days were spent
+				in collecting yellow sensations for his paper, and we are told
+				that he &#8220;planned for each edition as for a campaign.&#8221; The
+				following elevating passage is one of the realistic paragraphs
+				by which Mr. Crane makes the routine of Coleman&#8217;s life
+				known to us:</p>
+
+				<blockquote>
+					<p>Suddenly there was a flash of light and a cage of
+					bronze, gilt and steel dropped magically from above.
+					Coleman yelled &#8220;Down!&#8221; *&nbsp;*&nbsp;* A door flew open. Coleman
+					stepped upon the elevator. &#8220;Well, Johnnie,&#8221; he said
+					cheerfully to the lad who operated the machine, &#8220;is business
+					good?&#8221; &#8220;Yes, sir, pretty good,&#8221; answered the boy,
+					grinning. The little cage sank swiftly. Floor after floor
+					seemed to be rising with marvelous speed; the whole
+					building was winging straight into the sky. There was
+					soaring lights, figures and the opalescent glow of
+					ground glass doors marked with black inscriptions.
+					Other lights were springing heavenward. All the lofty
+					corridors rang with cries. &#8220;Up!&#8221; &#8220;Down!&#8221; &#8220;Down!&#8221;
+					&#8220;Up!!&#8221; The boy&#8217;s hand grasped a lever and his machine
+					obeyed his lightest movement with sometimes an unbalancing
+					swiftness.</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>Later, when Coleman reached the street, Mr. Crane describes
+				the cable cars as marching like panoplied elephants,
+				which is rather far, to say the least. The gentleman&#8217;s nights
+				were spent something as follows:</p>
+
+				<blockquote>
+					<p>&#8220;In the restaurant he first ordered a large bottle of
+					champagne. The last of the wine he finished in somber
+					<a class="pagenum" id="page235" title="235">&nbsp;</a>mood like an unbroken and defiant man who chews the
+					straw that litters his prison house. During his dinner he
+					was continually sending out messenger boys. He was
+					arranging a poker party. Through a window he watched
+					the beautiful moving life of upper Broadway at night,
+					with its crowds and clanging cable cars and its electric
+					signs, mammoth and glittering like the jewels of a
+					giantess.</p>
+
+					<p>&#8220;Word was brought to him that poker players were
+					arriving. He arose joyfully, leaving his cheese. In the
+					broad hall, occupied mainly by miscellaneous people
+					and actors, all deep in leather chairs, he found some of
+					his friends waiting. They trooped upstairs to Coleman&#8217;s
+					rooms, where, as a preliminary, Coleman began to hurl
+					books and papers from the table to the floor. A boy
+					came with drinks. Most of the men, in order to prepare
+					for the game, removed their coats and cuffs and drew up
+					the sleeves of their shirts. The electric globes shed a
+					blinding light upon the table. The sound of clinking
+					chips arose; the elected banker spun the cards, careless
+					and dextrous.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>The atmosphere of the entire novel is just that close and
+				enervating. Every page is like the next morning taste of a
+				champagne supper, and is heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes.
+				There is no fresh air in the book and no sunlight, only
+				the &#8220;blinding light shed by the electric globes.&#8221; If the life of
+				New York newspaper men is as unwholesome and sordid as
+				this, Mr. Crane, who has experienced it, ought to be sadly
+				ashamed to tell it. Next morning when Coleman went for
+				breakfast in the grill room of his hotel he ordered eggs on
+				toast and a pint of champagne for breakfast and discoursed
+				affably to the waiter.</p>
+
+				<blockquote>
+					<p>&#8220;May be you had a pretty lively time last night, Mr.
+					Coleman?&#8221;</p>
+
+					<p>&#8220;Yes, Pat,&#8221; answered Coleman. &#8220;I did. It was all because
+					of an unrequitted affection, Patrick.&#8221; The man
+					stood near, a napkin over his arm. Coleman went on
+					impressively. &#8220;The ways of the modern lover are
+					strange. Now, I, Patrick, am a modern lover, and when,
+					<a class="pagenum" id="page236" title="236">&nbsp;</a>yesterday, the dagger of disappointment was driven
+					deep into my heart, I immediately played poker as hard
+					as I could, and incidentally got loaded. This is the modern
+					point of view. I understand on good authority that
+					in old times lovers used to languish. That is probably a
+					lie, but at any rate we do not, in these times, languish to
+					any great extent. We get drunk. Do you understand
+					Patrick?&#8221;</p>
+
+					<p>The waiter was used to a harangue at Coleman&#8217;s
+					breakfast time. He placed his hand over his mouth and
+					giggled. &#8220;Yessir.&#8221;</p>
+
+					<p>&#8220;Of course,&#8221; continued Coleman, thoughtfully. &#8220;It
+					might be pointed out by uneducated persons that it is
+					difficult to maintain a high standard of drunkenness for
+					the adequate length of time, but in the series of experiments
+					which I am about to make, I am sure I can easily
+					prove them to be in the wrong.&#8221;</p>
+
+					<p>&#8220;I am sure, sir,&#8221; said the waiter, &#8220;the young ladies
+					would not like to be hearing you talk this way.&#8221;</p>
+
+					<p>&#8220;Yes; no doubt, no doubt. The young ladies have still
+					quite medieval ideas. They don&#8217;t understand. They still
+					prefer lovers to languish.&#8221;</p>
+
+					<p>&#8220;At any rate, sir, I don&#8217;t see that your heart is sure
+					enough broken. You seem to take it very easy.&#8221;</p>
+
+					<p>&#8220;Broken!&#8221; cried Coleman. &#8220;Easy? Man, my heart is in
+					fragments. Bring me another small bottle.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>After this Coleman went to Greece to write up the war for
+				the &#8220;Eclipse,&#8221; and incidentally to rescue his sweetheart from
+				the hands of the Turks and make &#8220;copy&#8221; of it. Very valid arguments
+				might be advanced that the lady would have fared
+				better with the Turks. On the voyage Coleman spent all his
+				days and nights in the card room and avoided the deck, since
+				fresh air was naturally disagreeable to him. For all that he saw
+				of Greece or that Mr. Crane&#8217;s readers see of Greece Coleman
+				might as well have stayed in the card room of the steamer, or
+				in the card room of his New York hotel for that matter.
+				Wherever he goes he carries the atmosphere of the card room
+				with him and the &#8220;blinding glare of the electrics.&#8221; In Greece
+				he makes love when he has leisure, but he makes &#8220;copy&#8221;
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page237" title="237">&nbsp;</a>much more ardently, and on the whole is quite as lurid and
+				sordid and showy as his worst Sunday editions. Some good
+				bits of battle descriptions there are, of the &#8220;Red Badge of
+				Courage&#8221; order, but one cannot make a novel of clever descriptions
+				of earthworks and poker games. The book concerns
+				itself not with large, universal interests or principles, but with
+				a yellow journalist grinding out yellow copy in such a
+				wooden fashion that the Sunday &#8220;Eclipse&#8221; must have been
+				even worse than most. In spite of the fact that Mr. Crane has
+				written some of the most artistic short stories in the English
+				language, I begin to wonder whether, blinded by his youth
+				and audacity, two qualities which the American people love,
+				we have not taken him too seriously. It is a grave matter for a
+				man in good health and with a bank account to have written a
+				book so coarse and dull and charmless as &#8220;Active Service.&#8221;
+				Compared with this &#8220;War was kind,&#8221; indeed.</p>
+
+				<p class="source"><cite>Pittsburg Leader</cite>, November 11, 1899</p>
+
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<div id="norris" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page238" title="238">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">Frank Norris <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<div id="norris_1" class="review">
+				<p class="first_paragraph">A new and a great book has been written. The name of it
+				is &#8220;McTeague, a Story of San Francisco,&#8221; and the man
+				who wrote it is Mr. Frank Norris. The great presses of the
+				country go on year after year grinding out commonplace
+				books, just as each generation goes on busily reproducing its
+				own mediocrity. When in this enormous output of ink and
+				paper, these thousands of volumes that are yearly rushed
+				upon the shelves of the book stores, one appears which contains
+				both power and promise, the reader may be pardoned
+				some enthusiasm. Excellence always surprises: we are never
+				quite prepared for it. In the case of &#8220;McTeague, a Story of
+				San Francisco,&#8221; it is even more surprising than usual. In the
+				first place the title is not alluring, and not until you have read
+				the book, can you know that there is an admirable consistency
+				in the stiff, uncompromising commonplaceness of that title.
+				In the second place the name of the author is as yet comparatively
+				unfamiliar, and finally the book is dedicated to a member
+				of the Harvard faculty, suggesting that whether it be a
+				story of San Francisco or Dawson City, it must necessarily be
+				vaporous, introspective and chiefly concerned with &#8220;literary&#8221;
+				impressions. Mr. Norris is, indeed, a &#8220;Harvard man,&#8221; but that
+				he is a good many other kinds of a man is self-evident. His
+				book is, in the language of Mr. Norman Hapgood, the work
+				of &#8220;a large human being, with a firm stomach, who knows
+				and loves the people.&#8221;</p>
+
+				<p>In a novel of such high merit as this, the subject matter is
+				the least important consideration. Every newspaper contains
+				the essential material for another &#8220;Comedie Humaine.&#8221; In
+				this case &#8220;McTeague,&#8221; the central figure, happens to be a dentist
+				practicing in a little side street of San Francisco. The novel
+				opens with this description of him:</p>
+
+				<blockquote>
+					<p>&#8220;It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that
+					day, McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon
+					at the car conductor&#8217;s coffee joint on Polk street. He
+					had a thick, gray soup, heavy, underdone meat, very
+					hot, on a cold plate; two kinds of vegetables; and a sort
+					<a class="pagenum" id="page239" title="239">&nbsp;</a>of suet pudding, full of strong butter and sugar. Once in
+					his office, or, as he called it on his sign-board, &#8216;Dental
+					Parlors,&#8217; he took off his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his
+					vest, and, having crammed his little stove with coke, he
+					lay back in his operating chair at the bay window, reading
+					the paper, drinking steam beer, and smoking his
+					huge porcelain pipe while his food digested; crop-full,
+					stupid and warm.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>McTeague had grown up in a mining camp in the mountains.
+				He remembered the years he had spent there trundling
+				heavy cars of ore in and out of the tunnel under the direction
+				of his father. For thirteen days out of each fortnight his father
+				was a steady, hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every
+				other Sunday he became an irresponsible animal, a beast, a
+				brute, crazed with alcohol. His mother cooked for the miners.
+				Her one ambition was that her son should enter a profession.
+				He was apprenticed to a traveling quack dentist and after a
+				fashion, learned the business.</p>
+
+				<blockquote>
+					<p>&#8220;Then one day at San Francisco had come the news
+					of his mother&#8217;s death; she had left him some money&#8212;not
+					much, but enough to set him up in business; so he
+					had cut loose from the charlatan and had opened his
+					&#8216;Dental Parlors&#8217; on Polk street, an &#8216;accommodation
+					street&#8217; of small shops in the residence quarter of the
+					town. Here he had slowly collected a clientele of
+					butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks and car conductors.
+					He made but few acquaintances. Polk street called him
+					the &#8216;doctor&#8217; and spoke of his enormous strength. For
+					McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of
+					blonde hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving
+					his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle,
+					slowly, ponderously. His hands were enormous, red,
+					and covered with a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were as
+					hard as wooden mallets, strong as vices, the hands of the
+					old-time car boy. Often he dispensed with forceps and
+					extracted a refractory tooth with his thumb and finger.
+					His head was square-cut, angular; the jaw salient: like
+					that of the carnivora.</p>
+
+					<p>&#8220;But for one thing McTeague would have been perfectly
+					<a class="pagenum" id="page240" title="240">&nbsp;</a>contented. Just outside his window was his signboard&#8212;a
+					modest affair&#8212;that read: &#8216;Doctor McTeague.
+					Dental Parlors. Gas Given;&#8217; but that was all. It was his
+					ambition, his dream, to have projecting from that
+					corner window a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous
+					prongs, something gorgeous and attractive. He
+					would have it some day, but as yet it was far beyond his
+					means.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>Then Mr. Norris launches into a description of the street
+				in which &#8220;McTeague&#8221; lives. He presents that street as it
+				is on Sunday, as it is on working days; as it is in the early
+				dawn when the workmen are going out with pickaxes on
+				their shoulders, as it is at ten o&#8217;clock when the women
+				are out purchasing from the small shopkeepers, as it is at
+				night when the shop girls are out with the soda-fountain
+				tenders and the motor cars dash by full of theatre-goers, and
+				the Salvationists sing before the saloon on the corner. In four
+				pages he reproduces the life in a by-street of a great city, the
+				little tragedy of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of
+				handling environment&#8212;most of them bad. When a young
+				author has very little to say and no story worth telling, he
+				resorts to environment. It is frequently used to disguise a
+				weakness of structure, as ladies who paint landscapes put their
+				cows knee-deep in water to conceal the defective drawing of
+				the legs. But such description as one meets throughout
+				Mr. Norris&#8217; book is in itself convincing proof of power, imagination
+				and literary skill. It is a positive and active force,
+				stimulating the reader&#8217;s imagination, giving him an actual
+				command, a realizing sense of this world into which he is
+				suddenly transplanted. It gives to the book perspective, atmosphere,
+				effects of time and distance, creates the illusion of life.
+				This power of mature, and accurate and comprehensive description
+				is very unusual among the younger American writers.
+				Most of them observe the world through a temperament,
+				and are more occupied with their medium than the objects
+				they see. And temperament is a glass which distorts most astonishingly.
+				But this young man sees with a clear eye, and
+				reproduces with a touch firm and decisive, strong almost to
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page241" title="241">&nbsp;</a>brutalness. Yet this hand that can depict so powerfully the
+				brute strength and brute passions of a &#8220;McTeague,&#8221; can deal
+				very finely and adroitly with the feminine element of his story.
+				This is his portrait of the little Swiss girl, &#8220;Trina,&#8221; whom the
+				dentist marries:</p>
+
+				<blockquote>
+					<p>&#8220;Trina was very small and prettily made. Her face was
+					round and rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and
+					blue, like the half-opened eyes of a baby; her lips and
+					the lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a little suggestive of
+					anaemia. But it was to her hair that one&#8217;s attention was
+					most attracted. Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and
+					braids, a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable
+					tiara, heavy, abundant and odorous. All the vitality that
+					should have given color to her face seemed to have been
+					absorbed by that marvelous hair: It was the coiffure of a
+					queen that shadowed the temples of this little bourgeoise.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>The tragedy of the story dates from a chance, a seeming
+				stroke of good fortune, one of those terrible gifts of the
+				Danai. A few weeks before her marriage &#8220;Trina&#8221; drew $5&nbsp;000
+				from a lottery ticket. From that moment her passion for
+				hoarding money becomes the dominant theme of the story,
+				takes command of the book and its characters. After their
+				marriage the dentist is disbarred from practice. They move
+				into a garret where she starves her husband and herself to
+				save that precious hoard. She sells even his office furniture,
+				everything but his concertina and his canary bird, with which
+				he stubbornly refuses to part and which are destined to become
+				very important accessories in the property room of
+				the theatre where this drama is played. This removal from
+				their first home is to this story what Gervaise&#8217;s removal from
+				her shop is to L&#8217;Assommoir; it is the fatal episode of the third
+				act, the sacrifice of self-respect, the beginning of the end.
+				From that time the money stands between &#8220;Trina&#8221; and her
+				husband. Outraged and humiliated, hating her for her meanness,
+				demoralized by his idleness and despair, he begins to
+				abuse her. The story becomes a careful and painful study of
+				the disintegration of this union, a penetrating and searching
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page242" title="242">&nbsp;</a>analysis of the degeneration of these two souls, the woman&#8217;s
+				corroded by greed, the man&#8217;s poisoned by disappointment
+				and hate.</p>
+
+				<p>And all the while this same painful theme is placed in a
+				lower key. Maria, the housemaid who took care of &#8220;McTeague&#8217;s&#8221;
+				dental parlors in his better days, was a half-crazy
+				girl from somewhere in Central America, she herself did not
+				remember just where. But she had a wonderful story about
+				her people owning a dinner service of pure gold with a punch
+				bowl you could scarcely lift, which rang like a church bell
+				when you struck it. On the strength of this story &#8220;Zercow,&#8221;
+				the Jew junk man, marries her, and believing that she knows
+				where this treasure is hidden, bullies and tortures her to force
+				her to disclose her secret. At last &#8220;Maria&#8221; is found with her
+				throat cut, and &#8220;Zercow&#8221; is picked up by the wharf with a
+				sack full of rusty tin cans, which in his dementia he must have
+				thought the fabled dinner service of gold.</p>
+
+				<p>From this it is a short step to &#8220;McTeague&#8217;s&#8221; crime. He kills
+				his wife to get possession of her money, and escapes to the
+				mountains. While he is on his way south, pushing toward
+				Mexico, he is overtaken by his murdered wife&#8217;s cousin and
+				former suitor. Both men are half mad with thirst, and there in
+				the desert wastes of Death&#8217;s Valley, they spring to their last
+				conflict. The cousin falls, but before he dies he slips a handcuff
+				over &#8220;McTeague&#8217;s&#8221; arm, and so the author leaves his hero
+				in the wastes of Death&#8217;s Valley, a hundred miles from water,
+				with a dead man chained to his arm. As he stands there the
+				canary bird, the survivor of his happier days, to which he had
+				clung with stubborn affection, begins &#8220;chittering feebly in its
+				little gilt prison.&#8221; It reminds one a little of Stevenson&#8217;s use of
+				poor &#8220;Goddedaal&#8217;s&#8221; canary in &#8220;The Wrecker.&#8221; It is just such
+				sharp, sure strokes that bring out the high lights in a story
+				and separate excellence from the commonplace. They are at
+				once dramatic and revelatory. Lacking them, a novel which
+				may otherwise be a good one, lacks its chief reason for being.
+				The fault with many worthy attempts at fiction lies not in
+				what they are, but in what they are not.</p>
+
+				<p>Mr. Norris&#8217; model, if he will admit that he has followed
+				one, is clearly no less a person than M. Zola himself. Yet there
+				is no discoverable trace of imitation in his book. He has
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page243" title="243">&nbsp;</a>simply taken a method which has been most successfully applied
+				in the study of French life and applied it in studying
+				American life, as one uses certain algebraic formulae to solve
+				certain problems. It is perhaps the only truthful literary
+				method of dealing with that part of society which environment
+				and heredity hedge about like the walls of a prison. It is
+				true that Mr. Norris now and then allows his &#8220;method&#8221; to
+				become too prominent, that his restraint savors of constraint,
+				yet he has written a true story of the people, courageous, dramatic,
+				full of matter and warm with life. He has addressed
+				himself seriously to art, and he seems to have no ambition to
+				be clever. His horizon is wide, his invention vigorous and
+				bold, his touch heavy and warm and human. This man is not
+				limited by literary prejudices: he sees the people as they are,
+				he is close to them and not afraid of their unloveliness. He
+				has looked at truth in the depths, among men begrimed by
+				toil and besotted by ignorance, and still found her fair. &#8220;McTeague&#8221;
+				is an achievement for a young man. It may not win at
+				once the success which it deserves, but Mr. Norris is one of
+				those who can afford to wait.</p>
+
+				<p class="source"><cite>The Courier</cite>, April 8, 1899</p>
+			</div>
+			<div id="norris_2" class="review">
+				<p>If you want to read a story that is all wheat and no chaff,
+				read &#8220;Blix.&#8221; Last winter that brilliant young Californian, Mr.
+				Norris, published a remarkable and gloomy novel, &#8220;McTeague,&#8221;
+				a book deep in insight, rich in promise and splendid
+				in execution, but entirely without charm and as disagreeable
+				as only a great piece of work can be. And now this gentleman,
+				who is not yet thirty, turns around and gives us an idyll that
+				sings through one&#8217;s brain like a summer wind and makes one
+				feel young enough to commit all manner of indiscretions. It
+				may be that Mr. Norris is desirous of showing us his versatility
+				and that he can follow any suit, or it may have been a
+				process of reaction. I believe it was after M. Zola had completed
+				one of his greatest and darkest novels of Parisian life
+				that he went down to the seaside and wrote &#8220;La Reve,&#8221; a
+				book that every girl should read when she is eighteen, and
+				then again when she is eighty. Powerful and solidly built as
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page244" title="244">&nbsp;</a>&#8220;McTeague&#8221; is, one felt that there method was carried almost
+				too far, that Mr. Norris was too consciously influenced by his
+				French masters. But &#8220;Blix&#8221; belongs to no school whatever,
+				and there is not a shadow of pedantry or pride of craft in it
+				from cover to cover. &#8220;Blix&#8221; herself is the method, the motives
+				and the aim of the book. The story is an exhalation of youth
+				and spring; it is the work of a man who breaks loose and
+				forgets himself. Mr. Norris was married only last summer,
+				and the march from &#8220;Lohengrin&#8221; is simply sticking out all
+				over &#8220;Blix.&#8221; It is the story of a San Francisco newspaper man
+				and a girl. The newspaper man &#8220;came out&#8221; in fiction, so to
+				speak, in the drawing room of Mr. Richard Harding Davis,
+				and has languished under that gentleman&#8217;s chaperonage until
+				he has come to be regarded as a fellow careful of nothing but
+				his toilet and his dinner. Mr. Davis&#8217; reporters all bathed regularly
+				and all ate nice things, but beyond that their tastes were
+				rather colorless. I am glad to see one red-blooded newspaper
+				man, in the person of &#8220;Landy Rivers,&#8221; of San Francisco,
+				break into fiction; a real live reporter with no sentimental loyalty
+				for his &#8220;paper,&#8221; and no Byronic poses about his vices, and
+				no astonishing taste about his clothes, and no money whatever,
+				which is the natural and normal condition of all reporters.
+				&#8220;Blix&#8221; herself was just a society girl, and &#8220;Landy&#8221; took
+				her to theatres and parties and tried to make himself believe
+				he was in love with her. But it wouldn&#8217;t work, for &#8220;Landy&#8221;
+				couldn&#8217;t love a society girl, not though she were as beautiful
+				as the morning and terrible as an army with banners, and had
+				&#8220;round full arms,&#8221; and &#8220;the skin of her face was white and
+				clean, except where it flushed into a most charming pink
+				upon her smooth, cool cheeks.&#8221; For while &#8220;Landy Rivers&#8221;
+				was at college he had been seized with the penchant for writing
+				short stories, and had worshiped at the shrines of Maupassant
+				and Kipling, and when a man is craft mad enough to
+				worship Maupassant truly and know him well, when he has
+				that tingling for technique in his fingers, not Aphrodite herself,
+				new risen from the waves, could tempt him into any
+				world where craft was not lord and king. So it happened that
+				their real love affair never began until one morning when
+				&#8220;Landy&#8221; had to go down to the wharf to write up a whaleback,
+				and &#8220;Blix&#8221; went along, and an old sailor told them a
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page245" title="245">&nbsp;</a>story and &#8220;Blix&#8221; recognized the literary possibilities of it, and
+				they had lunch in a Chinese restaurant, and &#8220;Landy&#8221; because
+				he was a newspaper man and it was the end of the week,
+				didn&#8217;t have any change about his clothes, and &#8220;Blix&#8221; had to
+				pay the bill. And it was in that green old tea house that
+				&#8220;Landy&#8221; read &#8220;Blix&#8221; one of his favorite yarns by Kipling, and
+				she in a calm, off-handed way, recognized one of the fine,
+				technical points in it, and &#8220;Landy&#8221; almost went to pieces for
+				joy of her doing it. That scene in the Chinese restaurant is
+				one of the prettiest bits of color you&#8217;ll find to rest your eyes
+				upon, and mighty good writing it is. I wonder, though if
+				when Mr. Norris adroitly mentioned the &#8220;clack and snarl&#8221; of
+				the banjo &#8220;Landy&#8221; played, he remembered the &#8220;silver snarling
+				trumpets&#8221; of Keats? After that, things went on as such things
+				will, and &#8220;Blix&#8221; quit the society racket and went to queer
+				places with &#8220;Landy,&#8221; and got interested in his work, and she
+				broke him of wearing red neckties and playing poker, and she
+				made him work, she did, for she grew to realize how much
+				that meant to him, and she jacked him up when he didn&#8217;t
+				work, and she suggested an ending for one of his stories that
+				was better than his own; just this big, splendid girl, who had
+				never gone to college to learn how to write novels. And so
+				how, in the name of goodness, could he help loving her? So
+				one morning down by the Pacific, with &#8220;Blix&#8221; and &#8220;The
+				Seven Seas,&#8221; it all came over &#8220;Landy,&#8221; that &#8220;living was better
+				than reading and life was better than literature.&#8221; And so it is;
+				once, and only once, for each of us; and that is the tune that
+				sings and sings through one&#8217;s head when one puts the book
+				away.</p>
+
+				<p class="source"><cite>The Courier</cite>, January 13, 1900</p>
+
+			</div>
+			<div id="norris_3" class="review">
+				<h4>An Heir Apparent.</h4>
+
+				<p>Last winter a young Californian, Mr. Frank Norris, published
+				a novel with the unpretentious title, &#8220;McTeague: a
+				Story of San Francisco.&#8221; It was a book that could not be ignored
+				nor dismissed with a word. There was something very
+				unusual about it, about its solidity and mass, the thoroughness
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page246" title="246">&nbsp;</a>and firmness of texture, and it came down like a blow
+				from a sledge hammer among the slighter and more sprightly
+				performances of the hour.</p>
+
+				<p>The most remarkable thing about the book was its maturity
+				and compactness. It has none of the ear-marks of those entertaining
+				&#8220;young writers&#8221; whom every season produces as inevitably
+				as its debutantes, young men who surprise for an hour
+				and then settle down to producing industriously for the class
+				with which their peculiar trick of phrase has found favor. It
+				was a book addressed to the American people and to the critics
+				of the world, the work of a young man who had set himself
+				to the art of authorship with an almighty seriousness, and
+				who had no ambition to be clever. &#8220;McTeague&#8221; was not an
+				experiment in style nor a pretty piece of romantic folly, it was
+				a true story of the people&#8212;having about it, as M. Zola
+				would say, &#8220;the smell of the people&#8221;&#8212;courageous, dramatic,
+				full of matter and warm with life. It was realism of the most
+				uncompromising kind. The theme was such that the author
+				could not have expected sudden popularity for his book, such
+				as sometimes overtakes monstrosities of style in these discouraging
+				days when Knighthood is in Flower to the extent of a
+				quarter of a million copies, nor could he have hoped for
+				pressing commissions from the fire-side periodicals. The life
+				story of a quack dentist who sometimes extracted molars with
+				his fingers, who mistreated and finally murdered his wife, is
+				not, in itself, attractive. But, after all, the theme counts for
+				very little. Every newspaper contains the essential subject matter
+				for another <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Comedie Humaine</em>. The important point is that
+				a man considerably under thirty could take up a subject so
+				grim and unattractive, and that, for the mere love of doing
+				things well, he was able to hold himself down to the task of
+				developing it completely, that he was able to justify this
+				quack&#8217;s existence in literature, to thrust this hairy, blonde
+				dentist with the &#8220;salient jaw of the carnivora,&#8221; in amongst the
+				immortals.</p>
+
+				<p>It was after M. Zola had completed one of the greatest and
+				gloomiest of his novels of Parisian life, that he went down by
+				the sea and wrote &#8220;La Reve,&#8221; that tender, adolescent story of
+				love and purity and youth. So, almost simultaneously with
+				&#8220;McTeague,&#8221; Mr. Norris published &#8220;Blix,&#8221; another San Francisco
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page247" title="247">&nbsp;</a>story, as short as &#8220;McTeague&#8221; was lengthy, as light as
+				&#8220;McTeague&#8221; was heavy, as poetic and graceful as &#8220;McTeague&#8221;
+				was somber and charmless. Here is a man worth waiting on; a
+				man who is both realist and poet, a man who can teach</p>
+
+				<blockquote class="poem">
+					<p class="i2">&#8220;Not only by a comet&#8217;s rush,</p>
+					<p>But by a rose&#8217;s birth.&#8221;</p>
+				</blockquote>
+
+				<p>Yet unlike as they are, in both books the source of power is
+				the same, and, for that matter, it was even the same in his first
+				book, &#8220;Moran of the Lady Letty.&#8221; Mr. Norris has dispensed
+				with the conventional symbols that have crept into art, with
+				the trite, half-truths and circumlocutions, and got back to the
+				physical basis of things. He has abjured tea-table psychology,
+				and the analysis of figures in the carpet and subtile dissections
+				of intellectual impotencies, and the diverting game of words
+				and the whole literature of the nerves. He is big and warm
+				and sometimes brutal, and the strength of the soil comes up
+				to him with very little loss in the transmission. His art strikes
+				deep down into the roots of life and the foundation of Things
+				as They Are&#8212;not as we tell each other they are at the tea-table.
+				But he is realistic art, not artistic realism. He is courageous,
+				but he is without bravado.</p>
+
+				<p>He sees things freshly, as though they had not been seen
+				before, and describes them with singular directness and vividness,
+				not with morbid acuteness, with a large, wholesome joy
+				of life. Nowhere is this more evident than in his insistent use
+				of environment. I recall the passage in which he describes the
+				street in which McTeague lives. He represents that street as it
+				is on Sunday, as it is on working days, as it is in the early
+				dawn when the workmen are going out with pickaxes on
+				their shoulders, as it is at ten o&#8217;clock when the women are out
+				marketing among the small shopkeepers, as it is at night when
+				the shop girls are out with the soda fountain tenders and the
+				motor cars dash by full of theater-goers, and the Salvationists
+				sing before the saloon on the corner. In four pages he reproduces
+				in detail the life in a by-street of a great city, the little
+				tragedy of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of
+				handling environment&#8212;most of them bad. When a young
+				author has very little to say and no story worth telling, he
+				resorts to environment. It is frequently used to disguise a
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page248" title="248">&nbsp;</a>weakness of structure, as ladies who paint landscapes put their
+				cows knee-deep in water to conceal the defective drawing of
+				the legs. But such description as one meets throughout
+				Mr. Norris&#8217; book is in itself convincing proof of power, imagination
+				and literary skill. It is a positive and active force,
+				stimulating the reader&#8217;s imagination, giving him an actual
+				command, a realizing sense of this world into which he is
+				suddenly transported. It gives to the book perspective, atmosphere,
+				effects of time and distance, creates the illusion of life.
+				This power of mature and comprehensive description is very
+				unusual among the younger American writers. Most of them
+				observe the world through a temperament, and are more occupied
+				with their medium than the objects they watch. And
+				temperament is a glass which distorts most astonishingly. But
+				this young man sees with a clear eye, and reproduces with a
+				touch, firm and decisive, strong almost to brutalness.</p>
+
+				<p>Mr. Norris approaches things on their physical side; his
+				characters are personalities of flesh before they are anything
+				else, types before they are individuals. Especially is this true of
+				his women. His Trina is &#8220;very small and prettily made. Her
+				face was round and rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and
+				blue, like the half-opened eyes of a baby; her lips and the
+				lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a little suggestive of anaemia.
+				But it was to her hair that one&#8217;s attention was most attracted.
+				Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and braids, a royal crown
+				of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara, heavy, abundant and
+				odorous. All the vitality that should have given color to her
+				face seems to have been absorbed by that marvelous hair. It
+				was the coiffure of a queen that shadowed the temples of this
+				little bourgeoise.&#8221; Blix had &#8220;round, full arms,&#8221; and &#8220;the skin
+				of her face was white and clean, except where it flushed into a
+				most charming pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks.&#8221; In this
+				grasp of the element of things, this keen, clean, frank pleasure
+				at color and odor and warmth, this candid admission of the
+				negative of beauty, which is co-existent with and inseparable
+				from it, lie much of his power and promise. Here is a man
+				catholic enough to include the extremes of physical and moral
+				life, strong enough to handle the crudest colors and darkest
+				shadows. Here is a man who has an appetite for the physical
+				universe, who loves the rank smells of crowded alley-ways, or
+				<a class="pagenum" id="page249" title="249">&nbsp;</a>the odors of boudoirs, or the delicate perfume exhaled from a
+				woman&#8217;s skin; who is not afraid of Pan, be he ever so shaggy,
+				and redolent of the herd.</p>
+
+				<p>Structurally, where most young novelists are weak, Mr.
+				Norris is very strong. He has studied the best French masters,
+				and he has adopted their methods quite simply, as one selects
+				an algebraic formula to solve his particular problem. As to his
+				style, that is, as expression always is, just as vigorous as his
+				thought compels it to be, just as vivid as his conception warrants.
+				If God Almighty has given a man ideas, he will get
+				himself a style from one source or another. Mr. Norris, fortunately,
+				is not a conscious stylist. He has too much to say to be
+				exquisitely vain about his medium. He has the kind of brain
+				stuff that would vanquish difficulties in any profession, that
+				might be put to building battleships, or solving problems of
+				finance, or to devising colonial policies. Let us be thankful
+				that he has put it to literature. Let us be thankful, moreover,
+				that he is not introspective and that his intellect does not devour
+				itself, but feeds upon the great race of man, and, above
+				all, let us rejoice that he is not a &#8220;temperamental&#8221; artist, but
+				something larger, for a great brain and an assertive temperament
+				seldom dwell together.</p>
+
+				<p>There are clever men enough in the field of American
+				letters, and the fault of most of them is merely one of magnitude;
+				they are not large enough; they travel in small orbits,
+				they play on muted strings. They sing neither of the combats
+				of Atriedes nor the labors of Cadmus, but of the tea-table and
+				the Odyssey of the Rialto. Flaubert said that a drop of water
+				contained all the elements of the sea, save one&#8212;immensity.
+				Mr. Norris is concerned only with serious things, he has only
+				large ambitions. His brush is bold, his color is taken fresh
+				from the kindly earth, his canvas is large enough to hold
+				American life, the real life of the people. He has come into
+				the court of the troubadours singing the song of Elys, the
+				song of warm, full nature. He has struck the true note of the
+				common life. He is what Mr. Norman Hapgood said the
+				great American dramatist must be: &#8220;A large human being,
+				with a firm stomach, who knows and loves the people.&#8221;</p>
+
+				<p class="source"><cite>The Courier</cite>, April 7, 1900</p>
+
+			</div>
+		</div>
+		<div id="knew" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page250" title="250">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">When I Knew Stephen Crane <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<p class="first_paragraph">It was, I think, in the spring of &#8217;94 that a slender, narrow-chested
+			fellow in a shabby grey suit, with a soft felt hat
+			pulled low over his eyes, sauntered into the office of the managing
+			editor of the Nebraska State Journal and introduced
+			himself as Stephen Crane. He stated that he was going to
+			Mexico to do some work for the Bacheller Syndicate and get
+			rid of his cough, and that he would be stopping in Lincoln
+			for a few days. Later he explained that he was out of money
+			and would be compelled to wait until he got a check from the
+			East before he went further. I was a Junior at the Nebraska
+			State University at the time, and was doing some work for the
+			State Journal in my leisure time, and I happened to be in the
+			managing editor&#8217;s room when Mr. Crane introduced himself.
+			I was just off the range; I knew a little Greek and something
+			about cattle and a good horse when I saw one, and beyond
+			horses and cattle I considered nothing of vital importance except
+			good stories and the people who wrote them. This was
+			the first man of letters I had ever met in the flesh, and when
+			the young man announced who he was, I dropped into a
+			chair behind the editor&#8217;s desk where I could stare at him
+			without being too much in evidence.</p>
+
+			<p>Only a very youthful enthusiasm and a large propensity for
+			hero worship could have found anything impressive in the
+			young man who stood before the managing editor&#8217;s desk. He
+			was thin to emaciation, his face was gaunt and unshaven, a
+			thin dark moustache straggled on his upper lip, his black hair
+			grew low on his forehead and was shaggy and unkempt. His
+			grey clothes were much the worse for wear and fitted him so
+			badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured for them.
+			He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a necktie,
+			and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and
+			were badly run over at the heel. I had seen many a tramp
+			printer come up the Journal stairs to hunt a job, but never one
+			who presented such a disreputable appearance as this story-maker
+			man. He wore gloves, which seemed rather a contradiction
+			to the general slovenliness of his attire, but when he
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page251" title="251">&nbsp;</a>took them off to search his pockets for his credentials, I noticed
+			that his hands were singularly fine; long, white, and delicately
+			shaped, with thin, nervous fingers. I have seen pictures
+			of Aubrey Beardsley&#8217;s hands that recalled Crane&#8217;s very vividly.</p>
+
+			<p>At that time Crane was but twenty-four, and almost an unknown
+			man. Hamlin Garland had seen some of his work and
+			believed in him, and had introduced him to Mr. Howells,
+			who recommended him to the Bacheller Syndicate. &#8220;The Red
+			Badge of Courage&#8221; had been published in the State Journal
+			that winter along with a lot of other syndicate matter, and
+			the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty that
+			the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the
+			copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through
+			the careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable
+			performance. But the grammar certainly was bad. I
+			remember one of the reporters who had corrected the phrase
+			&#8220;it don&#8217;t&#8221; for the tenth time remarked savagely, &#8220;If I couldn&#8217;t
+			write better English than this, I&#8217;d quit.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Crane spent several days in the town, living from hand to
+			mouth and waiting for his money. I think he borrowed a
+			small amount from the managing editor. He lounged about
+			the office most of the time, and I frequently encountered him
+			going in and out of the cheap restaurants on Tenth Street.
+			When he was at the office he talked a good deal in a wandering,
+			absent-minded fashion, and his conversation was uniformly
+			frivolous. If he could not evade a serious question by a
+			joke, he bolted. I cut my classes to lie in wait for him, confident
+			that in some unwary moment I could trap him into serious
+			conversation, that if one burned incense long enough and
+			ardently enough, the oracle would not be dumb. I was Maupassant
+			mad at the time, a malady particularly unattractive in
+			a Junior, and I made a frantic effort to get an expression of
+			opinion from him on &#8220;Le Bonheur.&#8221; &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re Moping, are
+			you?&#8221; he remarked with a sarcastic grin, and went on reading
+			a little volume of Poe that he carried in his pocket. At another
+			time I cornered him in the Funny Man&#8217;s room and succeeded
+			in getting a little out of him. We were taught literature by an
+			exceedingly analytical method at the University, and we probably
+			distorted the method, and I was busy trying to find the
+			least common multiple of <cite>Hamlet</cite> and the greatest common
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page252" title="252">&nbsp;</a>divisor of <cite>Macbeth</cite>, and I began asking him whether stories
+			were constructed by cabalistic formulae. At length he sighed
+			wearily and shook his drooping shoulders, remarking:</p>
+
+			<p>&#8220;Where did you get all that rot? Yarns aren&#8217;t done by mathematics.
+			You can&#8217;t do it by rule any more than you can dance
+			by rule. You have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers,
+			and if you haven&#8217;t,&#8212;well, you&#8217;re damned lucky, and you&#8217;ll
+			live long and prosper, that&#8217;s all.&#8221;&#8212;And with that he yawned
+			and went down the hall.</p>
+
+			<p>Crane was moody most of the time, his health was bad and
+			he seemed profoundly discouraged. Even his jokes were exceedingly
+			drastic. He went about with the tense, preoccupied,
+			self-centered air of a man who is brooding over some impending
+			disaster, and I conjectured vainly as to what it might be.
+			Though he was seemingly entirely idle during the few days I
+			knew him, his manner indicated that he was in the throes of
+			work that told terribly on his nerves. His eyes I remember as
+			the finest I have ever seen, large and dark and full of lustre
+			and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always
+			lurking deep in them. They were eyes that seemed to be burning
+			themselves out.</p>
+
+			<p>As he sat at the desk with his shoulders drooping forward,
+			his head low, and his long, white fingers drumming on the
+			sheets of copy paper, he was as nervous as a race horse fretting
+			to be on the track. Always, as he came and went about
+			the halls, he seemed like a man preparing for a sudden departure.
+			Now that he is dead it occurs to me that all his life was a
+			preparation for sudden departure. I remember once when he
+			was writing a letter he stopped and asked me about the spelling
+			of a word, saying carelessly, &#8220;I haven&#8217;t time to learn to
+			spell.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>Then, glancing down at his attire, he added with an absent-minded
+			smile, &#8220;I haven&#8217;t time to dress either; it takes an awful
+			slice out of a fellow&#8217;s life.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He said he was poor, and he certainly looked it, but four
+			years later when he was in Cuba, drawing the largest salary
+			ever paid a newspaper correspondent, he clung to this same
+			untidy manner of dress, and his ragged overalls and buttonless
+			shirt were eyesores to the immaculate Mr. Davis, in his
+			spotless linen and neat khaki uniform, with his Gibson chin
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page253" title="253">&nbsp;</a>always freshly shaven. When I first heard of his serious illness,
+			his old throat trouble aggravated into consumption by his
+			reckless exposure in Cuba, I recalled a passage from Maeterlinck&#8217;s
+			essay, &#8220;The Pre-Destined,&#8221; on those doomed to early
+			death: &#8220;As children, life seems nearer to them than to other
+			children. They appear to know nothing, and yet there is in
+			their eyes so profound a certainty that we feel they must
+			know all.&#8212;In all haste, but wisely and with minute care do
+			they prepare themselves to live, and this very haste is a sign
+			upon which mothers can scarce bring themselves to look.&#8221; I
+			remembered, too, the young man&#8217;s melancholy and his tenseness,
+			his burning eyes, and his way of slurring over the less
+			important things, as one whose time is short.</p>
+
+			<p>I have heard other people say how difficult it was to induce
+			Crane to talk seriously about his work, and I suspect that he
+			was particularly averse to discussions with literary men of
+			wider education and better equipment than himself, yet he
+			seemed to feel that this fuller culture was not for him. Perhaps
+			the unreasoning instinct which lies deep in the roots of our
+			lives, and which guides us all, told him that he had not time
+			enough to acquire it.</p>
+
+			<p>Men will sometimes reveal themselves to children, or to
+			people whom they think never to see again, more completely
+			than they ever do to their confreres. From the wise we hold
+			back alike our folly and our wisdom, and for the recipients of
+			our deeper confidences we seldom select our equals. The soul
+			has no message for the friends with whom we dine every
+			week. It is silenced by custom and convention, and we play
+			only in the shallows. It selects its listeners willfully, and seemingly
+			delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who
+			meets us in the highway at a fated hour. There are moments
+			too, when the tides run high or very low, when self-revelation
+			is necessary to every man, if it be only to his valet or his
+			gardener. At such a moment, I was with Mr. Crane.</p>
+
+			<p>The hoped for revelation came unexpectedly enough. It was
+			on the last night he spent in Lincoln. I had come back from
+			the theatre and was in the Journal office writing a notice of
+			the play. It was eleven o&#8217;clock when Crane came in. He had
+			expected his money to arrive on the night mail and it had not
+			done so, and he was out of sorts and deeply despondent. He
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page254" title="254">&nbsp;</a>sat down on the ledge of the open window that faced on the
+			street, and when I had finished my notice I went over and
+			took a chair beside him. Quite without invitation on my part,
+			Crane began to talk, began to curse his trade from the first
+			throb of creative desire in a boy to the finished work of the
+			master. The night was oppressively warm; one of those dry
+			winds that are the curse of that country was blowing up from
+			Kansas. The white, western moonlight threw sharp, blue
+			shadows below us. The streets were silent at that hour, and
+			we could hear the gurgle of the fountain in the Post Office
+			square across the street, and the twang of banjos from the
+			lower verandah of the Hotel Lincoln, where the colored waiters
+			were serenading the guests. The drop lights in the office
+			were dull under their green shades, and the telegraph sounder
+			clicked faintly in the next room. In all his long tirade, Crane
+			never raised his voice; he spoke slowly and monotonously and
+			even calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any
+			man as he revealed to me that night. It was an arraignment of
+			the wages of life, an invocation to the ministers of hate.</p>
+
+			<p>Incidentally he told me the sum he had received for &#8220;The
+			Red Badge of Courage,&#8221; which I think was something like
+			ninety dollars, and he repeated some lines from &#8220;The Black
+			Riders,&#8221; which was then in preparation. He gave me to understand
+			that he led a double literary life; writing in the first
+			place the matter that pleased himself, and doing it very
+			slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff that would sell.
+			And he remarked that his poor was just as bad as it could
+			possibly be. He realized, he said, that his limitations were absolutely
+			impassable. &#8220;What I can&#8217;t do, I can&#8217;t do at all, and I
+			can&#8217;t acquire it. I only hold one trump.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>He had no settled plans at all. He was going to Mexico
+			wholly uncertain of being able to do any successful work
+			there, and he seemed to feel very insecure about the financial
+			end of his venture. The thing that most interested me was
+			what he said about his slow method of composition. He declared
+			that there was little money in story-writing at best, and
+			practically none in it for him, because of the time it took him
+			to work up his detail. Other men, he said, could sit down and
+			write up an experience while the physical effect of it, so to
+			speak, was still upon them, and yesterday&#8217;s impressions made
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page255" title="255">&nbsp;</a>to-day&#8217;s &#8220;copy.&#8221; But when he came in from the streets to
+			write up what he had seen there, his faculties were benumbed,
+			and he sat twirling his pencil and hunting for words like a
+			schoolboy.</p>
+
+			<p>I mentioned &#8220;The Red Badge of Courage,&#8221; which was
+			written in nine days, and he replied that, though the writing
+			took very little time, he had been unconsciously working the
+			detail of the story out through most of his boyhood. His
+			ancestors had been soldiers, and he had been imagining war
+			stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers, and in writing
+			his first war story he had simply gone over his imaginary campaigns
+			and selected his favorite imaginary experiences. He declared
+			that his imagination was hide bound; it was there, but
+			it pulled hard. After he got a notion for a story, months
+			passed before he could get any sort of personal contract with
+			it, or feel any potency to handle it. &#8220;The detail of a thing has
+			to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a native
+			product, but it takes forever,&#8221; he remarked. I distinctly remember
+			the illustration, for it rather took hold of me.</p>
+
+			<p>I have often been astonished since to hear Crane spoken of
+			as &#8220;the reporter in fiction,&#8221; for the reportorial faculty of
+			superficial reception and quick transference was what he
+			conspicuously lacked. His first newspaper account of his shipwreck
+			on the filibuster &#8220;Commodore&#8221; off the Florida coast
+			was as lifeless as the &#8220;copy&#8221; of a police court reporter. It was
+			many months afterwards that the literary product of his terrible
+			experience appeared in that marvellous sea story &#8220;The
+			Open Boat,&#8221; unsurpassed in its vividness and constructive
+			perfection.</p>
+
+			<p>At the close of our long conversation that night, when the
+			copy boy came in to take me home, I suggested to Crane that
+			in ten years he would probably laugh at all his temporary
+			discomfort. Again his body took on that strenuous tension
+			and he clenched his hands, saying, &#8220;I can&#8217;t wait ten years, I
+			haven&#8217;t time.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>The ten years are not up yet, and he has done his work and
+			gathered his reward and gone. Was ever so much experience
+			and achievement crowded into so short a space of time? A
+			great man dead at twenty-nine! That would have puzzled the
+			ancients. Edward Garnett wrote of him in The Academy of
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page256" title="256">&nbsp;</a>December 17, 1899: &#8220;I cannot remember a parallel in the literary
+			history of fiction. Maupassant, Meredith, Henry James,
+			Mr. Howells and Tolstoy, were all learning their expression at
+			an age where Crane had achieved his and achieved it triumphantly.&#8221;
+			He had the precocity of those doomed to die in
+			youth. I am convinced that when I met him he had a vague
+			premonition of the shortness of his working day, and in the
+			heart of the man there was that which said, &#8220;That thou doest,
+			do quickly.&#8221;</p>
+
+			<p>At twenty-one this son of an obscure New Jersey rector,
+			with but a scant reading knowledge of French and no training,
+			had rivaled in technique the foremost craftsmen of the
+			Latin races. In the six years since I met him, a stranded reporter,
+			he stood in the firing line during two wars, knew hairbreadth
+			&#8217;scapes on land and sea, and established himself as the
+			first writer of his time in the picturing of episodic, fragmentary
+			life. His friends have charged him with fickleness, but he
+			was a man who was in the preoccupation of haste. He went
+			from country to country, from man to man, absorbing all that
+			was in them for him. He had no time to look backward. He
+			had no leisure for <em lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">camaraderie</em>. He drank life to the lees, but
+			at the banquet table where other men took their ease and
+			jested over their wine, he stood a dark and silent figure, sombre
+			as Poe himself, not wishing to be understood; and he
+			took his portion in haste, with his loins girded, and his shoes
+			on his feet, and his staff in his hand, like one who must depart
+			quickly.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>The Library</cite>, June 23, 1900</p>
+		</div>
+		<div id="fiction" class="essay"><a class="pagenum" id="page257" title="257">&nbsp;</a>
+			<h3 class="essay_title">On the Art of Fiction <a class="return_toc" href="#contents" title="Return to Contents">ToC</a></h3>
+			<p class="first_paragraph">One is sometimes asked about the &#8220;obstacles&#8221; that confront
+			young writers who are trying to do good work. I
+			should say the greatest obstacles that writers today have to get
+			over, are the dazzling journalistic successes of twenty years
+			ago, stories that surprised and delighted by their sharp photographic
+			detail and that were really nothing more than lively
+			pieces of reporting. The whole aim of that school of writing
+			was novelty&#8212;never a very important thing in art. They gave
+			us, altogether, poor standards&#8212;taught us to multiply our
+			ideas instead of to condense them. They tried to make a story
+			out of every theme that occurred to them and to get returns
+			on every situation that suggested itself. They got returns, of a
+			kind. But their work, when one looks back on it, now that the
+			novelty upon which they counted so much is gone, is journalistic
+			and thin. The especial merit of a good reportorial story is
+			that it shall be intensely interesting and pertinent today and
+			shall have lost its point by tomorrow.</p>
+
+			<p>Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very
+			nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what
+			conventions of form and what detail one can do without and
+			yet preserve the spirit of the whole&#8212;so that all that one has
+			suppressed and cut away is there to the reader&#8217;s consciousness
+			as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet had done
+			hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them
+			very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint
+			the spirit of them all into one picture, &#8220;The Sower,&#8221; the composition
+			is so simple that it seems inevitable. All the discarded
+			sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became,
+			and the process was all the time one of simplifying, of
+			sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that
+			was better and more universal.</p>
+
+			<p>Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of
+			a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A
+			good workman can&#8217;t be a cheap workman; he can&#8217;t be stingy
+			about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing
+			ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there
+			<a class="pagenum" id="page258" title="258">&nbsp;</a>is a market demand&#8212;a business as safe and commendable as
+			making soap or breakfast foods&#8212;or it should be an art,
+			which is always a search for something for which there is no
+			market demand, something new and untried, where the
+			values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized
+			values. The courage to go on without compromise does not
+			come to a writer all at once&#8212;nor, for that matter, does the
+			ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning
+			the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old
+			ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights
+			he would like to recapture.</p>
+
+			<p class="source"><cite>The Borzoi</cite>, 1920</p>
+
+		</div>
+	</div>
+	<div id="the_end">&nbsp;</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Collection of Stories, Reviews and
+Essays, by Willa Cather
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@@ -0,0 +1,10886 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays, 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: A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays
+
+Author: Willa Cather
+
+Release Date: May 24, 2008 [EBook #25586]
+Last updated: January 31, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COLLECTION OF STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Barbara Tozier and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+A Collection of
+
+Stories, Reviews and Essays
+
+by
+
+Willa Cather
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  PART I: STORIES
+
+    Peter
+    On the Divide
+    Eric Hermannson's Soul
+    The Sentimentality of William Tavener
+    The Namesake
+    The Enchanted Bluff
+    The Joy of Nelly Deane
+    The Bohemian Girl
+    Consequences
+    The Bookkeeper's Wife
+    Ardessa
+    Her Boss
+
+
+  PART II: REVIEWS AND ESSAYS
+
+    Mark Twain
+    William Dean Howells
+    Edgar Allan Poe
+    Walt Whitman
+    Henry James
+    Harold Frederic
+    Kate Chopin
+    Stephen Crane
+    Frank Norris
+    When I Knew Stephen Crane
+    On the Art of Fiction
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+STORIES
+
+
+
+
+_Peter_
+
+
+"No, Antone, I have told thee many times, no, thou shalt not sell it
+until I am gone."
+
+"But I need money; what good is that old fiddle to thee? The very
+crows laugh at thee when thou art trying to play. Thy hand trembles
+so thou canst scarce hold the bow. Thou shalt go with me to the Blue
+to cut wood to-morrow. See to it thou art up early."
+
+"What, on the Sabbath, Antone, when it is so cold? I get so very
+cold, my son, let us not go to-morrow."
+
+"Yes, to-morrow, thou lazy old man. Do not I cut wood upon the
+Sabbath? Care I how cold it is? Wood thou shalt cut, and haul it
+too, and as for the fiddle, I tell thee I will sell it yet." Antone
+pulled his ragged cap down over his low heavy brow, and went out.
+The old man drew his stool up nearer the fire, and sat stroking his
+violin with trembling fingers and muttering, "Not while I live, not
+while I live."
+
+Five years ago they had come here, Peter Sadelack, and his wife, and
+oldest son Antone, and countless smaller Sadelacks, here to the
+dreariest part of south-western Nebraska, and had taken up a
+homestead. Antone was the acknowledged master of the premises, and
+people said he was a likely youth, and would do well. That he was
+mean and untrustworthy every one knew, but that made little
+difference. His corn was better tended than any in the county, and
+his wheat always yielded more than other men's.
+
+Of Peter no one knew much, nor had any one a good word to say for
+him. He drank whenever he could get out of Antone's sight long
+enough to pawn his hat or coat for whiskey. Indeed there were but
+two things he would not pawn, his pipe and his violin. He was a
+lazy, absent minded old fellow, who liked to fiddle better than to
+plow, though Antone surely got work enough out of them all, for that
+matter. In the house of which Antone was master there was no one,
+from the little boy three years old, to the old man of sixty, who
+did not earn his bread. Still people said that Peter was worthless,
+and was a great drag on Antone, his son, who never drank, and was a
+much better man than his father had ever been. Peter did not care
+what people said. He did not like the country, nor the people, least
+of all he liked the plowing. He was very homesick for Bohemia. Long
+ago, only eight years ago by the calendar, but it seemed eight
+centuries to Peter, he had been a second violinist in the great
+theatre at Prague. He had gone into the theatre very young, and had
+been there all his life, until he had a stroke of paralysis, which
+made his arm so weak that his bowing was uncertain. Then they told
+him he could go. Those were great days at the theatre. He had plenty
+to drink then, and wore a dress coat every evening, and there were
+always parties after the play. He could play in those days, ay, that
+he could! He could never read the notes well, so he did not play
+first; but his touch, he had a touch indeed, so Herr Mikilsdoff, who
+led the orchestra, had said. Sometimes now Peter thought he could
+plow better if he could only bow as he used to. He had seen all the
+lovely women in the world there, all the great singers and the great
+players. He was in the orchestra when Rachel played, and he heard
+Liszt play when the Countess d'Agoult sat in the stage box and threw
+the master white lilies. Once, a French woman came and played for
+weeks, he did not remember her name now. He did not remember her
+face very well either, for it changed so, it was never twice the
+same. But the beauty of it, and the great hunger men felt at the
+sight of it, that he remembered. Most of all he remembered her
+voice. He did not know French, and could not understand a word she
+said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of
+Chopin. And her voice, he thought he should know that in the other
+world. The last night she played a play in which a man touched her
+arm, and she stabbed him. As Peter sat among the smoking gas jets
+down below the footlights with his fiddle on his knee, and looked up
+at her, he thought he would like to die too, if he could touch her
+arm once, and have her stab him so. Peter went home to his wife very
+drunk that night. Even in those days he was a foolish fellow, who
+cared for nothing but music and pretty faces.
+
+It was all different now. He had nothing to drink and little to eat,
+and here, there was nothing but sun, and grass, and sky. He had
+forgotten almost everything, but some things he remembered well
+enough. He loved his violin and the holy Mary, and above all else he
+feared the Evil One, and his son Antone.
+
+The fire was low, and it grew cold. Still Peter sat by the fire
+remembering. He dared not throw more cobs on the fire; Antone would
+be angry. He did not want to cut wood tomorrow, it would be Sunday,
+and he wanted to go to mass. Antone might let him do that. He held
+his violin under his wrinkled chin, his white hair fell over it, and
+he began to play "Ave Maria." His hand shook more than ever before,
+and at last refused to work the bow at all. He sat stupefied for a
+while, then arose, and taking his violin with him, stole out into
+the old sod stable. He took Antone's shot-gun down from its peg, and
+loaded it by the moonlight which streamed in through the door. He
+sat down on the dirt floor, and leaned back against the dirt wall.
+He heard the wolves howling in the distance, and the night wind
+screaming as it swept over the snow. Near him he heard the regular
+breathing of the horses in the dark. He put his crucifix above his
+heart, and folding his hands said brokenly all the Latin he had ever
+known, "_Pater noster, qui in caelum est._" Then he raised his head
+and sighed, "Not one kreutzer will Antone pay them to pray for my
+soul, not one kreutzer, he is so careful of his money, is Antone, he
+does not waste it in drink, he is a better man than I, but hard
+sometimes. He works the girls too hard, women were not made to work
+so. But he shall not sell thee, my fiddle, I can play thee no more,
+but they shall not part us. We have seen it all together, and we
+will forget it together, the French woman and all." He held his
+fiddle under his chin a moment, where it had lain so often, then put
+it across his knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off
+his old boot, held the gun between his knees with the muzzle against
+his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe.
+
+In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a pool of
+blood. They could not straighten him out enough to fit a coffin, so
+they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral Antone carried to
+town the fiddle-bow which Peter had forgotten to break. Antone was
+very thrifty, and a better man than his father had been.
+
+                               _The Mahogany Tree_, May 21, 1892
+
+
+
+
+_On the Divide_
+
+
+Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute's
+shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of
+long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the
+west the ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber
+wound along the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely
+ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been
+for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks,
+Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians are a
+timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond with a few
+plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn toward it.
+
+As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any
+kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake
+Creek there was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built
+of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster.
+The roof was covered with earth and was supported by one gigantic
+beam curved in the shape of a round arch. It was almost impossible
+that any tree had ever grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to
+say that Canute had taken the log across his knee and bent it into
+the shape he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one
+room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and bound
+together like big straw basket work. In one corner there was a cook
+stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks
+and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of
+dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal
+proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few
+cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
+wash-basin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
+some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
+incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some
+ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth,
+apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk
+handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and
+a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty
+snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time it
+opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide
+window-sills. At first glance they looked as though they had been
+ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer
+inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
+shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a
+rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as
+though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward
+instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps sitting
+on their shoulders and on their horses' heads. There were men
+praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons
+behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with
+big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these
+pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this
+world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always
+the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a
+serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had
+felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of
+them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude
+and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had
+trembled. It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men
+from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave
+and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were always
+smiling and dancing. Several of these boards had been split for
+kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his work
+highly.
+
+It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into
+his shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove,
+sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire,
+staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by
+heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red
+shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all
+the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter
+barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues
+of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain,
+beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he
+had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have
+left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and
+miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.
+
+He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily
+as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into
+the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw
+before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill
+themselves, and the snowflakes were settling down over the white
+leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the
+sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his
+ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he
+knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child
+fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of
+the polar twilight.
+
+His eyes fell upon his gun, and he took it down from the wall and
+looked it over. He sat down on the edge of his bed and held the
+barrel towards his face, letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid
+his finger on the trigger. He was perfectly calm, there was neither
+passion nor despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man
+who is considering. Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching
+into the cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol.
+Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily. He washed his face in the
+tin basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he
+stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on
+the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and tried
+to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper collar that was
+pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it under his
+rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the cracked,
+splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he threw
+it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
+striking off across the level.
+
+It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once
+in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and
+sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the
+frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things
+on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season.
+Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas
+seem to dry up the blood in men's veins as they do the sap in the
+corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender
+inside leaves about the ear, then the coroners prepare for active
+duty; for the oil of the country is burned out and it does not take
+long for the flame to eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation
+there when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and
+most of the Poles after they have become too careless and
+discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their
+throats with.
+
+It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy,
+but the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men
+that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years
+to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and as naked as the
+sea. It is not easy for men that have spent their youths fishing in
+the Northern seas to be content with following a plow, and men that
+have served in the Austrian army hate hard work and coarse clothing
+and the loneliness of the plains, and long for marches and
+excitement and tavern company and pretty barmaids. After a man has
+passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy for him to change the
+habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring with them to the
+Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have squandered in
+other lands and among other peoples.
+
+Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
+take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always
+taken liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his
+first year of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He
+exhausted whisky after a while, and went to alcohol, because its
+effects were speedier and surer. He was a big man with a terrible
+amount of resistant force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even
+to move him. After nine years of drinking, the quantities he could
+take would seem fabulous to an ordinary drinking man. He never let
+it interfere with his work, he generally drank at night and on
+Sundays. Every night, as soon as his chores were done, he began to
+drink. While he was able to sit up he would play on his mouth harp
+or hack away at his window sills with his jack knife. When the
+liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed and stare out
+of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and in solitude
+not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful loneliness
+and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he put
+mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
+mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains
+that, because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad
+caprice of their vice, were cursed of God.
+
+Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness
+is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a
+bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these,
+but he was morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the
+hells of Dante. As he lay on his giant's bed all the horrors of this
+world and every other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a
+man who knew no joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The
+skull and the serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal
+futileness and of eternal hate.
+
+When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
+Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he
+was not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out
+the social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him
+because of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering
+brows. Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal
+treachery of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle
+with the promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear
+water and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before
+autumn the lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and
+hard until it blisters and cracks open.
+
+So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
+about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful
+stories of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank. They
+said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
+before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
+of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young
+stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous
+horse began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood
+trickling down in his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused
+himself from his kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical
+courage of a drunken man leaned forward and wound his arms about the
+horse's hind legs and held them against his breast with crushing
+embrace. All through the darkness and cold of the night he lay
+there, matching strength against strength. When little Jim Peterson
+went over the next morning at four o'clock to go with him to the
+Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was on its fore
+knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story the
+Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they
+feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.
+
+One spring there moved to the next "eighty" a family that made a
+great change in Canute's life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of the
+time to be afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too garrulous to
+be afraid of any one who listened to her talk, and Lena, their
+pretty daughter, was not afraid of man nor devil. So it came about
+that Canute went over to take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he
+took it alone. After a while the report spread that he was going to
+marry Yensen's daughter, and the Norwegian girls began to tease Lena
+about the great bear she was going to keep house for. No one could
+quite see how the affair had come about, for Canute's tactics of
+courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently never spoke to her
+at all: he would sit for hours with Mary chattering on one side of
+him and Ole drinking on the other and watch Lena at her work. She
+teased him, and threw flour in his face and put vinegar in his
+coffee, but he took her rough jokes with silent wonder, never even
+smiling. He took her to church occasionally, but the most watchful
+and curious people never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring
+at her while she giggled and flirted with the other men.
+
+Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. She
+came home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to startle
+Lena with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen's dances, and all
+the other esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few weeks
+Lena's head was completely turned, and she gave her father no rest
+until he let her go to town to seek her fortune at the ironing
+board. From the time she came home on her first visit she began to
+treat Canute with contempt. She had bought a plush cloak and kid
+gloves, had her clothes made by the dress-maker, and assumed airs
+and graces that made the other women of the neighborhood cordially
+detest her. She generally brought with her a young man from town who
+waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and she did not even
+introduce him to Canute.
+
+The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one of them
+down. He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except that he
+drank more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully than
+ever. He lay around in his den and no one knew what he felt or
+thought, but little Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at Lena
+in church one Sunday when she was there with the town man, said that
+he would not give an acre of his wheat for Lena's life or the town
+chap's either; and Jim's wheat was so wondrously worthless that the
+statement was an exceedingly strong one.
+
+Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly like
+the town man's as possible. They had cost him half a millet crop;
+for tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they charge for
+it. He had hung those clothes in his shanty two months ago and had
+never put them on, partly from fear of ridicule, partly from
+discouragement, and partly because there was something in his own
+soul that revolted at the littleness of the device.
+
+Lena was at home just at this time. Work was slack in the laundry
+and Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home, glad enough to
+get an opportunity to torment Canute once more.
+
+She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as she worked.
+Mary was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding violently
+about the young man who was coming out from town that night. The
+young man had committed the fatal error of laughing at Mary's
+ceaseless babble and had never been forgiven.
+
+"He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running with him!
+I do not see why a daughter of mine should act so. I do not see why
+the Lord should visit such a punishment upon me as to give me such a
+daughter. There are plenty of good men you can marry."
+
+Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, "I don't happen to want to
+marry any man right away, and so long as Dick dresses nice and has
+plenty of money to spend, there is no harm in my going with him."
+
+"Money to spend? Yes, and that is all he does with it I'll be bound.
+You think it very fine now, but you will change your tune when you
+have been married five years and see your children running naked and
+your cupboard empty. Did Anne Hermanson come to any good end by
+marrying a town man?"
+
+"I don't know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I know any of the
+laundry girls would have Dick quick enough if they could get him."
+
+"Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too. Now there
+is Canuteson who has an 'eighty' proved up and fifty head of cattle
+and----"
+
+"And hair that ain't been cut since he was a baby, and a big dirty
+beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like a pig.
+Besides he will keep. I can have all the fun I want, and when I am
+old and ugly like you he can have me and take care of me. The Lord
+knows there ain't nobody else going to marry him."
+
+Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it were red hot.
+He was not the kind of a man to make a good eavesdropper, and he
+wished he had knocked sooner. He pulled himself together and struck
+the door like a battering ram. Mary jumped and opened it with a
+screech.
+
+"God! Canute, how you scared us! I thought it was crazy Lou,--he has
+been tearing around the neighborhood trying to convert folks. I am
+afraid as death of him. He ought to be sent off, I think. He is just
+as liable as not to kill us all, or burn the barn, or poison the
+dogs. He has been worrying even the poor minister to death, and he
+laid up with the rheumatism, too! Did you notice that he was too
+sick to preach last Sunday? But don't stand there in the cold,--come
+in. Yensen isn't here, but he just went over to Sorenson's for the
+mail; he won't be gone long. Walk right in the other room and sit
+down."
+
+Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and not
+noticing Lena as he passed her. But Lena's vanity would not allow
+him to pass unmolested. She took the wet sheet she was wringing out
+and cracked him across the face with it, and ran giggling to the
+other side of the room. The blow stung his cheeks and the soapy
+water flew in his eyes, and he involuntarily began rubbing them with
+his hands. Lena giggled with delight at his discomfiture, and the
+wrath in Canute's face grew blacker than ever. A big man humiliated
+is vastly more undignified than a little one. He forgot the sting of
+his face in the bitter consciousness that he had made a fool of
+himself. He stumbled blindly into the living room, knocking his head
+against the door jamb because he forgot to stoop. He dropped into a
+chair behind the stove, thrusting his big feet back helplessly on
+either side of him.
+
+Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still and
+silent, with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin of his
+face seemed to have shriveled up into little wrinkles that trembled
+when he lowered his brows. His life had been one long lethargy of
+solitude and alcohol, but now he was awakening, and it was as when
+the dumb stagnant heat of summer breaks out into thunder.
+
+When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute rose at once.
+
+"Yensen," he said quietly, "I have come to see if you will let me
+marry your daughter today."
+
+"Today!" gasped Ole.
+
+"Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow. I am tired of living alone."
+
+Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and stammered
+eloquently: "Do you think I will marry my daughter to a drunkard? a
+man who drinks raw alcohol? a man who sleeps with rattle snakes? Get
+out of my house or I will kick you out for your impudence." And Ole
+began looking anxiously for his feet.
+
+Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and went out into
+the kitchen. He went up to Lena and said without looking at her,
+"Get your things on and come with me!"
+
+The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily, dropping
+the soap, "Are you drunk?"
+
+"If you do not come with me, I will take you,--you had better come,"
+said Canute quietly.
+
+She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm roughly and
+wrenched the sheet from her. He turned to the wall and took down a
+hood and shawl that hung there, and began wrapping her up. Lena
+scratched and fought like a wild thing. Ole stood in the door,
+cursing, and Mary howled and screeched at the top of her voice. As
+for Canute, he lifted the girl in his arms and went out of the
+house. She kicked and struggled, but the helpless wailing of Mary
+and Ole soon died away in the distance, and her face was held down
+tightly on Canute's shoulder so that she could not see whither he
+was taking her. She was conscious only of the north wind whistling
+in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and of a great breast that
+heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths. The harder she
+struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held the heels of
+horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they would crush the
+breath from her, and lay still with fear. Canute was striding across
+the level fields at a pace at which man never went before, drawing
+the stinging north wind into his lungs in great gulps. He walked
+with his eyes half closed and looking straight in front of him, only
+lowering them when he bent his head to blow away the snow flakes
+that settled on her hair. So it was that Canute took her to his
+home, even as his bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair
+frivolous women of the South in their hairy arms and bore them down
+to their war ships. For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the
+conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters
+the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong
+arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
+
+When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a chair,
+where she sat sobbing. He stayed only a few minutes. He filled the
+stove with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge swallow of alcohol
+and put the bottle in his pocket. He paused a moment, staring
+heavily at the weeping girl, then he went off and locked the door
+and disappeared in the gathering gloom of the night.
+
+Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little Norwegian
+preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a thundering knock at
+his door, and Canute entered, covered with snow and with his beard
+frozen fast to his coat.
+
+"Come in, Canute, you must be frozen," said the little man, shoving
+a chair towards his visitor.
+
+Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly, "I want
+you to come over to my house tonight to marry me to Lena Yensen."
+
+"Have you got a license, Canute?"
+
+"No, I don't want a license. I want to be married."
+
+"But I can't marry you without a license, man. It would not be
+legal."
+
+A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian's eye. "I want you to
+come over to my house to marry me to Lena Yensen."
+
+"No, I can't, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like this,
+and my rheumatism is bad tonight."
+
+"Then if you will not go I must take you," said Canute with a sigh.
+
+He took down the preacher's bearskin coat and bade him put it on
+while he hitched up his buggy. He went out and closed the door
+softly after him. Presently he returned and found the frightened
+minister crouching before the fire with his coat lying beside him.
+Canute helped him put it on and gently wrapped his head in his big
+muffler. Then he picked him up and carried him out and placed him in
+his buggy. As he tucked the buffalo robes around him he said: "Your
+horse is old, he might flounder or lose his way in this storm. I
+will lead him."
+
+The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering
+with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could
+see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding
+steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him
+altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they
+were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the
+heart of the storm, and he said all the prayers he knew. But at last
+the long four miles were over, and Canute set him down in the snow
+while he unlocked the door. He saw the bride sitting by the fire
+with her eyes red and swollen as though she had been weeping. Canute
+placed a huge chair for him, and said roughly,--
+
+"Warm yourself."
+
+Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to take her
+home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute said simply,--
+
+"If you are warm now, you can marry us."
+
+"My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?" asked
+the minister in a trembling voice.
+
+"No sir, I don't, and it is disgraceful he should force me into it!
+I won't marry him."
+
+"Then, Canute, I cannot marry you," said the minister, standing as
+straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.
+
+"Are you ready to marry us now, sir?" said Canute, laying one iron
+hand on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher was a good man,
+but like most men of weak body he was a coward and had a horror of
+physical suffering, although he had known so much of it. So with
+many qualms of conscience he began to repeat the marriage service.
+Lena sat sullenly in her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood
+beside her, listening with his head bent reverently and his hands
+folded on his breast. When the little man had prayed and said amen,
+Canute began bundling him up again.
+
+"I will take you home, now," he said as he carried him out and
+placed him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury
+of the storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even
+the giant himself to his knees.
+
+After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a
+particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that
+of vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt
+nothing more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had
+no inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes
+that was final and all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about
+a license, but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled
+herself by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute
+some day, any way.
+
+She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got up
+and began to look about her. She had heard queer tales about the
+inside of Canute's shanty, and her curiosity soon got the better of
+her rage. One of the first things she noticed was the new black suit
+of clothes hanging on the wall. She was dull, but it did not take a
+vain woman long to interpret anything so decidedly flattering, and
+she was pleased in spite of herself. As she looked through the
+cupboard, the general air of neglect and discomfort made her pity
+the man who lived there.
+
+"Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get somebody to
+wash up his dishes. Batchin's pretty hard on a man."
+
+It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled. She
+looked at the window sill and gave a little shudder and wondered if
+the man were crazy. Then she sat down again and sat a long time
+wondering what her Dick and Ole would do.
+
+"It is queer Dick didn't come right over after me. He surely came,
+for he would have left town before the storm began and he might just
+as well come right on as go back. If he'd hurried he would have
+gotten here before the preacher came. I suppose he was afraid to
+come, for he knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the coward!"
+Her eyes flashed angrily.
+
+The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly lonesome. It
+was an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to be in. She
+could hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin,
+and more terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm.
+She remembered the tales they told of the big log overhead and she
+was afraid of those snaky things on the window sills. She remembered
+the man who had been killed in the draw, and she wondered what she
+would do if she saw crazy Lou's white face glaring into the window.
+The rattling of the door became unbearable, she thought the latch
+must be loose and took the lamp to look at it. Then for the first
+time she saw the ugly brown snake skins whose death rattle sounded
+every time the wind jarred the door.
+
+"Canute, Canute!" she screamed in terror.
+
+Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog getting up
+and shaking himself. The door opened and Canute stood before her,
+white as a snow drift.
+
+"What is it?" he asked kindly.
+
+"I am cold," she faltered.
+
+He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and
+filled the stove. Then he went out and lay in the snow before the
+door. Presently he heard her calling again.
+
+"What is it?" he said, sitting up.
+
+"I'm so lonesome, I'm afraid to stay in here all alone."
+
+"I will go over and get your mother." And he got up.
+
+"She won't come."
+
+"I'll bring her," said Canute grimly.
+
+"No, no. I don't want her, she will scold all the time."
+
+"Well, I will bring your father."
+
+She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up to
+the key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak
+before, so low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear
+her.
+
+"I don't want him either, Canute,--I'd rather have you."
+
+For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a groan.
+With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute stretched in
+the snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the door
+step.
+
+                                _Overland Monthly_, January 1896
+
+
+
+
+_Eric Hermannson's Soul_
+
+
+I.
+
+It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse--a night when the
+Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So
+it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free Gospeller. The
+schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men
+and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some
+mysterious psychic force. Here and there among this cowering,
+sweating multitude crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs
+of an awakened conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete
+divestment of reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind,
+which, in the parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed "the
+Light." On the floor, before the mourners' bench, lay the
+unconscious figure of a man in whom outraged nature had sought her
+last resort. This "trance" state is the highest evidence of grace
+among the Free Gospellers, and indicates a close walking with God.
+
+Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and
+vengeance of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an
+almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used
+to run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes
+of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the most
+ascetic. His was a bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of
+Nature's eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over
+the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then
+brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, the
+nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip hung loosely except in
+his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it shut like a steel
+trap. Yet about those coarse features there were deep, rugged
+furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the weakness
+of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
+lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
+cheeks there was a certain pallor, a grayness caught from many a
+vigil. It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that
+face, some fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost
+transfiguring it. To-night, as his muscles twitched with emotion,
+and the perspiration dropped from his hair and chin, there was a
+certain convincing power in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man
+possessed of a belief, of that sentiment of the sublime before which
+all inequalities are leveled, that transport of conviction which
+seems superior to all laws of condition, under which debauchees have
+become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and a camel-driver the
+founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner to-night, as he
+stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.
+
+It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner's
+God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for
+those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star
+schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations; men from the
+south and the north, peasants from almost every country of Europe,
+most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of Norway.
+Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world had dealt
+hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by toil and
+saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the dominion of
+an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
+advance-guard of a mighty civilization to be.
+
+Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
+the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. To-night Eric
+Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience
+with a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to
+play for some dance. The violin is an object of particular
+abhorrence to the Free Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church
+organ is bitter enough, but the fiddle they regard as a very
+incarnation of evil desires, singing forever of worldly pleasures
+and inseparably associated with all forbidden things.
+
+Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
+revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago,
+and special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son.
+But Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which
+are short enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide. He
+slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in
+Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at
+Chevalier's dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went
+across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play
+the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all
+the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and too
+busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue. On such
+occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and
+tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a
+battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and
+experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big
+cities and knew the ways of town-folk, who had never worked in the
+fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair and
+tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who
+knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.
+
+Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were
+not altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been
+fleeing before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his
+pleasures had fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that
+dogged his steps. The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more
+was he conscious that this phantom was gaining upon him, that in
+time it would track him down. One Sunday afternoon, late in the
+fall, when he had been drinking beer with Lena Hanson and listening
+to a song which made his cheeks burn, a rattlesnake had crawled out
+of the side of the sod house and thrust its ugly head in under the
+screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he knew enough of
+Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying coiled
+there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena
+good-by, and he went there no more.
+
+The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his
+violin, and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his
+dearest sin, to the weakness more precious to him than all his
+strength. In the great world beauty comes to men in many guises, and
+art in a hundred forms, but for Eric there was only his violin. It
+stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his only
+bridge into the kingdom of the soul.
+
+It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his
+impassioned pleading that night.
+
+"_Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_ Is there a Saul here
+to-night who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has
+thrust a spear into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you
+are offered this wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth
+not and the fire which will not be quenched. What right have you to
+lose one of God's precious souls? _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
+me?_"
+
+A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner's pale face, for he saw that Eric
+Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell
+upon his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.
+
+"O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I
+tell you the Spirit is coming! Just a little more prayer, brothers,
+a little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing
+upon my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!"
+
+The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual
+panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure
+fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners' bench rose a chant
+of terror and rapture:
+
+  "Eating honey and drinking wine,
+    _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_
+  I am my Lord's and he is mine,
+    _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_"
+
+The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague
+yearning of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all
+the passions so long, only to fall victims to the basest of them
+all, fear.
+
+A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson's bowed head,
+and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in
+the forest.
+
+The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head,
+crying in a loud voice:
+
+"_Lazarus, come forth!_ Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at
+sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the
+life-line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!" The minister
+threw his arms out and lifted his quivering face.
+
+Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the
+lightning was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and
+crushed it to splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the
+sound was like the shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.
+
+
+II.
+
+For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to
+which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came
+to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other
+manners and conditions, and there were greater distances between her
+life and Eric's than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek
+from New York city. Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at
+all; but ah! across what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable
+chances, do the unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!
+
+It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
+Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had
+spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was
+still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons
+to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to
+consign them to a living death in the sage-brush of the Black Hills.
+These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life.
+But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a
+cow-punchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by
+a smirched adventuress. He had been saved from these things by a
+girl, his sister, who had been very near to his life ever since the
+days when they read fairy tales together and dreamed the dreams that
+never come true. On this, his first visit to his father's ranch
+since he left it six years before, he brought her with him. She had
+been laid up half the winter from a sprain received while skating,
+and had had too much time for reflection during those months. She
+was restless and filled with a desire to see something of the wild
+country of which her brother had told her so much. She was to be
+married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she begged
+him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
+continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to
+all women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which
+allures and terrifies, to run one's whole soul's length out to the
+wind--just once.
+
+It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that
+strain of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her.
+They had slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the
+acquaintance of the personnel of a third-rate opera company on the
+train to Deadwood, dined in a camp of railroad constructors at the
+world's end beyond New Castle, gone through the Black Hills on
+horseback, fished for trout in Dome Lake, watched a dance at Cripple
+Creek, where the lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their
+besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to
+thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the windy crest
+of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming sunsets, a
+scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
+sunlight.
+
+Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in
+this day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful,
+talented, critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four.
+For the moment the life and people of the Divide interested her. She
+was there but a week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable
+ennui which travels faster even than the Vestibule Limited would
+have overtaken her. The week she tarried there was the week that
+Eric Hermannson was helping Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or
+a week later, and there would have been no story to write.
+
+It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and
+his sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse,
+staring out into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the
+gusts of hot wind that blew up from the sandy river-bottom twenty
+miles to the southward.
+
+The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
+
+"This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else. You
+remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
+Kansas. It's the key-note of this country."
+
+Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued
+gently:
+
+"I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it
+takes the taste out of things."
+
+She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
+own.
+
+"Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were children
+and were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do
+you know, I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the
+world go on its own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain
+we used to talk of last winter were gone for good, as though one
+could never give one's strength out to such petty things any more."
+
+Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
+that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the
+sky-line.
+
+"No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't
+shake the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time
+when the gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and
+burrow into the sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too
+complex now. You see we've made our dissipations so dainty and
+respectable that they've gone further in than the flesh, and taken
+hold of the ego proper. You couldn't rest, even here. The war-cry
+would follow you."
+
+"You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
+than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the
+art of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent
+men."
+
+"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most
+brilliant talker you know."
+
+Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot
+wind through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.
+
+"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
+interesting as Eric Hermannson?"
+
+"Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
+youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has
+retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
+fancy."
+
+"Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
+dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the
+others? I can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."
+
+"Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget as much as
+my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but I fancy
+it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted suspicion
+that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a soul
+somewhere. Nicht wahr?"
+
+"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except that
+it's more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and
+he makes it known, somehow, without speaking."
+
+"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis remarked,
+with the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.
+
+Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. "I knew it from the
+first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the
+Bernstein boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will
+in anybody. The earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes,
+unconsciously. But last night when I sang for him I was doubly sure.
+Oh, I haven't told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again.
+You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at
+that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It's her household
+fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and
+sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate
+manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I sang
+just the old things, of course. It's queer to sing familiar things
+here at the world's end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
+have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and
+the jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one
+lived here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and
+would read only the great books that we never get time to read in
+the world, and would remember only the great music, and the things
+that are really worth while would stand out clearly against that
+horizon over there. And of course I played the intermezzo from
+'Cavalleria Rusticana' for him; it goes rather better on an organ
+than most things do. He shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands
+up into knots and blurted out that he didn't know there was any
+music like that in the world. Why, there were tears in his voice,
+Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I _heard_ his tears. Then it dawned upon
+me that it was probably the first good music he had ever heard in
+all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does and never to
+hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long for it as we
+long for other perfect experiences that never come. I can't tell you
+what music means to that man. I never saw any one so susceptible to
+it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had finished the
+intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled brother who
+died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his arms. He
+did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told it
+slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
+to answer Mascagni's. It overcame me."
+
+"Poor devil," said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, "and
+so you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on wanting Grieg and
+Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That's a
+girl's philanthropy for you!"
+
+Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the
+unusual luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon
+as a necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house.
+Jerry sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at
+Margaret.
+
+"Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson
+will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she
+isn't lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will
+bring his fiddle--though the French don't mix with the Norwegians
+much."
+
+"Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our
+trip, and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see the
+Norwegians in character at last," cried Margaret, cordially.
+
+"See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in this
+scheme," said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe.
+"She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing
+all night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage
+at four to catch the six o'clock train out of Riverton--well, it's
+tommy-rot, that's what it is!"
+
+"Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide
+whether it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up at three
+in the morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir,
+I prefer to keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper."
+
+"But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired
+of dancing."
+
+"So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and
+I intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really
+wants to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to
+go to a party before. It will be something to remember next month at
+Newport, when we have to and don't want to. Remember your own theory
+that contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable.
+This is my party and Mr. Lockhart's; your whole duty to-morrow night
+will consist in being nice to the Norwegian girls. I'll warrant you
+were adept enough at it once. And you'd better be very nice indeed,
+for if there are many such young valkyrs as Eric's sister among
+them, they would simply tie you up in a knot if they suspected you
+were guying them."
+
+Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate,
+while his sister went on.
+
+"And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"
+
+Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of
+his plowshoe.
+
+"Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty hard
+to get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone over to
+the Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in the fire
+than shake 'em to a fiddle."
+
+Margaret made a gesture of impatience.
+
+"Those Free Gospellers have just cast an evil spell over this
+country, haven't they?"
+
+"Well," said Lockhart, cautiously, "I don't just like to pass
+judgment on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by
+their works, the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an'
+that's a fact. They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've
+sent a good-sized delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I don't
+see as they've made the rest of us much better than we were before.
+I had a little herdboy last spring, as square a little Dane as I
+want to work for me, but after the Gospellers got hold of him and
+sanctified him, the little beggar used to get down on his knees out
+on the prairie and pray by the hour and let the cattle get into the
+corn, an' I had to fire him. That's about the way it goes. Now
+there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler and the spryest dancer
+in all this section--called all the dances. Now he's got no ambition
+and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we can even get him to
+come in to-morrow night."
+
+"Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off," said Margaret,
+quickly. "Why, I intend to dance with him myself!"
+
+"I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd help us
+out and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,'" said Lockhart,
+imitating the labored English of the Norwegian.
+
+"'The Miller of Hoffbau, the Miller of Hoffbau, O my Princess!'"
+chirped Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.
+
+The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
+mischievously. "We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit that I am
+beaten until I have asked him myself."
+
+Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the
+heart of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay
+through the most attractive part of the Divide country, on several
+occasions Margaret Elliot and her brother had accompanied him.
+To-night Wyllis had business with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with
+Eric, mounted on a frisky little mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had
+broken to the side-saddle. Margaret regarded her escort very much as
+she did the servant who always accompanied her on long rides at
+home, and the ride to the village was a silent one. She was occupied
+with thoughts of another world, and Eric was wrestling with more
+thoughts than had ever been crowded into his head before. He rode
+with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as though he
+wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in his
+brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
+worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
+girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he
+knew where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first
+appeared unto them, never doubted its high origin.
+
+Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
+was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
+self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not
+afraid of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects
+before him when his father went down off the North Cape in the long
+Arctic night, and his mother, seized by a violent horror of
+seafaring life, had followed her brother to America. Eric was
+eighteen then, handsome as young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with
+a skin singularly pure and delicate, like a Swede's; hair as yellow
+as the locks of Tennyson's amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce,
+burning blue, whose flash was most dangerous to women. He had in
+those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
+approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even
+said of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to
+levity, a vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of
+those Norwegian exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a
+scorching sun, had repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation
+had sobered him, and he grew more and more like the clods among
+which he labored. It was as though some red-hot instrument had
+touched for a moment those delicate fibers of the brain which
+respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which lies the power of
+exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away. It is a painful
+thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those Norsemen,
+leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive, quite
+hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change comes
+almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with others
+it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man's
+heart to die.
+
+Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year
+before they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy
+hill where exiles of all nations grow akin.
+
+The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his
+people sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that
+night at the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin
+across his knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down
+upon him, and the gospel of maceration began its work. "_If thine
+eye offend thee, pluck it out_," et cetera. The pagan smile that
+once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
+Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when
+it destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of
+the cross has been, joy will not come again. This man understood
+things literally: one must live without pleasure to die without
+fear; to save the soul it was necessary to starve the soul.
+
+The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier
+left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that
+runs for some three miles through the French settlement, where the
+prairie is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of
+flax and wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender,
+tapering Lombard poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot
+saw under the wide light of the setting sun.
+
+The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It will be
+safe to run the horses here, won't it?"
+
+"Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his pony's
+flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West
+that new-comers always ride a horse or two to death before they get
+broken in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces
+and try to outride the horizon, to get to the end of something.
+Margaret galloped over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw
+her long veil fluttering in the wind. It had fluttered just so in
+his dreams last night and the night before. With a sudden
+inspiration of courage he overtook her and rode beside her, looking
+intently at her half-averted face. Before, he had only stolen
+occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes, always with
+more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let every line
+of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said that it
+was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant lines
+that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a
+historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long
+asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle
+together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left
+their unconscious memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in
+these details. To him this beauty was something more than color and
+line; it was as a flash of white light, in which one cannot
+distinguish color because all colors are there. To him it was a
+complete revelation, an embodiment of those dreams of impossible
+loveliness that linger by a young man's pillow on midsummer nights;
+yet, because it held something more than the attraction of health
+and youth and shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he
+felt as the Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not
+knowing whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like
+uncovering his head before it, again the fury seized him to break
+and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon
+it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms, and take
+and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his
+hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
+questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he
+admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.
+To-night, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched
+her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a
+star.
+
+Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in
+her saddle.
+
+"This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast," she
+said.
+
+Eric turned his eyes away.
+
+"I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear
+music like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work,"
+he asked, timidly.
+
+Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the
+outline of his face, pityingly.
+
+"Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't like
+you to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of atmosphere, some
+way," she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: "There he would
+be altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one's
+trunks upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather
+picturesque; why is it?" "No," she added aloud, "I shouldn't like
+that."
+
+"Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.
+
+Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused
+and a trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.
+
+"But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to
+dance with us to-morrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian
+dances; they say you know them all. Won't you?"
+
+Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they
+had done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin
+across his knee.
+
+"Yes, I will," he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered
+his soul to hell as he said it.
+
+They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound
+through a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a
+beat of hoofs ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies
+start and Eric rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of
+them and over the steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies,
+nimble as monkeys and wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive
+east from the plains of Montana to sell in the farming country.
+Margaret's pony made a shrill sound, a neigh that was almost a
+scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild
+blood of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret called to
+Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her
+pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was kicking
+and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all
+about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with
+their fore feet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty
+of the range that the little beast fought for.
+
+"Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!" Eric called, throwing all
+his weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic fore feet
+that now beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs
+that surged and tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the
+pony's head toward him and crowding her withers against the clay
+bank, so that she could not roll.
+
+"Hold tight, tight!" he shouted again, launching a kick at a
+snorting animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she
+should lose her courage and fall now, under those hoofs----He struck
+out again and again, kicking right and left with all his might.
+Already the negligent drivers had galloped into the cut, and their
+long quirts were whistling over the heads of the herd. As suddenly
+as it had come, the struggling, frantic wave of wild life swept up
+out of the gulch and on across the open prairie, and with a long
+despairing whinny of farewell the pony dropped her head and stood
+trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and blood from her bit.
+
+Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her
+saddle. "You are not hurt?" he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his
+face in the soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and
+that his lips were working nervously.
+
+"No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!"
+she cried in sharp alarm.
+
+He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.
+
+"No, it is not that," he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched
+at his side. "But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains
+out with my hands, I would kill them all. I was never afraid before.
+You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You
+came like an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing,
+you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played
+when I was a little boy. You are like all that I wanted once and
+never had, you are all that they have killed in me. I die for you
+to-night, to-morrow, for all eternity. I am not a coward; I was
+afraid because I love you more than Christ who died for me, more
+than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid
+before. If you had fallen--oh, my God!" he threw his arms out
+blindly and dropped his head upon the pony's mane, leaning limply
+against the animal like a man struck by some sickness. His shoulders
+rose and fell perceptibly with his labored breathing. The horse
+stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her
+hand on Eric's head and said gently:
+
+"You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?"
+
+"No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe.
+I will not frighten you again." His voice was still husky, but it
+was steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.
+
+When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's head
+until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.
+
+"The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty
+thoroughly scared myself," she said as she took her brother's arm
+and went slowly up the hill toward the house. "No, I'm not hurt,
+thanks to Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me.
+He's a mighty fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the
+morning, dear. I was pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to
+bed now. Good-night."
+
+When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the
+bed in her riding-dress face downward.
+
+"Oh, I pity him! I pity him!" she murmured, with a long sigh of
+exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again, she
+took from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at the
+village post-office. It was closely written in a long, angular hand,
+covering a dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and began:--
+
+"My Dearest Margaret: If I should attempt to say _how like a winter
+hath thine absence been_, I should incur the risk of being tedious.
+Really, it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having nothing
+better to do, and not caring to go anywhere in particular without
+you, I remained in the city until Jack Courtwell noted my general
+despondency and brought me down here to his place on the sound to
+manage some open-air theatricals he is getting up. 'As You Like It'
+is of course the piece selected. Miss Harrison plays Rosalind. I
+wish you had been here to take the part. Miss Harrison reads her
+lines well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or a tomboy;
+insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings and
+highly colored suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral
+setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the
+emotional element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile
+wit and really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando,
+but rumor says he is epris of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith,
+and his memory is treacherous and his interest fitful.
+
+"My new pictures arrived last week on the 'Gascogne.' The Puvis de
+Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in Paris. A pale
+dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow, and a stream of anemic water
+flows at her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because
+you admired it. It is here in all its florid splendor, the whole
+dominated by a glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure
+is as wonderful as you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold,
+painted with an easy, effortless voluptuousness, and that white,
+gleaming line of African coast in the background recalls memories of
+you very precious to me. But it is useless to deny that Constant
+irritates me. Though I cannot prove the charge against him, his
+brilliancy always makes me suspect him of cheapness."
+
+Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of this
+strange love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with
+discussions of pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid
+them by.
+
+She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went to open
+the window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated, feeling
+suddenly as though some danger were lurking outside, some inordinate
+desire waiting to spring upon her in the darkness. She stood there
+for a long time, gazing at the infinite sweep of the sky.
+
+"Oh, it is all so little, so little there," she murmured. "When
+everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be
+great? Why should one try to read highly colored suggestions into a
+life like that? If only I could find one thing in it all that
+mattered greatly, one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will
+life never give me that one great moment?"
+
+As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum-bushes
+outside. It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but
+Margaret started violently and trembled so that she caught the foot
+of the bed for support. Again she felt herself pursued by some
+overwhelming longing, some desperate necessity for herself, like the
+outstretching of helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air
+seemed heavy with sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the
+words, "I love you more than Christ, who died for me!" ringing in
+her ears.
+
+
+III.
+
+About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height. Even the
+old men who had come to "look on" caught the spirit of revelry and
+stamped the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric took the
+violin from the Frenchman, and Minna Oleson sat at the organ, and
+the music grew more and more characteristic--rude, half-mournful
+music, made up of the folk-songs of the North, that the villagers
+sing through the long night in hamlets by the sea, when they are
+thinking of the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so long away.
+To Margaret some of it sounded like Grieg's Peer Gynt music. She
+found something irresistibly infectious in the mirth of these people
+who were so seldom merry, and she felt almost one of them. Something
+seemed struggling for freedom in them to-night, something of the
+joyous childhood of the nations which exile had not killed. The
+girls were all boisterous with delight. Pleasure came to them but
+rarely, and when it came, they caught at it wildly and crushed its
+fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life
+enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labor and
+drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short
+wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless
+sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood.
+But what matter? To-night there was hot liquor in the glass and hot
+blood in the heart; to-night they danced.
+
+To-night Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no longer the
+big, silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and looked
+hopelessly into her eyes. To-night he was a man, with a man's rights
+and a man's power. To-night he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was
+yellow as the heavy wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes
+flashed like the blue water between the ice-packs in the North Seas.
+He was not afraid of Margaret to-night, and when he danced with her
+he held her firmly. She was tired and dragged on his arm a little,
+but the strength of the man was like an all-pervading fluid,
+stealing through her veins, awakening under her heart some nameless,
+unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all these years and
+that went out through her throbbing fingertips to his that answered.
+She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some lawless ancestor, long
+asleep, were calling out in her to-night, some drop of a hotter
+fluid that the centuries had failed to cool, and why, if this curse
+were in her, it had not spoken before. But was it a curse, this
+awakening, this wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For
+the first time in her life her heart held something stronger than
+herself, was not this worth while? Then she ceased to wonder. She
+lost sight of the lights and the faces, and the music was drowned by
+the beating of her own arteries. She saw only the blue eyes that
+flashed above her, felt only the warmth of that throbbing hand which
+held hers and which the blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a
+dream, she saw the drooping shoulders, high white forehead and
+tight, cynical mouth of the man she was to marry in December. For an
+hour she had been crowding back the memory of that face with all her
+strength.
+
+"Let us stop, this is enough," she whispered. His only answer was to
+tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that masterful
+strength bear her where it would. She forgot that this man was
+little more than a savage, that they would part at dawn. The blood
+has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past, no
+consideration of the future.
+
+"Let us go out where it is cooler," she said when the music stopped;
+thinking, "I am growing faint here, I shall be all right in the open
+air." They stepped out into the cool, blue air of the night.
+
+Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians had
+been slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into the
+cooler atmosphere, as is their custom.
+
+"You like to go up?" asked Eric, close to her ear.
+
+She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. "How high is
+it?"
+
+"Forty feet, about. I not let you fall." There was a note of
+irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he
+tremendously wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of
+the unusual, when she was not herself at all, but was living an
+unreality. To-morrow, yes, in a few hours, there would be the
+Vestibule Limited and the world.
+
+"Well, if you'll take good care of me. I used to be able to climb,
+when I was a little girl."
+
+Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent.
+Margaret wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her
+life, through all the routine of the days to come. Above them
+stretched the great Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night,
+with its big, burning stars, never so cold and dead and far away as
+in denser atmospheres. The moon would not be up for twenty minutes
+yet, and all about the horizon, that wide horizon, which seemed to
+reach around the world, lingered a pale, white light, as of a
+universal dawn. The weary wind brought up to them the heavy odors of
+the cornfields. The music of the dance sounded faintly from below.
+Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs swinging down on the
+ladder. His great shoulders looked more than ever like those of the
+stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful strength in
+the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men died forever
+with the youth of Greece.
+
+"How sweet the corn smells at night," said Margaret nervously.
+
+"Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think."
+
+She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled when this
+taciturn man spoke again.
+
+"You go away to-morrow?"
+
+"Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now."
+
+"You not come back any more?"
+
+"No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip; half-way across the
+continent."
+
+"You soon forget about this country, I guess." It seemed to him now
+a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that she should
+utterly forget this night into which he threw all his life and all
+his eternity, that was a bitter thought.
+
+"No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to me for
+that. And you won't be sorry you danced this one night, will you?"
+
+"I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be so
+happy again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I only this
+one. I will dream sometimes, maybe."
+
+The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her. It was
+as when some great animal composes itself for death, as when a great
+ship goes down at sea.
+
+She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and
+looked into her eyes.
+
+"You are not always happy, too?" he asked.
+
+"No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think."
+
+"You have a trouble?"
+
+"Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I
+could cure it."
+
+He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when
+they pray, and said falteringly, "If I own all the world, I give him
+you."
+
+Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on
+his.
+
+"Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I
+should not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already."
+
+She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat
+still and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed
+to speak and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an
+ultra-refined civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant
+sophistries. Cheat nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps
+two, but the third---- Can we ever rise above nature or sink below
+her? Did she not turn on Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony
+in his desert as upon Nero in his seraglio? Does she not always cry
+in brutal triumph: "I am here still, at the bottom of things,
+warming the roots of life; you cannot starve me nor tame me nor
+thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I am its destiny."
+
+This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a giant
+barbarian, heard that cry to-night, and she was afraid! Ah! the
+terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves!
+Until then we have not lived.
+
+"Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has begun
+again," she said.
+
+He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his arm
+about her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's hammer out
+in the cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her, and his hand
+trembled as it had done in the dance. His face was level with hers
+now and the moonlight fell sharply upon it. All her life she had
+searched the faces of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She
+knew that that look had never shone for her before, would never
+shine for her on earth again, that such love comes to one only in
+dreams or in impossible places like this, unattainable always. This
+was Love's self, in a moment it would die. Stung by the agonized
+appeal that emanated from the man's whole being, she leaned forward
+and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and again she heard the deep
+respirations rattle in his throat while she held them there, and the
+riotous force under her heart became an engulfing weakness. He drew
+her up to him until he felt all the resistance go out of her body,
+until every nerve relaxed and yielded. When she drew her face back
+from his, it was white with fear.
+
+"Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!" she muttered. And the
+drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed doom as she
+clung to the rounds of the ladder. All that she was to know of love
+she had left upon his lips.
+
+"The devil is loose again," whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric
+dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.
+
+But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the time
+when he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no quailing then! If
+ever a soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates infernal, his
+should go. For a moment he fancied he was there already, treading
+down the tempest of flame, hugging the fiery hurricane to his
+breast. He wondered whether in ages gone, all the countless years of
+sinning in which men had sold and lost and flung their souls away,
+any man had ever so cheated Satan, had ever bartered his soul for so
+great a price.
+
+It seemed but a little while till dawn.
+
+The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his
+sister said good-by. She could not meet Eric's eyes as she gave him
+her hand, but as he stood by the horse's head, just as the carriage
+moved off, she gave him one swift glance that said, "I will not
+forget." In a moment the carriage was gone.
+
+Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the watertank and
+went to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his horses to the
+door, a shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising in
+his stirrups. His rugged face was pale and worn with looking after
+his wayward flock, with dragging men into the way of salvation.
+
+"Good-morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?" he asked,
+sternly.
+
+"A dance? Oh, yes, a dance," replied Eric, cheerfully.
+
+"Certainly you did not dance, Eric?"
+
+"Yes, I danced. I danced all the time."
+
+The minister's shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound
+discouragement settled over his haggard face. There was almost
+anguish in the yearning he felt for this soul.
+
+"Eric, I didn't look for this from you. I thought God had set his
+mark on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like
+this that you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O
+foolish and perverse generation!"
+
+Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to where the
+new day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with
+light. As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the
+morning, something from the only poetry he had ever read flashed
+across his mind, and he murmured, half to himself, with dreamy
+exultation:
+
+"'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
+day.'"
+
+                                      _Cosmopolitan_, April 1900
+
+
+
+
+_The Sentimentality of William Tavener_
+
+
+It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success of living in the
+West, and Hester undoubtedly was that. When people spoke of William
+Tavener as the most prosperous farmer in McPherson County, they
+usually added that his wife was a "good manager." She was an
+executive woman, quick of tongue and something of an imperatrix. The
+only reason her husband did not consult her about his business was
+that she did not wait to be consulted.
+
+It would have been quite impossible for one man, within the limited
+sphere of human action, to follow all Hester's advice, but in the
+end William usually acted upon some of her suggestions. When she
+incessantly denounced the "shiftlessness" of letting a new threshing
+machine stand unprotected in the open, he eventually built a shed
+for it. When she sniffed contemptuously at his notion of fencing a
+hog corral with sod walls, he made a spiritless beginning on the
+structure--merely to "show his temper," as she put it--but in the
+end he went off quietly to town and bought enough barbed wire to
+complete the fence. When the first heavy rains came on, and the pigs
+rooted down the sod wall and made little paths all over it to
+facilitate their ascent, he heard his wife relate with relish the
+story of the little pig that built a mud house, to the minister at
+the dinner table, and William's gravity never relaxed for an
+instant. Silence, indeed, was William's refuge and his strength.
+
+William set his boys a wholesome example to respect their mother.
+People who knew him very well suspected that he even admired her. He
+was a hard man towards his neighbors, and even towards his sons;
+grasping, determined and ambitious.
+
+There was an occasional blue day about the house when William went
+over the store bills, but he never objected to items relating to his
+wife's gowns or bonnets. So it came about that many of the foolish,
+unnecessary little things that Hester bought for boys, she had
+charged to her personal account.
+
+One spring night Hester sat in a rocking chair by the sitting room
+window, darning socks. She rocked violently and sent her long needle
+vigorously back and forth over her gourd, and it took only a very
+casual glance to see that she was wrought up over something. William
+sat on the other side of the table reading his farm paper. If he had
+noticed his wife's agitation, his calm, clean-shaven face betrayed
+no sign of concern. He must have noticed the sarcastic turn of her
+remarks at the supper table, and he must have noticed the moody
+silence of the older boys as they ate. When supper was but half over
+little Billy, the youngest, had suddenly pushed back his plate and
+slipped away from the table, manfully trying to swallow a sob. But
+William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic
+horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
+
+After supper the boys had gone to the pond under the willows in the
+big cattle corral, to get rid of the dust of plowing. Hester could
+hear an occasional splash and a laugh ringing clear through the
+stillness of the night, as she sat by the open window. She sat
+silent for almost an hour reviewing in her mind many plans of
+attack. But she was too vigorous a woman to be much of a strategist,
+and she usually came to her point with directness. At last she cut
+her thread and suddenly put her darning down, saying emphatically:
+
+"William, I don't think it would hurt you to let the boys go to that
+circus in town to-morrow."
+
+William continued to read his farm paper, but it was not Hester's
+custom to wait for an answer. She usually divined his arguments and
+assailed them one by one before he uttered them.
+
+"You've been short of hands all summer, and you've worked the boys
+hard, and a man ought use his own flesh and blood as well as he does
+his hired hands. We're plenty able to afford it, and it's little
+enough our boys ever spend. I don't see how you can expect 'em to be
+steady and hard workin', unless you encourage 'em a little. I never
+could see much harm in circuses, and our boys have never been to
+one. Oh, I know Jim Howley's boys get drunk an' carry on when they
+go, but our boys ain't that sort, an' you know it, William. The
+animals are real instructive, an' our boys don't get to see much out
+here on the prairie. It was different where we were raised, but the
+boys have got no advantages here, an' if you don't take care,
+they'll grow up to be greenhorns."
+
+Hester paused a moment, and William folded up his paper, but
+vouchsafed no remark. His sisters in Virginia had often said that
+only a quiet man like William could ever have lived with Hester
+Perkins. Secretly, William was rather proud of his wife's "gift of
+speech," and of the fact that she could talk in prayer meeting as
+fluently as a man. He confined his own efforts in that line to a
+brief prayer at Covenant meetings.
+
+Hester shook out another sock and went on.
+
+"Nobody was ever hurt by goin' to a circus. Why, law me! I remember
+I went to one myself once, when I was little. I had most forgot
+about it. It was over at Pewtown, an' I remember how I had set my
+heart on going. I don't think I'd ever forgiven my father if he
+hadn't taken me, though that red clay road was in a frightful way
+after the rain. I mind they had an elephant and six poll parrots,
+an' a Rocky Mountain lion, an' a cage of monkeys, an' two camels.
+My! but they were a sight to me then!"
+
+Hester dropped the black sock and shook her head and smiled at the
+recollection. She was not expecting anything from William yet, and
+she was fairly startled when he said gravely, in much the same tone
+in which he announced the hymns in prayer meeting:
+
+"No, there was only one camel. The other was a dromedary."
+
+She peered around the lamp and looked at him keenly.
+
+"Why, William, how come you to know?"
+
+William folded his paper and answered with some hesitation, "I was
+there, too."
+
+Hester's interest flashed up.--"Well, I never, William! To think of
+my finding it out after all these years! Why, you couldn't have been
+much bigger'n our Billy then. It seems queer I never saw you when
+you was little, to remember about you. But then you Back Creek folks
+never have anything to do with us Gap people. But how come you to
+go? Your father was stricter with you than you are with your boys."
+
+"I reckon I shouldn't 'a gone," he said slowly, "but boys will do
+foolish things. I had done a good deal of fox hunting the winter
+before, and father let me keep the bounty money. I hired Tom Smith's
+Tap to weed the corn for me, an' I slipped off unbeknownst to father
+an' went to the show."
+
+Hester spoke up warmly: "Nonsense, William! It didn't do you no
+harm, I guess. You was always worked hard enough. It must have been
+a big sight for a little fellow. That clown must have just tickled
+you to death."
+
+William crossed his knees and leaned back in his chair.
+
+"I reckon I could tell all that fool's jokes now. Sometimes I can't
+help thinkin' about 'em in meetin' when the sermon's long. I mind I
+had on a pair of new boots that hurt me like the mischief, but I
+forgot all about 'em when that fellow rode the donkey. I recall I
+had to take them boots off as soon as I got out of sight o' town,
+and walked home in the mud barefoot."
+
+"O poor little fellow!" Hester ejaculated, drawing her chair nearer
+and leaning her elbows on the table. "What cruel shoes they did use
+to make for children. I remember I went up to Back Creek to see the
+circus wagons go by. They came down from Romney, you know. The
+circus men stopped at the creek to water the animals, an' the
+elephant got stubborn an' broke a big limb off the yellow willow
+tree that grew there by the toll house porch, an' the Scribners were
+'fraid as death he'd pull the house down. But this much I saw him
+do; he waded in the creek an' filled his trunk with water, and
+squirted it in at the window and nearly ruined Ellen Scribner's pink
+lawn dress that she had just ironed an' laid out on the bed ready to
+wear to the circus."
+
+"I reckon that must have been a trial to Ellen," chuckled William,
+"for she was mighty prim in them days."
+
+Hester drew her chair still nearer William's. Since the children had
+begun growing up, her conversation with her husband had been almost
+wholly confined to questions of economy and expense. Their
+relationship had become purely a business one, like that between
+landlord and tenant. In her desire to indulge her boys she had
+unconsciously assumed a defensive and almost hostile attitude
+towards her husband. No debtor ever haggled with his usurer more
+doggedly than did Hester with her husband in behalf of her sons. The
+strategic contest had gone on so long that it had almost crowded out
+the memory of a closer relationship. This exchange of confidences
+to-night, when common recollections took them unawares and opened
+their hearts, had all the miracle of romance. They talked on and on;
+of old neighbors, of old familiar faces in the valley where they had
+grown up, of long forgotten incidents of their youth--weddings,
+picnics, sleighing parties and baptizings. For years they had talked
+of nothing else but butter and eggs and the prices of things, and
+now they had as much to say to each other as people who meet after a
+long separation.
+
+When the clock struck ten, William rose and went over to his walnut
+secretary and unlocked it. From his red leather wallet he took out a
+ten dollar bill and laid it on the table beside Hester.
+
+"Tell the boys not to stay late, an' not to drive the horses hard,"
+he said quietly, and went off to bed.
+
+Hester blew out the lamp and sat still in the dark a long time. She
+left the bill lying on the table where William had placed it. She
+had a painful sense of having missed something, or lost something;
+she felt that somehow the years had cheated her.
+
+The little locust trees that grew by the fence were white with
+blossoms. Their heavy odor floated in to her on the night wind and
+recalled a night long ago, when the first whip-poor-Will of the
+Spring was heard, and the rough, buxom girls of Hawkins Gap had held
+her laughing and struggling under the locust trees, and searched in
+her bosom for a lock of her sweetheart's hair, which is supposed to
+be on every girl's breast when the first whip-poor-Will sings. Two
+of those same girls had been her bridesmaids. Hester had been a very
+happy bride. She rose and went softly into the room where William
+lay. He was sleeping heavily, but occasionally moved his hand before
+his face to ward off the flies. Hester went into the parlor and took
+the piece of mosquito net from the basket of wax apples and pears
+that her sister had made before she died. One of the boys had
+brought it all the way from Virginia, packed in a tin pail, since
+Hester would not risk shipping so precious an ornament by freight.
+She went back to the bed room and spread the net over William's
+head.
+
+Then she sat down by the bed and listened to his deep, regular
+breathing until she heard the boys returning. She went out to meet
+them and warn them not to waken their father.
+
+"I'll be up early to get your breakfast, boys. Your father says you
+can go to the show." As she handed the money to the eldest, she felt
+a sudden throb of allegiance to her husband and said sharply, "And
+you be careful of that, an' don't waste it. Your father works hard
+for his money."
+
+The boys looked at each other in astonishment and felt that they had
+lost a powerful ally.
+
+                                         _Library_, May 12, 1900
+
+
+
+
+_The Namesake_
+
+
+Seven of us, students, sat one evening in Hartwell's studio on the
+Boulevard St. Michel. We were all fellow-countrymen; one from New
+Hampshire, one from Colorado, another from Nevada, several from the
+farm lands of the Middle West, and I myself from California. Lyon
+Hartwell, though born abroad, was simply, as every one knew, "from
+America." He seemed, almost more than any other one living man, to
+mean all of it--from ocean to ocean. When he was in Paris, his
+studio was always open to the seven of us who were there that
+evening, and we intruded upon his leisure as often as we thought
+permissible.
+
+Although we were within the terms of the easiest of all intimacies,
+and although the great sculptor, even when he was more than usually
+silent, was at all times the most gravely cordial of hosts, yet, on
+that long remembered evening, as the sunlight died on the burnished
+brown of the horse-chestnuts below the windows, a perceptible
+dullness yawned through our conversation.
+
+We were, indeed, somewhat low in spirit, for one of our number,
+Charley Bentley, was leaving us indefinitely, in response to an
+imperative summons from home. To-morrow his studio, just across the
+hall from Hartwell's, was to pass into other hands, and Bentley's
+luggage was even now piled in discouraged resignation before his
+door. The various bales and boxes seemed literally to weigh upon us
+as we sat in his neighbor's hospitable rooms, drearily putting in
+the time until he should leave us to catch the ten o'clock express
+for Dieppe.
+
+The day we had got through very comfortably, for Bentley made it the
+occasion of a somewhat pretentious luncheon at Maxim's. There had
+been twelve of us at table, and the two young Poles were thirsty,
+the Gascon so fabulously entertaining, that it was near upon five
+o'clock when we put down our liqueur glasses for the last time, and
+the red, perspiring waiter, having pocketed the reward of his
+arduous and protracted services, bowed us affably to the door,
+flourishing his napkin and brushing back the streaks of wet, black
+hair from his rosy forehead. Our guests having betaken themselves
+belated to their respective engagements, the rest of us returned
+with Bentley--only to be confronted by the depressing array before
+his door. A glance about his denuded rooms had sufficed to chill the
+glow of the afternoon, and we fled across the hall in a body and
+begged Lyon Hartwell to take us in.
+
+Bentley had said very little about it, but we all knew what it meant
+to him to be called home. Each of us knew what it would mean to
+himself, and each had felt something of that quickened sense of
+opportunity which comes at seeing another man in any way counted out
+of the race. Never had the game seemed so enchanting, the chance to
+play it such a piece of unmerited, unbelievable good fortune.
+
+It must have been, I think, about the middle of October, for I
+remember that the sycamores were almost bare in the Luxembourg
+Gardens that morning, and the terrace about the queens of France
+were strewn with crackling brown leaves. The fat red roses, out the
+summer long on the stand of the old flower woman at the corner, had
+given place to dahlias and purple asters. First glimpses of autumn
+toilettes flashed from the carriages; wonderful little bonnets
+nodded at one along the Champs-Elysees; and in the Quarter an
+occasional feather boa, red or black or white, brushed one's coat
+sleeve in the gay twilight of the early evening. The crisp, sunny
+autumn air was all day full of the stir of people and carriages and
+of the cheer of salutations; greetings of the students, returned
+brown and bearded from their holiday, gossip of people come back
+from Trouville, from St. Valery, from Dieppe, from all over Brittany
+and the Norman coast. Everywhere was the joyousness of return, the
+taking up again of life and work and play.
+
+I had felt ever since early morning that this was the saddest of all
+possible seasons for saying good-by to that old, old city of youth,
+and to that little corner of it on the south shore which since the
+Dark Ages themselves--yes, and before--has been so peculiarly the
+land of the young.
+
+I can recall our very postures as we lounged about Hartwell's rooms
+that evening, with Bentley making occasional hurried trips to his
+desolated workrooms across the hall--as if haunted by a feeling of
+having forgotten something--or stopping to poke nervously at his
+_perroquets_, which he had bequeathed to Hartwell, gilt cage and
+all. Our host himself sat on the couch, his big, bronze-like
+shoulders backed up against the window, his shaggy head, beaked
+nose, and long chin cut clean against the gray light.
+
+Our drowsing interest, in so far as it could be said to be fixed
+upon anything, was centered upon Hartwell's new figure, which stood
+on the block ready to be cast in bronze, intended as a monument for
+some American battlefield. He called it "The Color Sergeant." It was
+the figure of a young soldier running, clutching the folds of a
+flag, the staff of which had been shot away. We had known it in all
+the stages of its growth, and the splendid action and feeling of the
+thing had come to have a kind of special significance for the half
+dozen of us who often gathered at Hartwell's rooms--though, in
+truth, there was as much to dishearten one as to inflame, in the
+case of a man who had done so much in a field so amazingly
+difficult; who had thrown up in bronze all the restless, teeming
+force of that adventurous wave still climbing westward in our own
+land across the waters. We recalled his "Scout," his "Pioneer," his
+"Gold Seekers," and those monuments in which he had invested one and
+another of the heroes of the Civil War with such convincing dignity
+and power.
+
+"Where in the world does he get the heat to make an idea like that
+carry?" Bentley remarked morosely, scowling at the clay figure.
+"Hang me, Hartwell, if I don't think it's just because you're not
+really an American at all, that you can look at it like that."
+
+The big man shifted uneasily against the window. "Yes," he replied
+smiling, "perhaps there is something in that. My citizenship was
+somewhat belated and emotional in its flowering. I've half a mind to
+tell you about it, Bentley." He rose uncertainly, and, after
+hesitating a moment, went back into his workroom, where he began
+fumbling among the litter in the corners.
+
+At the prospect of any sort of personal expression from Hartwell, we
+glanced questioningly at one another; for although he made us feel
+that he liked to have us about, we were always held at a distance by
+a certain diffidence of his. There were rare occasions--when he was
+in the heat of work or of ideas--when he forgot to be shy, but they
+were so exceptional that no flattery was quite so seductive as being
+taken for a moment into Hartwell's confidence. Even in the matter of
+opinions--the commonest of currency in our circle--he was niggardly
+and prone to qualify. No man ever guarded his mystery more
+effectually. There was a singular, intense spell, therefore, about
+those few evenings when he had broken through this excessive
+modesty, or shyness, or melancholy, and had, as it were, committed
+himself.
+
+When Hartwell returned from the back room, he brought with him an
+unframed canvas which he put on an easel near his clay figure. We
+drew close about it, for the darkness was rapidly coming on. Despite
+the dullness of the light, we instantly recognized the boy of
+Hartwell's "Color Sergeant." It was the portrait of a very handsome
+lad in uniform, standing beside a charger impossibly rearing. Not
+only in his radiant countenance and flashing eyes, but in every line
+of his young body there was an energy, a gallantry, a joy of life,
+that arrested and challenged one.
+
+"Yes, that's where I got the notion," Hartwell remarked, wandering
+back to his seat in the window. "I've wanted to do it for years, but
+I've never felt quite sure of myself. I was afraid of missing it. He
+was an uncle of mine, my father's half-brother, and I was named for
+him. He was killed in one of the big battles of Sixty-four, when I
+was a child. I never saw him--never knew him until he had been dead
+for twenty years. And then, one night, I came to know him as we
+sometimes do living persons--intimately, in a single moment."
+
+He paused to knock the ashes out of his short pipe, refilled it, and
+puffed at it thoughtfully for a few moments with his hands on his
+knees. Then, settling back heavily among the cushions and looking
+absently out of the window, he began his story. As he proceeded
+further and further into the experience which he was trying to
+convey to us, his voice sank so low and was sometimes so charged
+with feeling, that I almost thought he had forgotten our presence
+and was remembering aloud. Even Bentley forgot his nervousness in
+astonishment and sat breathless under the spell of the man's thus
+breathing his memories out into the dusk.
+
+"It was just fifteen years ago this last spring that I first went
+home, and Bentley's having to cut away like this brings it all back
+to me.
+
+"I was born, you know, in Italy. My father was a sculptor, though I
+dare say you've not heard of him. He was one of those first fellows
+who went over after Story and Powers,--went to Italy for 'Art,'
+quite simply; to lift from its native bough the willing, iridescent
+bird. Their story is told, informingly enough, by some of those
+ingenuous marble things at the Metropolitan. My father came over
+some time before the outbreak of the Civil War, and was regarded as
+a renegade by his family because he did not go home to enter the
+army. His half-brother, the only child of my grandfather's second
+marriage, enlisted at fifteen and was killed the next year. I was
+ten years old when the news of his death reached us. My mother died
+the following winter, and I was sent away to a Jesuit school, while
+my father, already ill himself, stayed on at Rome, chipping away at
+his Indian maidens and marble goddesses, still gloomily seeking the
+thing for which he had made himself the most unhappy of exiles.
+
+"He died when I was fourteen, but even before that I had been put to
+work under an Italian sculptor. He had an almost morbid desire that
+I should carry on his work, under, as he often pointed out to me,
+conditions so much more auspicious. He left me in the charge of his
+one intimate friend, an American gentleman in the consulate at Rome,
+and his instructions were that I was to be educated there and to
+live there until I was twenty-one. After I was of age, I came to
+Paris and studied under one master after another until I was nearly
+thirty. Then, almost for the first time, I was confronted by a duty
+which was not my pleasure.
+
+"My grandfather's death, at an advanced age, left an invalid maiden
+sister of my father's quite alone in the world. She had suffered for
+years from a cerebral disease, a slow decay of the faculties which
+rendered her almost helpless. I decided to go to America and, if
+possible, bring her back to Paris, where I seemed on my way toward
+what my poor father had wished for me.
+
+"On my arrival at my father's birthplace, however, I found that this
+was not to be thought of. To tear this timid, feeble, shrinking
+creature, doubly aged by years and illness, from the spot where she
+had been rooted for a lifetime, would have been little short of
+brutality. To leave her to the care of strangers seemed equally
+heartless. There was clearly nothing for me to do but to remain and
+wait for that slow and painless malady to run its course. I was
+there something over two years.
+
+"My grandfather's home, his father's homestead before him, lay on
+the high banks of a river in Western Pennsylvania. The little town
+twelve miles down the stream, whither my great-grandfather used to
+drive his ox-wagon on market days, had become, in two generations,
+one of the largest manufacturing cities in the world. For hundreds
+of miles about us the gentle hill slopes were honeycombed with gas
+wells and coal shafts; oil derricks creaked in every valley and
+meadow; the brooks were sluggish and discolored with crude
+petroleum, and the air was impregnated by its searching odor. The
+great glass and iron manufactories had come up and up the river
+almost to our very door; their smoky exhalations brooded over us,
+and their crashing was always in our ears. I was plunged into the
+very incandescence of human energy. But, though my nerves tingled
+with the feverish, passionate endeavor which snapped in the very air
+about me, none of these great arteries seemed to feed me; this
+tumultuous life did not warm me. On every side were the great muddy
+rivers, the ragged mountains from which the timber was being
+ruthlessly torn away, the vast tracts of wild country, and the
+gulches that were like wounds in the earth; everywhere the glare of
+that relentless energy which followed me like a searchlight and
+seemed to scorch and consume me. I could only hide myself in the
+tangled garden, where the dropping of a leaf or the whistle of a
+bird was the only incident.
+
+"The Hartwell homestead had been sold away little by little, until
+all that remained of it was garden and orchard. The house, a square
+brick structure, stood in the midst of a great garden which sloped
+toward the river, ending in a grassy bank which fell some forty feet
+to the water's edge. The garden was now little more than a tangle of
+neglected shrubbery; damp, rank, and of that intense blue-green
+peculiar to vegetation in smoky places where the sun shines but
+rarely, and the mists form early in the evening and hang late in the
+morning.
+
+"I shall never forget it as I saw it first, when I arrived there in
+the chill of a backward June. The long, rank grass, thick and soft
+and falling in billows, was always wet until midday. The gravel
+walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes, mock-orange, and
+bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected rose garden,
+surrounded by a low stone wall over which the long suckers trailed
+and matted. They had wound their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon
+layer, about the lock and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even
+the porches of the house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy
+with growth: wistaria, clematis, honeysuckle, and trumpet vine. The
+garden was grown up with trees, especially that part of it which lay
+above the river. The bark of the old locusts was blackened by the
+smoke that crept continually up the valley, and their feathery
+foliage, so merry in its movement and so yellow and joyous in its
+color, seemed peculiarly precious under that somber sky. There were
+sycamores and copper beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear;
+and fall pear-trees, hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all
+with a leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid
+in color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my
+great-grandfather built his cabin there, more than a century before,
+and this garden was almost the only spot for miles along the river
+where any of the original forest growth still survived. The smoke
+from the mills was fatal to trees of the larger sort, and even these
+had the look of doomed things--bent a little toward the town and
+seemed to wait with head inclined before that on-coming, shrieking
+force.
+
+"About the river, too, there was a strange hush, a tragic
+submission--it was so leaden and sullen in its color, and it flowed
+so soundlessly forever past our door.
+
+"I sat there every evening, on the high veranda overlooking it,
+watching the dim outlines of the steep hills on the other shore, the
+flicker of the lights on the island, where there was a boat-house,
+and listening to the call of the boatmen through the mist. The mist
+came as certainly as night, whitened by moonshine or starshine. The
+tin water-pipes went splash, splash, with it all evening, and the
+wind, when it rose at all, was little more than a sighing of the old
+boughs and a troubled breath in the heavy grasses.
+
+"At first it was to think of my distant friends and my old life that
+I used to sit there; but after awhile it was simply to watch the
+days and weeks go by, like the river which seemed to carry them
+away.
+
+"Within the house I was never at home. Month followed month, and yet
+I could feel no sense of kinship with anything there. Under the roof
+where my father and grandfather were born, I remained utterly
+detached. The somber rooms never spoke to me, the old furniture
+never seemed tinctured with race. This portrait of my boy uncle was
+the only thing to which I could draw near, the only link with
+anything I had ever known before.
+
+"There is a good deal of my father in the face, but it is my father
+transformed and glorified; his hesitating discontent drowned in a
+kind of triumph. From my first day in that house, I continually
+turned to this handsome kinsman of mine, wondering in what terms he
+had lived and had his hope; what he had found there to look like
+that, to bound at one, after all those years, so joyously out of the
+canvas.
+
+"From the timid, clouded old woman over whose life I had come to
+watch, I learned that in the backyard, near the old rose garden,
+there was a locust-tree which my uncle had planted. After his death,
+while it was still a slender sapling, his mother had a seat built
+round it, and she used to sit there on summer evenings. His grave
+was under the apple-trees in the old orchard.
+
+"My aunt could tell me little more than this. There were days when
+she seemed not to remember him at all.
+
+"It was from an old soldier in the village that I learned the boy's
+story. Lyon was, the old man told me, but fourteen when the first
+enlistment occurred, but was even then eager to go. He was in the
+court-house square every evening to watch the recruits at their
+drill, and when the home company was ordered off he rode into the
+city on his pony to see the men board the train and to wave them
+good-by. The next year he spent at home with a tutor, but when he
+was fifteen he held his parents to their promise and went into the
+army. He was color sergeant of his regiment and fell in a charge
+upon the breastworks of a fort about a year after his enlistment.
+
+"The veteran showed me an account of this charge which had been
+written for the village paper by one of my uncle's comrades who had
+seen his part in the engagement. It seems that as his company were
+running at full speed across the bottom lands toward the fortified
+hill, a shell burst over them. This comrade, running beside my
+uncle, saw the colors waver and sink as if falling, and looked to
+see that the boy's hand and forearm had been torn away by the
+exploding shrapnel. The boy, he thought, did not realize the extent
+of his injury, for he laughed, shouted something which his comrade
+did not catch, caught the flag in his left hand, and ran on up the
+hill. They went splendidly up over the breastworks, but just as my
+uncle, his colors flying, reached the top of the embankment, a
+second shell carried away his left arm at the arm-pit, and he fell
+over the wall with the flag settling about him.
+
+"It was because this story was ever present with me, because I was
+unable to shake it off, that I began to read such books as my
+grandfather had collected upon the Civil War. I found that this war
+was fought largely by boys, that more men enlisted at eighteen than
+at any other age. When I thought of those battlefields--and I
+thought of them much in those days--there was always that glory of
+youth above them, that impetuous, generous passion stirring the long
+lines on the march, the blue battalions in the plain. The bugle,
+whenever I have heard it since, has always seemed to me the very
+golden throat of that boyhood which spent itself so gaily, so
+incredibly.
+
+"I used often to wonder how it was that this uncle of mine, who
+seemed to have possessed all the charm and brilliancy allotted to
+his family and to have lived up its vitality in one splendid hour,
+had left so little trace in the house where he was born and where he
+had awaited his destiny. Look as I would, I could find no letters
+from him, no clothing or books that might have been his. He had been
+dead but twenty years, and yet nothing seemed to have survived
+except the tree he had planted. It seemed incredible and cruel that
+no physical memory of him should linger to be cherished among his
+kindred,--nothing but the dull image in the brain of that aged
+sister. I used to pace the garden walks in the evening, wondering
+that no breath of his, no echo of his laugh, of his call to his pony
+or his whistle to his dogs, should linger about those shaded paths
+where the pale roses exhaled their dewy, country smell. Sometimes,
+in the dim starlight, I have thought that I heard on the grasses
+beside me the stir of a footfall lighter than my own, and under the
+black arch of the lilacs I have fancied that he bore me company.
+
+"There was, I found, one day in the year for which my old aunt
+waited, and which stood out from the months that were all of a
+sameness to her. On the thirtieth of May she insisted that I should
+bring down the big flag from the attic and run it up upon the tall
+flagstaff beside Lyon's tree in the garden. Later in the morning she
+went with me to carry some of the garden flowers to the grave in the
+orchard,--a grave scarcely larger than a child's.
+
+"I had noticed, when I was hunting for the flag in the attic, a
+leather trunk with my own name stamped upon it, but was unable to
+find the key. My aunt was all day less apathetic than usual; she
+seemed to realize more clearly who I was, and to wish me to be with
+her. I did not have an opportunity to return to the attic until
+after dinner that evening, when I carried a lamp up-stairs and
+easily forced the lock of the trunk. I found all the things that I
+had looked for; put away, doubtless, by his mother, and still
+smelling faintly of lavender and rose leaves; his clothes, his
+exercise books, his letters from the army, his first boots, his
+riding-whip, some of his toys, even. I took them out and replaced
+them gently. As I was about to shut the lid, I picked up a copy of
+the AEneid, on the fly-leaf of which was written in a slanting,
+boyish hand,
+
+  Lyon Hartwell, January, 1862.
+
+He had gone to the wars in Sixty-three, I remembered.
+
+"My uncle, I gathered, was none too apt at his Latin, for the pages
+were dog-eared and rubbed and interlined, the margins mottled with
+pencil sketches--bugles, stacked bayonets, and artillery carriages.
+In the act of putting the book down, I happened to run over the
+pages to the end, and on the fly-leaf at the back I saw his name
+again, and a drawing--with his initials and a date--of the Federal
+flag; above it, written in a kind of arch and in the same unformed
+hand:
+
+  'Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light
+  What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?'
+
+It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some
+Egyptian inscription, but, the moment I saw it, wind and color
+seemed to touch it. I caught up the book, blew out the lamp, and
+rushed down into the garden.
+
+"I seemed, somehow, at last to have known him; to have been with him
+in that careless, unconscious moment and to have known him as he was
+then.
+
+"As I sat there in the rush of this realization, the wind began to
+rise, stirring the light foliage of the locust over my head and
+bringing, fresher than before, the woody odor of the pale roses that
+overran the little neglected garden. Then, as it grew stronger, it
+brought the sound of something sighing and stirring over my head in
+the perfumed darkness.
+
+"I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the Greeks
+believed, watched from birth over those marked for a violent or
+untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the shine of the
+morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing eyes looking
+straight before him, and at his side that grave figure, hidden in
+her draperies, her eyes following his, but seeing so much
+farther--seeing what he never saw, that great moment at the end,
+when he swayed above his comrades on the earthen wall.
+
+"All the while, the bunting I had run up in the morning flapped fold
+against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the dark--against a sky
+so black with rain clouds that I could see above me only the blur of
+something in soft, troubled motion.
+
+"The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly to a man so
+dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same feeling that artists
+know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of
+union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad
+that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and
+blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not
+begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and
+rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until
+the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring
+out of me and running into the ground."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Hartwell drew a long breath that lifted his heavy shoulders, and
+then let them fall again. He shifted a little and faced more
+squarely the scattered, silent company before him. The darkness had
+made us almost invisible to each other, and, except for the
+occasional red circuit of a cigarette end traveling upward from the
+arm of a chair, he might have supposed us all asleep.
+
+"And so," Hartwell added thoughtfully, "I naturally feel an interest
+in fellows who are going home. It's always an experience."
+
+No one said anything, and in a moment there was a loud rap at the
+door,--the concierge, come to take down Bentley's luggage and to
+announce that the cab was below. Bentley got his hat and coat,
+enjoined Hartwell to take good care of his _perroquets_, gave each
+of us a grip of the hand, and went briskly down the long flights of
+stairs. We followed him into the street, calling our good wishes,
+and saw him start on his drive across the lighted city to the Gare
+St. Lazare.
+
+                                         _McClure's_, March 1907
+
+
+
+
+_The Enchanted Bluff_
+
+
+We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper
+the oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand
+about us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown
+stretches of corn field as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of
+air that had rested over the water and our clean sand-bar grew
+fresher and smelled of the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on
+the flatter shore. The river was brown and sluggish, like any other
+of the half-dozen streams that water the Nebraska corn lands. On one
+shore was an irregular line of bald clay bluffs where a few
+scrub-oaks with thick trunks and flat, twisted tops threw light
+shadows on the long grass. The western shore was low and level, with
+corn fields that stretched to the sky-line, and all along the
+water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where slim
+cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.
+
+The turbulence of the river in spring-time discouraged milling, and,
+beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did
+not concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were
+left in undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through
+the miles of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and,
+after the winter skating season was over and the ice had gone out,
+the spring freshets and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement
+of the year. The channel was never the same for two successive
+seasons. Every spring the swollen stream undermined a bluff to the
+east, or bit out a few acres of corn field to the west and whirled
+the soil away to deposit it in spumy mud banks somewhere else. When
+the water fell low in midsummer, new sand-bars were thus exposed to
+dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes these were banked so
+firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to unseat them; the
+little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth,
+broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and with their
+mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them against the
+batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood soon
+glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that, even
+on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
+road, trembled along the face of the water.
+
+It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green,
+that we built our watch-fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow
+wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added
+that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with
+ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and
+fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured. We
+had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although we
+often swam out to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.
+
+This was our last watch-fire of the year, and there were reasons why
+I should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the
+other boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown
+High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first
+country school in the Norwegian district. I was already homesick at
+the thought of quitting the boys with whom I had always played; of
+leaving the river, and going up into a windy plain that was all
+windmills and corn fields and big pastures; where there was nothing
+wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands, and no
+chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the watercourses.
+
+Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
+but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were
+friends mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler
+boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were
+the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned
+hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder,
+was the best mathematician in school, and clever at his books, but
+he always dropped out in the spring term as if the river could not
+get on without him. He and Fritz caught the fat, horned catfish and
+sold them about the town, and they lived so much in the water that
+they were as brown and sandy as the river itself.
+
+There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who
+took half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in
+for reading detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith,
+destined by his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our
+games, though he walked like a timid little old man and had a funny,
+cracked laugh. Tip worked hard in his father's grocery store every
+afternoon, and swept it out before school in the morning. Even his
+recreations were laborious. He collected cigarette cards and tin
+tobacco-tags indefatigably, and would sit for hours humped up over a
+snarling little scroll-saw which he kept in his attic. His dearest
+possessions were some little pill-bottles that purported to contain
+grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from the Jordan and the
+Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His father had bought
+these dull things from a Baptist missionary who peddled them, and
+Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their remote origin.
+
+The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were
+almost too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant
+voice that we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to
+read poetry aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be
+sure, he was not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen
+and should have finished the High School the year before, but he was
+always off somewhere with his gun. Arthur's mother was dead, and his
+father, who was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to
+send the boy away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur
+always begged off for another year and promised to study. I remember
+him as a tall, brown boy with an intelligent face, always lounging
+among a lot of us little fellows, laughing at us oftener than with
+us, but such a soft, satisfied laugh that we felt rather flattered
+when we provoked it. In after-years people said that Arthur had been
+given to evil ways even as a lad, and it is true that we often saw
+him with the gambler's sons and with old Spanish Fanny's boy, but if
+he learned anything ugly in their company he never betrayed it to
+us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am bound to say
+that he led us into no worse places than the cattail marshes and the
+stubble fields. These, then, were the boys who camped with me that
+summer night upon the sand-bar.
+
+After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for
+driftwood. By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen,
+and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased with the
+coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire and made another
+futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it
+often before, but he could never be got past the big one.
+
+"You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the
+bright one in the middle?" said Otto Hassler; "that's Orion's belt,
+and the bright one is the clasp." I crawled behind Otto's shoulder
+and sighted up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip
+of his steady forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at
+night, and they knew a good many stars.
+
+Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands
+clasped under his head. "I can see the North Star," he announced,
+contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. "Any one might get
+lost and need to know that."
+
+We all looked up at it.
+
+"How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point
+north any more?" Tip asked.
+
+Otto shook his head. "My father says that there was another North
+Star once, and that maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what
+would happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?"
+
+Arthur chuckled. "I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to
+it in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good
+dead Indians."
+
+We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world.
+The gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a
+mutinous, complaining note in it at night, quite different from its
+cheerful daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much
+deeper and more powerful stream. Our water had always these two
+moods: the one of sunny complaisance, the other of inconsolable,
+passionate regret.
+
+"Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams," remarked Otto.
+"You could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always
+look as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody's fortune
+is all written out in the stars, don't they?"
+
+"They believe so in the old country," Fritz affirmed.
+
+But Arthur only laughed at him. "You're thinking of Napoleon,
+Fritzey. He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles.
+I guess the stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown folks."
+
+We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred
+before the evening star went down behind the corn fields, when some
+one cried, "There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!"
+
+We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us.
+It came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing,
+red as an angry heathen god.
+
+"When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice
+their prisoners on the temple top," Percy announced.
+
+"Go on, Perce. You got that out of _Golden Days_. Do you believe
+that, Arthur?" I appealed.
+
+Arthur answered, quite seriously: "Like as not. The moon was one of
+their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where
+they used to sacrifice their prisoners."
+
+As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the
+Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the
+Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were
+still conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.
+
+"Must have been a big cat jumping," said Fritz. "They do sometimes.
+They must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!"
+
+There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current
+fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.
+
+"Suppose there ever _was_ any gold hid away in this old river?"
+Fritz asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire,
+his chin on his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother
+laughed at him, but Arthur took his suggestion seriously.
+
+"Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere.
+Seven cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his
+men came up to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country
+once."
+
+Percy looked interested. "Was that before the Mormons went through?"
+
+We all laughed at this.
+
+"Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they
+came along this very river. They always followed the watercourses."
+
+"I wonder where this river really does begin?" Tip mused. That was
+an old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain.
+On the map the little black line stopped somewhere in western
+Kansas; but since rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only
+reasonable to suppose that ours came from the Rockies. Its
+destination, we knew, was the Missouri, and the Hassler boys always
+maintained that we could embark at Sandtown in flood-time, follow
+our noses, and eventually arrive at New Orleans. Now they took up
+their old argument. "If us boys had grit enough to try it, it
+wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St. Joe."
+
+We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler
+boys wanted to see the stock-yards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted
+to see a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not
+betray himself.
+
+"Now it's your turn, Tip."
+
+Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked
+shyly out of his queer, tight little face. "My place is awful far
+away. My uncle Bill told me about it."
+
+Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had
+drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had
+drifted out again.
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+"Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads
+or anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water
+before you get there and have to drink canned tomatoes."
+
+"Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?"
+
+Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.
+
+"There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for
+about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this
+here rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the
+Enchanted Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on
+top of it. The sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall.
+The Indians say that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards
+came, there was a village away up there in the air. The tribe that
+lived there had some sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, hung
+down over the face of the bluff, and the braves went down to hunt
+and carried water up in big jars swung on their backs. They kept a
+big supply of water and dried meat up there, and never went down
+except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe that made cloth and
+pottery, and they went up there to get out of the wars. You see,
+they could pick off any war party that tried to get up their little
+steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and they had
+some sort of a queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were
+Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't
+fighters, anyhow.
+
+"One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a
+kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found
+their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few
+steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped
+at the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the
+north came along and massacred 'em to a man, with all the old folks
+and women looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south
+and left the village to get down the best way they could. Of course
+they never got down. They starved to death up there, and when the
+war party came back on their way north, they could hear the children
+crying from the edge of the bluff where they had crawled out, but
+they didn't see a sign of a grown Indian, and nobody has ever been
+up there since."
+
+We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.
+
+"There couldn't have been many people up there," Percy demurred.
+"How big is the top, Tip?"
+
+"Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as
+tall as it is. The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of
+worn away for several hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so
+hard to climb."
+
+I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.
+
+"Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along
+once and saw that there was a town up there, and that was all."
+
+Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. "Of course there must be
+some way to get up there. Couldn't people get a rope over someway
+and pull a ladder up?"
+
+Tip's little eyes were shining with excitement. "I know a way. Me
+and Uncle Bill talked it all over. There's a kind of rocket that
+would take a rope over--life-savers use 'em--and then you could
+hoist a rope-ladder and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight
+with guy-ropes on the other side. I'm going to climb that there
+bluff, and I've got it all planned out."
+
+Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.
+
+"Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of
+their idols. There might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want
+to see."
+
+"Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?" Arthur asked.
+
+"Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried
+to cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man
+can reach. The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a
+boulder the glaciers left. It's a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but
+cactus and desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the
+bluff there's good water and plenty of grass. That's why the bison
+used to go down there."
+
+Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a
+dark, slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping-crane,
+we knew by her cry and her long neck. We ran to the edge of the
+island, hoping we might see her alight, but she wavered southward
+along the rivercourse until we lost her. The Hassler boys declared
+that by the look of the heavens it must be after midnight, so we
+threw more wood on our fire, put on our jackets, and curled down in
+the warm sand. Several of us pretended to doze, but I fancy we were
+really thinking about Tip's Bluff and the extinct people. Over in
+the wood the ring-doves were calling mournfully to one another, and
+once we heard a dog bark, far away. "Somebody getting into old
+Tommy's melon patch," Fritz murmured, sleepily, but nobody answered
+him. By and by Percy spoke out of the shadow.
+
+"Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?"
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?"
+
+"Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell the rest
+of us exactly what he finds," remarked one of the Hassler boys, and
+to this we all readily assented.
+
+Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have dreamed
+about a race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear that other
+people were getting ahead of me and that I was losing my chance. I
+sat up in my damp clothes and looked at the other boys, who lay
+tumbled in uneasy attitudes about the dead fire. It was still dark,
+but the sky was blue with the last wonderful azure of night. The
+stars glistened like crystal globes, and trembled as if they shone
+through a depth of clear water. Even as I watched, they began to
+pale and the sky brightened. Day came suddenly, almost
+instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue night, and it
+was gone. Everywhere the birds began to call, and all manner of
+little insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows. A breeze
+sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened corn.
+The boys rolled over and shook themselves. We stripped and plunged
+into the river just as the sun came up over the windy bluffs.
+
+When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out to our
+island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted Bluff,
+renewing our resolution to find it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the
+Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and
+will go nowhere that his red touring-car cannot carry him. Otto
+Hassler went on the railroad and lost his foot braking; after which
+he and Fritz succeeded their father as the town tailors.
+
+Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before
+he was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was home on one
+of my college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer-chair under a
+cottonwood tree in the little yard behind one of the two Sandtown
+saloons. He was very untidy and his hand was not steady, but when he
+rose, unabashed, to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as
+ever. When I had talked with him for an hour and heard him laugh
+again, I wondered how it was that when Nature had taken such pains
+with a man, from his hands to the arch of his long foot, she had
+ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about Tip Smith's Bluff, and
+declared he was going down there just as soon as the weather got
+cooler; he thought the Grand Canyon might be worth while, too.
+
+I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond
+the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood.
+And, indeed, it was under that very tree that he died one summer
+morning.
+
+Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married a
+slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a
+perambulator, and has grown stooped and gray from irregular meals
+and broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over,
+and he has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in
+Sandtown I walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he
+had balanced his cash and shut up his store. We took the long way
+around and sat down on the schoolhouse steps, and between us we
+quite revived the romance of the lone red rock and the extinct
+people. Tip insists that he still means to go down there, but he
+thinks now he will wait until his boy, Bert, is old enough to go
+with him. Bert has been let into the story, and thinks of nothing
+but the Enchanted Bluff.
+
+                                          _Harper's_, April 1909
+
+
+
+
+_The Joy of Nelly Deane_
+
+
+Nell and I were almost ready to go on for the last act of "Queen
+Esther," and we had for the moment got rid of our three patient
+dressers, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny. Nell was peering
+over my shoulder into the little cracked looking-glass that Mrs. Dow
+had taken from its nail on her kitchen wall and brought down to the
+church under her shawl that morning. When she realized that we were
+alone, Nell whispered to me in the quick, fierce way she had:
+
+"Say, Peggy, won't you go up and stay with me to-night? Scott
+Spinny's asked to take me home, and I don't want to walk up with him
+alone."
+
+"I guess so, if you'll ask my mother."
+
+"Oh, I'll fix her!" Nell laughed, with a toss of her head which
+meant that she usually got what she wanted, even from people much
+less tractable than my mother.
+
+In a moment our tiring-women were back again. The three old
+ladies--at least they seemed old to us--fluttered about us, more
+agitated than we were ourselves. It seemed as though they would
+never leave off patting Nell and touching her up. They kept trying
+things this way and that, never able in the end to decide which way
+was best. They wouldn't hear to her using rouge, and as they
+powdered her neck and arms, Mrs. Freeze murmured that she hoped we
+wouldn't get into the habit of using such things. Mrs. Spinny
+divided her time between pulling up and tucking down the "illusion"
+that filled in the square neck of Nelly's dress. She didn't like
+things much low, she said; but after she had pulled it up, she stood
+back and looked at Nell thoughtfully through her glasses. While the
+excited girl was reaching for this and that, buttoning a slipper,
+pinning down a curl, Mrs. Spinny's smile softened more and more
+until, just before _Esther_ made her entrance, the old lady tiptoed
+up to her and softly tucked the illusion down as far as it would go.
+
+"She's so pink; it seems a pity not," she whispered apologetically
+to Mrs. Dow.
+
+Every one admitted that Nelly was the prettiest girl in Riverbend,
+and the gayest--oh, the gayest! When she was not singing, she was
+laughing. When she was not laid up with a broken arm, the outcome of
+a foolhardy coasting feat, or suspended from school because she ran
+away at recess to go buggy-riding with Guy Franklin, she was sure to
+be up to mischief of some sort. Twice she broke through the ice and
+got soused in the river because she never looked where she skated or
+cared what happened so long as she went fast enough. After the
+second of these duckings our three dressers declared that she was
+trying to be a Baptist despite herself.
+
+Mrs. Spinny and Mrs. Freeze and Mrs. Dow, who were always hovering
+about Nelly, often whispered to me their hope that she would
+eventually come into our church and not "go with the Methodists";
+her family were Wesleyans. But to me these artless plans of theirs
+never wholly explained their watchful affection. They had good
+daughters themselves,--except Mrs. Spinny, who had only the sullen
+Scott,--and they loved their plain girls and thanked God for them.
+But they loved Nelly differently. They were proud of her pretty
+figure and yellow-brown eyes, which dilated so easily and sparkled
+with a kind of golden effervescence. They were always making pretty
+things for her, always coaxing her to come to the sewing-circle,
+where she knotted her thread, and put in the wrong sleeve, and
+laughed and chattered and said a great many things that she should
+not have said, and somehow always warmed their hearts. I think they
+loved her for her unquenchable joy.
+
+All the Baptist ladies liked Nell, even those who criticized her
+most severely, but the three who were first in fighting the battles
+of our little church, who held it together by their prayers and the
+labor of their hands, watched over her as they did over Mrs. Dow's
+century-plant before it blossomed. They looked for her on Sunday
+morning and smiled at her as she hurried, always a little late, up
+to the choir. When she rose and stood behind the organ and sang
+"There Is a Green Hill," one could see Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Freeze
+settle back in their accustomed seats and look up at her as if she
+had just come from that hill and had brought them glad tidings.
+
+It was because I sang contralto, or, as we said, alto, in the
+Baptist choir that Nell and I became friends. She was so gay and
+grown up, so busy with parties and dances and picnics, that I would
+scarcely have seen much of her had we not sung together. She liked
+me better than she did any of the older girls, who tried clumsily to
+be like her, and I felt almost as solicitous and admiring as did
+Mrs. Dow and Mrs. Spinny. I think even then I must have loved to see
+her bloom and glow, and I loved to hear her sing, in "The Ninety and
+Nine,"
+
+  But one was out on the hills away
+
+in her sweet, strong voice. Nell had never had a singing lesson, but
+she had sung from the time she could talk, and Mrs. Dow used fondly
+to say that it was singing so much that made her figure so pretty.
+
+After I went into the choir it was found to be easier to get Nelly
+to choir practice. If I stopped outside her gate on my way to church
+and coaxed her, she usually laughed, ran in for her hat and jacket,
+and went along with me. The three old ladies fostered our
+friendship, and because I was "quiet," they esteemed me a good
+influence for Nelly. This view was propounded in a sewing-circle
+discussion and, leaking down to us through our mothers, greatly
+amused us. Dear old ladies! It was so manifestly for what Nell was
+that they loved her, and yet they were always looking for
+"influences" to change her.
+
+The "Queen Esther" performance had cost us three months of hard
+practice, and it was not easy to keep Nell up to attending the
+tedious rehearsals. Some of the boys we knew were in the chorus of
+Assyrian youths, but the solo cast was made up of older people, and
+Nell found them very poky. We gave the cantata in the Baptist church
+on Christmas eve, "to a crowded house," as the Riverbend "Messenger"
+truly chronicled. The country folk for miles about had come in
+through a deep snow, and their teams and wagons stood in a long row
+at the hitch-bars on each side of the church door. It was certainly
+Nelly's night, for however much the tenor--he was her schoolmaster,
+and naturally thought poorly of her--might try to eclipse her in his
+dolorous solos about the rivers of Babylon, there could be no doubt
+as to whom the people had come to hear--and to see.
+
+After the performance was over, our fathers and mothers came back to
+the dressing-rooms--the little rooms behind the baptistry where the
+candidates for baptism were robed--to congratulate us, and Nell
+persuaded my mother to let me go home with her. This arrangement may
+not have been wholly agreeable to Scott Spinny, who stood glumly
+waiting at the baptistry door; though I used to think he dogged
+Nell's steps not so much for any pleasure he got from being with her
+as for the pleasure of keeping other people away. Dear little Mrs.
+Spinny was perpetually in a state of humiliation on account of his
+bad manners, and she tried by a very special tenderness to make up
+to Nelly for the remissness of her ungracious son.
+
+Scott was a spare, muscular fellow, good-looking, but with a face so
+set and dark that I used to think it very like the castings he sold.
+He was taciturn and domineering, and Nell rather liked to provoke
+him. Her father was so easy with her that she seemed to enjoy being
+ordered about now and then. That night, when every one was praising
+her and telling her how well she sang and how pretty she looked,
+Scott only said, as we came out of the dressing-room:
+
+"Have you got your high shoes on?"
+
+"No; but I've got rubbers on over my low ones. Mother doesn't care."
+
+"Well, you just go back and put 'em on as fast as you can."
+
+Nell made a face at him and ran back, laughing. Her mother, fat,
+comfortable Mrs. Deane, was immensely amused at this.
+
+"That's right, Scott," she chuckled. "You can do enough more with
+her than I can. She walks right over me an' Jud."
+
+Scott grinned. If he was proud of Nelly, the last thing he wished to
+do was to show it. When she came back he began to nag again. "What
+are you going to do with all those flowers? They'll freeze stiff as
+pokers."
+
+"Well, there won't none of _your_ flowers freeze, Scott Spinny, so
+there!" Nell snapped. She had the best of him that time, and the
+Assyrian youths rejoiced. They were most of them high-school boys,
+and the poorest of them had "chipped in" and sent all the way to
+Denver for _Queen Esther's_ flowers. There were bouquets from half a
+dozen townspeople, too, but none from Scott. Scott was a prosperous
+hardware merchant and notoriously penurious, though he saved his
+face, as the boys said, by giving liberally to the church.
+
+"There's no use freezing the fool things, anyhow. You get me some
+newspapers, and I'll wrap 'em up." Scott took from his pocket a
+folded copy of the Riverbend "Messenger" and began laboriously to
+wrap up one of the bouquets. When we left the church door he bore
+three large newspaper bundles, carrying them as carefully as if they
+had been so many newly frosted wedding-cakes, and left Nell and me
+to shift for ourselves as we floundered along the snow-burdened
+sidewalk.
+
+Although it was after midnight, lights were shining from many of the
+little wooden houses, and the roofs and shrubbery were so deep in
+snow that Riverbend looked as if it had been tucked down into a warm
+bed. The companies of people, all coming from church, tramping this
+way and that toward their homes and calling "Good night" and "Merry
+Christmas" as they parted company, all seemed to us very unusual and
+exciting.
+
+When we got home, Mrs. Deane had a cold supper ready, and Jud Deane
+had already taken off his shoes and fallen to on his fried chicken
+and pie. He was so proud of his pretty daughter that he must give
+her her Christmas presents then and there, and he went into the
+sleeping-chamber behind the dining-room and from the depths of his
+wife's closet brought out a short sealskin jacket and a round cap
+and made Nelly put them on.
+
+Mrs. Deane, who sat busy between a plate of spice cake and a tray
+piled with her famous whipped-cream tarts, laughed inordinately at
+his behavior.
+
+"Ain't he worse than any kid you ever see? He's been running to that
+closet like a cat shut away from her kittens. I wonder Nell ain't
+caught on before this. I did think he'd make out now to keep 'em
+till Christmas morning; but he's never made out to keep anything
+yet."
+
+That was true enough, and fortunately Jud's inability to keep
+anything seemed always to present a highly humorous aspect to his
+wife. Mrs. Deane put her heart into her cooking, and said that so
+long as a man was a good provider she had no cause to complain.
+Other people were not so charitable toward Jud's failing. I remember
+how many strictures were passed upon that little sealskin and how he
+was censured for his extravagance. But what a public-spirited thing,
+after all, it was for him to do! How, the winter through, we all
+enjoyed seeing Nell skating on the river or running about the town
+with the brown collar turned up about her bright cheeks and her hair
+blowing out from under the round cap! "No seal," Mrs. Dow said,
+"would have begrudged it to her. Why should we?" This was at the
+sewing-circle, when the new coat was under grave discussion.
+
+At last Nelly and I got up-stairs and undressed, and the pad of
+Jud's slippered feet about the kitchen premises--where he was
+carrying up from the cellar things that might freeze--ceased. He
+called "Good night, daughter," from the foot of the stairs, and the
+house grew quiet. But one is not a prima donna the first time for
+nothing, and it seemed as if we could not go to bed. Our light must
+have burned long after every other in Riverbend was out. The muslin
+curtains of Nell's bed were drawn back; Mrs. Deane had turned down
+the white counterpane and taken off the shams and smoothed the
+pillows for us. But their fair plumpness offered no temptation to
+two such hot young heads. We could not let go of life even for a
+little while. We sat and talked in Nell's cozy room, where there was
+a tiny, white fur rug--the only one in Riverbend--before the bed;
+and there were white sash curtains, and the prettiest little desk
+and dressing-table I had ever seen. It was a warm, gay little room,
+flooded all day long with sunlight from east and south windows that
+had climbing-roses all about them in summer. About the dresser were
+photographs of adoring high-school boys; and one of Guy Franklin,
+much groomed and barbered, in a dress-coat and a boutonniere. I
+never liked to see that photograph there. The home boys looked
+properly modest and bashful on the dresser, but he seemed to be
+staring impudently all the time.
+
+I knew nothing definite against Guy, but in Riverbend all
+"traveling-men" were considered worldly and wicked. He traveled for
+a Chicago dry-goods firm, and our fathers didn't like him because he
+put extravagant ideas into our mothers' heads. He had very smooth
+and nattering ways, and he introduced into our simple community a
+great variety of perfumes and scented soaps, and he always reminded
+me of the merchants in Caesar, who brought into Gaul "those things
+which effeminate the mind," as we translated that delightfully easy
+passage.
+
+Nell was silting before the dressing-table in her nightgown, holding
+the new fur coat and rubbing her cheek against it, when I saw a
+sudden gleam of tears in her eyes. "You know, Peggy," she said in
+her quick, impetuous way, "this makes me feel bad. I've got a secret
+from my daddy."
+
+I can see her now, so pink and eager, her brown hair in two springy
+braids down her back, and her eyes shining with tears and with
+something even softer and more tremulous.
+
+"I'm engaged, Peggy," she whispered, "really and truly."
+
+She leaned forward, unbuttoning her nightgown, and there on her
+breast, hung by a little gold chain about her neck, was a diamond
+ring--Guy Franklin's solitaire; every one in Riverbend knew it well.
+
+"I'm going to live in Chicago, and take singing lessons, and go to
+operas, and do all those nice things--oh, everything! I know you
+don't like him, Peggy, but you know you _are_ a kid. You'll see how
+it is yourself when you grow up. He's so _different_ from our boys,
+and he's just terribly in love with me. And then, Peggy,"--flushing
+all down over her soft shoulders,--"I'm awfully fond of him, too.
+Awfully."
+
+"Are you, Nell, truly?" I whispered. She seemed so changed to me by
+the warm light in her eyes and that delicate suffusion of color. I
+felt as I did when I got up early on picnic mornings in summer, and
+saw the dawn come up in the breathless sky above the river meadows
+and make all the cornfields golden.
+
+"Sure I do, Peggy; don't look so solemn. It's nothing to look that
+way about, kid. It's nice." She threw her arms about me suddenly and
+hugged me.
+
+"I hate to think about your going so far away from us all, Nell."
+
+"Oh, you'll love to come and visit me. Just you wait."
+
+She began breathlessly to go over things Guy Franklin had told her
+about Chicago, until I seemed to see it all looming up out there
+under the stars that kept watch over our little sleeping town. We
+had neither of us ever been to a city, but we knew what it would be
+like. We heard it throbbing like great engines, and calling to us,
+that far-away world. Even after we had opened the windows and
+scurried into bed, we seemed to feel a pulsation across all the
+miles of snow. The winter silence trembled with it, and the air was
+full of something new that seemed to break over us in soft waves. In
+that snug, warm little bed I had a sense of imminent change and
+danger. I was somehow afraid for Nelly when I heard her breathing so
+quickly beside me, and I put my arm about her protectingly as we
+drifted toward sleep.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the following spring we were both graduated from the Riverbend
+high school, and I went away to college. My family moved to Denver,
+and during the next four years I heard very little of Nelly Deane.
+My life was crowded with new people and new experiences, and I am
+afraid I held her little in mind. I heard indirectly that Jud Deane
+had lost what little property he owned in a luckless venture in
+Cripple Creek, and that he had been able to keep his house in
+Riverbend only through the clemency of his creditors. Guy Franklin
+had his route changed and did not go to Riverbend any more. He
+married the daughter of a rich cattle-man out near Long Pine, and
+ran a dry-goods store of his own. Mrs. Dow wrote me a long letter
+about once a year, and in one of these she told me that Nelly was
+teaching in the sixth grade in the Riverbend school.
+
+"Dear Nelly does not like teaching very well. The children try her,
+and she is so pretty it seems a pity for her to be tied down to
+uncongenial employment. Scott is still very attentive, and I have
+noticed him look up at the window of Nelly's room in a very
+determined way as he goes home to dinner. Scott continues
+prosperous; he has made money during these hard times and now owns
+both our hardware stores. He is close, but a very honorable fellow.
+Nelly seems to hold off, but I think Mrs. Spinny has hopes. Nothing
+would please her more. If Scott were more careful about his
+appearance, it would help. He of course gets black about his
+business, and Nelly, you know, is very dainty. People do say his
+mother does his courting for him, she is so eager. If only Scott
+does not turn out hard and penurious like his father! We must all
+have our schooling in this life, but I don't want Nelly's to be too
+severe. She is a dear girl, and keeps her color."
+
+Mrs. Dow's own schooling had been none too easy. Her husband had
+long been crippled with rheumatism, and was bitter and faultfinding.
+Her daughters had married poorly, and one of her sons had fallen
+into evil ways. But her letters were always cheerful, and in one of
+them she gently remonstrated with me because I "seemed inclined to
+take a sad view of life."
+
+In the winter vacation of my senior year I stopped on my way home to
+visit Mrs. Dow. The first thing she told me when I got into her old
+buckboard at the station was that "Scott had at last prevailed," and
+that Nelly was to marry him in the spring. As a preliminary step,
+Nelly was about to join the Baptist church. "Just think, you will be
+here for her baptizing! How that will please Nelly! She is to be
+immersed to-morrow night."
+
+I met Scott Spinny in the post-office that morning, and he gave me a
+hard grip with one black hand. There was something grim and
+saturnine about his powerful body and bearded face and his strong,
+cold hands. I wondered what perverse fate had driven him for eight
+years to dog the footsteps of a girl whose charm was due to
+qualities naturally distasteful to him. It still seems strange to me
+that in easy-going Riverbend, where there were so many boys who
+could have lived contentedly enough with my little grasshopper, it
+was the pushing ant who must have her and all her careless ways.
+
+By a kind of unformulated etiquette one did not call upon candidates
+for baptism on the day of the ceremony, so I had my first glimpse of
+Nelly that evening. The baptistry was a cemented pit directly under
+the pulpit rostrum, over which we had our stage when we sang "Queen
+Esther." I sat through the sermon somewhat nervously. After the
+minister, in his long, black gown, had gone down into the water and
+the choir had finished singing, the door from the dressing-room
+opened, and, led by one of the deacons, Nelly came down the steps
+into the pool. Oh, she looked so little and meek and chastened! Her
+white cashmere robe clung about her, and her brown hair was brushed
+straight back and hung in two soft braids from a little head bent
+humbly. As she stepped down into the water I shivered with the cold
+of it, and I remembered sharply how much I had loved her. She went
+down until the water was well above her waist, and stood white and
+small, with her hands crossed on her breast, while the minister said
+the words about being buried with Christ in baptism. Then, lying in
+his arm, she disappeared under the dark water. "It will be like that
+when she dies," I thought, and a quick pain caught my heart. The
+choir began to sing "Washed in the Blood of the Lamb" as she rose
+again, the door behind the baptistry opened, revealing those three
+dear guardians, Mrs. Dow, Mrs. Freeze, and Mrs. Spinny, and she went
+up into their arms.
+
+I went to see Nell next day, up in the little room of many memories.
+Such a sad, sad visit! She seemed changed--a little embarrassed and
+quietly despairing. We talked of many of the old Riverbend girls and
+boys, but she did not mention Guy Franklin or Scott Spinny, except
+to say that her father had got work in Scott's hardware store. She
+begged me, putting her hands on my shoulders with something of her
+old impulsiveness, to come and stay a few days with her. But I was
+afraid--afraid of what she might tell me and of what I might say.
+When I sat in that room with all her trinkets, the foolish harvest
+of her girlhood, lying about, and the white curtains and the little
+white rug, I thought of Scott Spinny with positive terror and could
+feel his hard grip on my hand again. I made the best excuse I could
+about having to hurry on to Denver; but she gave me one quick look,
+and her eyes ceased to plead. I saw that she understood me
+perfectly. We had known each other so well. Just once, when I got up
+to go and had trouble with my veil, she laughed her old merry laugh
+and told me there were some things I would never learn, for all my
+schooling.
+
+The next day, when Mrs. Dow drove me down to the station to catch
+the morning train for Denver, I saw Nelly hurrying to school with
+several books under her arm. She had been working up her lessons at
+home, I thought. She was never quick at her books, dear Nell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was ten years before I again visited Riverbend. I had been in
+Rome for a long time, and had fallen into bitter homesickness. One
+morning, sitting among the dahlias and asters that bloom so bravely
+upon those gigantic heaps of earth-red ruins that were once the
+palaces of the Caesars, I broke the seal of one of Mrs. Dow's long
+yearly letters. It brought so much sad news that I resolved then and
+there to go home to Riverbend, the only place that had ever really
+been home to me. Mrs. Dow wrote me that her husband, after years of
+illness, had died in the cold spell last March. "So good and patient
+toward the last," she wrote, "and so afraid of giving extra
+trouble." There was another thing she saved until the last. She
+wrote on and on, dear woman, about new babies and village
+improvements, as if she could not bear to tell me; and then it came:
+
+"You will be sad to hear that two months ago our dear Nelly left us.
+It was a terrible blow to us all. I cannot write about it yet, I
+fear. I wake up every morning feeling that I ought to go to her. She
+went three days after her little boy was born. The baby is a fine
+child and will live, I think, in spite of everything. He and her
+little girl, now eight years old, whom she named Margaret, after
+you, have gone to Mrs. Spinny's. She loves them more than if they
+were her own. It seems as if already they had made her quite young
+again. I wish you could see Nelly's children."
+
+Ah, that was what I wanted, to see Nelly's children! The wish came
+aching from my heart along with the bitter homesick tears; along
+with a quick, torturing recollection that flashed upon me, as I
+looked about and tried to collect myself, of how we two had sat in
+our sunny seat in the corner of the old bare school-room one
+September afternoon and learned the names of the seven hills
+together. In that place, at that moment, after so many years, how it
+all came back to me--the warm sun on my back, the chattering girl
+beside me, the curly hair, the laughing yellow eyes, the stubby
+little finger on the page! I felt as if even then, when we sat in
+the sun with our heads together, it was all arranged, written out
+like a story, that at this moment I should be sitting among the
+crumbling bricks and drying grass, and she should be lying in the
+place I knew so well, on that green hill far away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Mrs. Dow sat with her Christmas sewing in the familiar sitting-room,
+where the carpet and the wall-paper and the table-cover had all
+faded into soft, dull colors, and even the chromo of Hagar and
+Ishmael had been toned to the sobriety of age. In the bay-window the
+tall wire flower-stand still bore its little terraces of potted
+plants, and the big fuchsia and the Martha Washington geranium had
+blossomed for Christmas-tide. Mrs. Dow herself did not look greatly
+changed to me. Her hair, thin ever since I could remember it, was
+now quite white, but her spare, wiry little person had all its old
+activity, and her eyes gleamed with the old friendliness behind her
+silver-bowed glasses. Her gray house-dress seemed just like those
+she used to wear when I ran in after school to take her angel-food
+cake down to the church supper.
+
+The house sat on a hill, and from behind the geraniums I could see
+pretty much all of Riverbend, tucked down in the soft snow, and the
+air above was full of big, loose flakes, falling from a gray sky
+which betokened settled weather. Indoors the hard-coal burner made a
+tropical temperature, and glowed a warm orange from its isinglass
+sides. We sat and visited, the two of us, with a great sense of
+comfort and completeness. I had reached Riverbend only that morning,
+and Mrs. Dow, who had been haunted by thoughts of shipwreck and
+suffering upon wintry seas, kept urging me to draw nearer to the
+fire and suggesting incidental refreshment. We had chattered all
+through the winter morning and most of the afternoon, taking up one
+after another of the Riverbend girls and boys, and agreeing that we
+had reason to be well satisfied with most of them. Finally, after a
+long pause in which I had listened to the contented ticking of the
+clock and the crackle of the coal, I put the question I had until
+then held back:
+
+"And now, Mrs. Dow, tell me about the one we loved best of all.
+Since I got your letter I've thought of her every day. Tell me all
+about Scott and Nelly."
+
+The tears flashed behind her glasses, and she smoothed the little
+pink bag on her knee.
+
+"Well, dear, I'm afraid Scott proved to be a hard man, like his
+father. But we must remember that Nelly always had Mrs. Spinny. I
+never saw anything like the love there was between those two. After
+Nelly lost her own father and mother, she looked to Mrs. Spinny for
+everything. When Scott was too unreasonable, his mother could 'most
+always prevail upon him. She never lifted a hand to fight her own
+battles with Scott's father, but she was never afraid to speak up
+for Nelly. And then Nelly took great comfort of her little girl.
+Such a lovely child!"
+
+"Had she been very ill before the little baby came?"
+
+"No, Margaret; I'm afraid 't was all because they had the wrong
+doctor. I feel confident that either Doctor Tom or Doctor Jones
+could have brought her through. But, you see, Scott had offended
+them both, and they'd stopped trading at his store, so he would have
+young Doctor Fox, a boy just out of college and a stranger. He got
+scared and didn't know what to do. Mrs. Spinny felt he wasn't doing
+right, so she sent for Mrs. Freeze and me. It seemed like Nelly had
+got discouraged. Scott would move into their big new house before
+the plastering was dry, and though 't was summer, she had taken a
+terrible cold that seemed to have drained her, and she took no
+interest in fixing the place up. Mrs. Spinny had been down with her
+back again and wasn't able to help, and things was just anyway. We
+won't talk about that, Margaret; I think 't would hurt Mrs. Spinny
+to have you know. She nearly died of mortification when she sent for
+us, and blamed her poor back. We did get Nelly fixed up nicely
+before she died. I prevailed upon Doctor Tom to come in at the last,
+and it 'most broke his heart. 'Why, Mis' Dow,' he said, 'if you'd
+only have come and told me how 't was, I'd have come and carried her
+right off in my arms.'"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Dow," I cried, "then it needn't have been?"
+
+Mrs. Dow dropped her needle and clasped her hands quickly. "We
+mustn't look at it that way, dear," she said tremulously and a
+little sternly; "we mustn't let ourselves. We must just feel that
+our Lord wanted her _then_, and took her to Himself. When it was all
+over, she did look so like a child of God, young and trusting, like
+she did on her baptizing night, you remember?"
+
+I felt that Mrs. Dow did not want to talk any more about Nelly then,
+and, indeed, I had little heart to listen; so I told her I would go
+for a walk, and suggested that I might stop at Mrs. Spinny's to see
+the children.
+
+Mrs. Dow looked up thoughtfully at the clock. "I doubt if you'll
+find little Margaret there now. It's half-past four, and she'll have
+been out of school an hour and more. She'll be most likely coasting
+on Lupton's Hill. She usually makes for it with her sled the minute
+she is out of the school-house door. You know, it's the old hill
+where you all used to slide. If you stop in at the church about six
+o'clock, you'll likely find Mrs. Spinny there with the baby. I
+promised to go down and help Mrs. Freeze finish up the tree, and
+Mrs. Spinny said she'd run in with the baby, if 't wasn't too
+bitter. She won't leave him alone with the Swede girl. She's like a
+young woman with her first."
+
+Lupton's Hill was at the other end of town, and when I got there the
+dusk was thickening, drawing blue shadows over the snowy fields.
+There were perhaps twenty children creeping up the hill or whizzing
+down the packed sled-track. When I had been watching them for some
+minutes, I heard a lusty shout, and a little red sled shot past me
+into the deep snow-drift beyond. The child was quite buried for a
+moment, then she struggled out and stood dusting the snow from her
+short coat and red woolen comforter. She wore a brown fur cap, which
+was too big for her and of an old-fashioned shape, such as girls
+wore long ago, but I would have known her without the cap. Mrs. Dow
+had said a beautiful child, and there would not be two like this in
+Riverbend. She was off before I had time to speak to her, going up
+the hill at a trot, her sturdy little legs plowing through the
+trampled snow. When she reached the top she never paused to take
+breath, but threw herself upon her sled and came down with a whoop
+that was quenched only by the deep drift at the end.
+
+"Are you Margaret Spinny?" I asked as she struggled out in a cloud
+of snow.
+
+"Yes, 'm." She approached me with frank curiosity, pulling her
+little sled behind her. "Are you the strange lady staying at Mrs.
+Dow's?" I nodded, and she began to look my clothes over with
+respectful interest.
+
+"Your grandmother is to be at the church at six o'clock, isn't she?"
+
+"Yes, 'm."
+
+"Well, suppose we walk up there now. It's nearly six, and all the
+other children are going home." She hesitated, and looked up at the
+faintly gleaming track on the hill-slope. "Do you want another
+slide? Is that it?" I asked.
+
+"Do you mind?" she asked shyly.
+
+"No. I'll wait for you. Take your time; don't run."
+
+Two little boys were still hanging about the slide, and they cheered
+her as she came down, her comforter streaming in the wind.
+
+"Now," she announced, getting up out of the drift, "I'll show you
+where the church is."
+
+"Shall I tie your comforter again?"
+
+"No, 'm, thanks. I'm plenty warm." She put her mittened hand
+confidingly in mine and trudged along beside me.
+
+Mrs. Dow must have heard us tramping up the snowy steps of the
+church, for she met us at the door. Every one had gone except the
+old ladies. A kerosene lamp flickered over the Sunday-school chart,
+with the lesson-picture of the Wise Men, and the little barrel-stove
+threw out a deep glow over the three white heads that bent above the
+baby. There the three friends sat, patting him, and smoothing his
+dress, and playing with his hands, which made theirs look so brown.
+
+"You ain't seen nothing finer in all your travels," said Mrs.
+Spinny, and they all laughed.
+
+They showed me his full chest and how strong his back was; had me
+feel the golden fuzz on his head, and made him look at me with his
+round, bright eyes. He laughed and reared himself in my arms as I
+took him up and held him close to me. He was so warm and tingling
+with life, and he had the flush of new beginnings, of the new
+morning and the new rose. He seemed to have come so lately from his
+mother's heart! It was as if I held her youth and all her young joy.
+As I put my cheek down against his, he spied a pink flower in my
+hat, and making a gleeful sound, he lunged at it with both fists.
+
+"Don't let him spoil it," murmured Mrs. Spinny. "He loves color
+so--like Nelly."
+
+                                         _Century_, October 1911
+
+
+
+
+_The Bohemian Girl_
+
+
+The Trans-continental Express swung along the windings of the Sand
+River Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young
+man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the
+fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and
+strong back. There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity
+about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he
+stood up and squared them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue
+silk necktie with loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at
+the waist, and his short sack-coat hung open. His heavy shoes had
+seen good service. His reddish-brown hair, like his clothes, had a
+foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes under heavy reddish
+eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close shaving, and even
+the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the smooth brown of his
+skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very white. His
+head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the green
+cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe summer
+country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips. Once, as
+he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes,
+curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight
+line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly
+mockery. He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in
+getting excited; and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when
+he could. Neither the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the
+brakeman's call disturbed him. It was not until after the train had
+stopped that he rose, put on a Panama hat, took from the rack a
+small valise and a flute-case, and stepped deliberately to the
+station platform. The baggage was already unloaded, and the stranger
+presented a check for a battered sole-leather steamer-trunk.
+
+"Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent. "I may
+send for it, and I may not."
+
+"Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?" demanded the
+agent in a challenging tone.
+
+"Just so."
+
+The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the small
+trunk, which was marked "N.E.," and handed out a claim check without
+further comment. The stranger watched him as he caught one end of
+the trunk and dragged it into the express room. The agent's manner
+seemed to remind him of something amusing. "Doesn't seem to be a
+very big place," he remarked, looking about.
+
+"It's big enough for us," snapped the agent, as he banged the trunk
+into a corner.
+
+That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He
+chuckled quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and
+swung his valise around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama
+securely on his head, turned up his trousers, tucked the flute-case
+under his arm, and started off across the fields. He gave the town,
+as he would have said, a wide berth, and cut through a great fenced
+pasture, emerging, when he rolled under the barbed wire at the
+farther corner, upon a white dusty road which ran straight up from
+the river valley to the high prairies, where the ripe wheat stood
+yellow and the tin roofs and weather-cocks were twinkling in the
+fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles, the sun was
+sinking and the farm-wagons on their way home from town came
+rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze. When one
+of the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift, he
+clambered in willingly. The driver was a thin, grizzled old man with
+a long lean neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat's. "How
+fur ye goin'?" he asked, as he clucked to his horses and started
+off.
+
+"Do you go by the Ericson place?"
+
+"Which Ericson?" The old man drew in his reins as if he expected to
+stop again.
+
+"Preacher Ericson's."
+
+"Oh, the Old Lady Ericson's!" He turned and looked at Nils. "La, me!
+If you're goin' out there you might 'a' rid out in the automobile.
+That's a pity, now. The Old Lady Ericson was in town with her auto.
+You might 'a' heard it snortin' anywhere about the post-office er
+the butcher-shop."
+
+"Has she a motor?" asked the stranger absently.
+
+"'Deed an' she has! She runs into town every night about this time
+for her mail and meat for supper. Some folks say she's afraid her
+auto won't get exercise enough, but I say that's jealousy."
+
+"Aren't there any other motors about here?"
+
+"Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all. But nobody else gets around like
+the Old Lady Ericson. She's out, rain er shine, over the whole
+county, chargin' into town and out amongst her farms, an' up to her
+sons' places. Sure you ain't goin' to the wrong place?" He craned
+his neck and looked at Nils' flute-case with eager curiosity. "The
+old woman ain't got any piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand.
+His wife's musical; took lessons in Chicago."
+
+"I'm going up there to-morrow," said Nils imperturbably. He saw that
+the driver took him for a piano-tuner.
+
+"Oh, I see!" The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously. He was a
+little dashed by the stranger's non-communicativeness, but he soon
+broke out again.
+
+"I'm one o' Mis' Ericson's tenants. Look after one of her places. I
+did own the place myself oncet, but I lost it a while back, in the
+bad years just after the World's Fair. Just as well, too, I say.
+Lets you out o' payin' taxes. The Ericsons do own most of the county
+now. I remember the old preacher's fav'rite text used to be, 'To
+them that hath shall be given.' They've spread something
+wonderful--run over this here country like bindweed. But I ain't one
+that begretches it to 'em. Folks is entitled to what they kin git;
+and they're hustlers. Olaf, he's in the Legislature now, and a
+likely man fur Congress. Listen, if that ain't the old woman comin'
+now. Want I should stop her?"
+
+Nils shook his head. He heard the deep chug-chug of a motor
+vibrating steadily in the clear twilight behind them. The pale
+lights of the car swam over the hill, and the old man slapped his
+reins and turned clear out of the road, ducking his head at the
+first of three angry snorts from behind. The motor was running at a
+hot, even speed, and passed without turning an inch from its course.
+The driver was a stalwart woman who sat at ease in the front seat
+and drove her car bareheaded. She left a cloud of dust and a trail
+of gasoline behind her. Her tenant threw back his head and sneezed.
+
+"Whew! I sometimes say I'd as lief be _before_ Mrs. Ericson as
+behind her. She does beat all! Nearly seventy, and never lets
+another soul touch that car. Puts it into commission herself every
+morning, and keeps it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day. I never
+stop work for a drink o' water that I don't hear her a-churnin' up
+the road. I reckon her darter-in-laws never sets down easy nowadays.
+Never know when she'll pop in. Mis' Otto, she says to me: 'We're so
+afraid that thing'll blow up and do Ma some injury yet, she's so
+turrible venturesome.' Says I: 'I wouldn't stew, Mis' Otto; the old
+lady'll drive that car to the funeral of every darter-in-law she's
+got.' That was after the old woman had jumped a turrible bad
+culvert."
+
+The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying. Just now he
+was experiencing something very much like homesickness, and he was
+wondering what had brought it about. The mention of a name or two,
+perhaps; the rattle of a wagon along a dusty road; the rank,
+resinous smell of sunflowers and ironweed, which the night damp
+brought up from the draws and low places; perhaps, more than all,
+the dancing lights of the motor that had plunged by. He squared his
+shoulders with a comfortable sense of strength.
+
+The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady upgrade.
+The country, receding from the rough river valley, swelled more and
+more gently, as if it had been smoothed out by the wind. On one of
+the last of the rugged ridges, at the end of a branch road, stood a
+grim square house with a tin roof and double porches. Behind the
+house stretched a row of broken, wind-racked poplars, and down the
+hill-slope to the left straggled the sheds and stables. The old man
+stopped his horses where the Ericsons' road branched across a dry
+sand creek that wound about the foot of the hill.
+
+"That's the old lady's place. Want I should drive in?"
+
+"No, thank you. I'll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good
+night."
+
+His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old man
+drove on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see how
+the stranger would be received.
+
+As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive tramp of a
+horse coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he flashed out of
+the road and stood behind a thicket of wild plum bushes that grew in
+the sandy bed. Peering through the dusk, he saw a light horse, under
+tight rein, descending the hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a
+slender woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an
+old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding-skirt. She sat lightly in
+the saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the
+distance. As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air
+and shied. She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry
+exclamation, "_Blazne!_" in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let
+him out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high
+land, where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the
+band of faint color that lingered in the west. This horse and rider,
+with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to
+be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the last
+sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as an
+inevitable detail of the landscape.
+
+Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck
+against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the
+hill. When he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but
+a light was shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing
+in the hog corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two
+big wooden buckets, moving about among them. Half way between the
+barn and the house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path
+that ran around to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the
+screen door into the lamp-lit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest
+room in the house; Nils remembered that his older brothers used to
+give dances there when he was a boy. Beside the stove stood a little
+girl with two light yellow braids and a broad, flushed face, peering
+anxiously into a frying-pan. In the dining-room beyond, a large,
+broad-shouldered woman was moving about the table. She walked with
+an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and florid, almost
+without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy. Nils felt proud
+of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a momentary
+hesitation, or a movement that did not tell. He waited until she
+came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside, took her
+place at the stove. Then he tapped on the screen door and entered.
+
+"It's nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren't looking for me."
+
+Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at him.
+"Bring the lamp, Hilda, and let me look."
+
+Nils laughed and unslung his valise. "What's the matter, Mother?
+Don't you know me?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp. "You must be Nils. You don't look
+very different, anyway."
+
+"Nor you, Mother. You hold your own. Don't you wear glasses yet?"
+
+"Only to read by. Where's your trunk, Nils?"
+
+"Oh, I left that in town. I thought it might not be convenient for
+you to have company so near threshing-time."
+
+"Don't be foolish, Nils." Mrs. Ericson turned back to the stove. "I
+don't thresh now. I hitched the wheat land onto the next farm and
+have a tenant. Hilda, take some hot water up to the company room,
+and go call little Eric."
+
+The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute amazement, took
+up the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils a long, admiring look
+from the door of the kitchen stairs.
+
+"Who's the youngster?" Nils asked, dropping down on the bench behind
+the kitchen stove.
+
+"One of your Cousin Henrik's."
+
+"How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?"
+
+"Six years. There are two boys. One stays with Peter and one with
+Anders. Olaf is their guardeen."
+
+There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky boy
+peered wonderingly in through the screen door. He had a fair, gentle
+face and big gray eyes, and wisps of soft yellow hair hung down
+under his cap. Nils sprang up and pulled him into the kitchen,
+hugging him and slapping him on the shoulders. "Well, if it isn't my
+kid! Look at the size of him! Don't you know me, Eric?"
+
+The boy reddened under his sunburn and freckles, and hung his head.
+"I guess it's Nils," he said shyly.
+
+"You're a good guesser," laughed Nils, giving the lad's hand a
+swing. To himself he was thinking: "That's why the little girl
+looked so friendly. He's taught her to like me. He was only six when
+I went away, and he's remembered for twelve years."
+
+Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling. "You look just like I
+thought you would," he ventured.
+
+"Go wash your hands, Eric," called Mrs. Ericson. "I've got cob corn
+for supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you don't get much of
+that in the old country. Here's Hilda; she'll take you up to your
+room. You'll want to get the dust off you before you eat."
+
+Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate, and the
+little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him know that
+his room was ready. He put out his hand and she took it, with a
+startled glance up at his face. Little Eric dropped his towel, threw
+an arm about Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze,
+and then stumbled out to the porch.
+
+During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of his eight
+grown brothers farmed, how their crops were coming on, and how much
+live stock they were feeding. His mother watched him narrowly as she
+talked. "You've got better looking, Nils," she remarked abruptly,
+whereupon he grinned and the children giggled. Eric, although he was
+eighteen and as tall as Nils, was always accounted a child, being
+the last of so many sons. His face seemed childlike, too, Nils
+thought, and he had the open, wandering eyes of a little boy. All
+the others had been men at his age.
+
+After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on the
+step to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him
+and began to knit busily. It was one of the few old-world customs
+she had kept up, for she could not bear to sit with idle hands.
+
+"Where's little Eric, Mother?"
+
+"He's helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own will; I
+don't like a boy to be too handy about the house."
+
+"He seems like a nice kid."
+
+"He's very obedient."
+
+Nils smiled a little in the dark. It was just as well to shift the
+line of conversation. "What are you knitting there, Mother?"
+
+"Baby stockings. The boys keep me busy." Mrs. Ericson chuckled and
+clicked her needles.
+
+"How many grandchildren have you?"
+
+"Only thirty-one now. Olaf lost his three. They were sickly, like
+their mother."
+
+"I supposed he had a second crop by this time!"
+
+"His second wife has no children. She's too proud. She tears about
+on horseback all the time. But she'll get caught up with, yet. She
+sets herself very high, though nobody knows what for. They were low
+enough Bohemians she came of. I never thought much of Bohemians;
+always drinking."
+
+Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson knitted
+on. In a few moments she added grimly: "She was down here to-night,
+just before you came. She'd like to quarrel with me and come between
+me and Olaf, but I don't give her the chance. I suppose you'll be
+bringing a wife home some day."
+
+"I don't know. I've never thought much about it."
+
+"Well, perhaps it's best as it is," suggested Mrs. Ericson
+hopefully. "You'd never be contented tied down to the land. There
+was roving blood in your father's family, and it's come out in you.
+I expect your own way of life suits you best." Mrs. Ericson had
+dropped into a blandly agreeable tone which Nils well remembered. It
+seemed to amuse him a good deal and his white teeth flashed behind
+his pipe. His mother's strategies had always diverted him, even when
+he was a boy--they were so flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned
+to her vigor and force. "They've been waiting to see which way I'd
+jump," he reflected. He felt that Mrs. Ericson was pondering his
+case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.
+
+"I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work," she went on
+presently. "Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long. It's a
+pity you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair. Your
+father picked up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times,
+and I expect maybe he'd have give you a farm. It's too bad you put
+off comin' back so long, for I always thought he meant to do
+something by you."
+
+Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. "I'd have missed a
+lot if I had come back then. But I'm sorry I didn't get back to see
+father."
+
+"Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other.
+Perhaps you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as
+you'd have been with a farm," said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.
+
+"Land's a good thing to have," Nils commented, as he lit another
+match and sheltered it with his hand.
+
+His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out.
+"Only when you stay on it!" she hastened to say.
+
+Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with
+a yawn. "Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will take a little
+tramp before bed-time. It will make me sleep."
+
+"Very well; only don't stay long. I'll sit up and wait for you. I
+like to lock up myself."
+
+Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down the
+hill and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond.
+Neither spoke. They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his
+pipe. There was no moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay
+faint in the starlight. Over everything was darkness and thick
+silence, and the smell of dust and sunflowers. The brothers followed
+the road for a mile or more without finding a place to sit down.
+Finally Nils perched on a stile over the wire fence, and Eric sat on
+the lower step.
+
+"I began to think you never would come back, Nils," said the boy
+softly.
+
+"Didn't I promise you I would?"
+
+"Yes; but people don't bother about promises they make to babies.
+Did you really know you were going away for good when you went to
+Chicago with the cattle that time?"
+
+"I thought it very likely, if I could make my way."
+
+"I don't see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could." Eric
+rubbed his shoulder against his brother's knee.
+
+"The hard thing was leaving home--you and father. It was easy
+enough, once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got awful homesick;
+used to cry myself to sleep. But I'd burned my bridges."
+
+"You had always wanted to go, hadn't you?"
+
+"Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood
+still by the window?"
+
+Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the gray
+darkness.
+
+"You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering when
+they rustled at night? Well, they always whispered to me about the
+sea. Sometimes they said names out of the geography books. In a high
+wind they had a desperate sound, like something trying to tear
+loose."
+
+"How funny, Nils," said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his hand.
+"That tree still talks like that, and 'most always it talks to me
+about you."
+
+They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric whispered
+anxiously: "Hadn't we better go back now? Mother will get tired
+waiting for us." They rose and took a short cut home, through the
+pasture.
+
+
+II
+
+The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that came
+with dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room reflected the glare
+that shone through the thin window-shades, and he found it
+impossible to sleep. He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the hall
+and up the back stairs to the half-story room which he used to share
+with his little brother. Eric, in a skimpy night-shirt, was sitting
+on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair
+standing up in tufts all over his head. When he saw Nils, he
+murmured something confusedly and hustled his long legs into his
+trousers. "I didn't expect you'd be up so early, Nils," he said, as
+his head emerged from his blue shirt.
+
+"Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?" Nils gave him a playful tap
+which bent the tall boy up like a clasp-knife. "See here; I must
+teach you to box." Nils thrust his hands into his pockets and walked
+about. "You haven't changed things much up here. Got most of my old
+traps, haven't you?"
+
+He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the
+dresser. "If this isn't the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself with!"
+
+The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.
+
+"Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did he do
+it, Nils? You were with father when he found Lou, weren't you?"
+
+"Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we drove
+along, Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought we'd stop
+and cheer him up. When we found him father said he'd been dead a
+couple days. He'd tied a piece of binding twine round his neck, made
+a noose in each end, fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick,
+and let the stick spring straight; strangled himself."
+
+"What made him kill himself such a silly way?"
+
+The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He clapped
+little Eric on the shoulder. "What made him such a silly as to kill
+himself at all, I should say!"
+
+"Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died on him,
+didn't they?"
+
+"Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were plenty of
+hogs left in the world, weren't there?"
+
+"Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any good?"
+Eric asked, in astonishment.
+
+"Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people's hogs.
+He was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig--think of
+that, now!" Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and quite
+embarrassed little Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and hands at
+the tin basin. While he was patting his wet hair at the kitchen
+looking-glass, a heavy tread sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped
+his comb. "Gracious, there's Mother. We must have talked too long."
+He hurried out to the shed, slipped on his overalls, and disappeared
+with the milking-pails.
+
+Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black hair
+shining from the application of a wet brush.
+
+"Good morning, Mother. Can't I make the fire for you?"
+
+"No, thank you, Nils. It's no trouble to make a cob fire, and I like
+to manage the kitchen stove myself." Mrs. Ericson paused with a
+shovel full of ashes in her hand. "I expect you will be wanting to
+see your brothers as soon as possible. I'll take you up to Anders'
+place this morning. He's threshing, and most of our boys are over
+there."
+
+"Will Olaf be there?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between
+shovels. "No; Olaf's wheat is all in, put away in his new barn. He
+got six thousand bushel this year. He's going to town to-day to get
+men to finish roofing his barn."
+
+"So Olaf is building a new barn?" Nils asked absently.
+
+"Biggest one in the county, and almost done. You'll likely be here
+for the barn-raising. He's going to have a supper and a dance as
+soon as everybody's done threshing. Says it keeps the voters in a
+good humor. I tell him that's all nonsense; but Olaf has a long head
+for politics."
+
+"Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik's land?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke curling up
+about the cobs. "Yes; he holds it in trust for the children, Hilda
+and her brothers. He keeps strict account of everything he raises on
+it, and puts the proceeds out at compound interest for them."
+
+Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up. The door of
+the back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms behind her,
+buttoning up her long gingham apron as she came. He nodded to her
+gaily, and she twinkled at him out of her little blue eyes, set far
+apart over her wide cheek-bones.
+
+"There, Hilda, you grind the coffee--and just put in an extra
+handful; I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong," said Mrs.
+Ericson, as she went out to the shed.
+
+Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the
+coffee-grinder between her knees and ground so hard that her two
+braids bobbed and her face flushed under its broad spattering of
+freckles. He noticed on her middle finger something that had not
+been there last night, and that had evidently been put on for
+company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set garnet stone. As her
+hand went round and round he touched the ring with the tip of his
+finger, smiling.
+
+Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs. Ericson had
+disappeared. "My Cousin Clara gave me that," she whispered
+bashfully. "She's Cousin Olaf's wife."
+
+
+III
+
+Mrs. Olaf Ericson--Clara Vavrika, as many people still called
+her--was moving restlessly about her big bare house that morning.
+Her husband had left for the county town before his wife was out of
+bed--her lateness in rising was one of the many things the Ericson
+family had against her. Clara seldom came downstairs before eight
+o'clock, and this morning she was even later, for she had dressed
+with unusual care. She put on, however, only a tight-fitting black
+dress, which people thereabouts thought very plain. She was a tall,
+dark woman of thirty, with a rather sallow complexion and a touch of
+dull salmon red in her cheeks, where the blood seemed to burn under
+her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly above her low forehead, was
+so black that there were distinctly blue lights in it. Her black
+eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes were long and
+heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a strain of Tartar
+or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery determination and
+sometimes dull and opaque. Her expression was never altogether
+amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or, when she was
+animated, sarcastic. She was most attractive in profile, for then
+one saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head and delicate ears,
+and felt at once that here was a very positive, if not an altogether
+pleasing, personality.
+
+The entire management of Mrs. Olaf's household devolved upon her
+aunt, Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty. When
+Clara was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna's life had been
+spent in ungrudging service to her niece. Clara, like many
+self-willed and discontented persons, was really very apt, without
+knowing it, to do as other people told her, and to let her destiny
+be decided for her by intelligences much below her own. It was her
+Aunt Johanna who had humored and spoiled her in her girlhood, who
+had got her off to Chicago to study piano, and who had finally
+persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson as the best match she would be
+likely to make in that part of the country. Johanna Vavrika had been
+deeply scarred by smallpox in the old country. She was short and
+fat, homely and jolly and sentimental. She was so broad, and took
+such short steps when she walked, that her brother, Joe Vavrika,
+always called her his duck. She adored her niece because of her
+talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but most of
+all because of her selfishness.
+
+Clara's marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna's particular triumph.
+She was inordinately proud of Olaf's position, and she found a
+sufficiently exciting career in managing Clara's house, in keeping
+it above the criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf to keep him
+from finding fault with his wife, and in concealing from every one
+Clara's domestic infelicities. While Clara slept of a morning,
+Johanna Vavrika was bustling about, seeing that Olaf and the men had
+their breakfast, and that the cleaning or the butter-making or the
+washing was properly begun by the two girls in the kitchen. Then, at
+about eight o'clock, she would take Clara's coffee up to her, and chat
+with her while she drank it, telling her what was going on in the
+house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently said that her daughter-in-law would
+not know what day of the week it was if Johanna did not tell her
+every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised and pitied Johanna, but did not
+wholly dislike her. The one thing she hated in her daughter-in-law
+above everything else was the way in which Clara could come it over
+people. It enraged her that the affairs of her son's big, barnlike
+house went on as well as they did, and she used to feel that in this
+world we have to wait over-long to see the guilty punished. "Suppose
+Johanna Vavrika died or got sick?" the old lady used to say to Olaf.
+"Your wife wouldn't know where to look for her own dish-cloth." Olaf
+only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did not
+die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was looking
+poorly, she was never ill. She seldom left the house, and she slept
+in a little room off the kitchen. No Ericson, by night or day, could
+come prying about there to find fault without her knowing it. Her
+one weakness was that she was an incurable talker, and she sometimes
+made trouble without meaning to.
+
+This morning Clara was tying a wine-colored ribbon about her throat
+when Johanna appeared with her coffee. After putting the tray on a
+sewing-table, she began to make Clara's bed, chattering the while in
+Bohemian.
+
+"Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking. I'm going down
+presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf. He asked for prune
+preserves at breakfast, and I told him I was out of them, and to
+bring some prunes and honey and cloves from town."
+
+Clara poured her coffee. "Ugh! I don't see how men can eat so much
+sweet stuff. In the morning, too!"
+
+Her aunt chuckled knowingly. "Bait a bear with honey, as we say in
+the old country."
+
+"Was he cross?" her niece asked indifferently.
+
+"Olaf? Oh, no! He was in fine spirits. He's never cross if you know
+how to take him. I never knew a man to make so little fuss about
+bills. I gave him a list of things to get a yard long, and he didn't
+say a word; just folded it up and put it in his pocket."
+
+"I can well believe he didn't say a word," Clara remarked with a
+shrug. "Some day he'll forget how to talk."
+
+"Oh, but they say he's a grand speaker in the Legislature. He knows
+when to keep quiet. That's why he's got such influence in politics.
+The people have confidence in him." Johanna beat up a pillow and
+held it under her fat chin while she slipped on the case. Her niece
+laughed.
+
+"Maybe we could make people believe we were wise, Aunty, if we held
+our tongues. Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson that Norman threw me
+again last Saturday and turned my foot? She's been talking to Olaf."
+
+Johanna fell into great confusion. "Oh, but, my precious, the old
+lady asked for you, and she's always so angry if I can't give an
+excuse. Anyhow, she needn't talk; she's always tearing up something
+with that motor of hers."
+
+When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to dust the
+parlor. Since there was not much there to dust, this did not take
+very long. Olaf had built the house new for her before their
+marriage, but her interest in furnishing it had been short-lived. It
+went, indeed, little beyond a bath-tub and her piano. They had
+disagreed about almost every other article of furniture, and Clara
+had said she would rather have her house empty than full of things
+she didn't want. The house was set in a hillside, and the west
+windows of the parlor looked out above the kitchen yard thirty feet
+below. The east windows opened directly into the front yard. At one
+of the latter, Clara, while she was dusting, heard a low whistle.
+She did not turn at once, but listened intently as she drew her
+cloth slowly along the round of a chair. Yes, there it was:
+
+  "_I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,_"
+
+She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight, his hat in
+his hand, just outside the window. As she crossed the room he leaned
+against the wire screen. "Aren't you at all surprised to see me,
+Clara Vavrika?"
+
+"No; I was expecting to see you. Mother Ericson telephoned Olaf last
+night that you were here."
+
+Nils squinted and gave a long whistle. "Telephoned? That must have
+been while Eric and I were out walking. Isn't she enterprising? Lift
+this screen, won't you?"
+
+Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the
+window-sill. As he stepped into the room she said: "You didn't think
+you were going to get ahead of your mother, did you?"
+
+He threw his hat on the piano. "Oh, I do sometimes. You see, I'm
+ahead of her now. I'm supposed to be in Anders' wheat-field. But, as
+we were leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place beside the
+road and sank up to the hubs. While they were going for horses to
+pull her out, I cut away behind the stacks and escaped." Nils
+chuckled. Clara's dull eyes lit up as she looked at him admiringly.
+
+"You've got them guessing already. I don't know what your mother
+said to Olaf over the telephone, but he came back looking as if he'd
+seen a ghost, and he didn't go to bed until a dreadful hour--ten
+o'clock, I should think. He sat out on the porch in the dark like a
+graven image. It had been one of his talkative days, too." They both
+laughed, easily and lightly, like people who have laughed a great
+deal together; but they remained standing.
+
+"Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts, too,
+over in the threshing-field. What's the matter with them all?"
+
+Clara gave him a quick, searching look. "Well, for one thing,
+they've always been afraid you have the other will."
+
+Nils looked interested. "The other will?"
+
+"Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another, but they
+never knew what he did with it. They almost tore the old house to
+pieces looking for it. They always suspected that he carried on a
+clandestine correspondence with you, for the one thing he would do
+was to get his own mail himself. So they thought he might have sent
+the new will to you for safekeeping. The old one, leaving everything
+to your mother, was made long before you went away, and it's
+understood among them that it cuts you out--that she will leave all
+the property to the others. Your father made the second will to
+prevent that. I've been hoping you had it. It would be such fun to
+spring it on them." Clara laughed mirthfully, a thing she did not
+often do now.
+
+Nils shook his head reprovingly. "Come, now, you're malicious."
+
+"No, I'm not. But I'd like something to happen to stir them all up,
+just for once. There never was such a family for having nothing ever
+happen to them but dinner and threshing. I'd almost be willing to
+die, just to have a funeral. _You_ wouldn't stand it for three
+weeks."
+
+Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys with the
+finger of one hand. "I wouldn't? My dear young lady, how do you know
+what I can stand? _You_ wouldn't wait to find out."
+
+Clara flushed darkly and frowned. "I didn't believe you would ever
+come back--" she said defiantly.
+
+"Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went away.
+However, all's well that ends well, and I haven't come back to be a
+skeleton at the feast. We mustn't quarrel. Mother will be here with
+a search-warrant pretty soon." He swung round and faced her,
+thrusting his hands into his coat pockets. "Come, you ought to be
+glad to see me, if you want something to happen. I'm something, even
+without a will. We can have a little fun, can't we? I think we can!"
+
+She echoed him, "I think we can!" They both laughed and their eyes
+sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when she had
+put the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.
+
+"You know, I'm so tickled to see mother," Nils went on. "I didn't
+know I was so proud of her. A regular pile-driver. How about little
+pigtails, down at the house? Is Olaf doing the square thing by those
+children?"
+
+Clara frowned pensively. "Olaf has to do something that looks like
+the square thing, now that he's a public man!" She glanced drolly at
+Nils. "But he makes a good commission out of it. On Sundays they all
+get together here and figure. He lets Peter and Anders put in big
+bills for the keep of the two boys, and he pays them out of the
+estate. They are always having what they call accountings. Olaf gets
+something out of it, too. I don't know just how they do it, but it's
+entirely a family matter, as they say. And when the Ericsons say
+that--" Clara lifted her eyebrows.
+
+Just then the angry _honk-honk_ of an approaching motor sounded from
+down the road. Their eyes met and they began to laugh. They laughed
+as children do when they can not contain themselves, and can not
+explain the cause of their mirth to grown people, but share it
+perfectly together. When Clara Vavrika sat down at the piano after
+he was gone, she felt that she had laughed away a dozen years. She
+practised as if the house were burning over her head.
+
+When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat of the
+motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she made no comment
+upon his truancy until she had turned her car and was retracing her
+revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf's big pasture. Then she
+remarked dryly:
+
+"If I were you I wouldn't see too much of Olaf's wife while you are
+here. She's the kind of woman who can't see much of men without
+getting herself talked about. She was a good deal talked about
+before he married her."
+
+"Hasn't Olaf tamed her?" Nils asked indifferently.
+
+Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. "Olaf don't seem to
+have much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek
+enough, but she was always ailing. And this one has her own way. He
+says if he quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and then
+he'd lose the Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks in this
+district. But when you find a man under his wife's thumb you can
+always be sure there's a soft spot in him somewhere."
+
+Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. "She brought him a good
+deal of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson sniffed. "Well, she has a fair half section in her own
+name, but I can't see as that does Olaf much good. She will have a
+good deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don't marry again.
+But I don't consider a saloonkeeper's money as good as other
+people's money."
+
+Nils laughed outright. "Come, Mother, don't let your prejudices
+carry you that far. Money's money. Old Vavrika's a mighty decent
+sort of saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him."
+
+Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily: "Oh, I know you always stood up for
+them! But hanging around there when you were a boy never did you any
+good, Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there. There weren't
+so many after her when she married Olaf, let me tell you. She knew
+enough to grab her chance."
+
+Nils settled back in his seat. "Of course I liked to go there,
+Mother, and you were always cross about it. You never took the
+trouble to find out that it was the one jolly house in this country
+for a boy to go to. All the rest of you were working yourselves to
+death, and the houses were mostly a mess, full of babies and washing
+and flies. Oh, it was all right--I understand that; but you are
+young only once, and I happened to be young then. Now, Vavrika's was
+always jolly. He played the violin, and I used to take my flute, and
+Clara played the piano, and Johanna used to sing Bohemian songs. She
+always had a big supper for us--herrings and pickles and poppyseed
+bread, and lots of cake and preserves. Old Joe had been in the army
+in the old country, and he could tell lots of good stories. I can
+see him cutting bread, at the head of the table, now. I don't know
+what I'd have done when I was a kid if it hadn't been for the
+Vavrikas, really."
+
+"And all the time he was taking money that other people had worked
+hard in the fields for," Mrs. Ericson observed.
+
+"So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing. People ought
+to get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old Joe."
+
+"Your father," Mrs. Ericson said grimly, "liked everybody."
+
+As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place, Mrs.
+Ericson observed, "There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his way
+from town." Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his brother,
+who was waiting on the porch.
+
+Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement. His
+head was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at a
+distance, tried to remember what his brother looked like, he could
+recall only his heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils, and
+pale-blue eyes, set far apart. Olaf's features were rudimentary: the
+thing one noticed was the face itself, wide and flat and pale,
+devoid of any expression, betraying his fifty years as little as it
+betrayed anything else, and powerful by reason of its very
+stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked at him from
+under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could ever say
+what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had always felt in
+Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness of wet
+loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the most difficult
+of his brothers.
+
+"How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?"
+
+"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily. "I like this country
+better than I used to."
+
+"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.
+
+"Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm about
+ready to settle down." Nils saw his brother lower his big head.
+("Exactly like a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading me to
+slow down now, and go in for farming," he went on lightly.
+
+Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. "Farming ain't learned in a
+day," he brought out, still looking at the ground.
+
+"Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly." Nils had not meant to
+antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing it.
+"Of course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big success,
+as you fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious. I won't want
+much. A little land, and some cattle, maybe."
+
+Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to ask
+Nils what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't have a
+business somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he hadn't more
+pride than to come back with only a little sole-leather trunk to
+show for himself, and to present himself as the only failure in the
+family. He did not ask one of these questions, but he made them all
+felt distinctly.
+
+"Humph!" Nils thought. "No wonder the man never talks, when he can
+butt his ideas into you like that without ever saying a word. I
+suppose he uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife all the
+time. But I guess she has her innings." He chuckled, and Olaf looked
+up. "Never mind me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing why, like little
+Eric. He's another cheerful dog."
+
+"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid. He's just let his
+mother's best cow go dry because he don't milk her right. I was
+hoping you'd take him away somewhere and put him into business. If
+he don't do any good among strangers, he never will." This was a
+long speech for Olaf, and as he finished it he climbed into his
+buggy.
+
+Nils shrugged his shoulders. "Same old tricks," he thought. "Hits
+from behind you every time. What a whale of a man!" He turned and
+went round to the kitchen, where his mother was scolding little Eric
+for letting the gasoline get low.
+
+
+IV
+
+Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county-seat, where Olaf and Mrs.
+Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a little
+Bohemian settlement which lay at the other end of the county, ten
+level miles north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see her father
+almost every day. Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in the back yard
+of his saloon. The garden between the two buildings was inclosed by
+a high board fence as tight as a partition, and in summer Joe kept
+beer-tables and wooden benches among the gooseberry bushes under his
+little cherry tree. At one of these tables Nils Ericson was seated
+in the late afternoon, three days after his return home. Joe had
+gone in to serve a customer, and Nils was lounging on his elbows,
+looking rather mournfully into his half-emptied pitcher, when he
+heard a laugh across the little garden. Clara, in her riding-habit,
+was standing at the back door of the house, under the grapevine
+trellis that old Joe had grown there long ago. Nils rose.
+
+"Come out and keep your father and me company. We've been gossiping
+all afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the flies."
+
+She shook her head. "No, I never come out here any more. Olaf
+doesn't like it. I must live up to my position, you know."
+
+"You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as
+you used to? He _has_ tamed you! Who keeps up these flower-beds?"
+
+"I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the Bohemian
+papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is open. What have
+you two been doing?"
+
+"Talking, as I told you. I've been telling him about my travels. I
+find I can't talk much at home, not even to Eric."
+
+Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white moth that
+was fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves. "I suppose you
+will never tell me about all those things."
+
+"Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf's house, certainly. What's the
+matter with our talking here?" He pointed persuasively with his hat
+to the bushes and the green table, where the flies were singing
+lazily above the empty beer-glasses.
+
+Clara shook her head weakly. "No, it wouldn't do. Besides, I am
+going now."
+
+"I'm on Eric's mare. Would you be angry if I overtook you?"
+
+Clara looked back and laughed. "You might try and see. I can leave
+you if I don't want you. Eric's mare can't keep up with Norman."
+
+Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big Joe, six
+feet four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped him on the
+shoulder. "Not a God-damn a your money go in my drawer, you hear?
+Only next time you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty." Joe wagged
+his fingers in imitation of the flute-player's position. "My Clara,
+she come all-a-time Sundays an' play for me. She not like to play at
+Ericson's place." He shook his yellow curls and laughed. "Not a
+God-damn a fun at Ericson's. You come a Sunday. You like-a fun. No
+forget de flute." Joe talked very rapidly and always tumbled over
+his English. He seldom spoke it to his customers, and had never
+learned much.
+
+Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west end of
+the village, where the houses and gardens scattered into
+prairie-land and the road turned south. Far ahead of him, in the
+declining light, he saw Clara Vavrika's slender figure, loitering on
+horseback. He touched his mare with the whip, and shot along the
+white, level road, under the reddening sky. When he overtook Olaf's
+wife he saw that she had been crying. "What's the matter, Clara
+Vavrika?" he asked kindly.
+
+"Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there with
+father. I wonder why I ever went away."
+
+Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women:
+"That's what I've been wondering these many years. You were the last
+girl in the country I'd have picked for a wife for Olaf. What made
+you do it, Clara?"
+
+"I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbors"--Clara tossed
+her head. "People were beginning to wonder."
+
+"To wonder?"
+
+"Yes--why I didn't get married. I suppose I didn't like to keep them
+in suspense. I've discovered that most girls marry out of
+consideration for the neighborhood."
+
+Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed. "I'd have
+gambled that one girl I knew would say, 'Let the neighborhood be
+damned.'"
+
+Clara shook her head mournfully. "You see, they have it on you,
+Nils; that is, if you're a woman. They say you're beginning to go
+off. That's what makes us get married: we can't stand the laugh."
+
+Nils looked sidewise at her. He had never seen her head droop
+before. Resignation was the last thing he would have expected of
+her. "In your case, there wasn't something else?"
+
+"Something else?"
+
+"I mean, you didn't do it to spite somebody? Somebody who didn't
+come back?"
+
+Clara drew herself up. "Oh, I never thought you'd come back. Not
+after I stopped writing to you, at least. _That_ was all over, long
+before I married Olaf."
+
+"It never occurred to you, then, that the meanest thing you could do
+to me was to marry Olaf?"
+
+Clara laughed. "No; I didn't know you were so fond of Olaf."
+
+Nils smoothed his horse's mane with his glove. "You know, Clara
+Vavrika, you are never going to stick it out. You'll cut away some
+day, and I've been thinking you might as well cut away with me."
+
+Clara threw up her chin. "Oh, you don't know me as well as you
+think. I won't cut away. Sometimes, when I'm with father, I feel
+like it. But I can hold out as long as the Ericsons can. They've
+never got the best of me yet, and one can live, so long as one isn't
+beaten. If I go back to father, it's all up with Olaf in politics.
+He knows that, and he never goes much beyond sulking. I've as much
+wit as the Ericsons. I'll never leave them unless I can show them a
+thing or two."
+
+"You mean unless you can come it over them?"
+
+"Yes--unless I go away with a man who is cleverer than they are, and
+who has more money."
+
+Nils whistled. "Dear me, you are demanding a good deal. The
+Ericsons, take the lot of them, are a bunch to beat. But I should
+think the excitement of tormenting them would have worn off by this
+time."
+
+"It has, I'm afraid," Clara admitted mournfully.
+
+"Then why don't you cut away? There are more amusing games than this
+in the world. When I came home I thought it might amuse me to bully
+a few quarter sections out of the Ericsons; but I've almost decided
+I can get more fun for my money somewhere else."
+
+Clara took in her breath sharply. "Ah, you have got the other will!
+That was why you came home!"
+
+"No, it wasn't. I came home to see how you were getting on with
+Olaf."
+
+Clara struck her horse with the whip, and in a bound she was far
+ahead of him. Nils dropped one word, "Damn!" and whipped after her;
+but she leaned forward in her saddle and fairly cut the wind. Her
+long riding-skirt rippled in the still air behind her. The sun was
+just sinking behind the stubble in a vast, clear sky, and the
+shadows drew across the fields so rapidly that Nils could scarcely
+keep in sight the dark figure on the road. When he overtook her he
+caught her horse by the bridle. Norman reared, and Nils was
+frightened for her; but Clara kept her seat.
+
+"Let me go, Nils Ericson!" she cried. "I hate you more than any of
+them. You were created to torture me, the whole tribe of you--to
+make me suffer in every possible way."
+
+She struck her horse again and galloped away from him. Nils set his
+teeth and looked thoughtful. He rode slowly home along the deserted
+road, watching the stars come out in the clear violet sky. They
+flashed softly into the limpid heavens, like jewels let fall into
+clear water. They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid world. As he
+turned across the sand creek, he looked up at the North Star and
+smiled, as if there were an understanding between them. His mother
+scolded him for being late for supper.
+
+
+V
+
+On Sunday afternoon Joe Vavrika, in his shirt-sleeves and
+carpet-slippers, was sitting in his garden, smoking a long-tasseled
+porcelain pipe with a hunting scene painted on the bowl. Clara sat
+under the cherry tree, reading aloud to him from the weekly Bohemian
+papers. She had worn a white muslin dress under her riding-habit,
+and the leaves of the cherry tree threw a pattern of sharp shadows
+over her skirt. The black cat was dozing in the sunlight at her
+feet, and Joe's dachshund was scratching a hole under the scarlet
+geraniums and dreaming of badgers. Joe was filling his pipe for the
+third time since dinner, when he heard a knocking on the fence. He
+broke into a loud guffaw and unlatched the little door that led into
+the street. He did not call Nils by name, but caught him by the hand
+and dragged him in. Clara stiffened and the color deepened under her
+dark skin. Nils, too, felt a little awkward. He had not seen her
+since the night when she rode away from him and left him alone on
+the level road between the fields. Joe dragged him to the wooden
+bench beside the green table.
+
+"You bring de flute," he cried, tapping the leather case under Nils'
+arm. "Ah, das-a good! Now we have some liddle fun like old times. I
+got somet'ing good for you." Joe shook his finger at Nils and winked
+his blue eyes, a bright clear eye, full of fire, though the tiny
+blood-vessels on the ball were always a little distended. "I got
+somet'ing for you from"--he paused and waved his hand--"Hongarie.
+You know Hongarie? You wait!" He pushed Nils down on the bench, and
+went through the back door of his saloon.
+
+Nils looked at Clara, who sat frigidly with her white skirts drawn
+tight about her. "He didn't tell you he had asked me to come, did
+he? He wanted a party and proceeded to arrange it. Isn't he fun?
+Don't be cross; let's give him a good time."
+
+Clara smiled and shook out her skirt. "Isn't that like father? And
+he has sat here so meekly all day. Well, I won't pout. I'm glad you
+came. He doesn't have very many good times now any more. There are
+so few of his kind left. The second generation are a tame lot."
+
+Joe came back with a flask in one hand and three wine-glasses caught
+by the stems between the fingers of the other. These he placed on
+the table with an air of ceremony, and, going behind Nils, held the
+flask between him and the sun, squinting into it admiringly. "You
+know dis, Tokai? A great friend of mine, he bring dis to me, a
+present out of Hongarie. You know how much it cost, dis wine? Chust
+so much what it weigh in gold. Nobody but de nobles drink him in
+Bohemie. Many, many years I save him up, dis Tokai." Joe whipped out
+his official cork-screw and delicately removed the cork. "De old man
+die what bring him to me, an' dis wine he lay on his belly in my
+cellar an' sleep. An' now," carefully pouring out the heavy yellow
+wine, "an' now he wake up; and maybe he wake us up, too!" He carried
+one of the glasses to his daughter and presented it with great
+gallantry.
+
+Clara shook her head, but, seeing her father's disappointment,
+relented. "You taste it first. I don't want so much."
+
+Joe sampled it with a beatific expression, and turned to Nils. "You
+drink him slow, dis wine. He very soft, but he go down hot. You
+see!"
+
+After a second glass Nils declared that he couldn't take any more
+without getting sleepy. "Now get your fiddle, Vavrika," he said as
+he opened his flute-case.
+
+But Joe settled back in his wooden rocker and wagged his big
+carpet-slipper. "No-no-no-no-no-no-no! No play fiddle now any more:
+too much ache in de finger," waving them, "all-a-time rheumatiz. You
+play de flute, te-tety-te-tety-te. Bohemie songs."
+
+"I've forgotten all the Bohemian songs I used to play with you and
+Johanna. But here's one that will make Clara pout. You remember how
+her eyes used to snap when we called her the Bohemian Girl?" Nils
+lifted his flute and began "When Other Lips and Other Hearts," and
+Joe hummed the air in a husky baritone, waving his carpet-slipper.
+"Oh-h-h, das-a fine music," he cried, clapping his hands as Nils
+finished. "Now 'Marble Halls, Marble Halls'! Clara, you sing him."
+
+Clara smiled and leaned back in her chair, beginning softly:
+
+  "_I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,
+  With vassals and serfs at my knee,_"
+
+and Joe hummed like a big bumble-bee.
+
+"There's one more you always played," Clara said quietly; "I
+remember that best." She locked her hands over her knee and began
+"The Heart Bowed Down," and sang it through without groping for the
+words. She was singing with a good deal of warmth when she came to
+the end of the old song:
+
+  "_For memory is the only friend
+  That grief can call its own._"
+
+Joe flashed out his red silk handkerchief and blew his nose, shaking
+his head. "No-no-no-no-no-no-no! Too sad, too sad! I not like-a dat.
+Play quick somet'ing gay now."
+
+Nils put his lips to the instrument, and Joe lay back in his chair,
+laughing and singing, "Oh, Evelina, Sweet Evelina!" Clara laughed,
+too. Long ago, when she and Nils went to high school, the model
+student of their class was a very homely girl in thick spectacles.
+Her name was Evelina Oleson; she had a long, swinging walk which
+somehow suggested the measure of that song, and they used
+mercilessly to sing it at her.
+
+"Dat ugly Oleson girl, she teach in de school," Joe gasped, "an' she
+still walk chust like dat, yup-a, yup-a, yup-a, chust like a camel
+she go! Now, Nils, we have some more li'l drink. Oh,
+yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-_yes!_ Dis time you haf to drink, and Clara
+she haf to, so she show she not jealous. So, we all drink to your
+girl. You not tell her name, eh? No-no-no, I no make you tell. She
+pretty, eh? She make good sweetheart? I bet!" Joe winked and lifted
+his glass. "How soon you get married?"
+
+Nils screwed up his eyes. "That I don't know. When she says."
+
+Joe threw out his chest. "Das-a way boys talks. No way for mans.
+Mans say, 'You come to de church, an' get a hurry on you.' Das-a way
+mans talks."
+
+"Maybe Nils hasn't got enough to keep a wife," put in Clara
+ironically. "How about that, Nils?" she asked him frankly, as if she
+wanted to know.
+
+Nils looked at her coolly, raising one eyebrow. "Oh, I can keep her,
+all right."
+
+"The way she wants to be kept?"
+
+"With my wife, I'll decide that," replied Nils calmly. "I'll give
+her what's good for her."
+
+Clara made a wry face. "You'll give her the strap, I expect, like
+old Peter Oleson gave his wife."
+
+"When she needs it," said Nils lazily, locking his hands behind his
+head and squinting up through the leaves of the cherry tree. "Do you
+remember the time I squeezed the cherries all over your clean dress,
+and Aunt Johanna boxed my ears for me? My gracious, weren't you mad!
+You had both hands full of cherries, and I squeezed 'em and made the
+juice fly all over you. I liked to have fun with you; you'd get so
+mad."
+
+"We _did_ have fun, didn't we? None of the other kids ever had so
+much fun. We knew how to play."
+
+Nils dropped his elbows on the table and looked steadily across at
+her. "I've played with lots of girls since, but I haven't found one
+who was such good fun."
+
+Clara laughed. The late afternoon sun was shining full in her face,
+and deep in the back of her eyes there shone something fiery, like
+the yellow drops of Tokai in the brown glass bottle. "Can you still
+play, or are you only pretending?"
+
+"I can play better than I used to, and harder."
+
+"Don't you ever work, then?" She had not intended to say it. It
+slipped out because she was confused enough to say just the wrong
+thing.
+
+"I work between times." Nils' steady gaze still beat upon her.
+"Don't you worry about my working, Mrs. Ericson. You're getting like
+all the rest of them." He reached his brown, warm hand across the
+table and dropped it on Clara's, which was cold as an icicle. "Last
+call for play, Mrs. Ericson!" Clara shivered, and suddenly her hands
+and cheeks grew warm. Her fingers lingered in his a moment, and they
+looked at each other earnestly. Joe Vavrika had put the mouth of the
+bottle to his lips and was swallowing the last drops of the Tokai,
+standing. The sun, just about to sink behind his shop, glistened on
+the bright glass, on his flushed face and curly yellow hair. "Look,"
+Clara whispered; "that's the way I want to grow old."
+
+
+VI
+
+On the day of Olaf Ericson's barn-raising, his wife, for once in a
+way, rose early. Johanna Vavrika had been baking cakes and frying
+and boiling and spicing meats for a week beforehand, but it was not
+until the day before the party was to take place that Clara showed
+any interest in it. Then she was seized with one of her fitful
+spasms of energy, and took the wagon and little Eric and spent the
+day on Plum Creek, gathering vines and swamp goldenrod to decorate
+the barn.
+
+By four o'clock in the afternoon buggies and wagons began to arrive
+at the big unpainted building in front of Olaf's house. When Nils
+and his mother came at five, there were more than fifty people in
+the barn, and a great drove of children. On the ground floor stood
+six long tables, set with the crockery of seven flourishing Ericson
+families, lent for the occasion. In the middle of each table was a
+big yellow pumpkin, hollowed out and filled with woodbine. In one
+corner of the barn, behind a pile of green-and-white-striped
+watermelons, was a circle of chairs for the old people; the younger
+guests sat on bushel measures or barbed-wire spools, and the
+children tumbled about in the haymow. The box-stalls Clara had
+converted into booths. The framework was hidden by goldenrod and
+sheaves of wheat, and the partitions were covered with wild
+grapevines full of fruit. At one of these Johanna Vavrika watched
+over her cooked meats, enough to provision an army; and at the next
+her kitchen girls had ranged the ice-cream freezers, and Clara was
+already cutting pies and cakes against the hour of serving. At the
+third stall, little Hilda, in a bright pink lawn dress, dispensed
+lemonade throughout the afternoon. Olaf, as a public man, had
+thought it inadvisable to serve beer in his barn; but Joe Vavrika
+had come over with two demijohns concealed in his buggy, and after
+his arrival the wagon-shed was much frequented by the men.
+
+"Hasn't Cousin Clara fixed things lovely?" little Hilda whispered,
+when Nils went up to her stall and asked for lemonade.
+
+Nils leaned against the booth, talking to the excited little girl
+and watching the people. The barn faced the west, and the sun,
+pouring in at the big doors, filled the whole interior with a golden
+light, through which filtered fine particles of dust from the
+haymow, where the children were romping. There was a great
+chattering from the stall where Johanna Vavrika exhibited to the
+admiring women her platters heaped with fried chicken, her roasts of
+beef, boiled tongues, and baked hams with cloves stuck in the crisp
+brown fat and garnished with tansy and parsley. The older women,
+having assured themselves that there were twenty kinds of cake, not
+counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies, repaired to the corner
+behind the pile of watermelons, put on their white aprons, and fell
+to their knitting and fancy-work. They were a fine company of old
+women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them there
+together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent
+long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the
+rafters. There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best
+black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined hands;
+and several of almost heroic frame, not less massive than old Mrs.
+Ericson herself. Few of them wore glasses, and old Mrs. Svendsen, a
+Danish woman, who was quite bald, wore the only cap among them. Mrs.
+Oleson, who had twelve big grandchildren, could still show two
+braids of yellow hair as thick as her own wrists. Among all these
+grandmothers there were more brown heads than white. They all had a
+pleased, prosperous air, as if they were more than satisfied with
+themselves and with life. Nils, leaning against Hilda's
+lemonade-stand, watched them as they sat chattering in four
+languages, their fingers never lagging behind their tongues.
+
+"Look at them over there," he whispered, detaining Clara as she
+passed him. "Aren't they the Old Guard? I've just counted thirty
+hands. I guess they've wrung many a chicken's neck and warmed many a
+boy's jacket for him in their time."
+
+In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the Herculean
+labors those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of the cows they
+had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted,
+the children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had
+worn out, the mountains of food they had cooked. It made him dizzy.
+Clara Vavrika smiled a hard, enigmatical smile at him and walked
+rapidly away. Nils' eyes followed her white figure as she went
+toward the house. He watched her walking alone in the sunlight,
+looked at her slender, defiant shoulders and her little hard-set
+head with its coils of blue-black hair. "No," he reflected; "she'd
+never be like them, not if she lived here a hundred years. She'd
+only grow more bitter. You can't tame a wild thing; you can only
+chain it. People aren't all alike. I mustn't lose my nerve." He gave
+Hilda's pigtail a parting tweak and set out after Clara. "Where to?"
+he asked, as he came upon her in the kitchen.
+
+"I'm going to the cellar for preserves."
+
+"Let me go with you. I never get a moment alone with you. Why do you
+keep out of my way?"
+
+Clara laughed. "I don't usually get in anybody's way."
+
+Nils followed her down the stairs and to the far corner of the
+cellar, where a basement window let in a stream of light. From a
+swinging shelf Clara selected several glass jars, each labeled in
+Johanna's careful hand. Nils took up a brown flask. "What's this? It
+looks good."
+
+"It is. It's some French brandy father gave me when I was married.
+Would you like some? Have you a corkscrew? I'll get glasses."
+
+When she brought them, Nils took them from her and put them down on
+the window-sill. "Clara Vavrika, do you remember how crazy I used to
+be about you?"
+
+Clara shrugged her shoulders. "Boys are always crazy about somebody
+or other. I dare say some silly has been crazy about Evelina Oleson.
+You got over it in a hurry."
+
+"Because I didn't come back, you mean? I had to get on, you know,
+and it was hard sledding at first. Then I heard you'd married Olaf."
+
+"And then you stayed away from a broken heart," Clara laughed.
+
+"And then I began to think about you more than I had since I first
+went away. I began to wonder if you were really as you had seemed to
+me when I was a boy. I thought I'd like to see. I've had lots of
+girls, but no one ever pulled me the same way. The more I thought
+about you, the more I remembered how it used to be--like hearing a
+wild tune you can't resist, calling you out at night. It had been a
+long while since anything had pulled me out of my boots, and I
+wondered whether anything ever could again." Nils thrust his hands
+into his coat pockets and squared his shoulders, as his mother
+sometimes squared hers, as Olaf, in a clumsier manner, squared his.
+"So I thought I'd come back and see. Of course the family have tried
+to do me, and I rather thought I'd bring out father's will and make
+a fuss. But they can have their old land; they've put enough sweat
+into it." He took the flask and filled the two glasses carefully to
+the brim. "I've found out what I want from the Ericsons. Drink
+_skoal_, Clara." He lifted his glass, and Clara took hers with
+downcast eyes. "Look at me, Clara Vavrika. _Skoal!_"
+
+She raised her burning eyes and answered fiercely: "_Skoal!_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The barn supper began at six o'clock and lasted for two hilarious
+hours. Yense Nelson had made a wager that he could eat two whole
+fried chickens, and he did. Eli Swanson stowed away two whole
+custard pies, and Nick Hermanson ate a chocolate layer cake to the
+last crumb. There was even a cooky contest among the children, and
+one thin, slablike Bohemian boy consumed sixteen and won the prize,
+a ginger-bread pig which Johanna Vavrika had carefully decorated
+with red candies and burnt sugar. Fritz Sweiheart, the German
+carpenter, won in the pickle contest, but he disappeared soon after
+supper and was not seen for the rest of the evening. Joe Vavrika
+said that Fritz could have managed the pickles all right, but he had
+sampled the demijohn in his buggy too often before sitting down to
+the table.
+
+While the supper was being cleared away the two fiddlers began to
+tune up for the dance. Clara was to accompany them on her old
+upright piano, which had been brought down from her father's. By
+this time Nils had renewed old acquaintances. Since his interview
+with Clara in the cellar, he had been busy telling all the old women
+how young they looked, and all the young ones how pretty they were,
+and assuring the men that they had here the best farm-land in the
+world. He had made himself so agreeable that old Mrs. Ericson's
+friends began to come up to her and tell how lucky she was to get
+her smart son back again, and please to get him to play his flute.
+Joe Vavrika, who could still play very well when he forgot that he
+had rheumatism, caught up a fiddle from Johnny Oleson and played a
+crazy Bohemian dance tune that set the wheels going. When he dropped
+the bow every one was ready to dance.
+
+Olaf, in a frock-coat and a solemn made-up necktie, led the grand
+march with his mother. Clara had kept well out of _that_ by sticking
+to the piano. She played the march with a pompous solemnity which
+greatly amused the prodigal son, who went over and stood behind her.
+
+"Oh, aren't you rubbing it into them, Clara Vavrika? And aren't you
+lucky to have me here, or all your wit would be thrown away."
+
+"I'm used to being witty for myself. It saves my life."
+
+The fiddles struck up a polka, and Nils convulsed Joe Vavrika by
+leading out Evelina Oleson, the homely school-teacher. His next
+partner was a very fat Swedish girl, who, although she was an
+heiress, had not been asked for the first dance, but had stood
+against the wall in her tight, high-heeled shoes, nervously
+fingering a lace handkerchief. She was soon out of breath, so Nils
+led her, pleased and panting, to her seat, and went over to the
+piano, from which Clara had been watching his gallantry. "Ask Olena
+Yenson," she whispered. "She waltzes beautifully."
+
+Olena, too, was rather inconveniently plump, handsome in a smooth,
+heavy way, with a fine color and good-natured, sleepy eyes. She was
+redolent of violet sachet powder, and had warm, soft, white hands,
+but she danced divinely, moving as smoothly as the tide coming in.
+"There, that's something like," Nils said as he released her.
+"You'll give me the next waltz, won't you? Now I must go and dance
+with my little cousin."
+
+Hilda was greatly excited when Nils went up to her stall and held
+out his arm. Her little eyes sparkled, but she declared that she
+could not leave her lemonade. Old Mrs. Ericson, who happened along
+at this moment, said she would attend to that, and Hilda came out,
+as pink as her pink dress. The dance was a schottische, and in a
+moment her yellow braids were fairly standing on end. "Bravo!" Nils
+cried encouragingly. "Where did you learn to dance so nicely?"
+
+"My Cousin Clara taught me," the little girl panted.
+
+Nils found Eric sitting with a group of boys who were too awkward or
+too shy to dance, and told him that he must dance the next waltz
+with Hilda.
+
+The boy screwed up his shoulders. "Aw, Nils, I can't dance. My feet
+are too big; I look silly."
+
+"Don't be thinking about yourself. It doesn't matter how boys look."
+
+Nils had never spoken to him so sharply before, and Eric made haste
+to scramble out of his corner and brush the straw from his coat.
+
+Clara nodded approvingly. "Good for you, Nils. I've been trying to
+get hold of him. They dance very nicely together; I sometimes play
+for them."
+
+"I'm obliged to you for teaching him. There's no reason why he
+should grow up to be a lout."
+
+"He'll never be that. He's more like you than any of them. Only he
+hasn't your courage." From her slanting eyes Clara shot forth one of
+those keen glances, admiring and at the same time challenging, which
+she seldom bestowed on any one, and which seemed to say, "Yes, I
+admire you, but I am your equal."
+
+Clara was proving a much better host than Olaf, who, once the supper
+was over, seemed to feel no interest in anything but the lanterns.
+He had brought a locomotive headlight from town to light the revels,
+and he kept skulking about it as if he feared the mere light from it
+might set his new barn on fire. His wife, on the contrary, was
+cordial to every one, was animated and even gay. The deep salmon
+color in her cheeks burned vividly, and her eyes were full of life.
+She gave the piano over to the fat Swedish heiress, pulled her
+father away from the corner where he sat gossiping with his cronies,
+and made him dance a Bohemian dance with her. In his youth Joe had
+been a famous dancer, and his daughter got him so limbered up that
+every one sat round and applauded them. The old ladies were
+particularly delighted, and made them go through the dance again.
+From their corner where they watched and commented, the old women
+kept time with their feet and hands, and whenever the fiddles struck
+up a new air old Mrs. Svendsen's white cap would begin to bob.
+
+Clara was waltzing with little Eric when Nils came up to them,
+brushed his brother aside, and swung her out among the dancers.
+"Remember how we used to waltz on rollers at the old skating-rink in
+town? I suppose people don't do that any more. We used to keep it up
+for hours. You know, we never did moon around as other boys and
+girls did. It was dead serious with us from the beginning. When we
+were most in love with each other, we used to fight. You were always
+pinching people; your fingers were like little nippers. A regular
+snapping-turtle, you were. Lord, how you'd like Stockholm! Sit out
+in the streets in front of cafes and talk all night in summer. Just
+like a reception--officers and ladies and funny English people.
+Jolliest people in the world, the Swedes, once you get them going.
+Always drinking things--champagne and stout mixed, half-and-half;
+serve it out of big pitchers, and serve plenty. Slow pulse, you
+know; they can stand a lot. Once they light up, they're glow-worms,
+I can tell you."
+
+"All the same, you don't really like gay people."
+
+"_I_ don't?"
+
+"No; I could see that when you were looking at the old women there
+this afternoon. They're the kind you really admire, after all; women
+like your mother. And that's the kind you'll marry."
+
+"Is it, Miss Wisdom? You'll see who I'll marry, and she won't have a
+domestic virtue to bless herself with. She'll be a snapping-turtle,
+and she'll be a match for me. All the same, they're a fine bunch of
+old dames over there. You admire them yourself."
+
+"No, I don't; I detest them."
+
+"You won't, when you look back on them from Stockholm or Budapest.
+Freedom settles all that. Oh, but you're the real Bohemian Girl,
+Clara Vavrika!" Nils laughed down at her sullen frown and began
+mockingly to sing:
+
+  "_Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me
+  Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?_"
+
+Clara clutched his shoulder. "Hush, Nils; every one is looking at
+you."
+
+"I don't care. They can't gossip. It's all in the family, as the
+Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda's patrimony amongst
+them. Besides, we'll give them something to talk about when we hit
+the trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to them! They haven't had
+anything so interesting to chatter about since the grasshopper year.
+It'll give them a new lease of life. And Olaf won't lose the
+Bohemian vote, either. They'll have the laugh on him so that they'll
+vote two apiece. They'll send him to Congress. They'll never forget
+his barn party, or us. They'll always remember us as we're dancing
+together now. We're making a legend. Where's my waltz, boys?" he
+called as they whirled past the fiddlers.
+
+The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and began a
+new air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell from a quick
+waltz to a long, slow glide:
+
+  "_When other lips and other hearts
+    Their tale of love shall tell,
+  In language whose excess imparts
+    The power they feel so well,_"
+
+The old women applauded vigorously. "What a gay one he is, that
+Nils!" And old Mrs. Svendsen's cap lurched dreamily from side to
+side to the flowing measure of the dance.
+
+  "_Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,
+    And you'll remember me._"
+
+
+VII
+
+The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay
+yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp
+black shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a
+deep, crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything
+seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great,
+golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it seemed to
+transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to
+take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal
+to it, as if one were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river
+of melody. Near the road, Nils Ericson was lying against a straw
+stack in Olaf's wheat-field. His own life seemed strange and
+unfamiliar to him, as if it were something he had read about, or
+dreamed, and forgotten. He lay very still, watching the white road
+that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields, and then, at
+a distance, reappeared over a little hill. At last, against this
+white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got up and walked
+to the edge of the field. "She is passing the row of poplars now,"
+he thought. He heard the padded beat of hoofs along the dusty road,
+and as she came into sight he stepped out and waved his arms. Then,
+for fear of frightening the horse, he drew back and waited. Clara
+had seen him, and she came up at a walk. Nils took the horse by the
+bit and stroked his neck.
+
+"What are you doing out so late, Clara Vavrika? I went to the house,
+but Johanna told me you had gone to your father's."
+
+"Who can stay in the house on a night like this? Aren't you out
+yourself?"
+
+"Ah, but that's another matter."
+
+Nils turned the horse into the field.
+
+"What are you doing? Where are you taking Norman?"
+
+"Not far, but I want to talk to you to-night; I have something to
+say to you. I can't talk to you at the house, with Olaf sitting
+there on the porch, weighing a thousand tons."
+
+Clara laughed. "He won't be sitting there now. He's in bed by this
+time, and asleep--weighing a thousand tons."
+
+Nils plodded on across the stubble. "Are you really going to spend
+the rest of your life like this, night after night, summer after
+summer? Haven't you anything better to do on a night like this than
+to wear yourself and Norman out tearing across the country to your
+father's and back? Besides, your father won't live forever, you
+know. His little place will be shut up or sold, and then you'll have
+nobody but the Ericsons. You'll have to fasten down the hatches for
+the winter then."
+
+Clara moved her head restlessly. "Don't talk about that. I try never
+to think of it. If I lost father I'd lose everything, even my hold
+over the Ericsons."
+
+"Bah! You'd lose a good deal more than that. You'd lose your race,
+everything that makes you yourself. You've lost a good deal of it
+now."
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Of your love of life, your capacity for delight."
+
+Clara put her hands up to her face. "I haven't, Nils Ericson, I
+haven't! Say anything to me but that. I won't have it!" she declared
+vehemently.
+
+Nils led the horse up to a straw stack, and turned to Clara, looking
+at her intently, as he had looked at her that Sunday afternoon at
+Vavrika's. "But why do you fight for that so? What good is the power
+to enjoy, if you never enjoy? Your hands are cold again; what are
+you afraid of all the time? Ah, you're afraid of losing it; that's
+what's the matter with you! And you will, Clara Vavrika, you will!
+When I used to know you--listen; you've caught a wild bird in your
+hand, haven't you, and felt its heart beat so hard that you were
+afraid it would shatter its little body to pieces? Well, you used to
+be just like that, a slender, eager thing with a wild delight inside
+you. That is how I remembered you. And I come back and find you--a
+bitter woman. This is a perfect ferret fight here; you live by
+biting and being bitten. Can't you remember what life used to be?
+Can't you remember that old delight? I've never forgotten it, or
+known its like, on land or sea."
+
+He drew the horse under the shadow of the straw stack. Clara felt
+him take her foot out of the stirrup, and she slid softly down into
+his arms. He kissed her slowly. He was a deliberate man, but his
+nerves were steel when he wanted anything. Something flashed out
+from him like a knife out of a sheath. Clara felt everything
+slipping away from her; she was flooded by the summer night. He
+thrust his hand into his pocket, and then held it out at arm's
+length. "Look," he said. The shadow of the straw stack fell sharp
+across his wrist, and in the palm of his hand she saw a silver
+dollar shining. "That's my pile," he muttered; "will you go with
+me?"
+
+Clara nodded, and dropped her forehead on his shoulder.
+
+Nils took a deep breath. "Will you go with me to-night?"
+
+"Where?" she whispered softly.
+
+"To town, to catch the midnight flyer."
+
+Clara lifted her head and pulled herself together. "Are you crazy,
+Nils? We couldn't go away like that."
+
+"That's the only way we ever will go. You can't sit on the bank and
+think about it. You have to plunge. That's the way I've always done,
+and it's the right way for people like you and me. There's nothing
+so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth,
+and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing
+easier. Most people do that. You'd be better off tramping the roads
+with me than you are here." Nils held back her head and looked into
+her eyes. "But I'm not that kind of a tramp, Clara. You won't have
+to take in sewing. I'm with a Norwegian shipping line; came over on
+business with the New York offices, but now I'm going straight back
+to Bergen. I expect I've got as much money as the Ericsons. Father
+sent me a little to get started. They never knew about that. There,
+I hadn't meant to tell you; I wanted you to come on your own nerve."
+
+Clara looked off across the fields. "It isn't that, Nils, but
+something seems to hold me. I'm afraid to pull against it. It comes
+out of the ground, I think."
+
+"I know all about that. One has to tear loose. You're not needed
+here. Your father will understand; he's made like us. As for Olaf,
+Johanna will take better care of him than ever you could. It's now
+or never, Clara Vavrika. My bag's at the station; I smuggled it
+there yesterday."
+
+Clara clung to him and hid her face against his shoulder. "Not
+to-night," she whispered. "Sit here and talk to me to-night. I don't
+want to go anywhere to-night. I may never love you like this again."
+
+Nils laughed through his teeth. "You can't come that on me. That's
+not my way, Clara Vavrika. Eric's mare is over there behind the
+stacks, and I'm off on the midnight. It's good-by, or off across the
+world with me. My carriage won't wait. I've written a letter to
+Olaf; I'll mail it in town. When he reads it he won't bother us--not
+if I know him. He'd rather have the land. Besides, I could demand an
+investigation of his administration of Cousin Henrik's estate, and
+that would be bad for a public man. You've no clothes, I know; but
+you can sit up to-night, and we can get everything on the way.
+Where's your old dash, Clara Vavrika? What's become of your Bohemian
+blood? I used to think you had courage enough for anything. Where's
+your nerve--what are you waiting for?"
+
+Clara drew back her head, and he saw the slumberous fire in her
+eyes. "For you to say one thing, Nils Ericson."
+
+"I never say that thing to any woman, Clara Vavrika." He leaned
+back, lifted her gently from the ground, and whispered through his
+teeth: "But I'll never, never let you go, not to any man on earth
+but me! Do you understand me? Now, wait here."
+
+Clara sank down on a sheaf of wheat and covered her face with her
+hands. She did not know what she was going to do--whether she would
+go or stay. The great, silent country seemed to lay a spell upon
+her. The ground seemed to hold her as if by roots. Her knees were
+soft under her. She felt as if she could not bear separation from
+her old sorrows, from her old discontent. They were dear to her,
+they had kept her alive, they were a part of her. There would be
+nothing left of her if she were wrenched away from them. Never could
+she pass beyond that sky-line against which her restlessness had
+beat so many times. She felt as if her soul had built itself a nest
+there on that horizon at which she looked every morning and every
+evening, and it was dear to her, inexpressibly dear. She pressed her
+fingers against her eyeballs to shut it out. Beside her she heard
+the tramping of horses in the soft earth. Nils said nothing to her.
+He put his hands under her arms and lifted her lightly to her
+saddle. Then he swung himself into his own.
+
+"We shall have to ride fast to catch the midnight train. A last
+gallop, Clara Vavrika. Forward!"
+
+There was a start, a thud of hoofs along the moonlit road, two dark
+shadows going over the hill; and then the great, still land
+stretched untroubled under the azure night. Two shadows had passed.
+
+
+VIII
+
+A year after the flight of Olaf Ericson's wife, the night train was
+steaming across the plains of Iowa. The conductor was hurrying
+through one of the day-coaches, his lantern on his arm, when a lank,
+fair-haired boy sat up in one of the plush seats and tweaked him by
+the coat.
+
+"What is the next stop, please, sir?"
+
+"Red Oak, Iowa. But you go through to Chicago, don't you?" He looked
+down, and noticed that the boy's eyes were red and his face was
+drawn, as if he were in trouble.
+
+"Yes. But I was wondering whether I could get off at the next place
+and get a train back to Omaha."
+
+"Well, I suppose you could. Live in Omaha?"
+
+"No. In the western part of the State. How soon do we get to Red
+Oak?"
+
+"Forty minutes. You'd better make up your mind, so I can tell the
+baggageman to put your trunk off."
+
+"Oh, never mind about that! I mean, I haven't got any," the boy
+added, blushing.
+
+"Run away," the conductor thought, as he slammed the coach door
+behind him.
+
+Eric Ericson crumpled down in his seat and put his brown hand to his
+forehead. He had been crying, and he had had no supper, and his head
+was aching violently. "Oh, what shall I do?" he thought, as he
+looked dully down at his big shoes. "Nils will be ashamed of me; I
+haven't got any spunk."
+
+Ever since Nils had run away with his brother's wife, life at home
+had been hard for little Eric. His mother and Olaf both suspected
+him of complicity. Mrs. Ericson was harsh and fault-finding,
+constantly wounding the boy's pride; and Olaf was always getting her
+against him.
+
+Joe Vavrika heard often from his daughter. Clara had always been
+fond of her father, and happiness made her kinder. She wrote him
+long accounts of the voyage to Bergen, and of the trip she and Nils
+took through Bohemia to the little town where her father had grown
+up and where she herself was born. She visited all her kinsmen
+there, and sent her father news of his brother, who was a priest; of
+his sister, who had married a horse-breeder--of their big farm and
+their many children. These letters Joe always managed to read to
+little Eric. They contained messages for Eric and Hilda. Clara sent
+presents, too, which Eric never dared to take home and which poor
+little Hilda never even saw, though she loved to hear Eric tell
+about them when they were out getting the eggs together. But Olaf
+once saw Eric coming out of Vavrika's house,--the old man had never
+asked the boy to come into his saloon,--and Olaf went straight to
+his mother and told her. That night Mrs. Ericson came to Eric's room
+after he was in bed and made a terrible scene. She could be very
+terrifying when she was really angry. She forbade him ever to speak
+to Vavrika again, and after that night she would not allow him to go
+to town alone. So it was a long while before Eric got any more news
+of his brother. But old Joe suspected what was going on, and he
+carried Clara's letters about in his pocket. One Sunday he drove out
+to see a German friend of his, and chanced to catch sight of Eric,
+sitting by the cattle-pond in the big pasture. They went together
+into Fritz Oberlies' barn, and read the letters and talked things
+over. Eric admitted that things were getting hard for him at home.
+That very night old Joe sat down and laboriously penned a statement
+of the case to his daughter.
+
+Things got no better for Eric. His mother and Olaf felt that,
+however closely he was watched, he still, as they said, "heard."
+Mrs. Ericson could not admit neutrality. She had sent Johanna
+Vavrika packing back to her brother's, though Olaf would much rather
+have kept her than Anders' eldest daughter, whom Mrs. Ericson
+installed in her place. He was not so high-handed as his mother, and
+he once sulkily told her that she might better have taught her
+granddaughter to cook before she sent Johanna away. Olaf could have
+borne a good deal for the sake of prunes spiced in honey, the secret
+of which Johanna had taken away with her.
+
+At last two letters came to Joe Vavrika: one from Nils, inclosing a
+postal order for money to pay Eric's passage to Bergen, and one from
+Clara, saying that Nils had a place for Eric in the offices of his
+company, that he was to live with them, and that they were only
+waiting for him to come. He was to leave New York on one of the
+boats of Nils' own line; the captain was one of their friends, and
+Eric was to make himself known at once.
+
+Nils' directions were so explicit that a baby could have followed
+them, Eric felt. And here he was, nearing Red Oak, Iowa, and rocking
+backward and forward in despair. Never had he loved his brother so
+much, and never had the big world called to him so hard. But there
+was a lump in his throat which would not go down. Ever since
+nightfall he had been tormented by the thought of his mother, alone
+in that big house that had sent forth so many men. Her unkindness
+now seemed so little, and her loneliness so great. He remembered
+everything she had ever done for him: how frightened she had been
+when he tore his hand in the corn-sheller, and how she wouldn't let
+Olaf scold him. When Nils went away he didn't leave his mother all
+alone, or he would never have gone. Eric felt sure of that.
+
+The train whistled. The conductor came in, smiling not unkindly.
+"Well, young man, what are you going to do? We stop at Red Oak in
+three minutes."
+
+"Yes, thank you. I'll let you know." The conductor went out, and the
+boy doubled up with misery. He couldn't let his one chance go like
+this. He felt for his breast pocket and crackled Nils' kind letter
+to give him courage. He didn't want Nils to be ashamed of him. The
+train stopped. Suddenly he remembered his brother's kind, twinkling
+eyes, that always looked at you as if from far away. The lump in his
+throat softened. "Ah, but Nils, Nils would _understand_!" he
+thought. "That's just it about Nils; he always understands."
+
+A lank, pale boy with a canvas telescope stumbled off the train to
+the Red Oak siding, just as the conductor called, "All aboard!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next night Mrs. Ericson was sitting alone in her wooden
+rocking-chair on the front porch. Little Hilda had been sent to bed
+and had cried herself to sleep. The old woman's knitting was in her
+lap, but her hands lay motionless on top of it. For more than an
+hour she had not moved a muscle. She simply sat, as only the
+Ericsons and the mountains can sit. The house was dark, and there
+was no sound but the croaking of the frogs down in the pond of the
+little pasture.
+
+Eric did not come home by the road, but across the fields, where no
+one could see him. He set his telescope down softly in the kitchen
+shed, and slipped noiselessly along the path to the front porch. He
+sat down on the step without saying anything. Mrs. Ericson made no
+sign, and the frogs croaked on. At last the boy spoke timidly.
+
+"I've come back, Mother."
+
+"Very well," said Mrs. Ericson.
+
+Eric leaned over and picked up a little stick out of the grass.
+
+"How about the milking?" he faltered.
+
+"That's been done, hours ago."
+
+"Who did you get?"
+
+"Get? I did it myself. I can milk as good as any of you."
+
+Eric slid along the step nearer to her. "Oh, Mother, why did you?"
+he asked sorrowfully. "Why didn't you get one of Otto's boys?"
+
+"I didn't want anybody to know I was in need of a boy," said Mrs.
+Ericson bitterly. She looked straight in front of her and her mouth
+tightened. "I always meant to give you the home farm," she added.
+
+The boy started and slid closer. "Oh, Mother," he faltered, "I don't
+care about the farm. I came back because I thought you might be
+needing me, maybe." He hung his head and got no further.
+
+"Very well," said Mrs. Ericson. Her hand went out from her suddenly
+and rested on his head. Her fingers twined themselves in his soft,
+pale hair. His tears splashed down on the boards; happiness filled
+his heart.
+
+                                        _McClure's_, August 1912
+
+
+
+
+_Consequences_
+
+
+Henry Eastman, a lawyer, aged forty, was standing beside the
+Flatiron building in a driving November rainstorm, signaling
+frantically for a taxi. It was six-thirty, and everything on wheels
+was engaged. The streets were in confusion about him, the sky was in
+turmoil above him, and the Flatiron building, which seemed about to
+blow down, threw water like a mill-shoot. Suddenly, out of the
+brutal struggle of men and cars and machines and people tilting at
+each other with umbrellas, a quiet, well-mannered limousine paused
+before him, at the curb, and an agreeable, ruddy countenance
+confronted him through the open window of the car.
+
+"Don't you want me to pick you up, Mr. Eastman? I'm running directly
+home now."
+
+Eastman recognized Kier Cavenaugh, a young man of pleasure, who
+lived in the house on Central Park South, where he himself had an
+apartment.
+
+"Don't I?" he exclaimed, bolting into the car. "I'll risk getting
+your cushions wet without compunction. I came up in a taxi, but I
+didn't hold it. Bad economy. I thought I saw your car down on
+Fourteenth Street about half an hour ago."
+
+The owner of the car smiled. He had a pleasant, round face and round
+eyes, and a fringe of smooth, yellow hair showed under the rim of
+his soft felt hat. "With a lot of little broilers fluttering into
+it? You did. I know some girls who work in the cheap shops down
+there. I happened to be down-town and I stopped and took a load of
+them home. I do sometimes. Saves their poor little clothes, you
+know. Their shoes are never any good."
+
+Eastman looked at his rescuer. "Aren't they notoriously afraid of
+cars and smooth young men?" he inquired.
+
+Cavenaugh shook his head. "They know which cars are safe and which
+are chancy. They put each other wise. You have to take a bunch at a
+time, of course. The Italian girls can never come along; their men
+shoot. The girls understand, all right; but their fathers don't. One
+gets to see queer places, sometimes, taking them home."
+
+Eastman laughed drily. "Every time I touch the circle of your
+acquaintance, Cavenaugh, it's a little wider. You must know New York
+pretty well by this time."
+
+"Yes, but I'm on my good behavior below Twenty-third Street," the
+young man replied with simplicity. "My little friends down there
+would give me a good character. They're wise little girls. They have
+grand ways with each other, a romantic code of loyalty. You can find
+a good many of the lost virtues among them."
+
+The car was standing still in a traffic block at Fortieth Street,
+when Cavenaugh suddenly drew his face away from the window and
+touched Eastman's arm. "Look, please. You see that hansom with the
+bony gray horse--driver has a broken hat and red flannel around his
+throat. Can you see who is inside?"
+
+Eastman peered out. The hansom was just cutting across the line, and
+the driver was making a great fuss about it, bobbing his head and
+waving his whip. He jerked his dripping old horse into Fortieth
+Street and clattered off past the Public Library grounds toward
+Sixth Avenue. "No, I couldn't see the passenger. Someone you know?"
+
+"Could you see whether there was a passenger?" Cavenaugh asked.
+
+"Why, yes. A man, I think. I saw his elbow on the apron. No driver
+ever behaves like that unless he has a passenger."
+
+"Yes, I may have been mistaken," Cavenaugh murmured absent-mindedly.
+Ten minutes or so later, after Cavenaugh's car had turned off Fifth
+Avenue into Fifty-eighth Street, Eastman exclaimed, "There's your
+same cabby, and his cart's empty. He's headed for a drink now, I
+suppose." The driver in the broken hat and the red flannel neck
+cloth was still brandishing the whip over his old gray. He was
+coming from the west now, and turned down Sixth Avenue, under the
+elevated.
+
+Cavenaugh's car stopped at the bachelor apartment house between
+Sixth and Seventh Avenues where he and Eastman lived, and they went
+up in the elevator together. They were still talking when the lift
+stopped at Cavenaugh's floor, and Eastman stepped out with him and
+walked down the hall, finishing his sentence while Cavenaugh found
+his latch-key. When he opened the door, a wave of fresh cigarette
+smoke greeted them. Cavenaugh stopped short and stared into his
+hallway. "Now how in the devil--!" he exclaimed angrily.
+
+"Someone waiting for you? Oh, no, thanks. I wasn't coming in. I have
+to work to-night. Thank you, but I couldn't." Eastman nodded and
+went up the two flights to his own rooms.
+
+Though Eastman did not customarily keep a servant he had this winter
+a man who had been lent to him by a friend who was abroad. Rollins
+met him at the door and took his coat and hat.
+
+"Put out my dinner clothes, Rollins, and then get out of here until
+ten o'clock. I've promised to go to a supper to-night. I shan't be
+dining. I've had a late tea and I'm going to work until ten. You may
+put out some kumiss and biscuit for me."
+
+Rollins took himself off, and Eastman settled down at the big table
+in his sitting-room. He had to read a lot of letters submitted as
+evidence in a breach of contract case, and before he got very far he
+found that long paragraphs in some of the letters were written in
+German. He had a German dictionary at his office, but none here.
+Rollins had gone, and anyhow, the bookstores would be closed. He
+remembered having seen a row of dictionaries on the lower shelf of
+one of Cavenaugh's bookcases. Cavenaugh had a lot of books, though
+he never read anything but new stuff. Eastman prudently turned down
+his student's lamp very low--the thing had an evil habit of
+smoking--and went down two flights to Cavenaugh's door.
+
+The young man himself answered Eastman's ring. He was freshly
+dressed for the evening, except for a brown smoking jacket, and his
+yellow hair had been brushed until it shone. He hesitated as he
+confronted his caller, still holding the door knob, and his round
+eyes and smooth forehead made their best imitation of a frown. When
+Eastman began to apologize, Cavenaugh's manner suddenly changed. He
+caught his arm and jerked him into the narrow hall. "Come in, come
+in. Right along!" he said excitedly. "Right along," he repeated as
+he pushed Eastman before him into his sitting-room. "Well I'll--" he
+stopped short at the door and looked about his own room with an air
+of complete mystification. The back window was wide open and a
+strong wind was blowing in. Cavenaugh walked over to the window and
+stuck out his head, looking up and down the fire escape. When he
+pulled his head in, he drew down the sash.
+
+"I had a visitor I wanted you to see," he explained with a nervous
+smile. "At least I thought I had. He must have gone out that way,"
+nodding toward the window.
+
+"Call him back. I only came to borrow a German dictionary, if you
+have one. Can't stay. Call him back."
+
+Cavenaugh shook his head despondently. "No use. He's beat it.
+Nowhere in sight."
+
+"He must be active. Has he left something?" Eastman pointed to a
+very dirty white glove that lay on the floor under the window.
+
+"Yes, that's his." Cavenaugh reached for his tongs, picked up the
+glove, and tossed it into the grate, where it quickly shriveled on
+the coals. Eastman felt that he had happened in upon something
+disagreeable, possibly something shady, and he wanted to get away at
+once. Cavenaugh stood staring at the fire and seemed stupid and
+dazed; so he repeated his request rather sternly, "I think I've seen
+a German dictionary down there among your books. May I have it?"
+
+Cavenaugh blinked at him. "A German dictionary? Oh, possibly! Those
+were my father's. I scarcely know what there is." He put down the
+tongs and began to wipe his hands nervously with his handkerchief.
+
+Eastman went over to the bookcase behind the Chesterfield, opened
+the door, swooped upon the book he wanted and stuck it under his
+arm. He felt perfectly certain now that something shady had been
+going on in Cavenaugh's rooms, and he saw no reason why he should
+come in for any hang-over. "Thanks. I'll send it back to-morrow," he
+said curtly as he made for the door.
+
+Cavenaugh followed him. "Wait a moment. I wanted you to see him. You
+did see his glove," glancing at the grate.
+
+Eastman laughed disagreeably. "I saw a glove. That's not evidence. Do
+your friends often use that means of exit? Somewhat inconvenient."
+
+Cavenaugh gave him a startled glance. "Wouldn't you think so? For an
+old man, a very rickety old party? The ladders are steep, you know,
+and rusty." He approached the window again and put it up softly. In
+a moment he drew his head back with a jerk. He caught Eastman's arm
+and shoved him toward the window. "Hurry, please. Look! Down there."
+He pointed to the little patch of paved court four flights down.
+
+The square of pavement was so small and the walls about it were so
+high, that it was a good deal like looking down a well. Four tall
+buildings backed upon the same court and made a kind of shaft, with
+flagstones at the bottom, and at the top a square of dark blue with
+some stars in it. At the bottom of the shaft Eastman saw a black
+figure, a man in a caped coat and a tall hat stealing cautiously
+around, not across the square of pavement, keeping close to the dark
+wall and avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones
+from a window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was of
+course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling and
+decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with exaggerated care
+and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet street. When he
+reached the gate that led into an alley way between two buildings,
+he felt about for the latch, opened the door a mere crack, and then
+shot out under the feeble lamp that burned in the brick arch over
+the gateway. The door closed after him.
+
+"He'll get run in," Eastman remarked curtly, turning away from the
+window. "That door shouldn't be left unlocked. Any crook could come
+in. I'll speak to the janitor about it, if you don't mind," he added
+sarcastically.
+
+"Wish you would." Cavenaugh stood brushing down the front of his
+jacket, first with his right hand and then with his left. "You saw
+him, didn't you?"
+
+"Enough of him. Seems eccentric. I have to see a lot of buggy
+people. They don't take me in any more. But I'm keeping you and I'm
+in a hurry myself. Good night."
+
+Cavenaugh put out his hand detainingly and started to say something;
+but Eastman rudely turned his back and went down the hall and out of
+the door. He had never felt anything shady about Cavenaugh before,
+and he was sorry he had gone down for the dictionary. In five
+minutes he was deep in his papers; but in the half hour when he was
+loafing before he dressed to go out, the young man's curious
+behavior came into his mind again.
+
+Eastman had merely a neighborly acquaintance with Cavenaugh. He had
+been to a supper at the young man's rooms once, but he didn't
+particularly like Cavenaugh's friends; so the next time he was
+asked, he had another engagement. He liked Cavenaugh himself, if for
+nothing else than because he was so cheerful and trim and ruddy. A
+good complexion is always at a premium in New York, especially when
+it shines reassuringly on a man who does everything in the world to
+lose it. It encourages fellow mortals as to the inherent vigor of
+the human organism and the amount of bad treatment it will stand
+for. "Footprints that perhaps another," etc.
+
+Cavenaugh, he knew, had plenty of money. He was the son of a
+Pennsylvania preacher, who died soon after he discovered that his
+ancestral acres were full of petroleum, and Kier had come to New
+York to burn some of the oil. He was thirty-two and was still at it;
+spent his life, literally, among the breakers. His motor hit the
+Park every morning as if it were the first time ever. He took people
+out to supper every night. He went from restaurant to restaurant,
+sometimes to half-a-dozen in an evening. The head waiters were his
+hosts and their cordiality made him happy. They made a life-line for
+him up Broadway and down Fifth Avenue. Cavenaugh was still fresh and
+smooth, round and plump, with a lustre to his hair and white teeth
+and a clear look in his round eyes. He seemed absolutely unwearied
+and unimpaired; never bored and never carried away.
+
+Eastman always smiled when he met Cavenaugh in the entrance hall,
+serenely going forth to or returning from gladiatorial combats with
+joy, or when he saw him rolling smoothly up to the door in his car
+in the morning after a restful night in one of the remarkable new
+roadhouses he was always finding. Eastman had seen a good many young
+men disappear on Cavenaugh's route, and he admired this young man's
+endurance.
+
+To-night, for the first time, he had got a whiff of something
+unwholesome about the fellow--bad nerves, bad company, something on
+hand that he was ashamed of, a visitor old and vicious, who must
+have had a key to Cavenaugh's apartment, for he was evidently there
+when Cavenaugh returned at seven o'clock. Probably it was the same
+man Cavenaugh had seen in the hansom. He must have been able to let
+himself in, for Cavenaugh kept no man but his chauffeur; or perhaps
+the janitor had been instructed to let him in. In either case, and
+whoever he was, it was clear enough that Cavenaugh was ashamed of
+him and was mixing up in questionable business of some kind.
+
+Eastman sent Cavenaugh's book back by Rollins, and for the next few
+weeks he had no word with him beyond a casual greeting when they
+happened to meet in the hall or the elevator. One Sunday morning
+Cavenaugh telephoned up to him to ask if he could motor out to a
+roadhouse in Connecticut that afternoon and have supper; but when
+Eastman found there were to be other guests he declined.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On New Year's eve Eastman dined at the University Club at six
+o'clock and hurried home before the usual manifestations of insanity
+had begun in the streets. When Rollins brought his smoking coat, he
+asked him whether he wouldn't like to get off early.
+
+"Yes, sir. But won't you be dressing, Mr. Eastman?" he inquired.
+
+"Not to-night." Eastman handed him a bill. "Bring some change in the
+morning. There'll be fees."
+
+Rollins lost no time in putting everything to rights for the night,
+and Eastman couldn't help wishing that he were in such a hurry to be
+off somewhere himself. When he heard the hall door close softly, he
+wondered if there were any place, after all, that he wanted to go.
+From his window he looked down at the long lines of motors and taxis
+waiting for a signal to cross Broadway. He thought of some of their
+probable destinations and decided that none of those places pulled
+him very hard. The night was warm and wet, the air was drizzly.
+Vapor hung in clouds about the _Times_ Building, half hid the top of
+it, and made a luminous haze along Broadway. While he was looking
+down at the army of wet, black carriage-tops and their reflected
+headlights and tail-lights, Eastman heard a ring at his door. He
+deliberated. If it were a caller, the hall porter would have
+telephoned up. It must be the janitor. When he opened the door,
+there stood a rosy young man in a tuxedo, without a coat or hat.
+
+"Pardon. Should I have telephoned? I half thought you wouldn't be
+in."
+
+Eastman laughed. "Come in, Cavenaugh. You weren't sure whether you
+wanted company or not, eh, and you were trying to let chance decide
+it? That was exactly my state of mind. Let's accept the verdict."
+When they emerged from the narrow hall into his sitting-room, he
+pointed out a seat by the fire to his guest. He brought a tray of
+decanters and soda bottles and placed it on his writing table.
+
+Cavenaugh hesitated, standing by the fire. "Sure you weren't
+starting for somewhere?"
+
+"Do I look it? No, I was just making up my mind to stick it out
+alone when you rang. Have one?" he picked up a tall tumbler.
+
+"Yes, thank you. I always do."
+
+Eastman chuckled. "Lucky boy! So will I. I had a very early dinner.
+New York is the most arid place on holidays," he continued as he
+rattled the ice in the glasses. "When one gets too old to hit the
+rapids down there, and tired of gobbling food to heathenish dance
+music, there is absolutely no place where you can get a chop and
+some milk toast in peace, unless you have strong ties of blood
+brotherhood on upper Fifth Avenue. But you, why aren't you starting
+for somewhere?"
+
+The young man sipped his soda and shook his head as he replied:
+
+"Oh, I couldn't get a chop, either. I know only flashy people, of
+course." He looked up at his host with such a grave and candid
+expression that Eastman decided there couldn't be anything very
+crooked about the fellow. His smooth cheeks were positively
+cherubic.
+
+"Well, what's the matter with them? Aren't they flashing to-night?"
+
+"Only the very new ones seem to flash on New Year's eve. The older
+ones fade away. Maybe they are hunting a chop, too."
+
+"Well"--Eastman sat down--"holidays do dash one. I was just about to
+write a letter to a pair of maiden aunts in my old home town,
+up-state; old coasting hill, snow-covered pines, lights in the
+church windows. That's what you've saved me from."
+
+Cavenaugh shook himself. "Oh, I'm sure that wouldn't have been good
+for you. Pardon me," he rose and took a photograph from the
+bookcase, a handsome man in shooting clothes. "Dudley, isn't it? Did
+you know him well?"
+
+"Yes. An old friend. Terrible thing, wasn't it? I haven't got over
+the jolt yet."
+
+"His suicide? Yes, terrible! Did you know his wife?"
+
+"Slightly. Well enough to admire her very much. She must be terribly
+broken up. I wonder Dudley didn't think of that."
+
+Cavenaugh replaced the photograph carefully, lit a cigarette, and
+standing before the fire began to smoke. "Would you mind telling me
+about him? I never met him, but of course I'd read a lot about him,
+and I can't help feeling interested. It was a queer thing."
+
+Eastman took out his cigar case and leaned back in his deep chair.
+"In the days when I knew him best he hadn't any story, like the
+happy nations. Everything was properly arranged for him before he
+was born. He came into the world happy, healthy, clever, straight,
+with the right sort of connections and the right kind of fortune,
+neither too large nor too small. He helped to make the world an
+agreeable place to live in until he was twenty-six. Then he married
+as he should have married. His wife was a Californian, educated
+abroad. Beautiful. You have seen her picture?"
+
+Cavenaugh nodded. "Oh, many of them."
+
+"She was interesting, too. Though she was distinctly a person of the
+world, she had retained something, just enough of the large Western
+manner. She had the habit of authority, of calling out a special
+train if she needed it, of using all our ingenious mechanical
+contrivances lightly and easily, without over-rating them. She and
+Dudley knew how to live better than most people. Their house was the
+most charming one I have ever known in New York. You felt freedom
+there, and a zest of life, and safety--absolute sanctuary--from
+everything sordid or petty. A whole society like that would justify
+the creation of man and would make our planet shine with a soft,
+peculiar radiance among the constellations. You think I'm putting it
+on thick?"
+
+The young man sighed gently. "Oh, no! One has always felt there must
+be people like that. I've never known any."
+
+"They had two children, beautiful ones. After they had been married
+for eight years, Rosina met this Spaniard. He must have amounted to
+something. She wasn't a flighty woman. She came home and told Dudley
+how matters stood. He persuaded her to stay at home for six months
+and try to pull up. They were both fair-minded people, and I'm as
+sure as if I were the Almighty, that she did try. But at the end of
+the time, Rosina went quietly off to Spain, and Dudley went to hunt
+in the Canadian Rockies. I met his party out there. I didn't know
+his wife had left him and talked about her a good deal. I noticed
+that he never drank anything, and his light used to shine through
+the log chinks of his room until all hours, even after a hard day's
+hunting. When I got back to New York, rumors were creeping about.
+Dudley did not come back. He bought a ranch in Wyoming, built a big
+log house and kept splendid dogs and horses. One of his sisters went
+out to keep house for him, and the children were there when they
+were not in school. He had a great many visitors, and everyone who
+came back talked about how well Dudley kept things going.
+
+"He put in two years out there. Then, last month, he had to come
+back on business. A trust fund had to be settled up, and he was
+administrator. I saw him at the club; same light, quick step, same
+gracious handshake. He was getting gray, and there was something
+softer in his manner; but he had a fine red tan on his face and said
+he found it delightful to be here in the season when everything is
+going hard. The Madison Avenue house had been closed since Rosina
+left it. He went there to get some things his sister wanted. That,
+of course, was the mistake. He went alone, in the afternoon, and
+didn't go out for dinner--found some sherry and tins of biscuit in
+the sideboard. He shot himself sometime that night. There were
+pistols in his smoking-room. They found burnt out candles beside him
+in the morning. The gas and electricity were shut off. I suppose
+there, in his own house, among his own things, it was too much for
+him. He left no letters."
+
+Cavenaugh blinked and brushed the lapel of his coat. "I suppose," he
+said slowly, "that every suicide is logical and reasonable, if one
+knew all the facts."
+
+Eastman roused himself. "No, I don't think so. I've known too many
+fellows who went off like that--more than I deserve, I think--and
+some of them were absolutely inexplicable. I can understand Dudley;
+but I can't see why healthy bachelors, with money enough, like
+ourselves, need such a device. It reminds me of what Dr. Johnson
+said, that the most discouraging thing about life is the number of
+fads and hobbies and fake religions it takes to put people through a
+few years of it."
+
+"Dr. Johnson? The specialist? Oh, the old fellow!" said Cavenaugh
+imperturbably. "Yes, that's interesting. Still, I fancy if one knew
+the facts--Did you know about Wyatt?"
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"You wouldn't, probably. He was just a fellow about town who spent
+money. He wasn't one of the _forestieri_, though. Had connections
+here and owned a fine old place over on Staten Island. He went in
+for botany, and had been all over, hunting things; rusts, I believe.
+He had a yacht and used to take a gay crowd down about the South
+Seas, botanizing. He really did botanize, I believe. I never knew
+such a spender--only not flashy. He helped a lot of fellows and he
+was awfully good to girls, the kind who come down here to get a
+little fun, who don't like to work and still aren't really tough,
+the kind you see talking hard for their dinner. Nobody knows what
+becomes of them, or what they get out of it, and there are hundreds
+of new ones every year. He helped dozens of 'em; it was he who got
+me curious about the little shop girls. Well, one afternoon when his
+tea was brought, he took prussic acid instead. He didn't leave any
+letters, either; people of any taste don't. They wouldn't leave any
+material reminder if they could help it. His lawyers found that he
+had just $314.72 above his debts when he died. He had planned to
+spend all his money, and then take his tea; he had worked it out
+carefully."
+
+Eastman reached for his pipe and pushed his chair away from the
+fire. "That looks like a considered case, but I don't think
+philosophical suicides like that are common. I think they usually
+come from stress of feeling and are really, as the newspapers call
+them, desperate acts; done without a motive. You remember when Anna
+Karenina was under the wheels, she kept saying, 'Why am I here?'"
+
+Cavenaugh rubbed his upper lip with his pink finger and made an effort
+to wrinkle his brows. "May I, please?" reaching for the whiskey.
+"But have you," he asked, blinking as the soda flew at him, "have
+you ever known, yourself, cases that were really inexplicable?"
+
+"A few too many. I was in Washington just before Captain Jack Purden
+was married and I saw a good deal of him. Popular army man, fine
+record in the Philippines, married a charming girl with lots of
+money; mutual devotion. It was the gayest wedding of the winter, and
+they started for Japan. They stopped in San Francisco for a week and
+missed their boat because, as the bride wrote back to Washington,
+they were too happy to move. They took the next boat, were both good
+sailors, had exceptional weather. After they had been out for two
+weeks, Jack got up from his deck chair one afternoon, yawned, put
+down his book, and stood before his wife. 'Stop reading for a moment
+and look at me.' She laughed and asked him why. 'Because you happen
+to be good to look at.' He nodded to her, went back to the stern and
+was never seen again. Must have gone down to the lower deck and
+slipped overboard, behind the machinery. It was the luncheon hour,
+not many people about; steamer cutting through a soft green sea.
+That's one of the most baffling cases I know. His friends raked up
+his past, and it was as trim as a cottage garden. If he'd so much as
+dropped an ink spot on his fatigue uniform, they'd have found it. He
+wasn't emotional or moody; wasn't, indeed, very interesting; simply
+a good soldier, fond of all the pompous little formalities that make
+up a military man's life. What do you make of that, my boy?"
+
+Cavenaugh stroked his chin. "It's very puzzling, I admit. Still, if
+one knew everything----"
+
+"But we do know everything. His friends wanted to find something to
+help them out, to help the girl out, to help the case of the human
+creature."
+
+"Oh, I don't mean things that people could unearth," said Cavenaugh
+uneasily. "But possibly there were things that couldn't be found
+out."
+
+Eastman shrugged his shoulders. "It's my experience that when there
+are 'things' as you call them, they're very apt to be found. There
+is no such thing as a secret. To make any move at all one has to
+employ human agencies, employ at least one human agent. Even when
+the pirates killed the men who buried their gold for them, the bones
+told the story."
+
+Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny smile.
+
+"I like that idea. It's reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it
+means that we can't, after all, go so far afield as we might," he
+hesitated, "yes, as we might."
+
+Eastman looked at him sourly. "Cavenaugh, when you've practised law
+in New York for twelve years, you find that people can't go far in
+any direction, except--" He thrust his forefinger sharply at the
+floor. "Even in that direction, few people can do anything out of
+the ordinary. Our range is limited. Skip a few baths, and we become
+personally objectionable. The slightest carelessness can rot a man's
+integrity or give him ptomaine poisoning. We keep up only by
+incessant cleansing operations, of mind and body. What we call
+character, is held together by all sorts of tacks and strings and
+glue."
+
+Cavenaugh looked startled. "Come now, it's not so bad as that, is
+it? I've always thought that a serious man, like you, must know a
+lot of Launcelots." When Eastman only laughed, the younger man
+squirmed about in his chair. He spoke again hastily, as if he were
+embarrassed. "Your military friend may have had personal
+experiences, however, that his friends couldn't possibly get a line
+on. He may accidentally have come to a place where he saw himself in
+too unpleasant a light. I believe people can be chilled by a draft
+from outside, somewhere."
+
+"Outside?" Eastman echoed. "Ah, you mean the far outside! Ghosts,
+delusions, eh?"
+
+Cavenaugh winced. "That's putting it strong. Why not say tips from
+the outside? Delusions belong to a diseased mind, don't they? There
+are some of us who have no minds to speak of, who yet have had
+experiences. I've had a little something in that line myself and I
+don't look it, do I?"
+
+Eastman looked at the bland countenance turned toward him. "Not
+exactly. What's your delusion?"
+
+"It's not a delusion. It's a haunt."
+
+The lawyer chuckled. "Soul of a lost Casino girl?"
+
+"No; an old gentleman. A most unattractive old gentleman, who
+follows me about."
+
+"Does he want money?"
+
+Cavenaugh sat up straight. "No. I wish to God he wanted
+anything--but the pleasure of my society! I'd let him clean me out
+to be rid of him. He's a real article. You saw him yourself that
+night when you came to my rooms to borrow a dictionary, and he went
+down the fire-escape. You saw him down in the court."
+
+"Well, I saw somebody down in the court, but I'm too cautious to
+take it for granted that I saw what you saw. Why, anyhow, should I
+see your haunt? If it was your friend I saw, he impressed me
+disagreeably. How did you pick him up?"
+
+Cavenaugh looked gloomy. "That was queer, too. Charley Burke and I
+had motored out to Long Beach, about a year ago, sometime in
+October, I think. We had supper and stayed until late. When we were
+coming home, my car broke down. We had a lot of girls along who had
+to get back for morning rehearsals and things; so I sent them all
+into town in Charley's car, and he was to send a man back to tow me
+home. I was driving myself, and didn't want to leave my machine. We
+had not taken a direct road back; so I was stuck in a lonesome,
+woody place, no houses about. I got chilly and made a fire, and was
+putting in the time comfortably enough, when this old party steps
+up. He was in shabby evening clothes and a top hat, and had on his
+usual white gloves. How he got there, at three o'clock in the
+morning, miles from any town or railway, I'll leave it to you to
+figure out. _He_ surely had no car. When I saw him coming up to the
+fire, I disliked him. He had a silly, apologetic walk. His teeth
+were chattering, and I asked him to sit down. He got down like a
+clothes-horse folding up. I offered him a cigarette, and when he
+took off his gloves I couldn't help noticing how knotted and spotty
+his hands were. He was asthmatic, and took his breath with a wheeze.
+'Haven't you got anything--refreshing in there?' he asked, nodding
+at the car. When I told him I hadn't, he sighed. 'Ah, you young
+fellows are greedy. You drink it all up. You drink it all up, all
+up--up!' he kept chewing it over."
+
+Cavenaugh paused and looked embarrassed again. "The thing that was
+most unpleasant is difficult to explain. The old man sat there by
+the fire and leered at me with a silly sort of admiration that
+was--well, more than humiliating. 'Gay boy, gay dog!' he would
+mutter, and when he grinned he showed his teeth, worn and
+yellow--shells. I remembered that it was better to talk casually to
+insane people; so I remarked carelessly that I had been out with a
+party and got stuck.
+
+"'Oh yes, I remember,' he said, 'Flora and Lottie and Maybelle and
+Marcelline, and poor Kate.'
+
+"He had named them correctly; so I began to think I had been hitting
+the bright waters too hard.
+
+"Things I drank never had seemed to make me woody; but you can never
+tell when trouble is going to hit you. I pulled my hat down and
+tried to look as uncommunicative as possible; but he kept croaking
+on from time to time, like this: 'Poor Kate! Splendid arms, but dope
+got her. She took up with Eastern religions after she had her hair
+dyed. Got to going to a Swami's joint, and smoking opium. Temple of
+the Lotus, it was called, and the police raided it.'
+
+"This was nonsense, of course; the young woman was in the pink of
+condition. I let him rave, but I decided that if something didn't
+come out for me pretty soon, I'd foot it across Long Island. There
+wasn't room enough for the two of us. I got up and took another try
+at my car. He hopped right after me.
+
+"'Good car,' he wheezed, 'better than the little Ford.'
+
+"I'd had a Ford before, but so has everybody; that was a safe guess.
+
+"'Still,' he went on, 'that run in from Huntington Bay in the rain
+wasn't bad. Arrested for speeding, he-he.'
+
+"It was true I had made such a run, under rather unusual
+circumstances, and had been arrested. When at last I heard my
+life-boat snorting up the road, my visitor got up, sighed, and
+stepped back into the shadow of the trees. I didn't wait to see what
+became of him, you may believe. That was visitation number one. What
+do you think of it?"
+
+Cavenaugh looked at his host defiantly. Eastman smiled.
+
+"I think you'd better change your mode of life, Cavenaugh. Had many
+returns?" he inquired.
+
+"Too many, by far." The young man took a turn about the room and
+came back to the fire. Standing by the mantel he lit another
+cigarette before going on with his story:
+
+"The second visitation happened in the street, early in the evening,
+about eight o'clock. I was held up in a traffic block before the
+Plaza. My chauffeur was driving. Old Nibbs steps up out of the
+crowd, opens the door of my car, gets in and sits down beside me. He
+had on wilted evening clothes, same as before, and there was some
+sort of heavy scent about him. Such an unpleasant old party! A
+thorough-going rotter; you knew it at once. This time he wasn't
+talkative, as he had been when I first saw him. He leaned back in
+the car as if he owned it, crossed his hands on his stick and looked
+out at the crowd--sort of hungrily.
+
+"I own I really felt a loathing compassion for him. We got down the
+avenue slowly. I kept looking out at the mounted police. But what
+could I do? Have him pulled? I was afraid to. I was awfully afraid
+of getting him into the papers.
+
+"'I'm going to the New Astor,' I said at last. 'Can I take you
+anywhere?'
+
+"'No, thank you,' says he. 'I get out when you do. I'm due on West
+44th. I'm dining to-night with Marcelline--all that is left of her!'
+
+"He put his hand to his hat brim with a grewsome salute. Such a
+scandalous, foolish old face as he had! When we pulled up at the
+Astor, I stuck my hand in my pocket and asked him if he'd like a
+little loan.
+
+"'No, thank you, but'--he leaned over and whispered, ugh!--'but save
+a little, save a little. Forty years from now--a little--comes in
+handy. Save a little.'
+
+"His eyes fairly glittered as he made his remark. I jumped out. I'd
+have jumped into the North River. When he tripped off, I asked my
+chauffeur if he'd noticed the man who got into the car with me. He
+said he knew someone was with me, but he hadn't noticed just when he
+got in. Want to hear any more?"
+
+Cavenaugh dropped into his chair again. His plump cheeks were a
+trifle more flushed than usual, but he was perfectly calm. Eastman
+felt that the young man believed what he was telling him.
+
+"Of course I do. It's very interesting. I don't see quite where you
+are coming out though."
+
+Cavenaugh sniffed. "No more do I. I really feel that I've been put
+upon. I haven't deserved it any more than any other fellow of my
+kind. Doesn't it impress you disagreeably?"
+
+"Well, rather so. Has anyone else seen your friend?"
+
+"You saw him."
+
+"We won't count that. As I said, there's no certainty that you and I
+saw the same person in the court that night. Has anyone else had a
+look in?"
+
+"People sense him rather than see him. He usually crops up when I'm
+alone or in a crowd on the street. He never approaches me when I'm
+with people I know, though I've seen him hanging about the doors of
+theatres when I come out with a party; loafing around the stage
+exit, under a wall; or across the street, in a doorway. To be frank,
+I'm not anxious to introduce him. The third time, it was I who came
+upon him. In November my driver, Harry, had a sudden attack of
+appendicitis. I took him to the Presbyterian Hospital in the car,
+early in the evening. When I came home, I found the old villain in
+my rooms. I offered him a drink, and he sat down. It was the first
+time I had seen him in a steady light, with his hat off.
+
+"His face is lined like a railway map, and as to color--Lord, what a
+liver! His scalp grows tight to his skull, and his hair is dyed
+until it's perfectly dead, like a piece of black cloth."
+
+Cavenaugh ran his fingers through his own neatly trimmed thatch, and
+seemed to forget where he was for a moment.
+
+"I had a twin brother, Brian, who died when we were sixteen. I have
+a photograph of him on my wall, an enlargement from a kodak of him,
+doing a high jump, rather good thing, full of action. It seemed to
+annoy the old gentleman. He kept looking at it and lifting his
+eyebrows, and finally he got up, tip-toed across the room, and
+turned the picture to the wall.
+
+"'Poor Brian! Fine fellow, but died young,' says he.
+
+"Next morning, there was the picture, still reversed."
+
+"Did he stay long?" Eastman asked interestedly.
+
+"Half an hour, by the clock."
+
+"Did he talk?"
+
+"Well, he rambled."
+
+"What about?"
+
+Cavenaugh rubbed his pale eyebrows before answering.
+
+"About things that an old man ought to want to forget. His
+conversation is highly objectionable. Of course he knows me like a
+book; everything I've ever done or thought. But when he recalls
+them, he throws a bad light on them, somehow. Things that weren't
+much off color, look rotten. He doesn't leave one a shred of
+self-respect, he really doesn't. That's the amount of it." The young
+man whipped out his handkerchief and wiped his face.
+
+"You mean he really talks about things that none of your friends
+know?"
+
+"Oh, dear, yes! Recalls things that happened in school. Anything
+disagreeable. Funny thing, he always turns Brian's picture to the
+wall."
+
+"Does he come often?"
+
+"Yes, oftener, now. Of course I don't know how he gets in
+down-stairs. The hall boys never see him. But he has a key to my
+door. I don't know how he got it, but I can hear him turn it in the
+lock."
+
+"Why don't you keep your driver with you, or telephone for me to
+come down?"
+
+"He'd only grin and go down the fire escape as he did before. He's
+often done it when Harry's come in suddenly. Everybody has to be
+alone sometimes, you know. Besides, I don't want anybody to see him.
+He has me there."
+
+"But why not? Why do you feel responsible for him?"
+
+Cavenaugh smiled wearily. "That's rather the point, isn't it? Why do
+I? But I absolutely do. That identifies him, more than his knowing
+all about my life and my affairs."
+
+Eastman looked at Cavenaugh thoughtfully. "Well, I should advise you
+to go in for something altogether different and new, and go in for
+it hard; business, engineering, metallurgy, something this old
+fellow wouldn't be interested in. See if you can make him remember
+logarithms."
+
+Cavenaugh sighed. "No, he has me there, too. People never really
+change; they go on being themselves. But I would never make much
+trouble. Why can't they let me alone, damn it! I'd never hurt
+anybody, except, perhaps----"
+
+"Except your old gentleman, eh?" Eastman laughed. "Seriously,
+Cavenaugh, if you want to shake him, I think a year on a ranch would
+do it. He would never be coaxed far from his favorite haunts. He
+would dread Montana."
+
+Cavenaugh pursed up his lips. "So do I!"
+
+"Oh, you think you do. Try it, and you'll find out. A gun and a
+horse beats all this sort of thing. Besides losing your haunt, you'd
+be putting ten years in the bank for yourself. I know a good ranch
+where they take people, if you want to try it."
+
+"Thank you. I'll consider. Do you think I'm batty?"
+
+"No, but I think you've been doing one sort of thing too long. You
+need big horizons. Get out of this."
+
+Cavenaugh smiled meekly. He rose lazily and yawned behind his hand.
+"It's late, and I've taken your whole evening." He strolled over to
+the window and looked out. "Queer place, New York; rough on the
+little fellows. Don't you feel sorry for them, the girls especially?
+I do. What a fight they put up for a little fun! Why, even that old
+goat is sorry for them, the only decent thing he kept."
+
+Eastman followed him to the door and stood in the hall, while
+Cavenaugh waited for the elevator. When the car came up Cavenaugh
+extended his pink, warm hand. "Good night."
+
+The cage sank and his rosy countenance disappeared, his round-eyed
+smile being the last thing to go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Weeks passed before Eastman saw Cavenaugh again. One morning, just
+as he was starting for Washington to argue a case before the Supreme
+Court, Cavenaugh telephoned him at his office to ask him about the
+Montana ranch he had recommended; said he meant to take his advice
+and go out there for the spring and summer.
+
+When Eastman got back from Washington, he saw dusty trunks, just up
+from the trunk room, before Cavenaugh's door. Next morning, when he
+stopped to see what the young man was about, he found Cavenaugh in
+his shirt sleeves, packing.
+
+"I'm really going; off to-morrow night. You didn't think it of me,
+did you?" he asked gaily.
+
+"Oh, I've always had hopes of you!" Eastman declared. "But you are
+in a hurry, it seems to me."
+
+"Yes, I am in a hurry." Cavenaugh shot a pair of leggings into one
+of the open trunks. "I telegraphed your ranch people, used your
+name, and they said it would be all right. By the way, some of my
+crowd are giving a little dinner for me at Rector's to-night.
+Couldn't you be persuaded, as it's a farewell occasion?" Cavenaugh
+looked at him hopefully.
+
+Eastman laughed and shook his head. "Sorry, Cavenaugh, but that's
+too gay a world for me. I've got too much work lined up before me. I
+wish I had time to stop and look at your guns, though. You seem to
+know something about guns. You've more than you'll need, but nobody
+can have too many good ones." He put down one of the revolvers
+regretfully. "I'll drop in to see you in the morning, if you're up."
+
+"I shall be up, all right. I've warned my crowd that I'll cut away
+before midnight."
+
+"You won't, though," Eastman called back over his shoulder as he
+hurried down-stairs.
+
+The next morning, while Eastman was dressing, Rollins came in
+greatly excited.
+
+"I'm a little late, sir. I was stopped by Harry, Mr. Cavenaugh's
+driver. Mr. Cavenaugh shot himself last night, sir."
+
+Eastman dropped his vest and sat down on his shoe-box. "You're
+drunk, Rollins," he shouted. "He's going away to-day!"
+
+"Yes, sir. Harry found him this morning. Ah, he's quite dead, sir.
+Harry's telephoned for the coroner. Harry don't know what to do with
+the ticket."
+
+Eastman pulled on his coat and ran down the stairway. Cavenaugh's
+trunks were strapped and piled before the door. Harry was walking up
+and down the hall with a long green railroad ticket in his hand and
+a look of complete stupidity on his face.
+
+"What shall I do about this ticket, Mr. Eastman?" he whispered. "And
+what about his trunks? He had me tell the transfer people to come
+early. They may be here any minute. Yes, sir. I brought him home in
+the car last night, before twelve, as cheerful as could be."
+
+"Be quiet, Harry. Where is he?"
+
+"In his bed, sir."
+
+Eastman went into Cavenaugh's sleeping-room. When he came back to
+the sitting-room, he looked over the writing table; railway folders,
+time-tables, receipted bills, nothing else. He looked up for the
+photograph of Cavenaugh's twin brother. There it was, turned to the
+wall. Eastman took it down and looked at it; a boy in track clothes,
+half lying in the air, going over the string shoulders first, above
+the heads of a crowd of lads who were running and cheering. The face
+was somewhat blurred by the motion and the bright sunlight. Eastman
+put the picture back, as he found it. Had Cavenaugh entertained his
+visitor last night, and had the old man been more convincing than
+usual? "Well, at any rate, he's seen to it that the old man can't
+establish identity. What a soft lot they are, fellows like poor
+Cavenaugh!" Eastman thought of his office as a delightful place.
+
+                                      _McClure's_, November 1915
+
+
+
+
+_The Bookkeeper's Wife_
+
+
+Nobody but the janitor was stirring about the offices of the Remsen
+Paper Company, and still Percy Bixby sat at his desk, crouched on
+his high stool and staring out at the tops of the tall buildings
+flushed with the winter sunset, at the hundreds of windows, so many
+rectangles of white electric light, flashing against the broad waves
+of violet that ebbed across the sky. His ledgers were all in their
+places, his desk was in order, his office coat on its peg, and yet
+Percy's smooth, thin face wore the look of anxiety and strain which
+usually meant that he was behind in his work. He was trying to
+persuade himself to accept a loan from the company without the
+company's knowledge. As a matter of fact, he had already accepted
+it. His books were fixed, the money, in a black-leather bill-book,
+was already inside his waistcoat pocket.
+
+He had still time to change his mind, to rectify the false figures
+in his ledger, and to tell Stella Brown that they couldn't possibly
+get married next month. There he always halted in his reasoning, and
+went back to the beginning.
+
+The Remsen Paper Company was a very wealthy concern, with easy,
+old-fashioned working methods. They did a longtime credit business
+with safe customers, who never thought of paying up very close on
+their large indebtedness. From the payments on these large accounts
+Percy had taken a hundred dollars here and two hundred there until
+he had made up the thousand he needed. So long as he stayed by the
+books himself and attended to the mail-orders he couldn't possibly
+be found out. He could move these little shortages about from
+account to account indefinitely. He could have all the time he
+needed to pay back the deficit, and more time than he needed.
+
+Although he was so far along in one course of action, his mind still
+clung resolutely to the other. He did not believe he was going to do
+it. He was the least of a sharper in the world. Being scrupulously
+honest even in the most trifling matters was a pleasure to him. He
+was the sort of young man that Socialists hate more than they hate
+capitalists. He loved his desk, he loved his books, which had no
+handwriting in them but his own. He never thought of resenting the
+fact that he had written away in those books the good red years
+between twenty-one and twenty-seven. He would have hated to let any
+one else put so much as a pen-scratch in them. He liked all the boys
+about the office; his desk, worn smooth by the sleeves of his alpaca
+coat; his rulers and inks and pens and calendars. He had a great
+pride in working economics, and he always got so far ahead when
+supplies were distributed that he had drawers full of pencils and
+pens and rubber bands against a rainy day.
+
+Percy liked regularity: to get his work done on time, to have his
+half-day off every Saturday, to go to the theater Saturday night, to
+buy a new necktie twice a month, to appear in a new straw hat on the
+right day in May, and to know what was going on in New York. He read
+the morning and evening papers coming and going on the elevated, and
+preferred journals of approximate reliability. He got excited about
+ballgames and elections and business failures, was not above an
+interest in murders and divorce scandals, and he checked the news
+off as neatly as he checked his mail-orders. In short, Percy Bixby
+was like the model pupil who is satisfied with his lessons and his
+teachers and his holidays, and who would gladly go to school all his
+life. He had never wanted anything outside his routine until he
+wanted Stella Brown to marry him, and that had upset everything.
+
+It wasn't, he told himself for the hundredth time, that she was
+extravagant. Not a bit of it. She was like all girls. Moreover, she
+made good money, and why should she marry unless she could better
+herself? The trouble was that he had lied to her about his salary.
+There were a lot of fellows rushing Mrs. Brown's five daughters, and
+they all seemed to have fixed on Stella as first choice and this or
+that one of the sisters as second. Mrs. Brown thought it proper to
+drop an occasional hint in the presence of these young men to the
+effect that she expected Stella to "do well." It went without saying
+that hair and complexion like Stella's could scarcely be expected to
+do poorly. Most of the boys who went to the house and took the girls
+out in a bunch to dances and movies seemed to realize this. They
+merely wanted a whirl with Stella before they settled down to one of
+her sisters. It was tacitly understood that she came too high for
+them. Percy had sensed all this through those slumbering instincts
+which awake in us all to befriend us in love or in danger.
+
+But there was one of his rivals, he knew, who was a man to be
+reckoned with. Charley Greengay was a young salesman who wore
+tailor-made clothes and spotted waistcoats, and had a necktie for
+every day in the month. His air was that of a young man who is out
+for things that come high and who is going to get them. Mrs. Brown
+was ever and again dropping a word before Percy about how the girl
+that took Charley would have her flat furnished by the best
+furniture people, and her china-closet stocked with the best ware,
+and would have nothing to worry about but nicks and scratches. It
+was because he felt himself pitted against this pulling power of
+Greengay's that Percy had brazenly lied to Mrs. Brown, and told her
+that his salary had been raised to fifty a week, and that now he
+wanted to get married.
+
+When he threw out this challenge to Mother Brown, Percy was getting
+thirty-five dollars a week, and he knew well enough that there were
+several hundred thousand young men in New York who would do his work
+as well as he did for thirty.
+
+These were the factors in Percy's present situation. He went over
+them again and again as he sat stooping on his tall stool. He had
+quite lost track of time when he heard the janitor call good night
+to the watchman. Without thinking what he was doing, he slid into
+his overcoat, caught his hat, and rushed out to the elevator, which
+was waiting for the janitor. The moment the car dropped, it occurred
+to him that the thing was decided without his having made up his
+mind at all. The familiar floors passed him, ten, nine, eight,
+seven. By the time he reached the fifth, there was no possibility of
+going back; the click of the drop-lever seemed to settle that. The
+money was in his pocket. Now, he told himself as he hurried out into
+the exciting clamor of the street, he was not going to worry about
+it any more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Percy reached the Browns' flat on 123d Street that evening he
+felt just the slightest chill in Stella's greeting. He could make
+that all right, he told himself, as he kissed her lightly in the
+dark three-by-four entrance-hall. Percy's courting had been
+prosecuted mainly in the Bronx or in winged pursuit of a Broadway
+car. When he entered the crowded sitting-room he greeted Mrs. Brown
+respectfully and the four girls playfully. They were all piled on
+one couch, reading the continued story in the evening paper, and
+they didn't think it necessary to assume more formal attitudes for
+Percy. They looked up over the smeary pink sheets of paper, and
+handed him, as Percy said, the same old jolly:
+
+"Hullo, Perc'! Come to see me, ain't you? So flattered!"
+
+"Any sweet goods on you, Perc'? Anything doing in the bong-bong line
+to-night?"
+
+"Look at his new neckwear! Say, Perc', remember me. That tie would
+go lovely with my new tailored waist."
+
+"Quit your kiddin', girls!" called Mrs. Brown, who was drying
+shirt-waists on the dining-room radiator. "And, Percy, mind the rugs
+when you're steppin' round among them gum-drops."
+
+Percy fired his last shot at the recumbent figures, and followed
+Stella into the dining-room, where the table and two large
+easy-chairs formed, in Mrs. Brown's estimation, a proper background
+for a serious suitor.
+
+"I say, Stell'," he began as he walked about the table with his
+hands in his pockets, "seems to me we ought to begin buying our
+stuff." She brightened perceptibly. "Ah," Percy thought, "so that
+_was_ the trouble!" "To-morrow's Saturday; why can't we make an
+afternoon of it?" he went on cheerfully. "Shop till we're tired,
+then go to Houtin's for dinner, and end up at the theater."
+
+As they bent over the lists she had made of things needed, Percy
+glanced at her face. She was very much out of her sisters' class and
+out of his, and he kept congratulating himself on his nerve. He was
+going in for something much too handsome and expensive and
+distinguished for him, he felt, and it took courage to be a plunger.
+To begin with, Stella was the sort of girl who had to be well
+dressed. She had pale primrose hair, with bluish tones in it, very
+soft and fine, so that it lay smooth however she dressed it, and
+pale-blue eyes, with blond eyebrows and long, dark lashes. She would
+have been a little too remote and languid even for the fastidious
+Percy had it not been for her hard, practical mouth, with lips that
+always kept their pink even when the rest of her face was pale. Her
+employers, who at first might be struck by her indifference,
+understood that anybody with that sort of mouth would get through
+the work.
+
+After the shopping-lists had been gone over, Percy took up the
+question of the honeymoon. Stella said she had been thinking of
+Atlantic City. Percy met her with firmness. Whatever happened, he
+couldn't leave his books now.
+
+"I want to do my traveling right here on Forty-second Street, with a
+high-price show every night," he declared. He made out an itinerary,
+punctuated by theaters and restaurants, which Stella consented to
+accept as a substitute for Atlantic City.
+
+"They give your fellows a week off when they're married, don't
+they?" she asked.
+
+"Yes, but I'll want to drop into the office every morning to look
+after my mail. That's only businesslike."
+
+"I'd like to have you treated as well as the others, though." Stella
+turned the rings about on her pale hand and looked at her polished
+finger-tips.
+
+"I'll look out for that. What do you say to a little walk, Stell'?"
+Percy put the question coaxingly. When Stella was pleased with him
+she went to walk with him, since that was the only way in which
+Percy could ever see her alone. When she was displeased, she said
+she was too tired to go out. To-night she smiled at him
+incredulously, and went to put on her hat and gray fur piece.
+
+Once they were outside, Percy turned into a shadowy side street that
+was only partly built up, a dreary waste of derricks and foundation
+holes, but comparatively solitary. Stella liked Percy's steady,
+sympathetic silences; she was not a chatterbox herself. She often
+wondered why she was going to marry Bixby instead of Charley
+Greengay. She knew that Charley would go further in the world.
+Indeed, she had often coolly told herself that Percy would never go
+very far. But, as she admitted with a shrug, she was "weak to
+Percy." In the capable New York stenographer, who estimated values
+coldly and got the most for the least outlay, there was something
+left that belonged to another kind of woman--something that liked
+the very things in Percy that were not good business assets. However
+much she dwelt upon the effectiveness of Greengay's dash and color
+and assurance, her mind always came back to Percy's neat little
+head, his clean-cut face, and warm, clear, gray eyes, and she liked
+them better than Charley's fullness and blurred floridness. Having
+reckoned up their respective chances with no doubtful result, she
+opposed a mild obstinacy to her own good sense. "I guess I'll take
+Percy, _anyway_," she said simply, and that was all the good her
+clever business brain did her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Percy spent a night of torment, lying tense on his bed in the dark,
+and figuring out how long it would take him to pay back the money he
+was advancing to himself. Any fool could do it in five years, he
+reasoned, but he was going to do it in three. The trouble was that
+his expensive courtship had taken every penny of his salary. With
+competitors like Charley Greengay, you had to spend money or drop
+out. Certain birds, he reflected ruefully, are supplied with more
+attractive plumage when they are courting, but nature hadn't been so
+thoughtful for men. When Percy reached the office in the morning he
+climbed on his tall stool and leaned his arms on his ledger. He was
+so glad to feel it there that he was faint and weak-kneed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oliver Remsen, Junior, had brought new blood into the Remsen Paper
+Company. He married shortly after Percy Bixby did, and in the five
+succeeding years he had considerably enlarged the company's business
+and profits. He had been particularly successful in encouraging
+efficiency and loyalty in the employees. From the time he came into
+the office he had stood for shorter hours, longer holidays, and a
+generous consideration of men's necessities. He came out of college
+on the wave of economic reform, and he continued to read and think a
+good deal about how the machinery of labor is operated. He knew more
+about the men who worked for him than their mere office records.
+
+Young Remsen was troubled about Percy Bixby because he took no
+summer vacations--always asked for the two weeks' extra pay instead.
+Other men in the office had skipped a vacation now and then, but
+Percy had stuck to his desk for five years, had tottered to his
+stool through attacks of grippe and tonsilitis. He seemed to have
+grown fast to his ledger, and it was to this that Oliver objected.
+He liked his men to stay men, to look like men and live like men. He
+remembered how alert and wide-awake Bixby had seemed to him when he
+himself first came into the office. He had picked Bixby out as the
+most intelligent and interested of his father's employees, and since
+then had often wondered why he never seemed to see chances to forge
+ahead. Promotions, of course, went to the men who went after them.
+When Percy's baby died, he went to the funeral, and asked Percy to
+call on him if he needed money. Once when he chanced to sit down by
+Bixby on the elevated and found him reading Bryce's "American
+Commonwealth," he asked him to make use of his own large office
+library. Percy thanked him, but he never came for any books. Oliver
+wondered whether his bookkeeper really tried to avoid him.
+
+One evening Oliver met the Bixbys in the lobby of a theater. He
+introduced Mrs. Remsen to them, and held them for some moments in
+conversation. When they got into their motor, Mrs. Remsen said:
+
+"Is that little man afraid of you, Oliver? He looked like a scared
+rabbit."
+
+Oliver snapped the door, and said with a shade of irritation:
+
+"I don't know what's the matter with him. He's the fellow I've told
+you about who never takes a vacation. I half believe it's his wife.
+She looks pitiless enough for anything."
+
+"She's very pretty of her kind," mused Mrs. Remsen, "but rather
+chilling. One can see that she has ideas about elegance."
+
+"Rather unfortunate ones for a bookkeeper's wife. I surmise that
+Percy felt she was overdressed, and that made him awkward with me.
+I've always suspected that fellow of good taste."
+
+After that, when Remsen passed the counting-room and saw Percy
+screwed up over his ledger, he often remembered Mrs. Bixby, with her
+cold, pale eyes and long lashes, and her expression that was
+something between indifference and discontent. She rose behind
+Percy's bent shoulders like an apparition.
+
+One spring afternoon Remsen was closeted in his private office with
+his lawyer until a late hour. As he came down the long hall in the
+dusk he glanced through the glass partition into the counting-room,
+and saw Percy Bixby huddled up on his tall stool, though it was too
+dark to work. Indeed, Bixby's ledger was closed, and he sat with his
+two arms resting on the brown cover. He did not move a muscle when
+young Remsen entered.
+
+"You are late, Bixby, and so am I," Oliver began genially as he
+crossed to the front of the room and looked out at the lighted
+windows of other tall buildings. "The fact is, I've been doing
+something that men have a foolish way of putting off. I've been
+making my will."
+
+"Yes, sir." Percy brought it out with a deep breath.
+
+"Glad to be through with it," Oliver went on. "Mr. Melton will bring
+the paper back to-morrow, and I'd like to ask you to be one of the
+witnesses."
+
+"I'd be very proud, Mr. Remsen."
+
+"Thank you, Bixby. Good night." Remsen took up his hat just as Percy
+slid down from his stool.
+
+"Mr. Remsen, I'm told you're going to have the books gone over."
+
+"Why, yes, Bixby. Don't let that trouble you. I'm taking in a new
+partner, you know, an old college friend. Just because he is a
+friend, I insist upon all the usual formalities. But it is a
+formality, and I'll guarantee the expert won't make a scratch on
+your books. Good night. You'd better be coming, too." Remsen had
+reached the door when he heard "Mr. Remsen!" in a desperate voice
+behind him. He turned, and saw Bixby standing uncertainly at one end
+of the desk, his hand still on his ledger, his uneven shoulders
+drooping forward and his head hanging as if he were seasick. Remsen
+came back and stood at the other end of the long desk. It was too
+dark to see Bixby's face clearly.
+
+"What is it, Bixby?"
+
+"Mr. Remsen, five years ago, just before I was married, I falsified
+the books a thousand dollars, and I used the money." Percy leaned
+forward against his desk, which took him just across the chest.
+
+"What's that, Bixby?" Young Remsen spoke in a tone of polite
+surprise. He felt painfully embarrassed.
+
+"Yes, sir. I thought I'd get it all paid back before this. I've put
+back three hundred, but the books are still seven hundred out of
+true. I've played the shortages about from account to account these
+five years, but an expert would find 'em in twenty-four hours."
+
+"I don't just understand how--" Oliver stopped and shook his head.
+
+"I held it out of the Western remittances, Mr. Remsen. They were
+coming in heavy just then. I was up against it. I hadn't saved
+anything to marry on, and my wife thought I was getting more money
+than I was. Since we've been married, I've never had the nerve to
+tell her. I could have paid it all back if it hadn't been for the
+unforeseen expenses."
+
+Remsen sighed.
+
+"Being married is largely unforeseen expenses, Percy. There's only
+one way to fix this up: I'll give you seven hundred dollars in cash
+to-morrow, and you can give me your personal note, with the
+understanding that I hold ten dollars a week out of your pay-check
+until it is paid. I think you ought to tell your wife exactly how
+you are fixed, though. You can't expect her to help you much when
+she doesn't know."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That night Mrs. Bixby was sitting in their flat, waiting for her
+husband. She was dressed for a bridge party, and often looked with
+impatience from her paper to the Mission clock, as big as a coffin
+and with nothing but two weights dangling in its hollow framework.
+Percy had been loath to buy the clock when they got their furniture,
+and he had hated it ever since. Stella had changed very little since
+she came into the flat a bride. Then she wore her hair in a
+Floradora pompadour; now she wore it hooded close about her head
+like a scarf, in a rather smeary manner, like an Impressionist's
+brush-work. She heard her husband come in and close the door softly.
+While he was taking off his hat in the narrow tunnel of a hall, she
+called to him:
+
+"I hope you've had something to eat down-town. You'll have to dress
+right away." Percy came in and sat down. She looked up from the
+evening paper she was reading. "You've no time to sit down. We must
+start in fifteen minutes."
+
+He shaded his eyes from the glaring overhead light.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't go anywhere to-night. I'm all in."
+
+Mrs. Bixby rattled her paper, and turned from the theatrical page to
+the fashions.
+
+"You'll feel better after you dress. We won't stay late."
+
+Her even persistence usually conquered her husband. She never forgot
+anything she had once decided to do. Her manner of following it up
+grew more chilly, but never weaker. To-night there was no spring in
+Percy. He closed his eyes and replied without moving:
+
+"I can't go. You had better telephone the Burks we aren't coming. I
+have to tell you something disagreeable."
+
+Stella rose.
+
+"I certainly am not going to disappoint the Burks and stay at home
+to talk about anything disagreeable."
+
+"You're not very sympathetic, Stella."
+
+She turned away.
+
+"If I were, you'd soon settle down into a pretty dull proposition.
+We'd have no social life now if I didn't keep at you."
+
+Percy roused himself a little.
+
+"Social life? Well, we'll have to trim that pretty close for a
+while. I'm in debt to the company. We've been living beyond our
+means ever since we were married."
+
+"We can't live on less than we do," Stella said quietly. "No use in
+taking that up again."
+
+Percy sat up, clutching the arms of his chair.
+
+"We'll have to take it up. I'm seven hundred dollars short, and the
+books are to be audited to-morrow. I told young Remsen and he's
+going to take my note and hold the money out of my pay-checks. He
+could send me to jail, of course."
+
+Stella turned and looked down at him with a gleam of interest.
+
+"Oh, you've been playing solitaire with the books, have you? And
+he's found you out! I hope I'll never see that man again. Sugar
+face!" She said this with intense acrimony. Her forehead flushed
+delicately, and her eyes were full of hate. Young Remsen was not her
+idea of a "business man."
+
+Stella went into the other room. When she came back she wore her
+evening coat and carried long gloves and a black scarf. This she
+began to arrange over her hair before the mirror above the false
+fireplace. Percy lay inert in the Morris chair and watched her. Yes,
+he understood; it was very difficult for a woman with hair like that
+to be shabby and to go without things. Her hair made her
+conspicuous, and it had to be lived up to. It had been the deciding
+factor in his fate.
+
+Stella caught the lace over one ear with a large gold hairpin. She
+repeated this until she got a good effect. Then turning to Percy,
+she began to draw on her gloves.
+
+"I'm not worrying any, because I'm going back into business," she
+said firmly. "I meant to, anyway, if you didn't get a raise the
+first of the year. I have the offer of a good position, and we can
+live in an apartment hotel."
+
+Percy was on his feet in an instant.
+
+"I won't have you grinding in any office. That's flat."
+
+Stella's lower lip quivered in a commiserating smile. "Oh, I won't
+lose my health. Charley Greengay's a partner in his concern now, and
+he wants a private secretary."
+
+Percy drew back.
+
+"You can't work for Greengay. He's got too bad a reputation. You've
+more pride than that, Stella."
+
+The thin sweep of color he knew so well went over Stella's face.
+
+"His business reputation seems to be all right," she commented,
+working the kid on with her left hand.
+
+"What if it is?" Percy broke out. "He's the cheapest kind of a
+skate. He gets into scrapes with the girls in his own office. The
+last one got into the newspapers, and he had to pay the girl a wad."
+
+"He don't get into scrapes with his books, anyway, and he seems to
+be able to stand getting into the papers. I excuse Charley. His
+wife's a pill."
+
+"I suppose you think he'd have been all right if he'd married you,"
+said Percy, bitterly.
+
+"Yes, I do." Stella buttoned her glove with an air of finishing
+something, and then looked at Percy without animosity. "Charley and
+I both have sporty tastes, and we like excitement. You might as well
+live in Newark if you're going to sit at home in the evening. You
+oughtn't to have married a business woman; you need somebody
+domestic. There's nothing in this sort of life for either of us."
+
+"That means, I suppose, that you're going around with Greengay and
+his crowd?"
+
+"Yes, that's my sort of crowd, and you never did fit into it. You're
+too intellectual. I've always been proud of you, Percy. You're
+better style than Charley, but that gets tiresome. You will never
+burn much red fire in New York, now, will you?"
+
+Percy did not reply. He sat looking at the minute-hand of the
+eviscerated Mission clock. His wife almost never took the trouble to
+argue with him.
+
+"You're old style, Percy," she went on. "Of course everybody marries
+and wishes they hadn't, but nowadays people get over it. Some women
+go ahead on the quiet, but I'm giving it to you straight. I'm going
+to work for Greengay. I like his line of business, and I meet people
+well. Now I'm going to the Burks'."
+
+Percy dropped his hands limply between his knees.
+
+"I suppose," he brought out, "the real trouble is that you've
+decided my earning power is not very great."
+
+"That's part of it, and part of it is you're old-fashioned." Stella
+paused at the door and looked back. "What made you rush me, anyway,
+Percy?" she asked indulgently. "What did you go and pretend to be a
+spender and get tied up with me for?"
+
+"I guess everybody wants to be a spender when he's in love," Percy
+replied.
+
+Stella shook her head mournfully.
+
+"No, you're a spender or you're not. Greengay has been broke three
+times, fired, down and out, black-listed. But he's always come back,
+and he always will. You will never be fired, but you'll always be
+poor." She turned and looked back again before she went out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Six months later Bixby came to young Oliver Remsen one afternoon and
+said he would like to have twenty dollars a week held out of his pay
+until his debt was cleared off.
+
+Oliver looked up at his sallow employee and asked him how he could
+spare as much as that.
+
+"My expenses are lighter," Bixby replied. "My wife has gone into
+business with a ready-to-wear firm. She is not living with me any
+more."
+
+Oliver looked annoyed, and asked him if nothing could be done to
+readjust his domestic affairs. Bixby said no; they would probably
+remain as they were.
+
+"But where are you living, Bixby? How have you arranged things?" the
+young man asked impatiently.
+
+"I'm very comfortable. I live in a boarding-house and have my own
+furniture. There are several fellows there who are fixed the same
+way. Their wives went back into business, and they drifted apart."
+
+With a baffled expression Remsen stared at the uneven shoulders
+under the skin-fitting alpaca desk coat as his bookkeeper went out.
+He had meant to do something for Percy, but somehow, he reflected,
+one never did do anything for a fellow who had been stung as hard as
+that.
+
+                                             _Century_, May 1916
+
+
+
+
+_Ardessa_
+
+
+The grand-mannered old man who sat at a desk in the reception-room
+of "The Outcry" offices to receive visitors and incidentally to keep
+the time-book of the employees, looked up as Miss Devine entered at
+ten minutes past ten and condescendingly wished him good morning. He
+bowed profoundly as she minced past his desk, and with an
+indifferent air took her course down the corridor that led to the
+editorial offices. Mechanically he opened the flat, black book at
+his elbow and placed his finger on D, running his eye along the line
+of figures after the name Devine. "It's banker's hours she keeps,
+indeed," he muttered. What was the use of entering so capricious a
+record? Nevertheless, with his usual preliminary flourish he wrote
+10:10 under this, the fourth day of May.
+
+The employee who kept banker's hours rustled on down the corridor to
+her private room, hung up her lavender jacket and her trim spring
+hat, and readjusted her side combs by the mirror inside her closet
+door. Glancing at her desk, she rang for an office boy, and reproved
+him because he had not dusted more carefully and because there were
+lumps in her paste. When he disappeared with the paste-jar, she sat
+down to decide which of her employer's letters he should see and
+which he should not.
+
+Ardessa was not young and she was certainly not handsome. The
+coquettish angle at which she carried her head was a mannerism
+surviving from a time when it was more becoming. She shuddered at
+the cold candor of the new business woman, and was insinuatingly
+feminine.
+
+Ardessa's employer, like young Lochinvar, had come out of the West,
+and he had done a great many contradictory things before he became
+proprietor and editor of "The Outcry." Before he decided to go to
+New York and make the East take notice of him, O'Mally had acquired
+a punctual, reliable silver-mine in South Dakota. This silent friend
+in the background made his journalistic success comparatively easy.
+He had figured out, when he was a rich nobody in Nevada, that the
+quickest way to cut into the known world was through the
+printing-press. He arrived in New York, bought a highly respectable
+publication, and turned it into a red-hot magazine of protest, which
+he called "The Outcry." He knew what the West wanted, and it proved
+to be what everybody secretly wanted. In six years he had done the
+thing that had hitherto seemed impossible: built up a national
+weekly, out on the news-stands the same day in New York and San
+Francisco; a magazine the people howled for, a moving-picture film
+of their real tastes and interests.
+
+O'Mally bought "The Outcry" to make a stir, not to make a career,
+but he had got built into the thing more than he ever intended. It
+had made him a public man and put him into politics. He found the
+publicity game diverting, and it held him longer than any other game
+had ever done. He had built up about him an organization of which he
+was somewhat afraid and with which he was vastly bored. On his staff
+there were five famous men, and he had made every one of them. At
+first it amused him to manufacture celebrities. He found he could
+take an average reporter from the daily press, give him a "line" to
+follow, a trust to fight, a vice to expose,--this was all in that
+good time when people were eager to read about their own
+wickedness,--and in two years the reporter would be recognized as an
+authority. Other people--Napoleon, Disraeli, Sarah Bernhardt--had
+discovered that advertising would go a long way; but Marcus O'Mally
+discovered that in America it would go all the way--as far as you
+wished to pay its passage. Any human countenance, plastered in
+three-sheet posters from sea to sea, would be revered by the
+American people. The strangest thing was that the owners of these
+grave countenances, staring at their own faces on newsstands and
+billboards, fell to venerating themselves; and even he, O'Mally, was
+more or less constrained by these reputations that he had created
+out of cheap paper and cheap ink.
+
+Constraint was the last thing O'Mally liked. The most engaging and
+unusual thing about the man was that he couldn't be fooled by the
+success of his own methods, and no amount of "recognition" could
+make a stuffed shirt of him. No matter how much he was advertised as
+a great medicine-man in the councils of the nation, he knew that he
+was a born gambler and a soldier of fortune. He left his dignified
+office to take care of itself for a good many months of the year
+while he played about on the outskirts of social order. He liked
+being a great man from the East in rough-and-tumble Western cities
+where he had once been merely an unconsidered spender.
+
+O'Mally's long absences constituted one of the supreme advantages of
+Ardessa Devine's position. When he was at his post her duties were
+not heavy, but when he was giving balls in Goldfield, Nevada, she
+lived an ideal life. She came to the office every day, indeed, to
+forward such of O'Mally's letters as she thought best, to attend to
+his club notices and tradesmen's bills, and to taste the sense of
+her high connections. The great men of the staff were all about her,
+as contemplative as Buddhas in their private offices, each
+meditating upon the particular trust or form of vice confided to his
+care. Thus surrounded, Ardessa had a pleasant sense of being at the
+heart of things. It was like a mental massage, exercise without
+exertion. She read and she embroidered. Her room was pleasant, and
+she liked to be seen at ladylike tasks and to feel herself a
+graceful contrast to the crude girls in the advertising and
+circulation departments across the hall. The younger stenographers,
+who had to get through with the enormous office correspondence, and
+who rushed about from one editor to another with wire baskets full
+of letters, made faces as they passed Ardessa's door and saw her
+cool and cloistered, daintily plying her needle. But no matter how
+hard the other stenographers were driven, no one, not even one of
+the five oracles of the staff, dared dictate so much as a letter to
+Ardessa. Like a sultan's bride, she was inviolate in her lord's
+absence; she had to be kept for him.
+
+Naturally the other young women employed in "The Outcry" offices
+disliked Miss Devine. They were all competent girls, trained in the
+exacting methods of modern business, and they had to make good every
+day in the week, had to get through with a great deal of work or
+lose their position. O'Mally's private secretary was a mystery to
+them. Her exemptions and privileges, her patronizing remarks, formed
+an exhaustless subject of conversation at the lunch-hour. Ardessa
+had, indeed, as they knew she must have, a kind of "purchase" on her
+employer.
+
+When O'Mally first came to New York to break into publicity, he
+engaged Miss Devine upon the recommendation of the editor whose
+ailing publication he bought and rechristened. That editor was a
+conservative, scholarly gentleman of the old school, who was
+retiring because he felt out of place in the world of brighter,
+breezier magazines that had been flowering since the new century
+came in. He believed that in this vehement world young O'Mally would
+make himself heard and that Miss Devine's training in an editorial
+office would be of use to him.
+
+When O'Mally first sat down at a desk to be an editor, all the cards
+that were brought in looked pretty much alike to him. Ardessa was at
+his elbow. She had long been steeped in literary distinctions and in
+the social distinctions which used to count for much more than they
+do now. She knew all the great men, all the nephews and clients of
+great men. She knew which must be seen, which must be made welcome,
+and which could safely be sent away. She could give O'Mally on the
+instant the former rating in magazine offices of nearly every name
+that was brought in to him. She could give him an idea of the man's
+connections, of the price his work commanded, and insinuate whether
+he ought to be met with the old punctiliousness or with the new
+joviality. She was useful in explaining to her employer the
+significance of various invitations, and the standing of clubs and
+associations. At first she was virtually the social mentor of the
+bullet-headed young Westerner who wanted to break into everything,
+the solitary person about the office of the humming new magazine who
+knew anything about the editorial traditions of the eighties and
+nineties which, antiquated as they now were, gave an editor, as
+O'Mally said, a background.
+
+Despite her indolence, Ardessa was useful to O'Mally as a social
+reminder. She was the card catalogue of his ever-changing personal
+relations. O'Mally went in for everything and got tired of
+everything; that was why he made a good editor. After he was through
+with people, Ardessa was very skilful in covering his retreat. She
+read and answered the letters of admirers who had begun to bore him.
+When great authors, who had been dined and feted the month before,
+were suddenly left to cool their heels in the reception-room, thrown
+upon the suave hospitality of the grand old man at the desk, it was
+Ardessa who went out and made soothing and plausible explanations as
+to why the editor could not see them. She was the brake that checked
+the too-eager neophyte, the emollient that eased the severing of
+relationships, the gentle extinguisher of the lights that failed.
+When there were no longer messages of hope and cheer to be sent to
+ardent young writers and reformers, Ardessa delivered, as sweetly as
+possible, whatever messages were left.
+
+In handling these people with whom O'Mally was quite through,
+Ardessa had gradually developed an industry which was immensely
+gratifying to her own vanity. Not only did she not crush them; she
+even fostered them a little. She continued to advise them in the
+reception-room and "personally" received their manuscripts long
+after O'Mally had declared that he would never read another line
+they wrote. She let them outline their plans for stories and
+articles to her, promising to bring these suggestions to the
+editor's attention. She denied herself to nobody, was gracious even
+to the Shakspere-Bacon man, the perpetual-motion man, the
+travel-article man, the ghosts which haunt every magazine office.
+The writers who had had their happy hour of O'Mally's favor kept
+feeling that Ardessa might reinstate them. She answered their
+letters of inquiry in her most polished and elegant style, and even
+gave them hints as to the subjects in which the restless editor was
+or was not interested at the moment: she feared it would be useless
+to send him an article on "How to Trap Lions," because he had just
+bought an article on "Elephant-Shooting in Majuba Land," etc.
+
+So when O'Mally plunged into his office at 11:30 on this, the fourth
+day of May, having just got back from three-days' fishing, he found
+Ardessa in the reception-room, surrounded by a little court of
+discards. This was annoying, for he always wanted his stenographer
+at once. Telling the office boy to give her a hint that she was
+needed, he threw off his hat and topcoat and began to race through
+the pile of letters Ardessa had put on his desk. When she entered,
+he did not wait for her polite inquiries about his trip, but broke
+in at once.
+
+"What is that fellow who writes about phossy jaw still hanging round
+here for? I don't want any articles on phossy jaw, and if I did, I
+wouldn't want his."
+
+"He has just sold an article on the match industry to 'The New Age,'
+Mr. O'Mally," Ardessa replied as she took her seat at the editor's
+right.
+
+"Why does he have to come and tell us about it? We've nothing to do
+with 'The New Age.' And that prison-reform guy, what's he loafing
+about for?"
+
+Ardessa bridled.
+
+"You remember, Mr. O'Mally, he brought letters of introduction from
+Governor Harper, the reform Governor of Mississippi."
+
+O'Mally jumped up, kicking over his waste-basket in his impatience.
+
+"That was months ago. I went through his letters and went through him,
+too. He hasn't got anything we want. I've been through with Governor
+Harper a long while. We're asleep at the switch in here. And let me
+tell you, if I catch sight of that causes-of-blindness-in-babies
+woman around here again, I'll do something violent. Clear them out,
+Miss Devine! Clear them out! We need a traffic policeman in this
+office. Have you got that article on 'Stealing Our National Water
+Power' ready for me?"
+
+"Mr. Gerrard took it back to make modifications. He gave it to me at
+noon on Saturday, just before the office closed. I will have it
+ready for you to-morrow morning, Mr. O'Mally, if you have not too
+many letters for me this afternoon," Ardessa replied pointedly.
+
+"Holy Mike!" muttered O'Mally, "we need a traffic policeman for the
+staff, too. Gerrard's modified that thing half a dozen times
+already. Why don't they get accurate information in the first
+place?"
+
+He began to dictate his morning mail, walking briskly up and down
+the floor by way of giving his stenographer an energetic example.
+Her indolence and her ladylike deportment weighed on him. He wanted
+to take her by the elbows and run her around the block. He didn't
+mind that she loafed when he was away, but it was becoming harder
+and harder to speed her up when he was on the spot. He knew his
+correspondence was not enough to keep her busy, so when he was in
+town he made her type his own breezy editorials and various articles
+by members of his staff.
+
+Transcribing editorial copy is always laborious, and the only way to
+make it easy is to farm it out. This Ardessa was usually clever
+enough to do. When she returned to her own room after O'Mally had
+gone out to lunch, Ardessa rang for an office boy and said
+languidly, "James, call Becky, please."
+
+In a moment a thin, tense-faced Hebrew girl of eighteen or nineteen
+came rushing in, carrying a wire basket full of typewritten sheets.
+She was as gaunt as a plucked spring chicken, and her cheap, gaudy
+clothes might have been thrown on her. She looked as if she were
+running to catch a train and in mortal dread of missing it. While
+Miss Devine examined the pages in the basket, Becky stood with her
+shoulders drawn up and her elbows drawn in, apparently trying to
+hide herself in her insufficient open-work waist. Her wild, black
+eyes followed Miss Devine's hands desperately. Ardessa sighed.
+
+"This seems to be very smeary copy again, Becky. You don't keep your
+mind on your work, and so you have to erase continually."
+
+Becky spoke up in wailing self-vindication.
+
+"It ain't that, Miss Devine. It's so many hard words he uses that I
+have to be at the dictionary all the time. Look! Look!" She produced
+a bunch of manuscript faintly scrawled in pencil, and thrust it
+under Ardessa's eyes. "He don't write out the words at all. He just
+begins a word, and then makes waves for you to guess."
+
+"I see you haven't always guessed correctly, Becky," said Ardessa,
+with a weary smile. "There are a great many words here that would
+surprise Mr. Gerrard, I am afraid."
+
+"And the inserts," Becky persisted. "How is anybody to tell where
+they go, Miss Devine? It's mostly inserts; see, all over the top and
+sides and back."
+
+Ardessa turned her head away.
+
+"Don't claw the pages like that, Becky. You make me nervous. Mr.
+Gerrard has not time to dot his i's and cross his t's. That is what
+we keep copyists for. I will correct these sheets for you,--it would
+be terrible if Mr. O'Mally saw them,--and then you can copy them
+over again. It must be done by to-morrow morning, so you may have to
+work late. See that your hands are clean and dry, and then you will
+not smear it."
+
+"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Miss Devine. Will you tell the janitor,
+please, it's all right if I have to stay? He was cross because I was
+here Saturday afternoon doing this. He said it was a holiday, and
+when everybody else was gone I ought to--"
+
+"That will do, Becky. Yes, I will speak to the janitor for you. You
+may go to lunch now."
+
+Becky turned on one heel and then swung back.
+
+"Miss Devine," she said anxiously, "will it be all right if I get
+white shoes for now?"
+
+Ardessa gave her kind consideration.
+
+"For office wear, you mean? No, Becky. With only one pair, you could
+not keep them properly clean; and black shoes are much less
+conspicuous. Tan, if you prefer."
+
+Becky looked down at her feet. They were too large, and her skirt
+was as much too short as her legs were too long.
+
+"Nearly all the girls I know wear white shoes to business," she
+pleaded.
+
+"They are probably little girls who work in factories or department
+stores, and that is quite another matter. Since you raise the
+question, Becky, I ought to speak to you about your new waist. Don't
+wear it to the office again, please. Those cheap open-work waists
+are not appropriate in an office like this. They are all very well
+for little chorus girls."
+
+"But Miss Kalski wears expensive waists to business more open than
+this, and jewelry--"
+
+Ardessa interrupted. Her face grew hard.
+
+"Miss Kalski," she said coldly, "works for the business department.
+You are employed in the editorial offices. There is a great
+difference. You see, Becky, I might have to call you in here at any
+time when a scientist or a great writer or the president of a
+university is here talking over editorial matters, and such clothes
+as you have on to-day would make a bad impression. Nearly all our
+connections are with important people of that kind, and we ought to
+be well, but quietly, dressed."
+
+"Yes, Miss Devine. Thank you," Becky gasped and disappeared. Heaven
+knew she had no need to be further impressed with the greatness of
+"The Outcry" office. During the year and a half she had been there
+she had never ceased to tremble. She knew the prices all the authors
+got as well as Miss Devine did, and everything seemed to her to be
+done on a magnificent scale. She hadn't a good memory for long
+technical words, but she never forgot dates or prices or initials or
+telephone numbers.
+
+Becky felt that her job depended on Miss Devine, and she was so glad
+to have it that she scarcely realized she was being bullied.
+Besides, she was grateful for all that she had learned from Ardessa;
+Ardessa had taught her to do most of the things that she was
+supposed to do herself. Becky wanted to learn, she had to learn;
+that was the train she was always running for. Her father, Isaac
+Tietelbaum, the tailor, who pressed Miss Devine's skirts and kept
+her ladylike suits in order, had come to his client two years ago
+and told her he had a bright girl just out of a commercial high
+school. He implored Ardessa to find some office position for his
+daughter. Ardessa told an appealing story to O'Mally, and brought
+Becky into the office, at a salary of six dollars a week, to help
+with the copying and to learn business routine. When Becky first
+came she was as ignorant as a young savage. She was rapid at her
+shorthand and typing, but a Kafir girl would have known as much
+about the English language. Nobody ever wanted to learn more than
+Becky. She fairly wore the dictionary out. She dug up her old school
+grammar and worked over it at night. She faithfully mastered Miss
+Devine's fussy system of punctuation.
+
+There were eight children at home, younger than Becky, and they were
+all eager to learn. They wanted to get their mother out of the three
+dark rooms behind the tailor shop and to move into a flat up-stairs,
+where they could, as Becky said, "live private." The young
+Tietelbaums doubted their father's ability to bring this change
+about, for the more things he declared himself ready to do in his
+window placards, the fewer were brought to him to be done. "Dyeing,
+Cleaning, Ladies' Furs Remodeled"--it did no good.
+
+Rebecca was out to "improve herself," as her father had told her she
+must. Ardessa had easy way with her. It was one of those rare
+relationships from which both persons profit. The more Becky could
+learn from Ardessa, the happier she was; and the more Ardessa could
+unload on Becky, the greater was her contentment. She easily broke
+Becky of the gum-chewing habit, taught her to walk quietly, to
+efface herself at the proper moment, and to hold her tongue. Becky
+had been raised to eight dollars a week; but she didn't care half so
+much about that as she did about her own increasing efficiency. The
+more work Miss Devine handed over to her the happier she was, and
+the faster she was able to eat it up. She tested and tried herself
+in every possible way. She now had full confidence that she would
+surely one day be a high-priced stenographer, a real "business
+woman."
+
+Becky would have corrupted a really industrious person, but a
+bilious temperament like Ardessa's couldn't make even a feeble stand
+against such willingness. Ardessa had grown soft and had lost the
+knack of turning out work. Sometimes, in her importance and
+serenity, she shivered. What if O'Mally should die, and she were
+thrust out into the world to work in competition with the brazen,
+competent young women she saw about her everywhere? She believed
+herself indispensable, but she knew that in such a mischanceful
+world as this the very powers of darkness might rise to separate her
+from this pearl among jobs.
+
+When Becky came in from lunch she went down the long hall to the
+wash-room, where all the little girls who worked in the advertising
+and circulation departments kept their hats and jackets. There were
+shelves and shelves of bright spring hats, piled on top of one
+another, all as stiff as sheet-iron and trimmed with gay flowers. At
+the marble wash-stand stood Rena Kalski, the right bower of the
+business manager, polishing her diamond rings with a nail-brush.
+
+"Hullo, kid," she called over her shoulder to Becky. "I've got a
+ticket for you for Thursday afternoon."
+
+Becky's black eyes glowed, but the strained look on her face drew
+tighter than ever.
+
+"I'll never ask her, Miss Kalski," she said rapidly. "I don't dare.
+I have to stay late to-night again; and I know she'd be hard to
+please after, if I was to try to get off on a week-day. I thank you,
+Miss Kalski, but I'd better not."
+
+Miss Kalski laughed. She was a slender young Hebrew, handsome in an
+impudent, Tenderloin sort of way, with a small head, reddish-brown
+almond eyes, a trifle tilted, a rapacious mouth, and a beautiful
+chin.
+
+"Ain't you under that woman's thumb, though! Call her bluff. She
+isn't half the prima donna she thinks she is. On my side of the hall
+we know who's who about this place."
+
+The business and editorial departments of "The Outcry" were
+separated by a long corridor and a great contempt. Miss Kalski dried
+her rings with tissue-paper and studied them with an appraising eye.
+
+"Well, since you're such a 'fraidy-calf,'" she went on, "maybe I can
+get a rise out of her myself. Now I've got you a ticket out of that
+shirt-front, I want you to go. I'll drop in on Devine this
+afternoon."
+
+When Miss Kalski went back to her desk in the business manager's
+private office, she turned to him familiarly, but not impertinently.
+
+"Mr. Henderson, I want to send a kid over in the editorial
+stenographers' to the Palace Thursday afternoon. She's a nice kid,
+only she's scared out of her skin all the time. Miss Devine's her
+boss, and she'll be just mean enough not to let the young one off.
+Would you say a word to her?"
+
+The business manager lit a cigar.
+
+"I'm not saying words to any of the high-brows over there. Try it
+out with Devine yourself. You're not bashful."
+
+Miss Kalski shrugged her shoulders and smiled.
+
+"Oh, very well." She serpentined out of the room and crossed the
+Rubicon into the editorial offices. She found Ardessa typing
+O'Mally's letters and wearing a pained expression.
+
+"Good afternoon, Miss Devine," she said carelessly. "Can we borrow
+Becky over there for Thursday afternoon? We're short."
+
+Miss Devine looked piqued and tilted her head.
+
+"I don't think it's customary, Miss Kalski, for the business
+department to use our people. We never have girls enough here to do
+the work. Of course if Mr. Henderson feels justified--"
+
+"Thanks awfully, Miss Devine,"--Miss Kalski interrupted her with the
+perfectly smooth, good-natured tone which never betrayed a hint of
+the scorn every line of her sinuous figure expressed,--"I will tell
+Mr. Henderson. Perhaps we can do something for you some day."
+Whether this was a threat, a kind wish, or an insinuation, no mortal
+could have told. Miss Kalski's face was always suggesting insolence
+without being quite insolent. As she returned to her own domain she
+met the cashier's head clerk in the hall. "That Devine woman's a
+crime," she murmured. The head clerk laughed tolerantly.
+
+That afternoon as Miss Kalski was leaving the office at 5:15, on her
+way down the corridor she heard a typewriter clicking away in the
+empty, echoing editorial offices. She looked in, and found Becky
+bending forward over the machine as if she were about to swallow it.
+
+"Hello, kid. Do you sleep with that?" she called. She walked up to
+Becky and glanced at her copy. "What do you let 'em keep you up
+nights over that stuff for?" she asked contemptuously. "The world
+wouldn't suffer if that stuff never got printed."
+
+Rebecca looked up wildly. Not even Miss Kalski's French pansy hat or
+her ear-rings and landscape veil could loosen Becky's tenacious mind
+from Mr. Gerrard's article on water power. She scarcely knew what
+Miss Kalski had said to her, certainly not what she meant.
+
+"But I must make progress already, Miss Kalski," she panted.
+
+Miss Kalski gave her low, siren laugh.
+
+"I should say you must!" she ejaculated.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ardessa decided to take her vacation in June, and she arranged that
+Miss Milligan should do O'Mally's work while she was away. Miss
+Milligan was blunt and noisy, rapid and inaccurate. It would be just
+as well for O'Mally to work with a coarse instrument for a time; he
+would be more appreciative, perhaps, of certain qualities to which
+he had seemed insensible of late. Ardessa was to leave for East
+Hampton on Sunday, and she spent Saturday morning instructing her
+substitute as to the state of the correspondence. At noon O'Mally
+burst into her room. All the morning he had been closeted with a new
+writer of mystery-stories just over from England.
+
+"Can you stay and take my letters this afternoon, Miss Devine? You
+'re not leaving until to-morrow."
+
+Ardessa pouted, and tilted her head at the angle he was tired of.
+
+"I'm sorry, Mr. O'Mally, but I've left all my shopping for this
+afternoon. I think Becky Tietelbaum could do them for you. I will
+tell her to be careful."
+
+"Oh, all right." O'Mally bounced out with a reflection of Ardessa's
+disdainful expression on his face. Saturday afternoon was always a
+half-holiday, to be sure, but since she had weeks of freedom when he
+was away--However--
+
+At two o'clock Becky Tietelbaum appeared at his door, clad in the
+sober office suit which Miss Devine insisted she should wear, her
+note-book in her hand, and so frightened that her fingers were cold
+and her lips were pale. She had never taken dictation from the
+editor before. It was a great and terrifying occasion.
+
+"Sit down," he said encouragingly. He began dictating while he shook
+from his bag the manuscripts he had snatched away from the amazed
+English author that morning. Presently he looked up.
+
+"Do I go too fast?"
+
+"No, sir," Becky found strength to say.
+
+At the end of an hour he told her to go and type as many of the
+letters as she could while he went over the bunch of stuff he had
+torn from the Englishman. He was with the Hindu detective in an
+opium den in Shanghai when Becky returned and placed a pile of
+papers on his desk.
+
+"How many?" he asked, without looking up.
+
+"All you gave me, sir."
+
+"All, so soon? Wait a minute and let me see how many mistakes." He
+went over the letters rapidly, signing them as he read. "They seem
+to be all right. I thought you were the girl that made so many
+mistakes."
+
+Rebecca was never too frightened to vindicate herself.
+
+"Mr. O'Mally, sir, I don't make mistakes with letters. It's only
+copying the articles that have so many long words, and when the
+writing isn't plain, like Mr. Gerrard's. I never make many mistakes
+with Mr. Johnson's articles, or with yours I don't."
+
+O'Mally wheeled round in his chair, looked with curiosity at her
+long, tense face, her black eyes, and straight brows.
+
+"Oh, so you sometimes copy articles, do you? How does that happen?"
+
+"Yes, sir. Always Miss Devine gives me the articles to do. It's good
+practice for me."
+
+"I see." O'Mally shrugged his shoulders. He was thinking that he
+could get a rise out of the whole American public any day easier
+than he could get a rise out of Ardessa. "What editorials of mine
+have you copied lately, for instance?"
+
+Rebecca blazed out at him, reciting rapidly:
+
+"Oh, 'A Word about the Rosenbaums,' 'Useless Navy-Yards,' 'Who
+Killed Cock Robin'--"
+
+"Wait a minute." O'Mally checked her flow. "What was that one
+about--Cock Robin?"
+
+"It was all about why the secretary of the interior dismissed--"
+
+"All right, all right. Copy those letters, and put them down the
+chute as you go out. Come in here for a minute on Monday morning."
+
+Becky hurried home to tell her father that she had taken the
+editor's letters and had made no mistakes. On Monday she learned
+that she was to do O'Mally's work for a few days. He disliked Miss
+Milligan, and he was annoyed with Ardessa for trying to put her over
+on him when there was better material at hand. With Rebecca he got
+on very well; she was impersonal, unreproachful, and she fairly
+panted for work. Everything was done almost before he told her what
+he wanted. She raced ahead with him; it was like riding a good
+modern bicycle after pumping along on an old hard tire.
+
+On the day before Miss Devine's return O'Mally strolled over for a
+chat with the business office.
+
+"Henderson, your people are taking vacations now, I suppose? Could
+you use an extra girl?"
+
+"If it's that thin black one, I can."
+
+O'Mally gave him a wise smile.
+
+"It isn't. To be honest, I want to put one over on you. I want you
+to take Miss Devine over here for a while and speed her up. I can't
+do anything. She's got the upper hand of me. I don't want to fire
+her, you understand, but she makes my life too difficult. It's my
+fault, of course. I've pampered her. Give her a chance over here;
+maybe she'll come back. You can be firm with 'em, can't you?"
+
+Henderson glanced toward the desk where Miss Kalski's lightning eye
+was skimming over the printing-house bills that he was supposed to
+verify himself.
+
+"Well, if I can't, I know who can," he replied, with a chuckle.
+
+"Exactly," O'Mally agreed. "I'm counting on the force of Miss
+Kalski's example. Miss Devine's all right, Miss Kalski, but she
+needs regular exercise. She owes it to her complexion. I can't
+discipline people."
+
+Miss Kalski's only reply was a low, indulgent laugh.
+
+O'Mally braced himself on the morning of Ardessa's return. He told
+the waiter at his club to bring him a second pot of coffee and to
+bring it hot. He was really afraid of her. When she presented
+herself at his office at 10:30 he complimented her upon her tan and
+asked about her vacation. Then he broke the news to her.
+
+"We want to make a few temporary changes about here, Miss Devine,
+for the summer months. The business department is short of help.
+Henderson is going to put Miss Kalski on the books for a while to
+figure out some economies for him, and he is going to take you over.
+Meantime I'll get Becky broken in so that she could take your work
+if you were sick or anything."
+
+Ardessa drew herself up.
+
+"I've not been accustomed to commercial work, Mr. O'Mally. I've no
+interest in it, and I don't care to brush up in it."
+
+"Brushing up is just what we need, Miss Devine." O'Mally began
+tramping about his room expansively. "I'm going to brush everybody
+up. I'm going to brush a few people out; but I want you to stay with
+us, of course. You belong here. Don't be hasty now. Go to your room
+and think it over."
+
+Ardessa was beginning to cry, and O'Mally was afraid he would lose
+his nerve. He looked out of the window at a new sky-scraper that was
+building, while she retired without a word.
+
+At her own desk Ardessa sat down breathless and trembling. The one
+thing she had never doubted was her unique value to O'Mally. She
+had, as she told herself, taught him everything. She would say a few
+things to Becky Tietelbaum, and to that pigeon-breasted tailor, her
+father, too! The worst of it was that Ardessa had herself brought it
+all about; she could see that clearly now. She had carefully trained
+and qualified her successor. Why had she ever civilized Becky? Why
+had she taught her manners and deportment, broken her of the
+gum-chewing habit, and made her presentable? In her original state
+O'Mally would never have put up with her, no matter what her
+ability.
+
+Ardessa told herself that O'Mally was notoriously fickle; Becky
+amused him, but he would soon find out her limitations. The wise
+thing, she knew, was to humor him; but it seemed to her that she
+could not swallow her pride. Ardessa grew yellower within the hour.
+Over and over in her mind she bade O'Mally a cold adieu and minced
+out past the grand old man at the desk for the last time. But each
+exit she rehearsed made her feel sorrier for herself. She thought
+over all the offices she knew, but she realized that she could never
+meet their inexorable standards of efficiency.
+
+While she was bitterly deliberating, O'Mally himself wandered in,
+rattling his keys nervously in his pocket. He shut the door behind
+him.
+
+"Now, you're going to come through with this all right, aren't you,
+Miss Devine? I want Henderson to get over the notion that my people
+over here are stuck up and think the business department are old
+shoes. That's where we get our money from, as he often reminds me.
+You'll be the best-paid girl over there; no reduction, of course.
+You don't want to go wandering off to some new office where
+personality doesn't count for anything." He sat down confidentially
+on the edge of her desk. "Do you, now, Miss Devine?"
+
+Ardessa simpered tearfully as she replied.
+
+"Mr. O'Mally," she brought out, "you'll soon find that Becky is not
+the sort of girl to meet people for you when you are away. I don't
+see how you can think of letting her."
+
+"That's one thing I want to change, Miss Devine. You're too
+soft-handed with the has-beens and the never-was-ers. You're too
+much of a lady for this rough game. Nearly everybody who comes in
+here wants to sell us a gold-brick, and you treat them as if they
+were bringing in wedding presents. Becky is as rough as sandpaper,
+and she'll clear out a lot of dead wood." O'Mally rose, and tapped
+Ardessa's shrinking shoulder. "Now, be a sport and go through with
+it, Miss Devine. I'll see that you don't lose. Henderson thinks
+you'll refuse to do his work, so I want you to get moved in there
+before he comes back from lunch. I've had a desk put in his office
+for you. Miss Kalski is in the bookkeeper's room half the time now."
+
+Rena Kalski was amazed that afternoon when a line of office boys
+entered, carrying Miss Devine's effects, and when Ardessa herself
+coldly followed them. After Ardessa had arranged her desk, Miss
+Kalski went over to her and told her about some matters of routine
+very good-naturedly. Ardessa looked pretty badly shaken up, and Rena
+bore no grudges.
+
+"When you want the dope on the correspondence with the paper men,
+don't bother to look it up. I've got it all in my head, and I can
+save time for you. If he wants you to go over the printing bills
+every week, you'd better let me help you with that for a while. I
+can stay almost any afternoon. It's quite a trick to figure out the
+plates and over-time charges till you get used to it. I've worked
+out a quick method that saves trouble."
+
+When Henderson came in at three he found Ardessa, chilly, but civil,
+awaiting his instructions. He knew she disapproved of his tastes and
+his manners, but he didn't mind. What interested and amused him was
+that Rena Kalski, whom he had always thought as cold-blooded as an
+adding-machine, seemed to be making a hair-mattress of herself to
+break Ardessa's fall.
+
+At five o'clock, when Ardessa rose to go, the business manager said
+breezily:
+
+"See you at nine in the morning, Miss Devine. We begin on the
+stroke."
+
+Ardessa faded out of the door, and Miss Kalski's slender back
+squirmed with amusement.
+
+"I never thought to hear such words spoken," she admitted; "but I
+guess she'll limber up all right. The atmosphere is bad over there.
+They get moldy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After the next monthly luncheon of the heads of departments, O'Mally
+said to Henderson, as he feed the coat-boy:
+
+"By the way, how are you making it with the bartered bride?"
+
+Henderson smashed on his Panama as he said:
+
+"Any time you want her back, don't be delicate."
+
+But O'Mally shook his red head and laughed.
+
+"Oh, I'm no Indian giver!"
+
+                                             _Century_, May 1918
+
+
+
+
+_Her Boss_
+
+
+Paul Wanning opened the front door of his house in Orange, closed it
+softly behind him, and stood looking about the hall as he drew off
+his gloves.
+
+Nothing was changed there since last night, and yet he stood gazing
+about him with an interest which a long-married man does not often
+feel in his own reception hall. The rugs, the two pillars, the
+Spanish tapestry chairs, were all the same. The Venus di Medici
+stood on her column as usual and there, at the end of the hall
+(opposite the front door), was the full-length portrait of Mrs.
+Wanning, maturely blooming forth in an evening gown, signed with the
+name of a French painter who seemed purposely to have made his
+signature indistinct. Though the signature was largely what one paid
+for, one couldn't ask him to do it over.
+
+In the dining room the colored man was moving about the table set
+for dinner, under the electric cluster. The candles had not yet been
+lighted. Wanning watched him with a homesick feeling in his heart.
+They had had Sam a long while, twelve years, now. His warm hall, the
+lighted dining-room, the drawing room where only the flicker of the
+wood fire played upon the shining surfaces of many objects--they
+seemed to Wanning like a haven of refuge. It had never occurred to
+him that his house was too full of things. He often said, and he
+believed, that the women of his household had "perfect taste." He
+had paid for these objects, sometimes with difficulty, but always
+with pride. He carried a heavy life-insurance and permitted himself
+to spend most of the income from a good law practise. He wished,
+during his life-time, to enjoy the benefits of his wife's
+discriminating extravagance.
+
+Yesterday Wanning's doctor had sent him to a specialist. Today the
+specialist, after various laboratory tests, had told him most
+disconcerting things about the state of very necessary, but hitherto
+wholly uninteresting, organs of his body.
+
+The information pointed to something incredible; insinuated that his
+residence in this house was only temporary; that he, whose time was so
+full, might have to leave not only his house and his office and his
+club, but a world with which he was extremely well satisfied--the
+only world he knew anything about.
+
+Wanning unbuttoned his overcoat, but did not take it off. He stood
+folding his muffler slowly and carefully. What he did not understand
+was, how he could go while other people stayed. Sam would be moving
+about the table like this, Mrs. Wanning and her daughters would be
+dressing upstairs, when he would not be coming home to dinner any
+more; when he would not, indeed, be dining anywhere.
+
+Sam, coming to turn on the parlor lights, saw Wanning and stepped
+behind him to take his coat.
+
+"Good evening, Mr. Wanning, sah, excuse me. You entahed so quietly,
+sah, I didn't heah you."
+
+The master of the house slipped out of his coat and went languidly
+upstairs.
+
+He tapped at the door of his wife's room, which stood ajar.
+
+"Come in, Paul," she called from her dressing table.
+
+She was seated, in a violet dressing gown, giving the last touches to
+her coiffure, both arms lifted. They were firm and white, like her neck
+and shoulders. She was a handsome woman of fifty-five,--still a
+woman, not an old person, Wanning told himself, as he kissed her
+cheek. She was heavy in figure, to be sure, but she had kept, on the
+whole, presentable outlines. Her complexion was good, and she wore
+less false hair than either of her daughters.
+
+Wanning himself was five years older, but his sandy hair did not
+show the gray in it, and since his mustache had begun to grow white
+he kept it clipped so short that it was unobtrusive. His fresh skin
+made him look younger than he was. Not long ago he had overheard the
+stenographers in his law office discussing the ages of their
+employers. They had put him down at fifty, agreeing that his two
+partners must be considerably older than he--which was not the case.
+Wanning had an especially kindly feeling for the little new girl, a
+copyist, who had exclaimed that "Mr. Wanning couldn't be fifty; he
+seemed so boyish!"
+
+Wanning lingered behind his wife, looking at her in the mirror.
+
+"Well, did you tell the girls, Julia?" he asked, trying to speak
+casually.
+
+Mrs. Wanning looked up and met his eyes in the glass. "The girls?"
+
+She noticed a strange expression come over his face.
+
+"About your health, you mean? Yes, dear, but I tried not to alarm
+them. They feel dreadfully. I'm going to have a talk with Dr. Seares
+myself. These specialists are all alarmists, and I've often heard of
+his frightening people."
+
+She rose and took her husband's arm, drawing him toward the
+fireplace.
+
+"You are not going to let this upset you, Paul? If you take care of
+yourself, everything will come out all right. You have always been
+so strong. One has only to look at you."
+
+"Did you," Wanning asked, "say anything to Harold?"
+
+"Yes, of course. I saw him in town today, and he agrees with me that
+Seares draws the worst conclusions possible. He says even the young
+men are always being told the most terrifying things. Usually they
+laugh at the doctors and do as they please. You certainly don't look
+like a sick man, and you don't feel like one, do you?"
+
+She patted his shoulder, smiled at him encouragingly, and rang for
+the maid to come and hook her dress.
+
+When the maid appeared at the door, Wanning went out through the
+bathroom to his own sleeping chamber. He was too much dispirited to
+put on a dinner coat, though such remissness was always noticed. He
+sat down and waited for the sound of the gong, leaving his door
+open, on the chance that perhaps one of his daughters would come in.
+
+When Wanning went down to dinner he found his wife already at her
+chair, and the table laid for four.
+
+"Harold," she explained, "is not coming home. He has to attend a
+first night in town."
+
+A moment later their two daughters entered, obviously "dressed."
+They both wore earrings and masses of hair. The daughters' names
+were Roma and Florence,--Roma, Firenze, one of the young men who
+came to the house often, but not often enough, had called them.
+Tonight they were going to a rehearsal of "The Dances of the
+Nations,"--a benefit performance in which Miss Roma was to lead the
+Spanish dances, her sister the Grecian.
+
+The elder daughter had often been told that her name suited her
+admirably. She looked, indeed, as we are apt to think the
+unrestrained beauties of later Rome must have looked,--but as their
+portrait busts emphatically declare they did not. Her head was
+massive, her lips full and crimson, her eyes large and heavy-lidded,
+her forehead low. At costume balls and in living pictures she was
+always Semiramis, or Poppea, or Theodora. Barbaric accessories
+brought out something cruel and even rather brutal in her handsome
+face. The men who were attracted to her were somehow afraid of her.
+
+Florence was slender, with a long, graceful neck, a restless head,
+and a flexible mouth--discontent lurked about the corners of it. Her
+shoulders were pretty, but her neck and arms were too thin. Roma was
+always struggling to keep within a certain weight--her chin and
+upper arms grew persistently more solid--and Florence was always
+striving to attain a certain weight. Wanning used sometimes to
+wonder why these disconcerting fluctuations could not go the other
+way; why Roma could not melt away as easily as did her sister, who
+had to be sent to Palm Beach to save the precious pounds.
+
+"I don't see why you ever put Rickie Allen in charge of the English
+country dances," Florence said to her sister, as they sat down. "He
+knows the figures, of course, but he has no real style."
+
+Roma looked annoyed. Rickie Allen was one of the men who came to the
+house almost often enough.
+
+"He is absolutely to be depended upon, that's why," she said firmly.
+
+"I think he is just right for it, Florence," put in Mrs. Wanning.
+"It's remarkable he should feel that he can give up the time; such a
+busy man. He must be very much interested in the movement."
+
+Florence's lip curled drolly under her soup spoon. She shot an
+amused glance at her mother's dignity.
+
+"Nothing doing," her keen eyes seemed to say.
+
+Though Florence was nearly thirty and her sister a little beyond,
+there was, seriously, nothing doing. With so many charms and so much
+preparation, they never, as Florence vulgarly said, quite pulled it
+off. They had been rushed, time and again, and Mrs. Wanning had
+repeatedly steeled herself to bear the blow. But the young men went
+to follow a career in Mexico or the Philippines, or moved to
+Yonkers, and escaped without a mortal wound.
+
+Roma turned graciously to her father.
+
+"I met Mr. Lane at the Holland House today, where I was lunching
+with the Burtons, father. He asked about you, and when I told him
+you were not so well as usual, he said he would call you up. He
+wants to tell you about some doctor he discovered in Iowa, who cures
+everything with massage and hot water. It sounds freakish, but Mr.
+Lane is a very clever man, isn't he?"
+
+"Very," assented Wanning.
+
+"I should think he must be!" sighed Mrs. Wanning. "How in the world
+did he make all that money, Paul? He didn't seem especially
+promising years ago, when we used to see so much of them."
+
+"Corporation business. He's attorney for the P. L. and G.," murmured
+her husband.
+
+"What a pile he must have!" Florence watched the old negro's slow
+movements with restless eyes. "Here is Jenny, a Contessa, with a
+glorious palace in Genoa that her father must have bought her.
+Surely Aldrini had nothing. Have you seen the baby count's pictures,
+Roma? They're very cunning. I should think you'd go to Genoa and
+visit Jenny."
+
+"We must arrange that, Roma. It's such an opportunity." Though Mrs.
+Wanning addressed her daughter, she looked at her husband. "You
+would get on so well among their friends. When Count Aldrini was
+here you spoke Italian much better than poor Jenny. I remember when
+we entertained him, he could scarcely say anything to her at all."
+
+Florence tried to call up an answering flicker of amusement upon her
+sister's calm, well-bred face. She thought her mother was rather
+outdoing herself tonight,--since Aldrini had at least managed to say
+the one important thing to Jenny, somehow, somewhere. Jenny Lane had
+been Roma's friend and schoolmate, and the Count was an ephemeral
+hope in Orange. Mrs. Wanning was one of the first matrons to declare
+that she had no prejudices against foreigners, and at the dinners
+that were given for the Count, Roma was always put next him to act
+as interpreter.
+
+Roma again turned to her father.
+
+"If I were you, dear, I would let Mr. Lane tell me about his doctor.
+New discoveries are often made by queer people."
+
+Roma's voice was low and sympathetic; she never lost her dignity.
+
+Florence asked if she might have her coffee in her room, while she
+dashed off a note, and she ran upstairs humming "Bright Lights" and
+wondering how she was going to stand her family until the summer
+scattering. Why could Roma never throw off her elegant reserve and
+call things by their names? She sometimes thought she might like her
+sister, if she would only come out in the open and howl about her
+disappointments.
+
+Roma, drinking her coffee deliberately, asked her father if they
+might have the car early, as they wanted to pick up Mr. Allen and
+Mr. Rydberg on their way to rehearsal.
+
+Wanning said certainly. Heaven knew he was not stingy about his car,
+though he could never quite forget that in his day it was the young
+men who used to call for the girls when they went to rehearsals.
+
+"You are going with us, Mother?" Roma asked as they rose.
+
+"I think so dear. Your father will want to go to bed early, and I
+shall sleep better if I go out. I am going to town tomorrow to pour
+tea for Harold. We must get him some new silver, Paul. I am quite
+ashamed of his spoons."
+
+Harold, the only son, was a playwright--as yet "unproduced"--and he
+had a studio in Washington Square.
+
+A half-hour later, Wanning was alone in his library. He would not
+permit himself to feel aggrieved. What was more commendable than a
+mother's interest in her children's pleasures? Moreover, it was his
+wife's way of following things up, of never letting die grass grow
+under her feet, that had helped to push him along in the world. She
+was more ambitious than he,--that had been good for him. He was
+naturally indolent, and Julia's childlike desire to possess material
+objects, to buy what other people were buying, had been the spur
+that made him go after business. It had, moreover, made his house
+the attractive place he believed it to be.
+
+"Suppose," his wife sometimes said to him when the bills came in
+from Celeste or Mme. Blanche, "suppose you had homely daughters; how
+would you like that?"
+
+He wouldn't have liked it. When he went anywhere with his three
+ladies, Wanning always felt very well done by. He had no complaint
+to make about them, or about anything. That was why it seemed so
+unreasonable--He felt along his back incredulously with his hand.
+Harold, of course, was a trial; but among all his business friends,
+he knew scarcely one who had a promising boy.
+
+The house was so still that Wanning could hear a faint, metallic
+tinkle from the butler's pantry. Old Sam was washing up the silver,
+which he put away himself every night.
+
+Wanning rose and walked aimlessly down the hall and out through the
+dining-room.
+
+"Any Apollinaris on ice, Sam? I'm not feeling very well tonight."
+
+The old colored man dried his hands.
+
+"Yessah, Mistah Wanning. Have a little rye with it, sah?"
+
+"No, thank you, Sam. That's one of the things I can't do any more.
+I've been to see a big doctor in the city, and he tells me there's
+something seriously wrong with me. My kidneys have sort of gone back
+on me."
+
+It was a satisfaction to Wanning to name the organ that had betrayed
+him, while all the rest of him was so sound.
+
+Sam was immediately interested. He shook his grizzled head and
+looked full of wisdom.
+
+"Don't seem like a gen'leman of such a temperate life ought to have
+anything wrong thar, sah."
+
+"No, it doesn't, does it?"
+
+Wanning leaned against the china closet and talked to Sam for nearly
+half an hour. The specialist who condemned him hadn't seemed half so
+much interested. There was not a detail about the examination and
+the laboratory tests in which Sam did not show the deepest concern.
+He kept asking Wanning if he could remember "straining himself" when
+he was a young man.
+
+"I've knowed a strain like that to sleep in a man for yeahs and
+yeahs, and then come back on him, 'deed I have," he said,
+mysteriously. "An' again, it might be you got a floatin' kidney,
+sah. Aftah dey once teah loose, dey sometimes don't make no trouble
+for quite a while."
+
+When Wanning went to his room he did not go to bed. He sat up until
+he heard the voices of his wife and daughters in the hall below. His
+own bed somehow frightened him. In all the years he had lived in
+this house he had never before looked about his room, at that bed,
+with the thought that he might one day be trapped there, and might
+not get out again. He had been ill, of course, but his room had
+seemed a particularly pleasant place for a sick man; sunlight,
+flowers,--agreeable, well-dressed women coming in and out.
+
+Now there was something sinister about the bed itself, about its
+position, and its relation to the rest of the furniture.
+
+
+II
+
+The next morning, on his way downtown, Wanning got off the subway
+train at Astor Place and walked over to Washington Square. He
+climbed three flights of stairs and knocked at his son's studio.
+Harold, dressed, with his stick and gloves in his hand, opened the
+door. He was just going over to the Brevoort for breakfast. He
+greeted his father with the cordial familiarity practised by all the
+"boys" of his set, clapped him on the shoulder and said in his
+light, tonsilitis voice:
+
+"Come in, Governor, how delightful! I haven't had a call from you in
+a long time."
+
+He threw his hat and gloves on the writing table. He was a perfect
+gentleman, even with his father.
+
+Florence said the matter with Harold was that he had heard people
+say he looked like Byron, and stood for it.
+
+What Harold would stand for in such matters was, indeed, the best
+definition of him. When he read his play "The Street Walker" in
+drawing rooms and one lady told him it had the poetic symbolism of
+Tchekhov, and another said that it suggested the biting realism of
+Brieux, he never, in his most secret thoughts, questioned the acumen
+of either lady. Harold's speech, even if you heard it in the next
+room and could not see him, told you that he had no sense of the
+absurd,--a throaty staccato, with never a downward inflection,
+trustfully striving to please.
+
+"Just going out?" his father asked. "I won't keep you. Your mother
+told you I had a discouraging session with Seares?"
+
+"So awfully sorry you've had this bother, Governor; just as sorry as
+I can be. No question about it's coming out all right, but it's a
+downright nuisance, your having to diet and that sort of thing. And
+I suppose you ought to follow directions, just to make us all feel
+comfortable, oughtn't you?" Harold spoke with fluent sympathy.
+
+Wanning sat down on the arm of a chair and shook his head. "Yes,
+they do recommend a diet, but they don't promise much from it."
+
+Harold laughed precipitately. "Delicious! All doctors are, aren't
+they? So profound and oracular! The medicine-man; it's quite the
+same idea, you see; with tom-toms."
+
+Wanning knew that Harold meant something subtle,--one of the
+subtleties which he said were only spoiled by being explained--so he
+came bluntly to one of the issues he had in mind.
+
+"I would like to see you settled before I quit the harness, Harold."
+
+Harold was absolutely tolerant.
+
+He took out his cigarette case and burnished it with his
+handkerchief.
+
+"I perfectly understand your point of view, dear Governor, but
+perhaps you don't altogether get mine. Isn't it so? I am settled.
+What you mean by being settled, would unsettle me, completely. I'm
+cut out for just such an existence as this; to live four floors up
+in an attic, get my own breakfast, and have a charwoman to do for
+me. I should be awfully bored with an establishment. I'm quite
+content with a little diggings like this."
+
+Wanning's eyes fell. Somebody had to pay the rent of even such
+modest quarters as contented Harold, but to say so would be rude,
+and Harold himself was never rude. Wanning did not, this morning,
+feel equal to hearing a statement of his son's uncommercial ideals.
+
+"I know," he said hastily. "But now we're up against hard facts, my
+boy. I did not want to alarm your mother, but I've had a time limit
+put on me, and it's not a very long one."
+
+Harold threw away the cigarette he had just lighted in a burst of
+indignation.
+
+"That's the sort of thing I consider criminal, Father, absolutely
+criminal! What doctor has a right to suggest such a thing? Seares
+himself may be knocked out tomorrow. What have laboratory tests got
+to do with a man's will to live? The force of that depends upon his
+entire personality, not on any organ or pair of organs."
+
+Harold thrust his hands in his pockets and walked up and down, very
+much stirred. "Really, I have a very poor opinion of scientists.
+They ought to be made serve an apprenticeship in art, to get some
+conception of the power of human motives. Such brutality!"
+
+Harold's plays dealt with the grimmest and most depressing matters,
+but he himself was always agreeable, and he insisted upon high
+cheerfulness as the correct tone of human intercourse.
+
+Wanning rose and turned to go. There was, in Harold, simply no
+reality, to which one could break through. The young man took up his
+hat and gloves.
+
+"Must you go? Let me step along with you to the sub. The walk will
+do me good."
+
+Harold talked agreeably all the way to Astor Place. His father heard
+little of what he said, but he rather liked his company and his wish
+to be pleasant.
+
+Wanning went to his club for luncheon, meaning to spend the
+afternoon with some of his friends who had retired from business and
+who read the papers there in the empty hours between two and seven.
+He got no satisfaction, however. When he tried to tell these men of
+his present predicament, they began to describe ills of their own in
+which he could not feel interested. Each one of them had a
+treacherous organ of which he spoke with animation, almost with
+pride, as if it were a crafty business competitor whom he was
+constantly outwitting. Each had a doctor, too, for whom he was
+ardently soliciting business. They wanted either to telephone their
+doctor and make an appointment for Wanning, or to take him then and
+there to the consulting room. When he did not accept these
+invitations, they lost interest in him and remembered engagements.
+He called a taxi and returned to the offices of McQuiston, Wade, and
+Wanning.
+
+Settled at his desk, Wanning decided that he would not go home to
+dinner, but would stay at the office and dictate a long letter to an
+old college friend who lived in Wyoming. He could tell Douglas Brown
+things that he had not succeeded in getting to any one else. Brown,
+out in the Wind River mountains, couldn't defend himself, couldn't
+slap Wanning on the back and tell him to gather up the sunbeams.
+
+He called up his house in Orange to say that he would not be home
+until late. Roma answered the telephone. He spoke mournfully, but
+she was not disturbed by it.
+
+"Very well, Father. Don't get too tired," she said in her well
+modulated voice.
+
+When Wanning was ready to dictate his letter, he looked out from his
+private office into the reception room and saw that his stenographer
+in her hat and gloves, and furs of the newest cut, was just leaving.
+
+"Goodnight, Mr. Wanning," she said, drawing down her dotted veil.
+
+Had there been important business letters to be got off on the night
+mail, he would have felt that he could detain her, but not for
+anything personal. Miss Doane was an expert legal stenographer, and
+she knew her value. The slightest delay in dispatching office
+business annoyed her. Letters that were not signed until the next
+morning awoke her deepest contempt. She was scrupulous in
+professional etiquette, and Wanning felt that their relations,
+though pleasant, were scarcely cordial.
+
+As Miss Doane's trim figure disappeared through the outer door,
+little Annie Wooley, the copyist, came in from the stenographers'
+room. Her hat was pinned over one ear, and she was scrambling into
+her coat as she came, holding her gloves in her teeth and her
+battered handbag in the fist that was already through a sleeve.
+
+"Annie, I wanted to dictate a letter. You were just leaving, weren't
+you?"
+
+"Oh, I don't mind!" she answered cheerfully, and pulling off her old
+coat, threw it on a chair. "I'll get my book."
+
+She followed him into his room and sat down by a table,--though she
+wrote with her book on her knee.
+
+Wanning had several times kept her after office hours to take his
+private letters for him, and she had always been good-natured about
+it. On each occasion, when he gave her a dollar to get her dinner,
+she protested, laughing, and saying that she could never eat so much
+as that.
+
+She seemed a happy sort of little creature, didn't pout when she was
+scolded, and giggled about her own mistakes in spelling. She was
+plump and undersized, always dodging under the elbows of taller
+people and clattering about on high heels, much run over. She had
+bright black eyes and fuzzy black hair in which, despite Miss
+Doane's reprimands, she often stuck her pencil. She was the girl who
+couldn't believe that Wanning was fifty, and he had liked her ever
+since he overheard that conversation.
+
+Tilting back his chair--he never assumed this position when he
+dictated to Miss Doane--Wanning began: "To Mr. D. E. Brown, South
+Forks, Wyoming."
+
+He shaded his eyes with his hand and talked off a long letter to
+this man who would be sorry that his mortal frame was breaking up.
+He recalled to him certain fine months they had spent together on
+the Wind River when they were young men, and said he sometimes
+wished that like D. E. Brown, he had claimed his freedom in a big
+country where the wheels did not grind a man as hard as they did in
+New York. He had spent all these years hustling about and getting
+ready to live the way he wanted to live, and now he had a puncture
+the doctors couldn't mend. What was the use of it?
+
+Wanning's thoughts were fixed on the trout streams and the great
+silver-firs in the canyons of the Wind River Mountains, when he was
+disturbed by a soft, repeated sniffling. He looked out between his
+fingers. Little Annie, carried away by his eloquence, was fairly
+panting to make dots and dashes fast enough, and she was sopping her
+eyes with an unpresentable, end-of-the-day handkerchief.
+
+Wanning rambled on in his dictation. Why was she crying? What did it
+matter to her? He was a man who said good-morning to her, who
+sometimes took an hour of the precious few she had left at the end
+of the day and then complained about her bad spelling. When the
+letter was finished, he handed her a new two dollar bill.
+
+"I haven't got any change tonight; and anyhow, I'd like you to eat a
+whole lot. I'm on a diet, and I want to see everybody else eat."
+
+Annie tucked her notebook under her arm and stood looking at the
+bill which she had not taken up from the table.
+
+"I don't like to be paid for taking letters to your friends, Mr.
+Wanning," she said impulsively. "I can run personal letters off
+between times. It ain't as if I needed the money," she added
+carelessly.
+
+"Get along with you! Anybody who is eighteen years old and has a
+sweet tooth needs money, all they can get."
+
+Annie giggled and darted out with the bill in her hand.
+
+Wanning strolled aimlessly after her into the reception room.
+
+"Let me have that letter before lunch tomorrow, please, and be sure
+that nobody sees it." He stopped and frowned. "I don't look very
+sick, do I?"
+
+"I should say you don't!" Annie got her coat on after considerable
+tugging. "Why don't you call in a specialist? My mother called a
+specialist for my father before he died."
+
+"Oh, is your father dead?"
+
+"I should say he is! He was a painter by trade, and he fell off a
+seventy-foot stack into the East River. Mother couldn't get anything
+out of the company, because he wasn't buckled. He lingered for four
+months, so I know all about taking care of sick people. I was
+attending business college then, and sick as he was, he used to give
+me dictation for practise. He made us all go into professions; the
+girls, too. He didn't like us to just run."
+
+Wanning would have liked to keep Annie and hear more about her
+family, but it was nearly seven o'clock, and he knew he ought, in
+mercy, to let her go. She was the only person to whom he had talked
+about his illness who had been frank and honest with him, who had
+looked at him with eyes that concealed nothing. When he broke the
+news of his condition to his partners that morning, they shut him
+off as if he were uttering indecent ravings. All day they had met
+him with a hurried, abstracted manner. McQuiston and Wade went out
+to lunch together, and he knew what they were thinking, perhaps
+talking, about. Wanning had brought into the firm valuable business,
+but he was less enterprising than either of his partners.
+
+
+III
+
+In the early summer Wanning's family scattered. Roma swallowed her
+pride and sailed for Genoa to visit the Contessa Jenny. Harold went
+to Cornish to be in an artistic atmosphere. Mrs. Wanning and
+Florence took a cottage at York Harbor where Wanning was supposed to
+join them whenever he could get away from town. He did not often get
+away. He felt most at ease among his accustomed surroundings. He
+kept his car in the city and went back and forth from his office to
+the club where he was living. Old Sam, his butler, came in from
+Orange every night to put his clothes in order and make him
+comfortable.
+
+Wanning began to feel that he would not tire of his office in a
+hundred years. Although he did very little work, it was pleasant to
+go down town every morning when the streets were crowded, the sky
+clear, and the sunshine bright. From the windows of his private
+office he could see the harbor and watch the ocean liners come down
+the North River and go out to sea.
+
+While he read his mail, he often looked out and wondered why he had
+been so long indifferent to that extraordinary scene of human
+activity and hopefulness. How had a short-lived race of beings the
+energy and courage valiantly to begin enterprises which they could
+follow for only a few years; to throw up towers and build
+sea-monsters and found great businesses, when the frailest of the
+materials with which they worked, the paper upon which they wrote,
+the ink upon their pens, had more permanence in this world than
+they? All this material rubbish lasted. The linen clothing and
+cosmetics of the Egyptians had lasted. It was only the human flame
+that certainly, certainly went out. Other things had a fighting
+chance; they might meet with mishap and be destroyed, they might
+not. But the human creature who gathered and shaped and hoarded and
+foolishly loved these things, he had no chance--absolutely none.
+Wanning's cane, his hat, his topcoat, might go from beggar to beggar
+and knock about in this world for another fifty years or so; but not
+he.
+
+In the late afternoon he never hurried to leave his office now.
+Wonderful sunsets burned over the North River, wonderful stars
+trembled up among the towers; more wonderful than anything he could
+hurry away to. One of his windows looked directly down upon the
+spire of Old Trinity, with the green churchyard and the pale
+sycamores far below. Wanning often dropped into the church when he
+was going out to lunch; not because he was trying to make his peace
+with Heaven, but because the church was old and restful and
+familiar, because it and its gravestones had sat in the same place
+for a long while. He bought flowers from the street boys and kept
+them on his desk, which his partners thought strange behavior, and
+which Miss Doane considered a sign that he was failing.
+
+But there were graver things than bouquets for Miss Doane and the
+senior partner to ponder over.
+
+The senior partner, McQuiston, in spite of his silvery hair and
+mustache and his important church connections, had rich natural
+taste for scandal.--After Mr. Wade went away for his vacation, in
+May, Wanning took Annie Wooley out of the copying room, put her at a
+desk in his private office, and raised her pay to eighteen dollars a
+week, explaining to McQuiston that for the summer months he would
+need a secretary. This explanation satisfied neither McQuiston nor
+Miss Doane.
+
+Annie was also paid for overtime, and although Wanning attended to
+very little of the office business now, there was a great deal of
+overtime. Miss Doane was, of course, 'above' questioning a chit like
+Annie; but what was he doing with his time and his new secretary,
+she wanted to know?
+
+If anyone had told her that Wanning was writing a book, she would
+have said bitterly that it was just like him. In his youth Wanning
+had hankered for the pen. When he studied law, he had intended to
+combine that profession with some tempting form of authorship. Had
+he remained a bachelor, he would have been an unenterprising
+literary lawyer to the end of his days. It was his wife's
+restlessness and her practical turn of mind that had made him a
+money-getter. His illness seemed to bring back to him the illusions
+with which he left college.
+
+As soon as his family were out of the way and he shut up the Orange
+house, he began to dictate his autobiography to Annie Wooley. It was
+not only the story of his life, but an expression of all his
+theories and opinions, and a commentary on the fifty years of events
+which he could remember.
+
+Fortunately, he was able to take great interest in this undertaking.
+He had the happiest convictions about the clear-cut style he was
+developing and his increasing felicity in phrasing. He meant to
+publish the work handsomely, at his own expense and under his own
+name. He rather enjoyed the thought of how greatly disturbed Harold
+would be. He and Harold differed in their estimates of books. All
+the solid works which made up Wanning's library, Harold considered
+beneath contempt. Anybody, he said, could do that sort of thing.
+
+When Wanning could not sleep at night, he turned on the light beside
+his bed and made notes on the chapter he meant to dictate the next
+day.
+
+When he returned to the office after lunch, he gave instructions
+that he was not to be interrupted by telephone calls, and shut
+himself up with his secretary.
+
+After he had opened all the windows and taken off his coat, he fell
+to dictating. He found it a delightful occupation, the solace of
+each day. Often he had sudden fits of tiredness; then he would lie
+down on the leather sofa and drop asleep, while Annie read "The
+Leopard's Spots" until he awoke.
+
+Like many another business man Wanning had relied so long on
+stenographers that the operation of writing with a pen had become
+laborious to him. When he undertook it, he wanted to cut everything
+short. But walking up and down his private office, with the strong
+afternoon sun pouring in at his windows, a fresh air stirring, all
+the people and boats moving restlessly down there, he could say
+things he wanted to say. It was like living his life over again.
+
+He did not miss his wife or his daughters. He had become again the
+mild, contemplative youth he was in college, before he had a
+profession and a family to grind for, before the two needs which
+shape our destiny had made of him pretty much what they make of
+every man.
+
+At five o'clock Wanning sometimes went out for a cup of tea and took
+Annie along. He felt dull and discouraged as soon as he was alone.
+So long as Annie was with him, he could keep a grip on his own
+thoughts. They talked about what he had just been dictating to her.
+She found that he liked to be questioned, and she tried to be
+greatly interested in it all.
+
+After tea, they went back to the office. Occasionally Wanning lost
+track of time and kept Annie until it grew dark. He knew he had old
+McQuiston guessing, but he didn't care. One day the senior partner
+came to him with a reproving air.
+
+"I am afraid Miss Doane is leaving us, Paul. She feels that Miss
+Wooley's promotion is irregular."
+
+"How is that any business of hers, I'd like to know? She has all my
+legal work. She is always disagreeable enough about doing anything
+else."
+
+McQuiston's puffy red face went a shade darker.
+
+"Miss Doane has a certain professional pride; a strong feeling for
+office organization. She doesn't care to fill an equivocal position.
+I don't know that I blame her. She feels that there is something not
+quite regular about the confidence you seem to place in this
+inexperienced young woman."
+
+Wanning pushed back his chair.
+
+"I don't care a hang about Miss Doane's sense of propriety. I need a
+stenographer who will carry out my instructions. I've carried out
+Miss Doane's long enough. I've let that schoolma'am hector me for
+years. She can go when she pleases."
+
+That night McQuiston wrote to his partner that things were in a bad
+way, and they would have to keep an eye on Wanning. He had been seen
+at the theatre with his new stenographer.
+
+That was true. Wanning had several times taken Annie to the Palace
+on Saturday afternoon. When all his acquaintances were off motoring
+or playing golf, when the down-town offices and even the streets
+were deserted, it amused him to watch a foolish show with a
+delighted, cheerful little person beside him.
+
+Beyond her generosity, Annie had no shining merits of character, but
+she had the gift of thinking well of everything, and wishing well.
+When she was there Wanning felt as if there were someone who cared
+whether this was a good or a bad day with him. Old Sam, too, was
+like that. While the old black man put him to bed and made him
+comfortable, Wanning could talk to him as he talked to little Annie.
+Even if he dwelt upon his illness, in plain terms, in detail, he did
+not feel as if he were imposing on them.
+
+People like Sam and Annie admitted misfortune,--admitted it almost
+cheerfully. Annie and her family did not consider illness or any of
+its hard facts vulgar or indecent. It had its place in their scheme
+of life, as it had not in that of Wanning's friends.
+
+Annie came out of a typical poor family of New York. Of eight
+children, only four lived to grow up. In such families the stream of
+life is broad enough, but runs shallow. In the children, vitality is
+exhausted early. The roots do not go down into anything very strong.
+Illness and deaths and funerals, in her own family and in those of
+her friends, had come at frequent intervals in Annie's life. Since
+they had to be, she and her sisters made the best of them. There was
+something to be got out of funerals, even, if they were managed
+right. They kept people in touch with old friends who had moved
+uptown, and revived kindly feelings.
+
+Annie had often given up things she wanted because there was
+sickness at home, and now she was patient with her boss. What he
+paid her for overtime work by no means made up to her what she lost.
+
+Annie was not in the least thrifty, nor were any of her sisters. She
+had to make a living, but she was not interested in getting all she
+could for her time, or in laying up for the future. Girls like Annie
+know that the future is a very uncertain thing, and they feel no
+responsibility about it. The present is what they have--and it is
+all they have. If Annie missed a chance to go sailing with the
+plumber's son on Saturday afternoon, why, she missed it. As for the
+two dollars her boss gave her, she handed them over to her mother.
+Now that Annie was getting more money, one of her sisters quit a job
+she didn't like and was staying at home for a rest. That was all
+promotion meant to Annie.
+
+The first time Annie's boss asked her to work on Saturday afternoon,
+she could not hide her disappointment. He suggested that they might
+knock off early and go to a show, or take a run in his car, but she
+grew tearful and said it would be hard to make her family
+understand. Wanning thought perhaps he could explain to her mother.
+He called his motor and took Annie home.
+
+When his car stopped in front of the tenement house on Eighth
+Avenue, heads came popping out of the windows for six storys up, and
+all the neighbor women, in dressing sacks and wrappers, gazed down
+at the machine and at the couple alighting from it. A motor meant a
+wedding or the hospital.
+
+The plumber's son, Willy Steen, came over from the corner saloon to
+see what was going on, and Annie introduced him at the doorstep.
+
+Mrs. Wooley asked Wanning to come into the parlor and invited him to
+have a chair of ceremony between the folding bed and the piano.
+
+Annie, nervous and tearful, escaped to the dining-room--the cheerful
+spot where the daughters visited with each other and with their
+friends. The parlor was a masked sleeping chamber and store room.
+
+The plumber's son sat down on the sofa beside Mrs. Wooley, as if he
+were accustomed to share in the family councils. Mrs. Wooley waited
+expectant and kindly. She looked the sensible, hard-working woman
+that she was, and one could see she hadn't lived all her life on
+Eighth Avenue without learning a great deal.
+
+Wanning explained to her that he was writing a book which he wanted
+to finish during the summer months when business was not so heavy.
+He was ill and could not work regularly. His secretary would have to
+take his dictation when he felt able to give it; must, in short, be
+a sort of companion to him. He would like to feel that she could go
+out in his car with him, or even to the theater, when he felt like
+it. It might have been better if he had engaged a young man for this
+work, but since he had begun it with Annie, he would like to keep
+her if her mother was willing.
+
+Mrs. Wooley watched him with friendly, searching eyes. She glanced
+at Willy Steen, who, wise in such distinctions, had decided that
+there was nothing shady about Annie's boss. He nodded his sanction.
+
+"I don't want my girl to conduct herself in any such way as will
+prejudice her, Mr. Wanning," she said thoughtfully. "If you've got
+daughters, you know how that is. You've been liberal with Annie, and
+it's a good position for her. It's right she should go to business
+every day, and I want her to do her work right, but I like to have
+her home after working hours. I always think a young girl's time is
+her own after business hours, and I try not to burden them when they
+come home. I'm willing she should do your work as suits you, if it's
+her wish; but I don't like to press her. The good times she misses
+now, it's not you nor me, sir, that can make them up to her. These
+young things has their feelings."
+
+"Oh, I don't want to press her, either," Wanning said hastily. "I
+simply want to know that you understand the situation. I've made her
+a little present in my will as a recognition that she is doing more
+for me than she is paid for."
+
+"That's something above me, sir. We'll hope there won't be no
+question of wills for many years yet," Mrs. Wooley spoke heartily.
+"I'm glad if my girl can be of any use to you, just so she don't
+prejudice herself."
+
+The plumber's son rose as if the interview were over.
+
+"It's all right, Mama Wooley, don't you worry," he said.
+
+He picked up his canvas cap and turned to Wanning. "You see, Annie
+ain't the sort of girl that would want to be spotted circulating
+around with a monied party her folks didn't know all about. She'd
+lose friends by it."
+
+After this conversation Annie felt a great deal happier. She was
+still shy and a trifle awkward with poor Wanning when they were
+outside the office building, and she missed the old freedom of her
+Saturday afternoons. But she did the best she could, and Willy Steen
+tried to make it up to her.
+
+In Annie's absence he often came in of an afternoon to have a cup of
+tea and a sugar-bun with Mrs. Wooley and the daughter who was
+"resting." As they sat at the dining-room table, they discussed
+Annie's employer, his peculiarities, his health, and what he had
+told Mrs. Wooley about his will.
+
+Mrs. Wooley said she sometimes felt afraid he might disinherit his
+children, as rich people often did, and make talk; but she hoped for
+the best. Whatever came to Annie, she prayed it might not be in the
+form of taxable property.
+
+
+IV
+
+Late in September Wanning grew suddenly worse. His family hurried
+home, and he was put to bed in his house in Orange. He kept asking
+the doctors when he could get back to the office, but he lived only
+eight days.
+
+The morning after his father's funeral, Harold went to the office to
+consult Wanning's partners and to read the will. Everything in the
+will was as it should be. There were no surprises except a codicil
+in the form of a letter to Mrs. Wanning, dated July 8th, requesting
+that out of the estate she should pay the sum of one thousand
+dollars to his stenographer, Annie Wooley, "in recognition of her
+faithful services."
+
+"I thought Miss Doane was my father's stenographer," Harold
+exclaimed.
+
+Alec McQuiston looked embarrassed and spoke in a low, guarded tone.
+
+"She was, for years. But this spring,--" he hesitated.
+
+McQuiston loved a scandal. He leaned across his desk toward Harold.
+
+"This spring your father put this little girl, Miss Wooley, a
+copyist, utterly inexperienced, in Miss Doane's place. Miss Doane
+was indignant and left us. The change made comment here in the
+office. It was slightly--No, I will be frank with you, Harold, it
+was very irregular."
+
+Harold also looked grave. "What could my father have meant by such a
+request as this to my mother?"
+
+The silver haired senior partner flushed and spoke as if he were
+trying to break something gently.
+
+"I don't understand it, my boy. But I think, indeed I prefer to
+think, that your father was not quite himself all this summer. A man
+like your father does not, in his right senses, find pleasure in the
+society of an ignorant, common little girl. He does not make a
+practise of keeping her at the office after hours, often until eight
+o'clock, or take her to restaurants and to the theater with him;
+not, at least, in a slanderous city like New York."
+
+Harold flinched before McQuiston's meaning gaze and turned aside in
+pained silence. He knew, as a dramatist, that there are dark
+chapters in all men's lives, and this but too clearly explained why
+his father had stayed in town all summer instead of joining his
+family.
+
+McQuiston asked if he should ring for Annie Wooley.
+
+Harold drew himself up. "No. Why should I see her? I prefer not to.
+But with your permission, Mr. McQuiston, I will take charge of this
+request to my mother. It could only give her pain, and might awaken
+doubts in her mind."
+
+"We hardly know," murmured the senior partner, "where an
+investigation would lead us. Technically, of course, I cannot agree
+with you. But if, as one of the executors of the will, you wish to
+assume personal responsibility for this bequest, under the
+circumstances--irregularities beget irregularities."
+
+"My first duty to my father," said Harold, "is to protect my
+mother."
+
+That afternoon McQuiston called Annie Wooley into his private office
+and told her that her services would not be needed any longer, and
+that in lieu of notice the clerk would give her two weeks' salary.
+
+"Can I call up here for references?" Annie asked.
+
+"Certainly. But you had better ask for me, personally. You must know
+there has been some criticism of you here in the office, Miss
+Wooley."
+
+"What about?" Annie asked boldly.
+
+"Well, a young girl like you cannot render so much personal service
+to her employer as you did to Mr. Wanning without causing
+unfavorable comment. To be blunt with you, for your own good, my
+dear young lady, your services to your employer should terminate in
+the office, and at the close of office hours. Mr. Wanning was a very
+sick man and his judgment was at fault, but you should have known
+what a girl in your station can do and what she cannot do."
+
+The vague discomfort of months flashed up in little Annie. She had
+no mind to stand by and be lectured without having a word to say for
+herself.
+
+"Of course he was sick, poor man!" she burst out. "Not as anybody
+seemed much upset about it. I wouldn't have given up my
+half-holidays for anybody if they hadn't been sick, no matter what
+they paid me. There wasn't anything in it for me."
+
+McQuiston raised his hand warningly.
+
+"That will do, young lady. But when you get another place, remember
+this: it is never your duty to entertain or to provide amusement for
+your employer."
+
+He gave Annie a look which she did not clearly understand, although
+she pronounced him a nasty old man as she hustled on her hat and
+jacket.
+
+When Annie reached home she found Willy Steen sitting with her
+mother and sister at the dining-room table. This was the first day
+that Annie had gone to the office since Wanning's death, and her
+family awaited her return with suspense.
+
+"Hello yourself," Annie called as she came in and threw her handbag
+into an empty armchair.
+
+"You're off early, Annie," said her mother gravely. "Has the will
+been read?"
+
+"I guess so. Yes, I know it has. Miss Wilson got it out of the safe
+for them. The son came in. He's a pill."
+
+"Was nothing said to you, daughter?"
+
+"Yes, a lot. Please give me some tea, mother." Annie felt that her
+swagger was failing.
+
+"Don't tantalize us, Ann," her sister broke in. "Didn't you get
+anything?"
+
+"I got the mit, all right. And some back talk from the old man that
+I'm awful sore about."
+
+Annie dashed away the tears and gulped her tea.
+
+Gradually her mother and Willy drew the story from her. Willy
+offered at once to go to the office building and take his stand
+outside the door and never leave it until he had punched old Mr.
+McQuiston's face. He rose as if to attend to it at once, but Mrs.
+Wooley drew him to his chair again and patted his arm.
+
+"It would only start talk and get the girl in trouble, Willy. When
+it's lawyers, folks in our station is helpless. I certainly believed
+that man when he sat here; you heard him yourself. Such a gentleman
+as he looked."
+
+Willy thumped his great fist, still in punching position, down on
+his knee.
+
+"Never you be fooled again, Mama Wooley. You'll never get anything
+out of a rich guy that he ain't signed up in the courts for. Rich is
+tight. There's no exceptions."
+
+Annie shook her head.
+
+"I didn't want anything out of him. He was a nice, kind man, and he
+had his troubles, I guess. He wasn't tight."
+
+"Still," said Mrs. Wooley sadly, "Mr. Wanning had no call to hold
+out promises. I hate to be disappointed in a gentleman. You've had
+confining work for some time, daughter; a rest will do you good."
+
+                                       _Smart Set_, October 1919
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+REVIEWS AND ESSAYS
+
+
+
+
+_Mark Twain_
+
+
+If there is anything which should make an American sick and
+disgusted at the literary taste of his country, and almost swerve
+his allegiance to his flag it is that controversy between Mark Twain
+and Max O'Rell, in which the Frenchman proves himself a wit and a
+gentleman and the American shows himself little short of a clown and
+an all around tough. The squabble arose apropos of Paul Bourget's
+new book on America, "Outre Mer," a book which deals more fairly and
+generously with this country than any book yet written in a foreign
+tongue. Mr. Clemens did not like the book, and like all men of his
+class, and limited mentality, he cannot criticise without becoming
+personal and insulting. He cannot be scathing without being a
+blackguard. He tried to demolish a serious and well considered work
+by publishing a scurrilous, slangy and loosely written article about
+it. In this article Mr. Clemens proves very little against Mr.
+Bourget and a very great deal against himself. He demonstrates
+clearly that he is neither a scholar, a reader or a man of letters
+and very little of a gentleman. His ignorance of French literature
+is something appalling. Why, in these days it is as necessary for a
+literary man to have a wide knowledge of the French masterpieces as
+it is for him to have read Shakespeare or the Bible. What man who
+pretends to be an author can afford to neglect those models of style
+and composition. George Meredith, Thomas Hardy and Henry James
+excepted, the great living novelists are Frenchmen.
+
+Mr. Clemens asks what the French sensualists can possibly teach the
+great American people about novel writing or morality? Well, it
+would not seriously hurt the art of the classic author of "Puddin'
+Head Wilson" to study Daudet, De Maupassant, Hugo and George Sand,
+whatever it might do to his morals. Mark Twain is a humorist of a
+kind. His humor is always rather broad, so broad that the polite
+world can justly call it coarse. He is not a reader nor a thinker
+nor a man who loves art of any kind. He is a clever Yankee who has
+made a "good thing" out of writing. He has been published in the
+North American Review and in the Century, but he is not and never
+will be a part of literature. The association and companionship of
+cultured men has given Mark Twain a sort of professional veneer, but
+it could not give him fine instincts or nice discriminations or
+elevated tastes. His works are pure and suitable for children, just
+as the work of most shallow and mediocre fellows. House dogs and
+donkeys make the most harmless and chaste companions for young
+innocence in the world. Mark Twain's humor is of the kind that
+teamsters use in bantering with each other, and his laugh is the
+gruff "haw-haw" of the backwoodsman. He is still the rough, awkward,
+good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands on the river steamer
+and chewed uncured tobacco when he was three years old. Thoroughly
+likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters. It is
+an unfortunate feature of American literature that a hostler with
+some natural cleverness and a great deal of assertion receives the
+same recognition as a standard American author that a man like
+Lowell does. The French academy is a good thing after all. It at
+least divides the sheep from the goats and gives a sheep the
+consolation of knowing that he is a sheep.
+
+It is rather a pity that Paul Bourget should have written "Outre
+Mer," thoroughly creditable book though it is. Mr. Bourget is a
+novelist, and he should not content himself with being an essayist,
+there are far too many of them in the world already. He can develop
+strong characters, invent strong situations, he can write the truth
+and he should not drift into penning opinions and platitudes. When
+God has made a man a creator, it is a great mistake for him to turn
+critic. It is rather an insult to God and certainly a very great
+wrong to man.
+
+                           _Nebraska State Journal_, May 5, 1895
+
+
+I got a letter last week from a little boy just half-past seven who
+had just read "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer." He said: "If
+there are any more books like them in the world, send them to me
+quick." I had to humbly confess to him that if there were any others
+I had not the good fortune to know of them. What a red-letter-day it
+is to a boy, the day he first opens "Tom Sawyer." I would rather
+sail on the raft down the Missouri again with "Huck" Finn and Jim
+than go down the Nile in December or see Venice from a gondola in
+May. Certainly Mark Twain is much better when he writes of his
+Missouri boys than when he makes sickley romances about Joan of Arc.
+And certainly he never did a better piece of work than "Prince and
+Pauper." One seems to get at the very heart of old England in that
+dearest of children's books, and in its pages the frail boy king,
+and his gloomy sister Mary who in her day wrought so much woe for
+unhappy England, and the dashing Princess Elizabeth who lived to
+rule so well, seem to live again. A friend of Mr. Clemens' once told
+me that he said he wrote that book so that when his little daughters
+grew up they might know that their tired old jester of a father
+could be serious and gentle sometimes.
+
+                                    _The Home Monthly_, May 1897
+
+
+
+
+_William Dean Howells_
+
+
+Certainly now in his old age Mr. Howells is selecting queer titles
+for his books. A while ago we had that feeble tale, "The Coast of
+Bohemia," and now we have "My Literary Passions." "Passions,"
+literary or otherwise, were never Mr. Howells' forte and surely no
+man could be further from even the coast of Bohemia.
+
+Apropos of "My Literary Passions" which has so long strung out in
+the Ladies' Home Journal along with those thrilling articles about
+how Henry Ward Beecher tied his necktie and what kind of coffee Mrs.
+Hall Cain likes, why did Mr. Howells write it? Doesn't Mr. Howells
+know that at one time or another every one raves over Don Quixote,
+imitates Heine, worships Tourgueneff and calls Tolstoi a prophet?
+Does Mr. Howells think that no one but he ever had youth and
+enthusiasm and aspirations? Doesn't he know that the only thing that
+makes the world worth living in at all is that once, when we are
+young, we all have that great love for books and impersonal things,
+all reverence and dream? We have all known the time when Porthos,
+Athos and d'Artagan were vastly more real and important to us than
+the folks who lived next door. We have all dwelt in that country
+where Anna Karenina and the Levins were the only people who mattered
+much. We have all known that intoxicating period when we thought we
+"understood life," because we had read Daudet, Zola and Guy de
+Maupassant, and like Mr. Howells we all looked back rather fondly
+upon the time when we believed that books were the truth and art was
+all. After a while books grow matter of fact like everything else
+and we always think enviously of the days when they were new and
+wonderful and strange. That's a part of existence. We lose our first
+keen relish for literature just as we lose it for ice-cream and
+confectionery. The taste grows older, wiser and more subdued. We
+would all wear out of very enthusiasm if it did not. But why should
+Mr. Howells tell the world this common experience in detail as
+though it were his and his alone. He might as well write a detailed
+account of how he had the measles and the whooping cough. It was all
+right and proper for Mr. Howells to like Heine and Hugo, but, in the
+words of the circus clown, "We've all been there."
+
+                         _Nebraska State Journal_, July 14, 1895
+
+
+
+
+_Edgar Allan Poe_
+
+
+  My tantalized spirit
+    Here blandly reposes,
+  Forgetting, or never
+    Regretting its roses,
+  Its old agitations
+    Of myrtles and roses.
+
+  For now, while so quietly
+    Lying, it fancies
+  A holier odor
+    About it, of pansies--
+  A rosemary odor
+    Commingled with pansies.
+  With rue and the beautiful
+    Puritan pansies.
+
+              --Edgar Allan Poe.
+
+The Shakespeare society of New York, which is really about the only
+useful literary organization in this country, is making vigorous
+efforts to redress an old wrong and atone for a long neglect.
+Sunday, Sept. 22, it held a meeting at the Poe cottage on
+Kingsbridge road near Fordham, for the purpose of starting an
+organized movement to buy back the cottage, restore it to its
+original condition and preserve it as a memorial of Poe. So it has
+come at last. After helping build monuments to Shelley, Keats and
+Carlyle we have at last remembered this man, the greatest of our
+poets and the most unhappy. I am glad that this movement is in the
+hands of American actors, for it was among them that Poe found his
+best friends and warmest admirers. Some way he always seemed to
+belong to the strolling Thespians who were his mother's people.
+
+Among all the thousands of life's little ironies that make history
+so diverting, there is none more paradoxical than that Edgar Poe
+should have been an American. Look at his face. Had we ever another
+like it? He must have been a strange figure in his youth, among
+those genial, courtly Virginians, this handsome, pale fellow,
+violent in his enthusiasm, ardent in his worship, but spiritually
+cold in his affections. Now playing heavily for the mere excitement
+of play, now worshipping at the shrine of a woman old enough to be
+his mother, merely because her voice was beautiful; now swimming six
+miles up the James river against a heavy current in the glaring sun
+of a June midday. He must have seemed to them an unreal figure, a
+sort of stage man who was wandering about the streets with his mask
+and buskins on, a theatrical figure who had escaped by some strange
+mischance into the prosaic daylight. His speech and actions were
+unconsciously and sincerely dramatic, always as though done for
+effect. He had that nervous, egotistic, self-centered nature common
+to stage children who seem to have been dazzled by the footlights
+and maddened by the applause before they are born. It was in his
+blood. With the exception of two women who loved him, lived for him,
+died for him, he went through life friendless, misunderstood, with
+that dense, complete, hopeless misunderstanding which, as Amiel
+said, is the secret of that sad smile upon the lips of the great.
+Men tried to befriend him, but in some way or other he hurt and
+disappointed them. He tried to mingle and share with other men, but
+he was always shut from them by that shadow, light as gossamer but
+unyielding as adamant, by which, from the beginning of the world,
+art has shielded and guarded and protected her own, that
+God-concealing mist in which the heroes of old were hidden, immersed
+in that gloom and solitude which, if we could but know it here, is
+but the shadow of God's hand as it falls upon his elect.
+
+We lament our dearth of great prose. With the exception of Henry
+James and Hawthorne, Poe is our only master of pure prose. We lament
+our dearth of poets. With the exception of Lowell, Poe is our only
+great poet. Poe found short story writing a bungling makeshift. He
+left it a perfect art. He wrote the first perfect short stories in
+the English language. He first gave the short story purpose, method,
+and artistic form. In a careless reading one can not realize the
+wonderful literary art, the cunning devices, the masterly effects
+that those entrancing tales conceal. They are simple and direct
+enough to delight us when we are children, subtle and artistic
+enough to be our marvel when we are old. To this day they are the
+wonder and admiration of the French, who are the acknowledged
+masters of craft and form. How in his wandering, laborious life,
+bound to the hack work of the press and crushed by an ever-growing
+burden of want and debt, did he ever come upon all this deep and
+mystical lore, this knowledge of all history, of all languages, of
+all art, this penetration into the hidden things of the East? As
+Steadman says, "The self training of genius is always a marvel." The
+past is spread before us all and most of us spend our lives in
+learning those things which we do not need to know, but genius
+reaches out instinctively and takes only the vital detail, by some
+sort of spiritual gravitation goes directly to the right thing.
+
+Poe belonged to the modern French school of decorative and
+discriminating prose before it ever existed in France. He rivalled
+Gautier, Flaubert and de Maupassant before they were born. He
+clothed his tales in a barbaric splendor and persuasive unreality
+never before heard of in English. No such profusion of color,
+oriental splendor of detail, grotesque combinations and mystical
+effects had ever before been wrought into language. There are tales
+as grotesque, as monstrous, unearthly as the stone griffens and
+gargoyles that are cut up among the unvisited niches and towers of
+Notre Dame, stories as poetic and delicately beautiful as the golden
+lace work chased upon an Etruscan ring. He fitted his words together
+as the Byzantine jewelers fitted priceless stones. He found the
+inner harmony and kinship of words. Where lived another man who
+could blend the beautiful and the horrible, the gorgeous and the
+grotesque in such intricate and inexplicable fashion? Who could
+delight you with his noun and disgust you with his verb, thrill you
+with his adjective and chill you with his adverb, make you run the
+whole gamut of human emotions in a single sentence? Sitting in that
+miserable cottage at Fordham he wrote of the splendor of dream
+palaces beyond the dreams of art. He hung those grimy walls with
+dream tapestries, paved those narrow halls with black marble and
+polished onyx, and into those low-roofed chambers he brought all the
+treasured imagery of fancy, from the "huge carvings of untutored
+Egypt" to "mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from strange
+convolute censers, together with multitudinous, flaring and
+flickering tongues of purple and violet fire." Hungry and ragged he
+wrote of Epicurean feasts and luxury that would have beggared the
+purpled pomp of pagan Rome and put Nero and his Golden House to
+shame.
+
+And this mighty master of the organ of language, who knew its every
+stop and pipe, who could awaken at will the thin silver tones of its
+slenderest reeds or the solemn cadence of its deepest thunder, who
+could make it sing like a flute or roar like a cataract, he was born
+into a country without a literature. He was of that ornate school
+which usually comes last in a national literature, and he came
+first. American taste had been vitiated by men like Griswold and N.
+P. Willis until it was at the lowest possible ebb. Willis was
+considered a genius, that is the worst that could possibly be said.
+In the North a new race of great philosophers was growing up, but
+Poe had neither their friendship nor encouragement. He went indeed,
+sometimes, to the chilly _salon_ of Margaret Fuller, but he was
+always a discord there. He was a mere artist and he had no business
+with philosophy, he had no theories as to the "higher life" and the
+"true happiness." He had only his unshapen dreams that battled with
+him in dark places, the unborn that struggled in his brain for
+birth. What time has an artist to learn the multiplication table or
+to talk philosophy? He was not afraid of them. He laughed at Willis,
+and flung Longfellow's lie in his teeth, the lie the rest of the
+world was twenty years in finding. He scorned the obtrusive learning
+of the transcendentalists and he disliked their hard talkative
+women. He left them and went back to his dream women, his
+_Berenice_, his _Ligeia_, his _Marchesa Aphrodite_, pale and cold as
+the mist maidens of the North, sad as the Norns who weep for human
+woe.
+
+The tragedy of Poe's life was not alcohol, but hunger. He died when
+he was forty, when his work was just beginning. Thackeray had not
+touched his great novels at forty, George Eliot was almost unknown
+at that age. Hugo, Goethe, Hawthorne, Lowell and Dumas all did their
+great work after they were forty years old. Poe never did his great
+work. He could not endure the hunger. This year the Drexel Institute
+has put over sixty thousand dollars into a new edition of Poe's
+poems and stories. He himself never got six thousand for them
+altogether. If one of the great and learned institutions of the land
+had invested one tenth of that amount in the living author forty
+years ago we should have had from him such works as would have made
+the name of this nation great. But he sold "The Masque of the Red
+Death" for a few dollars, and now the Drexel Institute pays a
+publisher thousands to publish it beautifully. It is enough to make
+Satan laugh until his ribs ache, and all the little devils laugh and
+heap on fresh coals. I don't wonder they hate humanity. It's so
+dense, so hopelessly stupid.
+
+Only a few weeks before Poe's death he said he had never had time or
+opportunity to make a serious effort. All his tales were merely
+experiments, thrown off when his day's work as a journalist was
+over, when he should have been asleep. All those voyages into the
+mystical unknown, into the gleaming, impalpable kingdom of pure
+romance from which he brought back such splendid trophies, were but
+experiments. He was only getting his tools into shape getting ready
+for his great effort, the effort that never came.
+
+Bread seems a little thing to stand in the way of genius, but it
+can. The simple sordid facts were these, that in the bitterest
+storms of winter Poe seldom wrote by a fire, that after he was
+twenty-five years old he never knew what it was to have enough to
+eat without dreading tomorrow's hunger. Chatterton had only himself
+to sacrifice, but Poe saw the woman he loved die of want before his
+very eyes, die smiling and begging him not to give up his work. They
+saw the depths together in those long winter nights when she lay in
+that cold room, wrapped in Poe's only coat, he, with one hand
+holding hers, and with the other dashing off some of the most
+perfect masterpieces of English prose. And when he would wince and
+turn white at her coughing, she would always whisper: "Work on, my
+poet, and when you have finished read it to me. I am happy when I
+listen." O, the devotion of women and the madness of art! They are
+the two most awesome things on earth, and surely this man knew both
+to the full.
+
+I have wondered so often how he did it. How he kept his purpose
+always clean and his taste always perfect. How it was that hard
+labor never wearied nor jaded him, never limited his imagination,
+that the jarring clamor about him never drowned the fine harmonies
+of his fancy. His discrimination remained always delicate, and from
+the constant strain of toil his fancy always rose strong and
+unfettered. Without encouragement or appreciation of any sort,
+without models or precedents he built up that pure style of his that
+is without peer in the language, that style of which every sentence
+is a drawing by Vedder. Elizabeth Barrett and a few great artists
+over in France knew what he was doing, they knew that in literature
+he was making possible a new heaven and a new earth. But he never
+knew that they knew it. He died without the assurance that he was or
+ever would be understood. And yet through all this, with the whole
+world of art and letters against him, betrayed by his own people, he
+managed to keep that lofty ideal of perfect work. What he suffered
+never touched or marred his work, but it wrecked his character.
+Poe's character was made by his necessity. He was a liar and an
+egotist; a man who had to beg for bread at the hands of his
+publishers and critics could be nothing but a liar, and had he not
+had the insane egotism and conviction of genius, he would have
+broken down and written the drivelling trash that his countrymen
+delighted to read. Poe lied to his publishers sometimes, there is no
+doubt of that, but there were two to whom he was never false, his
+wife and his muse. He drank sometimes too, when for very ugly and
+relentless reasons he could not eat. And then he forgot what he
+suffered. For Bacchus is the kindest of the gods after all. When
+Aphrodite has fooled us and left us and Athene has betrayed us in
+battle, then poor tipsy Bacchus, who covers his head with vine
+leaves where the curls are getting thin, holds out his cup to us and
+says, "forget." It's poor consolation, but he means it well.
+
+The Transcendentalists were good conversationalists, that in fact
+was their principal accomplishment. They used to talk a great deal
+of genius, that rare and capricious spirit that visits earth so
+seldom, that is wooed by so many, and won by so few. They had grand
+theories that all men should be poets, that the visits of that rare
+spirit should be made as frequent and universal as afternoon calls.
+O, they had plans to make a whole generation of little geniuses. But
+she only laughed her scornful laughter, that deathless lady of the
+immortals, up in her echoing chambers that are floored with dawn and
+roofed with the spangled stars. And she snatched from them the only
+man of their nation she had ever deigned to love, whose lips she had
+touched with music and whose soul with song. In his youth she had
+shown him the secrets of her beauty and his manhood had been one
+pursuit of her, blind to all else, like Anchises, who on the night
+that he knew the love of Venus, was struck sightless, that he might
+never behold the face of a mortal woman. For Our Lady of Genius has
+no care for the prayers and groans of mortals, nor for their
+hecatombs sweet of savor. Many a time of old she has foiled the
+plans of seers and none may entreat her or take her by force. She
+favors no one nation or clime. She takes one from the millions, and
+when she gives herself unto a man it is without his will or that of
+his fellows, and he pays for it, dear heaven, he pays!
+
+  "The sun comes forth and many reptiles spawn,
+  He sets and each ephemeral insect then
+  Is gathered unto death without a dawn,
+  And the immortal stars awake again."
+
+Yes, "and the immortal stars awake again." None may thwart the
+unerring justice of the gods, not even the Transcendentalists. What
+matter that one man's life was miserable, that one man was broken on
+the wheel? His work lives and his crown is eternal. That the work of
+his age was undone, that is the pity, that the work of his youth was
+done, that is the glory. The man is nothing. There are millions of
+men. The work is everything. There is so little perfection. We
+lament our dearth of poets when we let Poe starve. We are like the
+Hebrews who stoned their prophets and then marvelled that the voice
+of God was silent. We will wait a long time for another. There are
+Griswold and N. P. Willis, our chosen ones, let us turn to them.
+Their names are forgotten. God is just. They are,
+
+  "Gathered unto death without a dawn.
+  And the immortal stars awake again."
+
+                                 _The Courier_, October 12, 1895
+
+
+You can afford to give a little more care and attention to this
+imaginative boy of yours than to any of your other children. His
+nerves are more finely strung and all his life he will need your
+love more than the others. Be careful to get him the books he likes
+and see that they are good ones. Get him a volume of Poe's short
+stories. I know many people are prejudiced against Poe because of
+the story that he drank himself to death. But that myth has been
+exploded long ago. Poe drank less than even the average man of his
+time. No, the most artistic of all American story tellers did not
+die because he drank too much, but because he ate too little. And
+yet we, his own countrymen who should be so proud of him, are not
+content with having starved him and wronged him while he lived, we
+must even go on slandering him after he has been dead almost fifty
+years. But get his works for this imaginative boy of yours and he
+will tell you how great a man the author of "The Gold Bug" and "The
+Masque of the Red Death" was. Children are impartial critics and
+sometimes very good ones. They do not reason about a book, they just
+like it or dislike it intensely, and after all that is the
+conclusion of the whole matter. I am very sure that "The Fall of the
+House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Black Cat" will
+give this woolgathering lad of yours more pleasure than a new
+bicycle could.
+
+                                    _The Home Monthly_, May 1897
+
+
+
+
+_Walt Whitman_
+
+
+Speaking of monuments reminds one that there is more talk about a
+monument to Walt Whitman, "the good, gray poet." Just why the
+adjective good is always applied to Whitman it is difficult to
+discover, probably because people who could not understand him at
+all took it for granted that he meant well. If ever there was a poet
+who had no literary ethics at all beyond those of nature, it was he.
+He was neither good nor bad, any more than are the animals he
+continually admired and envied. He was a poet without an exclusive
+sense of the poetic, a man without the finer discriminations,
+enjoying everything with the unreasoning enthusiasm of a boy. He was
+the poet of the dung hill as well as of the mountains, which is
+admirable in theory but excruciating in verse. In the same paragraph
+he informs you that, "The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,"
+and that "The malformed limbs are tied to the table, what is removed
+drop horribly into a pail." No branch of surgery is poetic, and that
+hopelessly prosaic word "pail" would kill a whole volume of sonnets.
+Whitman's poems are reckless rhapsodies over creation in general,
+some times sublime, some times ridiculous. He declares that the
+ocean with its "imperious waves, commanding" is beautiful, and that
+the fly-specks on the walls are also beautiful. Such catholic taste
+may go in science, but in poetry their results are sad. The poet's
+task is usually to select the poetic. Whitman never bothers to do
+that, he takes everything in the universe from fly-specks to the
+fixed stars. His "Leaves of Grass" is a sort of dictionary of the
+English language, and in it is the name of everything in creation
+set down with great reverence but without any particular connection.
+
+But however ridiculous Whitman may be there is a primitive elemental
+force about him. He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life.
+He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the
+old Greeks and the primitive poets did. He exults so in the red
+blood in his body and the strength in his arms. He has such a
+passion for the warmth and dignity of all that is natural. He has no
+code but to be natural, a code that this complex world has so long
+outgrown. He is sensual, not after the manner of Swinbourne and
+Gautier, who are always seeking for perverted and bizarre effects on
+the senses, but in the frank fashion of the old barbarians who ate
+and slept and married and smacked their lips over the mead horn. He
+is rigidly limited to the physical, things that quicken his pulses,
+please his eyes or delight his nostrils. There is an element of
+poetry in all this, but it is by no means the highest. If a joyous
+elephant should break forth into song, his lay would probably be
+very much like Whitman's famous "song of myself." It would have just
+about as much delicacy and deftness and discriminations. He says:
+
+"I think I could turn and live with the animals. They are so placid
+and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do
+not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in
+the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick
+discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied nor not one is
+demented with the mania of many things. Not one kneels to another
+nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is
+respectable or unhappy, over the whole earth." And that is not irony
+on nature, he means just that, life meant no more to him. He
+accepted the world just as it is and glorified it, the seemly and
+unseemly, the good and the bad. He had no conception of a difference
+in people or in things. All men had bodies and were alike to him,
+one about as good as another. To live was to fulfil all natural laws
+and impulses. To be comfortable was to be happy. To be happy was the
+ultimatum. He did not realize the existence of a conscience or a
+responsibility. He had no more thought of good or evil than the
+folks in Kipling's Jungle book.
+
+And yet there is an undeniable charm about this optimistic vagabond
+who is made so happy by the warm sunshine and the smell of spring
+fields. A sort of good fellowship and whole-heartedness in every
+line he wrote. His veneration for things physical and material, for
+all that is in water or air or land, is so real that as you read him
+you think for the moment that you would rather like to live so if
+you could. For the time you half believe that a sound body and a
+strong arm are the greatest things in the world. Perhaps no book
+shows so much as "Leaves of Grass" that keen senses do not make a
+poet. When you read it you realize how spirited a thing poetry
+really is and how great a part spiritual perceptions play in
+apparently sensuous verse, if only to select the beautiful from the
+gross.
+
+                      _Nebraska State Journal_, January 19, 1896
+
+
+
+
+_Henry James_
+
+
+Their mania for careless and hasty work is not confined to the
+lesser men. Howells and Hardy have gone with the crowd. Now that
+Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English speaking author who
+is really keeping his self-respect and sticking for perfection. Of
+course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of
+human actions and motives, Henry James. In the last four years he
+has published, I believe, just two small volumes, "The Lesson of the
+Master" and "Terminations," and in those two little volumes of short
+stories he who will may find out something of what it means to be
+really an artist. The framework is perfect and the polish is
+absolutely without flaw. They are sometimes a little hard, always
+calculating and dispassionate, but they are perfect. I wish James
+would write about modern society, about "degeneracy" and the new
+woman and all the rest of it. Not that he would throw any light on
+it. He seldom does; but he would say such awfully clever things
+about it, and turn on so many side-lights. And then his sentences!
+If his character novels were all wrong one could read him forever
+for the mere beauty of his sentences. He never lets his phrases run
+away with him. They are never dull and never too brilliant. He
+subjects them to the general tone of his sentence and has his whole
+paragraph partake of the same predominating color. You are never
+startled, never surprised, never thrilled or never enraptured;
+always delighted by that masterly prose that is as correct, as
+classical, as calm and as subtle as the music of Mozart.
+
+                                _The Courier_, November 16, 1895
+
+
+It is strange that from "Felicia" down, the stage novel has never
+been a success. Henry James' "Tragic Muse" is the only theatrical
+novel that has a particle of the real spirit of the stage in it, a
+glimpse of the enthusiasm, the devotion, the exaltation and the
+sordid, the frivolous and the vulgar which are so strangely and
+inextricably blended in that life of the green room. For although
+Henry James cannot write plays he can write passing well of the
+people who enact them. He has put into one book all those inevitable
+attendants of the drama, the patronizing theatre goer who loves it
+above all things and yet feels so far superior to it personally; the
+old tragedienne, the queen of a dying school whose word is law and
+whose judgments are to a young actor as the judgments of God; and of
+course there is the girl, the aspirant, the tragic muse who beats
+and beats upon those brazen doors that guard the unapproachable
+until one fine morning she beats them down and comes into her
+kingdom, the kingdom of unborn beauty that is to live through her.
+It is a great novel, that book of the master's, so perfect as a
+novel that one does not realize what a masterly study it is of the
+life and ends and aims of the people who make plays live.
+
+                        _Nebraska State Journal_, March 29, 1896
+
+
+
+
+_Harold Frederic_
+
+
+    "THE MARKET-PLACE." Harold Frederic. $1.50. New York: F. A.
+    Stokes & Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.
+
+Unusual interest is attached to the posthumous work of that great
+man whose career ended so prematurely and so tragically. The story
+is a study in the ethics and purposes of money-getting, in the
+romantic element in modern business. In it finance is presented not
+as being merely the province of shrewdness, or greediness, or petty
+personal gratification, but of great projects, of great
+brain-battles, a field for the exercising of talent, daring,
+imagination, appealing to the strength of a strong man, filling the
+same place in men's lives that was once filled by the incentives of
+war, kindling in man the desire for the leadership of men. The hero
+of the story, "Joel Thorpe," is one of those men, huge of body, keen
+of brain, with cast iron nerves, as sound a heart as most men, and a
+magnificent capacity for bluff. He has lived and risked and lost in
+a dozen countries, been almost within reach of fortune a dozen
+times, and always missed her until, finally, in London, by promoting
+a great rubber syndicate he becomes a multi-millionaire. He marries
+the most beautiful and one of the most impecunious peeresses in
+England and retires to his country estate. There, as a gentleman of
+leisure, he loses his motive in life, loses power for lack of
+opportunity, and grows less commanding even in the eyes of his wife,
+who misses the uncompromising, barbaric strength which took her by
+storm and won her. Finally he evolves a gigantic philanthropic
+scheme of spending his money as laboriously as he made it.
+
+Mr. Frederic says:
+
+    "Napoleon was the greatest man of his age--one of the
+    greatest men of all ages--not only in war but in a hundred
+    other ways. He spent the last six years of his life at St.
+    Helena in excellent health, with companions that he talked
+    freely to, and in all the extraordinarily copious reports of
+    his conversations there, we don't get a single sentence
+    worth repeating. The greatness had entirely evaporated from
+    him the moment he was put on an island where he had nothing
+    to do."
+
+It is very fitting that Mr. Frederic's last book should be in praise
+of action, the thing that makes the world go round; of force,
+however misspent, which is the sum of life as distinguished from the
+inertia of death. In the forty-odd years of his life he wrote almost
+as many pages as Balzac, most of it mere newspaper copy, it is true,
+read and forgotten, but all of it vigorous and with the stamp of a
+strong man upon it. And he played just as hard as he worked--alas,
+it was the play that killed him! The young artist who illustrated
+the story gave to the pictures of "Joel Thorpe" very much the look
+of Harold Frederic himself, and they might almost stand for his
+portraits. I fancy the young man did not select his model
+carelessly. In this big, burly adventurer who took fortune and women
+by storm, who bluffed the world by his prowess and fought his way to
+the front with battle-ax blows, there is a great deal of Harold
+Frederic, the soldier of fortune, the Utica milk boy who fought his
+way from the petty slavery of a provincial newspaper to the foremost
+ranks of the journalists of the world and on into literature, into
+literature worth the writing. The man won his place in England much
+as his hero won his, by defiance, by strong shoulder blows, by his
+self-sufficiency and inexhaustible strength, and when he finished
+his book he did not know that his end would be so much less glorious
+than his hero's, that it would be his portion not to fall manfully
+in the thick of the combat and the press of battle, but to die
+poisoned in the tent of Chryseis. For who could foresee a tragedy so
+needless, so blind, so brutal in its lack of dignity, or know that
+such strength could perish through such insidious weakness, that so
+great a man could be stung to death by a mania born in little minds?
+
+In point of execution and literary excellence, both "The Market
+Place" and "Gloria Mundi" are vastly inferior to "The Damnation of
+Theron Ware," or that exquisite London idyl, "March Hares." The
+first 200 pages of "Theron Ware" are as good as anything in American
+fiction, much better than most of it. They are not so much the work
+of a literary artist as of a vigorous thinker, a man of strong
+opinions and an intimate and comprehensive knowledge of men. The
+whole work, despite its irregularities and indifference to form, is
+full of brain stuff, the kind of active, healthful, masterful
+intellect that some men put into politics, some into science and a
+few, a very few, into literature. Both "Gloria Mundi" and "The
+Market Place" bear unmistakable evidences of the slack rein and the
+hasty hand. Both of them contain considerable padding, the stamp of
+the space writer. They are imperfectly developed, and are not packed
+with ideas like his earlier novels. Their excellence is in flashes;
+it is not the searching, evenly distributed light which permeates
+his more careful work. There were, as we know too well, good reasons
+why Mr. Frederic should work hastily. He needed a large income and
+he worked heroically, writing many thousands of words a day to
+obtain it. From the experience of the ages we have learned to expect
+to find, coupled with great strength, a proportionate weakness, and
+usually it devours the greater part, as the seven lean kine devoured
+the seven fat in Pharaoh's vision. Achilles was a god in all his
+nobler parts, but his feet were of the earth and to the earth they
+held him down, and he died stung by an arrow in the heel.
+
+                               _Pittsburg Leader_, June 10, 1899
+
+
+
+
+_Kate Chopin_
+
+
+    "THE AWAKENING." Kate Chopin. $1.25. Chicago: H. S. Stone &
+    Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.
+
+A Creole "Bovary" is this little novel of Miss Chopin's. Not that
+the heroine is a creole exactly, or that Miss Chopin is a
+Flaubert--save the mark!--but the theme is similar to that which
+occupied Flaubert. There was, indeed, no need that a second "Madame
+Bovary" should be written, but an author's choice of themes is
+frequently as inexplicable as his choice of a wife. It is governed
+by some innate temperamental bias that cannot be diagrammed. This is
+particularly so in women who write, and I shall not attempt to say
+why Miss Chopin has devoted so exquisite and sensitive,
+well-governed a style to so trite and sordid a theme. She writes
+much better than it is ever given to most people to write, and hers
+is a genuinely literary style; of no great elegance or solidity; but
+light, flexible, subtle and capable of producing telling effects
+directly and simply. The story she has to tell in the present
+instance is new neither in matter nor treatment. "Edna Pontellier,"
+a Kentucky girl, who, like "Emma Bovary," had been in love with
+innumerable dream heroes before she was out of short skirts, married
+"Leonce Pontellier" as a sort of reaction from a vague and visionary
+passion for a tragedian whose unresponsive picture she used to kiss.
+She acquired the habit of liking her husband in time, and even of
+liking her children. Though we are not justified in presuming that
+she ever threw articles from her dressing table at them, as the
+charming "Emma" had a winsome habit of doing, we are told that "she
+would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart, she would
+sometimes forget them." At a creole watering place, which is
+admirably and deftly sketched by Miss Chopin, "Edna" met "Robert
+Lebrun," son of the landlady, who dreamed of a fortune awaiting him
+in Mexico while he occupied a petty clerical position in New
+Orleans. "Robert" made it his business to be agreeable to his
+mother's boarders, and "Edna," not being a creole, much against his
+wish and will, took him seriously. "Robert" went to Mexico but found
+that fortunes were no easier to make there than in New Orleans. He
+returns and does not even call to pay his respects to her. She
+encounters him at the home of a friend and takes him home with her.
+She wheedles him into staying for dinner, and we are told she sent
+the maid off "in search of some delicacy she had not thought of for
+herself, and she recommended great care in the dripping of the
+coffee and having the omelet done to a turn."
+
+Only a few pages back we were informed that the husband, "M.
+Pontellier," had cold soup and burnt fish for his dinner. Such is
+life. The lover of course disappointed her, was a coward and ran
+away from his responsibilities before they began. He was afraid to
+begin a chapter with so serious and limited a woman. She remembered
+the sea where she had first met "Robert." Perhaps from the same
+motive which threw "Anna Keraninna" under the engine wheels, she
+threw herself into the sea, swam until she was tired and then let
+go.
+
+    "She looked into the distance, and for a moment the old
+    terror flamed up, then sank again. She heard her father's
+    voice, and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of
+    an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs
+    of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the
+    porch. There was a hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks
+    filled the air."
+
+"Edna Pontellier" and "Emma Bovary" are studies in the same feminine
+type; one a finished and complete portrayal, the other a hasty
+sketch, but the theme is essentially the same. Both women belong to
+a class, not large, but forever clamoring in our ears, that demands
+more romance out of life than God put into it. Mr. G. Barnard Shaw
+would say that they are the victims of the over-idealization of
+love. They are the spoil of the poets, the Iphigenias of sentiment.
+The unfortunate feature of their disease is that it attacks only
+women of brains, at least of rudimentary brains, but whose
+development is one-sided; women of strong and fine intuitions, but
+without the faculty of observation, comparison, reasoning about
+things. Probably, for emotional people, the most convenient thing
+about being able to think is that it occasionally gives them a rest
+from feeling. Now with women of the "Bovary" type, this relaxation
+and recreation is impossible. They are not critics of life, but, in
+the most personal sense, partakers of life. They receive impressions
+through the fancy. With them everything begins with fancy, and
+passions rise in the brain rather than in the blood, the poor,
+neglected, limited one-sided brain that might do so much better
+things than badgering itself into frantic endeavors to love. For
+these are the people who pay with their blood for the fine ideals of
+the poets, as Marie Delclasse paid for Dumas' great creation,
+"Marguerite Gauthier." These people really expect the passion of
+love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only
+intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist upon
+making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art,
+expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite
+variety, pleasure and distraction, to contribute to their lives what
+the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less
+limited and less intense idealists. So this passion, when set up
+against Shakespeare, Balzac, Wagner, Raphael, fails them. They have
+staked everything on one hand, and they lose. They have driven the
+blood until it will drive no further, they have played their nerves
+up to the point where any relaxation short of absolute annihilation
+is impossible. Every idealist abuses his nerves, and every
+sentimentalist brutally abuses them. And in the end, the nerves get
+even. Nobody ever cheats them, really. Then "the awakening" comes.
+Sometimes it comes in the form of arsenic, as it came to "Emma
+Bovary," sometimes it is carbolic acid taken covertly in the police
+station, a goal to which unbalanced idealism not infrequently leads.
+"Edna Pontellier," fanciful and romantic to the last, chose the sea
+on a summer night and went down with the sound of her first lover's
+spurs in her ears, and the scent of pinks about her. And next time I
+hope that Miss Chopin will devote that flexible, iridescent style of
+hers to a better cause.
+
+                                _Pittsburg Leader_, July 8, 1899
+
+
+
+
+_Stephen Crane_
+
+
+    "WAR IS KIND." Stephen Crane. $2.50. New York: F. A. Stokes
+    & Co. Pittsburg: J. R. Weldin & Co.
+
+This truly remarkable book is printed on dirty gray blotting paper,
+on each page of which is a mere dot of print over a large I of
+vacancy. There are seldom more than ten lines on a page, and it
+would be better if most of those lines were not there at all. Either
+Mr. Crane is insulting the public or insulting himself, or he has
+developed a case of atavism and is chattering the primeval nonsense
+of the apes. His "Black Riders," uneven as it was, was a casket of
+polished masterpieces when compared with "War Is Kind." And it is
+not kind at all, Mr. Crane; when it provokes such verses as these,
+it is all that Sherman said it was.
+
+The only production in the volume that is at all coherent is the
+following, from which the book gets its title:
+
+  Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind,
+  Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky,
+  And the affrighted steed ran on alone.
+                  Do not weep,
+                  War is kind.
+
+  Hoarse booming drums of the regiment,
+  Little souls who thirst for fight,
+      These men were born to drill and die.
+  The unexplained glory flies above them.
+  Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom--
+      A field where a thousand corpses lie.
+
+  Do not weep, babe, for war is kind,
+  Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
+  Raged at the breast, gulped and died.
+                  Do not weep,
+                  War is kind.
+
+  Swift-blazing flag of the regiment,
+  Eagle with crest of red and gold,
+      These men were born to drill and die.
+  Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
+  Make plain to them the excellence of killing,
+      And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
+
+  Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
+  On the bright, splendid shroud of your son,
+                  Do not weep,
+                  War is kind.
+
+Of course, one may have objections to hearts hanging like humble
+buttons, or to buttons being humble at all, but one should not stop
+to quarrel about such trifles with a poet who can perpetrate the
+following:
+
+  Thou art my love,
+  And thou art the beard
+  On another man's face--
+  Woe is me.
+
+  Thou art my love,
+  And thou art a temple,
+  And in this temple is an altar,
+  And on this temple is my heart--
+  Woe is me.
+
+  Thou art my love,
+  And thou art a wretch.
+  Let these sacred love-lies choke thee.
+  For I am come to where I know your lies as truth
+  And your truth as lies--
+  Woe is me.
+
+Now, if you please, is the object of these verses animal, mineral or
+vegetable? Is the expression, "Thou art the beard on another man's
+face," intended as a figure, or was it written by a barber?
+Certainly, after reading this, "Simple Simon" is a ballade of
+perfect form, and "Jack and Jill" or "Hickity, Pickity, My Black
+Hen," are exquisite lyrics. But of the following what shall be said:
+
+  Now let me crunch you
+  With full weight of affrighted love.
+  I doubted you
+  --I doubted you--
+  And in this short doubting
+  My love grew like a genie
+  For my further undoing.
+
+  Beware of my friends,
+  Be not in speech too civil,
+  For in all courtesy
+  My weak heart sees specters,
+  Mists of desire
+  Arising from the lips of my chosen;
+  Be not civil.
+
+This is somewhat more lucid as evincing the bard's exquisite
+sensitiveness:
+
+  Ah, God, the way your little finger moved
+  As you thrust a bare arm backward.
+  And made play with your hair
+  And a comb, a silly gilt comb
+  --Ah, God, that I should suffer
+  Because of the way a little finger moved.
+
+Mr. Crane's verselets are illustrated by some Bradley pictures,
+which are badly drawn, in bad taste, and come with bad grace. On
+page 33 of the book there are just two lines which seem to
+completely sum up the efforts of both poet and artist:
+
+  "My good friend," said a learned bystander,
+  "Your operations are mad."
+
+Yet this fellow Crane has written short stories equal to
+some of Maupassant's.
+
+                                _Pittsburg Leader_, June 3, 1899
+
+
+After reading such a delightful newspaper story as Mr. Frank Norris'
+"Blix," it is with assorted sensations of pain and discomfort that
+one closes the covers of another newspaper novel, "Active Service,"
+by Stephen Crane. If one happens to have some trifling regard for
+pure English, he does not come forth from the reading of this novel
+unscathed. The hero of this lurid tale is a newspaper man, and he
+edits the Sunday edition of the New York "Eclipse," and delights in
+publishing "stories" about deformed and sightless infants. "The
+office of the 'Eclipse' was at the top of an immense building on
+Broadway. It was a sheer mountain to the heights of which the
+interminable thunder of the streets rose faintly. The Hudson was a
+broad path of silver in the distance." This leaves little doubt as
+to the fortunate journal which had secured Rufus Coleman as its
+Sunday editor. Mr. Coleman's days were spent in collecting yellow
+sensations for his paper, and we are told that he "planned for each
+edition as for a campaign." The following elevating passage is one
+of the realistic paragraphs by which Mr. Crane makes the routine of
+Coleman's life known to us:
+
+    Suddenly there was a flash of light and a cage of bronze,
+    gilt and steel dropped magically from above. Coleman yelled
+    "Down!" * * * A door flew open. Coleman stepped upon the
+    elevator. "Well, Johnnie," he said cheerfully to the lad who
+    operated the machine, "is business good?" "Yes, sir, pretty
+    good," answered the boy, grinning. The little cage sank
+    swiftly. Floor after floor seemed to be rising with
+    marvelous speed; the whole building was winging straight
+    into the sky. There was soaring lights, figures and the
+    opalescent glow of ground glass doors marked with black
+    inscriptions. Other lights were springing heavenward. All
+    the lofty corridors rang with cries. "Up!" "Down!" "Down!"
+    "Up!!" The boy's hand grasped a lever and his machine obeyed
+    his lightest movement with sometimes an unbalancing
+    swiftness.
+
+Later, when Coleman reached the street, Mr. Crane describes the
+cable cars as marching like panoplied elephants, which is rather
+far, to say the least. The gentleman's nights were spent something
+as follows:
+
+    "In the restaurant he first ordered a large bottle of
+    champagne. The last of the wine he finished in somber mood
+    like an unbroken and defiant man who chews the straw that
+    litters his prison house. During his dinner he was
+    continually sending out messenger boys. He was arranging a
+    poker party. Through a window he watched the beautiful
+    moving life of upper Broadway at night, with its crowds and
+    clanging cable cars and its electric signs, mammoth and
+    glittering like the jewels of a giantess.
+
+    "Word was brought to him that poker players were arriving.
+    He arose joyfully, leaving his cheese. In the broad hall,
+    occupied mainly by miscellaneous people and actors, all deep
+    in leather chairs, he found some of his friends waiting.
+    They trooped upstairs to Coleman's rooms, where, as a
+    preliminary, Coleman began to hurl books and papers from the
+    table to the floor. A boy came with drinks. Most of the men,
+    in order to prepare for the game, removed their coats and
+    cuffs and drew up the sleeves of their shirts. The electric
+    globes shed a blinding light upon the table. The sound of
+    clinking chips arose; the elected banker spun the cards,
+    careless and dextrous."
+
+The atmosphere of the entire novel is just that close and
+enervating. Every page is like the next morning taste of a champagne
+supper, and is heavy with the smell of stale cigarettes. There is no
+fresh air in the book and no sunlight, only the "blinding light shed
+by the electric globes." If the life of New York newspaper men is as
+unwholesome and sordid as this, Mr. Crane, who has experienced it,
+ought to be sadly ashamed to tell it. Next morning when Coleman went
+for breakfast in the grill room of his hotel he ordered eggs on
+toast and a pint of champagne for breakfast and discoursed affably
+to the waiter.
+
+    "May be you had a pretty lively time last night, Mr.
+    Coleman?"
+
+    "Yes, Pat," answered Coleman. "I did. It was all because of
+    an unrequitted affection, Patrick." The man stood near, a
+    napkin over his arm. Coleman went on impressively. "The ways
+    of the modern lover are strange. Now, I, Patrick, am a
+    modern lover, and when, yesterday, the dagger of
+    disappointment was driven deep into my heart, I immediately
+    played poker as hard as I could, and incidentally got
+    loaded. This is the modern point of view. I understand on
+    good authority that in old times lovers used to languish.
+    That is probably a lie, but at any rate we do not, in these
+    times, languish to any great extent. We get drunk. Do you
+    understand Patrick?"
+
+    The waiter was used to a harangue at Coleman's breakfast
+    time. He placed his hand over his mouth and giggled.
+    "Yessir."
+
+    "Of course," continued Coleman, thoughtfully. "It might be
+    pointed out by uneducated persons that it is difficult to
+    maintain a high standard of drunkenness for the adequate
+    length of time, but in the series of experiments which I am
+    about to make, I am sure I can easily prove them to be in
+    the wrong."
+
+    "I am sure, sir," said the waiter, "the young ladies would
+    not like to be hearing you talk this way."
+
+    "Yes; no doubt, no doubt. The young ladies have still quite
+    medieval ideas. They don't understand. They still prefer
+    lovers to languish."
+
+    "At any rate, sir, I don't see that your heart is sure
+    enough broken. You seem to take it very easy."
+
+    "Broken!" cried Coleman. "Easy? Man, my heart is in
+    fragments. Bring me another small bottle."
+
+After this Coleman went to Greece to write up the war for the
+"Eclipse," and incidentally to rescue his sweetheart from the hands
+of the Turks and make "copy" of it. Very valid arguments might be
+advanced that the lady would have fared better with the Turks. On
+the voyage Coleman spent all his days and nights in the card room
+and avoided the deck, since fresh air was naturally disagreeable to
+him. For all that he saw of Greece or that Mr. Crane's readers see
+of Greece Coleman might as well have stayed in the card room of the
+steamer, or in the card room of his New York hotel for that matter.
+Wherever he goes he carries the atmosphere of the card room with him
+and the "blinding glare of the electrics." In Greece he makes love
+when he has leisure, but he makes "copy" much more ardently, and on
+the whole is quite as lurid and sordid and showy as his worst Sunday
+editions. Some good bits of battle descriptions there are, of the
+"Red Badge of Courage" order, but one cannot make a novel of clever
+descriptions of earthworks and poker games. The book concerns itself
+not with large, universal interests or principles, but with a yellow
+journalist grinding out yellow copy in such a wooden fashion that
+the Sunday "Eclipse" must have been even worse than most. In spite
+of the fact that Mr. Crane has written some of the most artistic
+short stories in the English language, I begin to wonder whether,
+blinded by his youth and audacity, two qualities which the American
+people love, we have not taken him too seriously. It is a grave
+matter for a man in good health and with a bank account to have
+written a book so coarse and dull and charmless as "Active Service."
+Compared with this "War was kind," indeed.
+
+                           _Pittsburg Leader_, November 11, 1899
+
+
+
+
+_Frank Norris_
+
+
+A new and a great book has been written. The name of it is
+"McTeague, a Story of San Francisco," and the man who wrote it is
+Mr. Frank Norris. The great presses of the country go on year after
+year grinding out commonplace books, just as each generation goes on
+busily reproducing its own mediocrity. When in this enormous output
+of ink and paper, these thousands of volumes that are yearly rushed
+upon the shelves of the book stores, one appears which contains both
+power and promise, the reader may be pardoned some enthusiasm.
+Excellence always surprises: we are never quite prepared for it. In
+the case of "McTeague, a Story of San Francisco," it is even more
+surprising than usual. In the first place the title is not alluring,
+and not until you have read the book, can you know that there is an
+admirable consistency in the stiff, uncompromising commonplaceness
+of that title. In the second place the name of the author is as yet
+comparatively unfamiliar, and finally the book is dedicated to a
+member of the Harvard faculty, suggesting that whether it be a story
+of San Francisco or Dawson City, it must necessarily be vaporous,
+introspective and chiefly concerned with "literary" impressions. Mr.
+Norris is, indeed, a "Harvard man," but that he is a good many other
+kinds of a man is self-evident. His book is, in the language of Mr.
+Norman Hapgood, the work of "a large human being, with a firm
+stomach, who knows and loves the people."
+
+In a novel of such high merit as this, the subject matter is the
+least important consideration. Every newspaper contains the
+essential material for another "Comedie Humaine." In this case
+"McTeague," the central figure, happens to be a dentist practicing
+in a little side street of San Francisco. The novel opens with this
+description of him:
+
+    "It was Sunday, and, according to his custom on that day,
+    McTeague took his dinner at two in the afternoon at the car
+    conductor's coffee joint on Polk street. He had a thick,
+    gray soup, heavy, underdone meat, very hot, on a cold plate;
+    two kinds of vegetables; and a sort of suet pudding, full of
+    strong butter and sugar. Once in his office, or, as he
+    called it on his sign-board, 'Dental Parlors,' he took off
+    his coat and shoes, unbuttoned his vest, and, having crammed
+    his little stove with coke, he lay back in his operating
+    chair at the bay window, reading the paper, drinking steam
+    beer, and smoking his huge porcelain pipe while his food
+    digested; crop-full, stupid and warm."
+
+McTeague had grown up in a mining camp in the mountains. He
+remembered the years he had spent there trundling heavy cars of ore
+in and out of the tunnel under the direction of his father. For
+thirteen days out of each fortnight his father was a steady,
+hard-working shift-boss of the mine. Every other Sunday he became an
+irresponsible animal, a beast, a brute, crazed with alcohol. His
+mother cooked for the miners. Her one ambition was that her son
+should enter a profession. He was apprenticed to a traveling quack
+dentist and after a fashion, learned the business.
+
+    "Then one day at San Francisco had come the news of his
+    mother's death; she had left him some money--not much, but
+    enough to set him up in business; so he had cut loose from
+    the charlatan and had opened his 'Dental Parlors' on Polk
+    street, an 'accommodation street' of small shops in the
+    residence quarter of the town. Here he had slowly collected
+    a clientele of butcher boys, shop girls, drug clerks and car
+    conductors. He made but few acquaintances. Polk street
+    called him the 'doctor' and spoke of his enormous strength.
+    For McTeague was a young giant, carrying his huge shock of
+    blonde hair six feet three inches from the ground; moving
+    his immense limbs, heavy with ropes of muscle, slowly,
+    ponderously. His hands were enormous, red, and covered with
+    a fell of stiff yellow hair; they were as hard as wooden
+    mallets, strong as vices, the hands of the old-time car boy.
+    Often he dispensed with forceps and extracted a refractory
+    tooth with his thumb and finger. His head was square-cut,
+    angular; the jaw salient: like that of the carnivora.
+
+    "But for one thing McTeague would have been perfectly
+    contented. Just outside his window was his signboard--a
+    modest affair--that read: 'Doctor McTeague. Dental Parlors.
+    Gas Given;' but that was all. It was his ambition, his
+    dream, to have projecting from that corner window a huge
+    gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something
+    gorgeous and attractive. He would have it some day, but as
+    yet it was far beyond his means."
+
+Then Mr. Norris launches into a description of the street in which
+"McTeague" lives. He presents that street as it is on Sunday, as it
+is on working days; as it is in the early dawn when the workmen are
+going out with pickaxes on their shoulders, as it is at ten o'clock
+when the women are out purchasing from the small shopkeepers, as it
+is at night when the shop girls are out with the soda-fountain
+tenders and the motor cars dash by full of theatre-goers, and the
+Salvationists sing before the saloon on the corner. In four pages he
+reproduces the life in a by-street of a great city, the little
+tragedy of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of handling
+environment--most of them bad. When a young author has very little
+to say and no story worth telling, he resorts to environment. It is
+frequently used to disguise a weakness of structure, as ladies who
+paint landscapes put their cows knee-deep in water to conceal the
+defective drawing of the legs. But such description as one meets
+throughout Mr. Norris' book is in itself convincing proof of power,
+imagination and literary skill. It is a positive and active force,
+stimulating the reader's imagination, giving him an actual command,
+a realizing sense of this world into which he is suddenly
+transplanted. It gives to the book perspective, atmosphere, effects
+of time and distance, creates the illusion of life. This power of
+mature, and accurate and comprehensive description is very unusual
+among the younger American writers. Most of them observe the world
+through a temperament, and are more occupied with their medium than
+the objects they see. And temperament is a glass which distorts most
+astonishingly. But this young man sees with a clear eye, and
+reproduces with a touch firm and decisive, strong almost to
+brutalness. Yet this hand that can depict so powerfully the brute
+strength and brute passions of a "McTeague," can deal very finely
+and adroitly with the feminine element of his story. This is his
+portrait of the little Swiss girl, "Trina," whom the dentist
+marries:
+
+    "Trina was very small and prettily made. Her face was round
+    and rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue, like the
+    half-opened eyes of a baby; her lips and the lobes of her
+    tiny ears were pale, a little suggestive of anaemia. But it
+    was to her hair that one's attention was most attracted.
+    Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils and braids, a royal
+    crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara, heavy,
+    abundant and odorous. All the vitality that should have
+    given color to her face seemed to have been absorbed by that
+    marvelous hair: It was the coiffure of a queen that shadowed
+    the temples of this little bourgeoise."
+
+The tragedy of the story dates from a chance, a seeming stroke of
+good fortune, one of those terrible gifts of the Danai. A few weeks
+before her marriage "Trina" drew $5 000 from a lottery ticket. From
+that moment her passion for hoarding money becomes the dominant
+theme of the story, takes command of the book and its characters.
+After their marriage the dentist is disbarred from practice. They
+move into a garret where she starves her husband and herself to save
+that precious hoard. She sells even his office furniture, everything
+but his concertina and his canary bird, with which he stubbornly
+refuses to part and which are destined to become very important
+accessories in the property room of the theatre where this drama is
+played. This removal from their first home is to this story what
+Gervaise's removal from her shop is to L'Assommoir; it is the fatal
+episode of the third act, the sacrifice of self-respect, the
+beginning of the end. From that time the money stands between
+"Trina" and her husband. Outraged and humiliated, hating her for her
+meanness, demoralized by his idleness and despair, he begins to
+abuse her. The story becomes a careful and painful study of the
+disintegration of this union, a penetrating and searching analysis
+of the degeneration of these two souls, the woman's corroded by
+greed, the man's poisoned by disappointment and hate.
+
+And all the while this same painful theme is placed in a lower key.
+Maria, the housemaid who took care of "McTeague's" dental parlors in
+his better days, was a half-crazy girl from somewhere in Central
+America, she herself did not remember just where. But she had a
+wonderful story about her people owning a dinner service of pure
+gold with a punch bowl you could scarcely lift, which rang like a
+church bell when you struck it. On the strength of this story
+"Zercow," the Jew junk man, marries her, and believing that she
+knows where this treasure is hidden, bullies and tortures her to
+force her to disclose her secret. At last "Maria" is found with her
+throat cut, and "Zercow" is picked up by the wharf with a sack full
+of rusty tin cans, which in his dementia he must have thought the
+fabled dinner service of gold.
+
+From this it is a short step to "McTeague's" crime. He kills his
+wife to get possession of her money, and escapes to the mountains.
+While he is on his way south, pushing toward Mexico, he is overtaken
+by his murdered wife's cousin and former suitor. Both men are half
+mad with thirst, and there in the desert wastes of Death's Valley,
+they spring to their last conflict. The cousin falls, but before he
+dies he slips a handcuff over "McTeague's" arm, and so the author
+leaves his hero in the wastes of Death's Valley, a hundred miles
+from water, with a dead man chained to his arm. As he stands there
+the canary bird, the survivor of his happier days, to which he had
+clung with stubborn affection, begins "chittering feebly in its
+little gilt prison." It reminds one a little of Stevenson's use of
+poor "Goddedaal's" canary in "The Wrecker." It is just such sharp,
+sure strokes that bring out the high lights in a story and separate
+excellence from the commonplace. They are at once dramatic and
+revelatory. Lacking them, a novel which may otherwise be a good one,
+lacks its chief reason for being. The fault with many worthy
+attempts at fiction lies not in what they are, but in what they are
+not.
+
+Mr. Norris' model, if he will admit that he has followed one, is
+clearly no less a person than M. Zola himself. Yet there is no
+discoverable trace of imitation in his book. He has simply taken a
+method which has been most successfully applied in the study of
+French life and applied it in studying American life, as one uses
+certain algebraic formulae to solve certain problems. It is perhaps
+the only truthful literary method of dealing with that part of
+society which environment and heredity hedge about like the walls of
+a prison. It is true that Mr. Norris now and then allows his
+"method" to become too prominent, that his restraint savors of
+constraint, yet he has written a true story of the people,
+courageous, dramatic, full of matter and warm with life. He has
+addressed himself seriously to art, and he seems to have no ambition
+to be clever. His horizon is wide, his invention vigorous and bold,
+his touch heavy and warm and human. This man is not limited by
+literary prejudices: he sees the people as they are, he is close to
+them and not afraid of their unloveliness. He has looked at truth in
+the depths, among men begrimed by toil and besotted by ignorance,
+and still found her fair. "McTeague" is an achievement for a young
+man. It may not win at once the success which it deserves, but Mr.
+Norris is one of those who can afford to wait.
+
+                                    _The Courier_, April 8, 1899
+
+
+If you want to read a story that is all wheat and no chaff, read
+"Blix." Last winter that brilliant young Californian, Mr. Norris,
+published a remarkable and gloomy novel, "McTeague," a book deep in
+insight, rich in promise and splendid in execution, but entirely
+without charm and as disagreeable as only a great piece of work can
+be. And now this gentleman, who is not yet thirty, turns around and
+gives us an idyll that sings through one's brain like a summer wind
+and makes one feel young enough to commit all manner of
+indiscretions. It may be that Mr. Norris is desirous of showing us
+his versatility and that he can follow any suit, or it may have been
+a process of reaction. I believe it was after M. Zola had completed
+one of his greatest and darkest novels of Parisian life that he went
+down to the seaside and wrote "La Reve," a book that every girl
+should read when she is eighteen, and then again when she is eighty.
+Powerful and solidly built as "McTeague" is, one felt that there
+method was carried almost too far, that Mr. Norris was too
+consciously influenced by his French masters. But "Blix" belongs to
+no school whatever, and there is not a shadow of pedantry or pride
+of craft in it from cover to cover. "Blix" herself is the method,
+the motives and the aim of the book. The story is an exhalation of
+youth and spring; it is the work of a man who breaks loose and
+forgets himself. Mr. Norris was married only last summer, and the
+march from "Lohengrin" is simply sticking out all over "Blix." It is
+the story of a San Francisco newspaper man and a girl. The newspaper
+man "came out" in fiction, so to speak, in the drawing room of Mr.
+Richard Harding Davis, and has languished under that gentleman's
+chaperonage until he has come to be regarded as a fellow careful of
+nothing but his toilet and his dinner. Mr. Davis' reporters all
+bathed regularly and all ate nice things, but beyond that their
+tastes were rather colorless. I am glad to see one red-blooded
+newspaper man, in the person of "Landy Rivers," of San Francisco,
+break into fiction; a real live reporter with no sentimental loyalty
+for his "paper," and no Byronic poses about his vices, and no
+astonishing taste about his clothes, and no money whatever, which is
+the natural and normal condition of all reporters. "Blix" herself
+was just a society girl, and "Landy" took her to theatres and
+parties and tried to make himself believe he was in love with her.
+But it wouldn't work, for "Landy" couldn't love a society girl, not
+though she were as beautiful as the morning and terrible as an army
+with banners, and had "round full arms," and "the skin of her face
+was white and clean, except where it flushed into a most charming
+pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks." For while "Landy Rivers" was at
+college he had been seized with the penchant for writing short
+stories, and had worshiped at the shrines of Maupassant and Kipling,
+and when a man is craft mad enough to worship Maupassant truly and
+know him well, when he has that tingling for technique in his
+fingers, not Aphrodite herself, new risen from the waves, could
+tempt him into any world where craft was not lord and king. So it
+happened that their real love affair never began until one morning
+when "Landy" had to go down to the wharf to write up a whaleback,
+and "Blix" went along, and an old sailor told them a story and
+"Blix" recognized the literary possibilities of it, and they had
+lunch in a Chinese restaurant, and "Landy" because he was a
+newspaper man and it was the end of the week, didn't have any change
+about his clothes, and "Blix" had to pay the bill. And it was in
+that green old tea house that "Landy" read "Blix" one of his
+favorite yarns by Kipling, and she in a calm, off-handed way,
+recognized one of the fine, technical points in it, and "Landy"
+almost went to pieces for joy of her doing it. That scene in the
+Chinese restaurant is one of the prettiest bits of color you'll find
+to rest your eyes upon, and mighty good writing it is. I wonder,
+though if when Mr. Norris adroitly mentioned the "clack and snarl"
+of the banjo "Landy" played, he remembered the "silver snarling
+trumpets" of Keats? After that, things went on as such things will,
+and "Blix" quit the society racket and went to queer places with
+"Landy," and got interested in his work, and she broke him of
+wearing red neckties and playing poker, and she made him work, she
+did, for she grew to realize how much that meant to him, and she
+jacked him up when he didn't work, and she suggested an ending for
+one of his stories that was better than his own; just this big,
+splendid girl, who had never gone to college to learn how to write
+novels. And so how, in the name of goodness, could he help loving
+her? So one morning down by the Pacific, with "Blix" and "The Seven
+Seas," it all came over "Landy," that "living was better than
+reading and life was better than literature." And so it is; once,
+and only once, for each of us; and that is the tune that sings and
+sings through one's head when one puts the book away.
+
+                                 _The Courier_, January 13, 1900
+
+
+AN HEIR APPARENT.
+
+Last winter a young Californian, Mr. Frank Norris, published a novel
+with the unpretentious title, "McTeague: a Story of San Francisco."
+It was a book that could not be ignored nor dismissed with a word.
+There was something very unusual about it, about its solidity and
+mass, the thoroughness and firmness of texture, and it came down
+like a blow from a sledge hammer among the slighter and more
+sprightly performances of the hour.
+
+The most remarkable thing about the book was its maturity and
+compactness. It has none of the ear-marks of those entertaining
+"young writers" whom every season produces as inevitably as its
+debutantes, young men who surprise for an hour and then settle down
+to producing industriously for the class with which their peculiar
+trick of phrase has found favor. It was a book addressed to the
+American people and to the critics of the world, the work of a young
+man who had set himself to the art of authorship with an almighty
+seriousness, and who had no ambition to be clever. "McTeague" was
+not an experiment in style nor a pretty piece of romantic folly, it
+was a true story of the people--having about it, as M. Zola would
+say, "the smell of the people"--courageous, dramatic, full of matter
+and warm with life. It was realism of the most uncompromising kind.
+The theme was such that the author could not have expected sudden
+popularity for his book, such as sometimes overtakes monstrosities
+of style in these discouraging days when Knighthood is in Flower to
+the extent of a quarter of a million copies, nor could he have hoped
+for pressing commissions from the fire-side periodicals. The life
+story of a quack dentist who sometimes extracted molars with his
+fingers, who mistreated and finally murdered his wife, is not, in
+itself, attractive. But, after all, the theme counts for very
+little. Every newspaper contains the essential subject matter for
+another _Comedie Humaine_. The important point is that a man
+considerably under thirty could take up a subject so grim and
+unattractive, and that, for the mere love of doing things well, he
+was able to hold himself down to the task of developing it
+completely, that he was able to justify this quack's existence in
+literature, to thrust this hairy, blonde dentist with the "salient
+jaw of the carnivora," in amongst the immortals.
+
+It was after M. Zola had completed one of the greatest and gloomiest
+of his novels of Parisian life, that he went down by the sea and
+wrote "La Reve," that tender, adolescent story of love and purity
+and youth. So, almost simultaneously with "McTeague," Mr. Norris
+published "Blix," another San Francisco story, as short as
+"McTeague" was lengthy, as light as "McTeague" was heavy, as poetic
+and graceful as "McTeague" was somber and charmless. Here is a man
+worth waiting on; a man who is both realist and poet, a man who can
+teach
+
+    "Not only by a comet's rush,
+  But by a rose's birth."
+
+Yet unlike as they are, in both books the source of power is the
+same, and, for that matter, it was even the same in his first book,
+"Moran of the Lady Letty." Mr. Norris has dispensed with the
+conventional symbols that have crept into art, with the trite,
+half-truths and circumlocutions, and got back to the physical basis
+of things. He has abjured tea-table psychology, and the analysis of
+figures in the carpet and subtile dissections of intellectual
+impotencies, and the diverting game of words and the whole
+literature of the nerves. He is big and warm and sometimes brutal,
+and the strength of the soil comes up to him with very little loss
+in the transmission. His art strikes deep down into the roots of
+life and the foundation of Things as They Are--not as we tell each
+other they are at the tea-table. But he is realistic art, not
+artistic realism. He is courageous, but he is without bravado.
+
+He sees things freshly, as though they had not been seen before, and
+describes them with singular directness and vividness, not with
+morbid acuteness, with a large, wholesome joy of life. Nowhere is
+this more evident than in his insistent use of environment. I recall
+the passage in which he describes the street in which McTeague
+lives. He represents that street as it is on Sunday, as it is on
+working days, as it is in the early dawn when the workmen are going
+out with pickaxes on their shoulders, as it is at ten o'clock when
+the women are out marketing among the small shopkeepers, as it is at
+night when the shop girls are out with the soda fountain tenders and
+the motor cars dash by full of theater-goers, and the Salvationists
+sing before the saloon on the corner. In four pages he reproduces in
+detail the life in a by-street of a great city, the little tragedy
+of the small shopkeeper. There are many ways of handling
+environment--most of them bad. When a young author has very little
+to say and no story worth telling, he resorts to environment. It is
+frequently used to disguise a weakness of structure, as ladies who
+paint landscapes put their cows knee-deep in water to conceal the
+defective drawing of the legs. But such description as one meets
+throughout Mr. Norris' book is in itself convincing proof of power,
+imagination and literary skill. It is a positive and active force,
+stimulating the reader's imagination, giving him an actual command,
+a realizing sense of this world into which he is suddenly
+transported. It gives to the book perspective, atmosphere, effects
+of time and distance, creates the illusion of life. This power of
+mature and comprehensive description is very unusual among the
+younger American writers. Most of them observe the world through a
+temperament, and are more occupied with their medium than the
+objects they watch. And temperament is a glass which distorts most
+astonishingly. But this young man sees with a clear eye, and
+reproduces with a touch, firm and decisive, strong almost to
+brutalness.
+
+Mr. Norris approaches things on their physical side; his characters
+are personalities of flesh before they are anything else, types
+before they are individuals. Especially is this true of his women.
+His Trina is "very small and prettily made. Her face was round and
+rather pale; her eyes long and narrow and blue, like the half-opened
+eyes of a baby; her lips and the lobes of her tiny ears were pale, a
+little suggestive of anaemia. But it was to her hair that one's
+attention was most attracted. Heaps and heaps of blue-black coils
+and braids, a royal crown of swarthy bands, a veritable sable tiara,
+heavy, abundant and odorous. All the vitality that should have given
+color to her face seems to have been absorbed by that marvelous
+hair. It was the coiffure of a queen that shadowed the temples of
+this little bourgeoise." Blix had "round, full arms," and "the skin
+of her face was white and clean, except where it flushed into a most
+charming pink upon her smooth, cool cheeks." In this grasp of the
+element of things, this keen, clean, frank pleasure at color and
+odor and warmth, this candid admission of the negative of beauty,
+which is co-existent with and inseparable from it, lie much of his
+power and promise. Here is a man catholic enough to include the
+extremes of physical and moral life, strong enough to handle the
+crudest colors and darkest shadows. Here is a man who has an
+appetite for the physical universe, who loves the rank smells of
+crowded alley-ways, or the odors of boudoirs, or the delicate
+perfume exhaled from a woman's skin; who is not afraid of Pan, be he
+ever so shaggy, and redolent of the herd.
+
+Structurally, where most young novelists are weak, Mr. Norris is
+very strong. He has studied the best French masters, and he has
+adopted their methods quite simply, as one selects an algebraic
+formula to solve his particular problem. As to his style, that is,
+as expression always is, just as vigorous as his thought compels it
+to be, just as vivid as his conception warrants. If God Almighty has
+given a man ideas, he will get himself a style from one source or
+another. Mr. Norris, fortunately, is not a conscious stylist. He has
+too much to say to be exquisitely vain about his medium. He has the
+kind of brain stuff that would vanquish difficulties in any
+profession, that might be put to building battleships, or solving
+problems of finance, or to devising colonial policies. Let us be
+thankful that he has put it to literature. Let us be thankful,
+moreover, that he is not introspective and that his intellect does
+not devour itself, but feeds upon the great race of man, and, above
+all, let us rejoice that he is not a "temperamental" artist, but
+something larger, for a great brain and an assertive temperament
+seldom dwell together.
+
+There are clever men enough in the field of American letters, and
+the fault of most of them is merely one of magnitude; they are not
+large enough; they travel in small orbits, they play on muted
+strings. They sing neither of the combats of Atriedes nor the labors
+of Cadmus, but of the tea-table and the Odyssey of the Rialto.
+Flaubert said that a drop of water contained all the elements of the
+sea, save one--immensity. Mr. Norris is concerned only with serious
+things, he has only large ambitions. His brush is bold, his color is
+taken fresh from the kindly earth, his canvas is large enough to
+hold American life, the real life of the people. He has come into
+the court of the troubadours singing the song of Elys, the song of
+warm, full nature. He has struck the true note of the common life.
+He is what Mr. Norman Hapgood said the great American dramatist must
+be: "A large human being, with a firm stomach, who knows and loves
+the people."
+
+                                    _The Courier_, April 7, 1900
+
+
+
+
+_When I Knew Stephen Crane_
+
+
+It was, I think, in the spring of '94 that a slender, narrow-chested
+fellow in a shabby grey suit, with a soft felt hat pulled low over
+his eyes, sauntered into the office of the managing editor of the
+Nebraska State Journal and introduced himself as Stephen Crane. He
+stated that he was going to Mexico to do some work for the Bacheller
+Syndicate and get rid of his cough, and that he would be stopping in
+Lincoln for a few days. Later he explained that he was out of money
+and would be compelled to wait until he got a check from the East
+before he went further. I was a Junior at the Nebraska State
+University at the time, and was doing some work for the State
+Journal in my leisure time, and I happened to be in the managing
+editor's room when Mr. Crane introduced himself. I was just off the
+range; I knew a little Greek and something about cattle and a good
+horse when I saw one, and beyond horses and cattle I considered
+nothing of vital importance except good stories and the people who
+wrote them. This was the first man of letters I had ever met in the
+flesh, and when the young man announced who he was, I dropped into a
+chair behind the editor's desk where I could stare at him without
+being too much in evidence.
+
+Only a very youthful enthusiasm and a large propensity for hero
+worship could have found anything impressive in the young man who
+stood before the managing editor's desk. He was thin to emaciation,
+his face was gaunt and unshaven, a thin dark moustache straggled on
+his upper lip, his black hair grew low on his forehead and was
+shaggy and unkempt. His grey clothes were much the worse for wear
+and fitted him so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever been measured
+for them. He wore a flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for a
+necktie, and his shoes were dusty and worn gray about the toes and
+were badly run over at the heel. I had seen many a tramp printer
+come up the Journal stairs to hunt a job, but never one who
+presented such a disreputable appearance as this story-maker man. He
+wore gloves, which seemed rather a contradiction to the general
+slovenliness of his attire, but when he took them off to search his
+pockets for his credentials, I noticed that his hands were
+singularly fine; long, white, and delicately shaped, with thin,
+nervous fingers. I have seen pictures of Aubrey Beardsley's hands
+that recalled Crane's very vividly.
+
+At that time Crane was but twenty-four, and almost an unknown man.
+Hamlin Garland had seen some of his work and believed in him, and
+had introduced him to Mr. Howells, who recommended him to the
+Bacheller Syndicate. "The Red Badge of Courage" had been published
+in the State Journal that winter along with a lot of other syndicate
+matter, and the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty
+that the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the
+copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the
+careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable
+performance. But the grammar certainly was bad. I remember one of
+the reporters who had corrected the phrase "it don't" for the tenth
+time remarked savagely, "If I couldn't write better English than
+this, I'd quit."
+
+Crane spent several days in the town, living from hand to mouth and
+waiting for his money. I think he borrowed a small amount from the
+managing editor. He lounged about the office most of the time, and I
+frequently encountered him going in and out of the cheap restaurants
+on Tenth Street. When he was at the office he talked a good deal in
+a wandering, absent-minded fashion, and his conversation was
+uniformly frivolous. If he could not evade a serious question by a
+joke, he bolted. I cut my classes to lie in wait for him, confident
+that in some unwary moment I could trap him into serious
+conversation, that if one burned incense long enough and ardently
+enough, the oracle would not be dumb. I was Maupassant mad at the
+time, a malady particularly unattractive in a Junior, and I made a
+frantic effort to get an expression of opinion from him on "Le
+Bonheur." "Oh, you're Moping, are you?" he remarked with a sarcastic
+grin, and went on reading a little volume of Poe that he carried in
+his pocket. At another time I cornered him in the Funny Man's room
+and succeeded in getting a little out of him. We were taught
+literature by an exceedingly analytical method at the University,
+and we probably distorted the method, and I was busy trying to find
+the least common multiple of _Hamlet_ and the greatest common
+divisor of _Macbeth_, and I began asking him whether stories were
+constructed by cabalistic formulae. At length he sighed wearily and
+shook his drooping shoulders, remarking:
+
+"Where did you get all that rot? Yarns aren't done by mathematics.
+You can't do it by rule any more than you can dance by rule. You
+have to have the itch of the thing in your fingers, and if you
+haven't,--well, you're damned lucky, and you'll live long and
+prosper, that's all."--And with that he yawned and went down the
+hall.
+
+Crane was moody most of the time, his health was bad and he seemed
+profoundly discouraged. Even his jokes were exceedingly drastic. He
+went about with the tense, preoccupied, self-centered air of a man
+who is brooding over some impending disaster, and I conjectured
+vainly as to what it might be. Though he was seemingly entirely idle
+during the few days I knew him, his manner indicated that he was in
+the throes of work that told terribly on his nerves. His eyes I
+remember as the finest I have ever seen, large and dark and full of
+lustre and changing lights, but with a profound melancholy always
+lurking deep in them. They were eyes that seemed to be burning
+themselves out.
+
+As he sat at the desk with his shoulders drooping forward, his head
+low, and his long, white fingers drumming on the sheets of copy
+paper, he was as nervous as a race horse fretting to be on the
+track. Always, as he came and went about the halls, he seemed like a
+man preparing for a sudden departure. Now that he is dead it occurs
+to me that all his life was a preparation for sudden departure. I
+remember once when he was writing a letter he stopped and asked me
+about the spelling of a word, saying carelessly, "I haven't time to
+learn to spell."
+
+Then, glancing down at his attire, he added with an absent-minded
+smile, "I haven't time to dress either; it takes an awful slice out
+of a fellow's life."
+
+He said he was poor, and he certainly looked it, but four years
+later when he was in Cuba, drawing the largest salary ever paid a
+newspaper correspondent, he clung to this same untidy manner of
+dress, and his ragged overalls and buttonless shirt were eyesores to
+the immaculate Mr. Davis, in his spotless linen and neat khaki
+uniform, with his Gibson chin always freshly shaven. When I first
+heard of his serious illness, his old throat trouble aggravated into
+consumption by his reckless exposure in Cuba, I recalled a passage
+from Maeterlinck's essay, "The Pre-Destined," on those doomed to
+early death: "As children, life seems nearer to them than to other
+children. They appear to know nothing, and yet there is in their
+eyes so profound a certainty that we feel they must know all.--In
+all haste, but wisely and with minute care do they prepare
+themselves to live, and this very haste is a sign upon which mothers
+can scarce bring themselves to look." I remembered, too, the young
+man's melancholy and his tenseness, his burning eyes, and his way of
+slurring over the less important things, as one whose time is short.
+
+I have heard other people say how difficult it was to induce Crane
+to talk seriously about his work, and I suspect that he was
+particularly averse to discussions with literary men of wider
+education and better equipment than himself, yet he seemed to feel
+that this fuller culture was not for him. Perhaps the unreasoning
+instinct which lies deep in the roots of our lives, and which guides
+us all, told him that he had not time enough to acquire it.
+
+Men will sometimes reveal themselves to children, or to people whom
+they think never to see again, more completely than they ever do to
+their confreres. From the wise we hold back alike our folly and our
+wisdom, and for the recipients of our deeper confidences we seldom
+select our equals. The soul has no message for the friends with whom
+we dine every week. It is silenced by custom and convention, and we
+play only in the shallows. It selects its listeners willfully, and
+seemingly delights to waste its best upon the chance wayfarer who
+meets us in the highway at a fated hour. There are moments too, when
+the tides run high or very low, when self-revelation is necessary to
+every man, if it be only to his valet or his gardener. At such a
+moment, I was with Mr. Crane.
+
+The hoped for revelation came unexpectedly enough. It was on the
+last night he spent in Lincoln. I had come back from the theatre and
+was in the Journal office writing a notice of the play. It was
+eleven o'clock when Crane came in. He had expected his money to
+arrive on the night mail and it had not done so, and he was out of
+sorts and deeply despondent. He sat down on the ledge of the open
+window that faced on the street, and when I had finished my notice I
+went over and took a chair beside him. Quite without invitation on
+my part, Crane began to talk, began to curse his trade from the
+first throb of creative desire in a boy to the finished work of the
+master. The night was oppressively warm; one of those dry winds that
+are the curse of that country was blowing up from Kansas. The white,
+western moonlight threw sharp, blue shadows below us. The streets
+were silent at that hour, and we could hear the gurgle of the
+fountain in the Post Office square across the street, and the twang
+of banjos from the lower verandah of the Hotel Lincoln, where the
+colored waiters were serenading the guests. The drop lights in the
+office were dull under their green shades, and the telegraph sounder
+clicked faintly in the next room. In all his long tirade, Crane
+never raised his voice; he spoke slowly and monotonously and even
+calmly, but I have never known so bitter a heart in any man as he
+revealed to me that night. It was an arraignment of the wages of
+life, an invocation to the ministers of hate.
+
+Incidentally he told me the sum he had received for "The Red Badge
+of Courage," which I think was something like ninety dollars, and he
+repeated some lines from "The Black Riders," which was then in
+preparation. He gave me to understand that he led a double literary
+life; writing in the first place the matter that pleased himself,
+and doing it very slowly; in the second place, any sort of stuff
+that would sell. And he remarked that his poor was just as bad as it
+could possibly be. He realized, he said, that his limitations were
+absolutely impassable. "What I can't do, I can't do at all, and I
+can't acquire it. I only hold one trump."
+
+He had no settled plans at all. He was going to Mexico wholly
+uncertain of being able to do any successful work there, and he
+seemed to feel very insecure about the financial end of his venture.
+The thing that most interested me was what he said about his slow
+method of composition. He declared that there was little money in
+story-writing at best, and practically none in it for him, because
+of the time it took him to work up his detail. Other men, he said,
+could sit down and write up an experience while the physical effect
+of it, so to speak, was still upon them, and yesterday's impressions
+made to-day's "copy." But when he came in from the streets to write
+up what he had seen there, his faculties were benumbed, and he sat
+twirling his pencil and hunting for words like a schoolboy.
+
+I mentioned "The Red Badge of Courage," which was written in nine
+days, and he replied that, though the writing took very little time,
+he had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out
+through most of his boyhood. His ancestors had been soldiers, and he
+had been imagining war stories ever since he was out of
+knickerbockers, and in writing his first war story he had simply
+gone over his imaginary campaigns and selected his favorite
+imaginary experiences. He declared that his imagination was hide
+bound; it was there, but it pulled hard. After he got a notion for a
+story, months passed before he could get any sort of personal
+contract with it, or feel any potency to handle it. "The detail of a
+thing has to filter through my blood, and then it comes out like a
+native product, but it takes forever," he remarked. I distinctly
+remember the illustration, for it rather took hold of me.
+
+I have often been astonished since to hear Crane spoken of as "the
+reporter in fiction," for the reportorial faculty of superficial
+reception and quick transference was what he conspicuously lacked.
+His first newspaper account of his shipwreck on the filibuster
+"Commodore" off the Florida coast was as lifeless as the "copy" of a
+police court reporter. It was many months afterwards that the
+literary product of his terrible experience appeared in that
+marvellous sea story "The Open Boat," unsurpassed in its vividness
+and constructive perfection.
+
+At the close of our long conversation that night, when the copy boy
+came in to take me home, I suggested to Crane that in ten years he
+would probably laugh at all his temporary discomfort. Again his body
+took on that strenuous tension and he clenched his hands, saying, "I
+can't wait ten years, I haven't time."
+
+The ten years are not up yet, and he has done his work and gathered
+his reward and gone. Was ever so much experience and achievement
+crowded into so short a space of time? A great man dead at
+twenty-nine! That would have puzzled the ancients. Edward Garnett
+wrote of him in The Academy of December 17, 1899: "I cannot remember
+a parallel in the literary history of fiction. Maupassant, Meredith,
+Henry James, Mr. Howells and Tolstoy, were all learning their
+expression at an age where Crane had achieved his and achieved it
+triumphantly." He had the precocity of those doomed to die in youth.
+I am convinced that when I met him he had a vague premonition of the
+shortness of his working day, and in the heart of the man there was
+that which said, "That thou doest, do quickly."
+
+At twenty-one this son of an obscure New Jersey rector, with but a
+scant reading knowledge of French and no training, had rivaled in
+technique the foremost craftsmen of the Latin races. In the six
+years since I met him, a stranded reporter, he stood in the firing
+line during two wars, knew hairbreadth 'scapes on land and sea, and
+established himself as the first writer of his time in the picturing
+of episodic, fragmentary life. His friends have charged him with
+fickleness, but he was a man who was in the preoccupation of haste.
+He went from country to country, from man to man, absorbing all that
+was in them for him. He had no time to look backward. He had no
+leisure for _camaraderie_. He drank life to the lees, but at the
+banquet table where other men took their ease and jested over their
+wine, he stood a dark and silent figure, sombre as Poe himself, not
+wishing to be understood; and he took his portion in haste, with his
+loins girded, and his shoes on his feet, and his staff in his hand,
+like one who must depart quickly.
+
+                                    _The Library_, June 23, 1900
+
+
+
+
+_On the Art of Fiction_
+
+
+One is sometimes asked about the "obstacles" that confront young
+writers who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest
+obstacles that writers today have to get over, are the dazzling
+journalistic successes of twenty years ago, stories that surprised
+and delighted by their sharp photographic detail and that were
+really nothing more than lively pieces of reporting. The whole aim
+of that school of writing was novelty--never a very important thing
+in art. They gave us, altogether, poor standards--taught us to
+multiply our ideas instead of to condense them. They tried to make a
+story out of every theme that occurred to them and to get returns on
+every situation that suggested itself. They got returns, of a kind.
+But their work, when one looks back on it, now that the novelty upon
+which they counted so much is gone, is journalistic and thin. The
+especial merit of a good reportorial story is that it shall be
+intensely interesting and pertinent today and shall have lost its
+point by tomorrow.
+
+Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly
+the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions
+of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the
+spirit of the whole--so that all that one has suppressed and cut
+away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in
+type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants
+sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but
+when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, "The
+Sower," the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All
+the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it
+finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying,
+of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was
+better and more universal.
+
+Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a
+dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good
+workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting
+material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the
+manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand--a
+business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast
+foods--or it should be an art, which is always a search for
+something for which there is no market demand, something new and
+untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with
+standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does
+not come to a writer all at once--nor, for that matter, does the
+ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning
+the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and
+his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to
+recapture.
+
+                                              _The Borzoi_, 1920
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Collection of Stories, Reviews and
+Essays, by Willa Cather
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