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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of IT and Other Stories, by Gouverneur Morris
+
+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: IT and Other Stories
+
+Author: Gouverneur Morris
+
+Release Date: January 30, 2009 [EBook #27934]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IT AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IT
+
+AND OTHER STORIES
+
+BY
+
+GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE FOOTPRINT, AND OTHER STORIES,"
+"THE SPREAD EAGLE AND OTHER STORIES," ETC.
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1912
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+Published March, 1912
+
+
+TO ELSIE
+
+                   I
+
+     Crown the heads of better men
+       With lilies and with morning-glories!
+     I'm unworthy of a pen--
+       These are Bread-and-Butter stories.
+          Shall I tell you how I know?
+          Strangers wrote and told me so.
+
+                   II
+
+     He who only toils for fame
+       I pronounce a silly Billy.
+     _I_ can't dine upon a name,
+       Or look dressy in a lily.
+          And--oh shameful truth to utter!--
+          I _won't_ live on bread and butter.
+
+                   III
+
+     Sometimes now (and sometimes then)
+       Meat and wine my soul requires.
+     Satan tempted me--my pen
+       Fills the house with open fires.
+          I _must_ have a horse or two--
+          Babies, oh my Love--and you!
+
+G. M.
+
+AIKEN, _February 10, 1912_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                 PAGE
+_It_                                1
+
+_Two Business Women_               31
+
+_The Trap_                         73
+
+_Sapphira_                        119
+
+_The Bride's Dead_                169
+
+_Holding Hands_                   199
+
+_The Claws of The Tiger_          235
+
+_Growing Up_                      273
+
+_The Battle of Aiken_             297
+
+_An Idyl of Pelham Bay Park_      313
+
+_Back There in the Grass_         337
+
+_Asabri_                          363
+
+
+
+
+IT
+
+
+Prana Beach would be a part of the solid west coast if it wasn't for a
+half circle of the deadliest, double-damned, orchid-haunted black
+morass, with a solid wall of insects that bite, rising out of it. But
+the beach is good dry sand, and the wind keeps the bugs back in the
+swamp. Between the beach and the swamp is a strip of loam and jungle,
+where some niggers live and a god.
+
+I landed on Prana Beach because I'd heard--but it wasn't so and it
+doesn't matter. Anyhow, I landed--all alone; the canoemen wouldn't come
+near enough for me to land dry, at that. Said the canoe would shrivel
+up, like a piece of hide in a fire, if it touched that beach; said
+they'd turn white and be blown away like puffs of smoke. They nearly
+backed away with my stuff; would have if I hadn't pulled a gun on them.
+But they made me wade out and get it myself--thirty foot of rope with
+knots, dynamite, fuses, primers, compass, grub for a week, and--well, a
+bit of skin in a half-pint flask with a rubber and screw-down top. Not
+nice, it wasn't, wading out and back and out and back. There was one
+shark, I remember, came in so close that he grounded, snout out, and
+made a noise like a pig. Sun was going down, looking like a bloody
+murder victim, and there wasn't going to be any twilight. It's an
+uncertain light that makes wading nasty. It might be salt-water soaking
+into my jeans, but with that beastly red light over it, it looked like
+blood.
+
+The canoe backed out to the--you can't call 'em a nautical name. They've
+one big, square sail of crazy-quilt work--raw silk, pieces of rubber
+boots, rattan matting, and grass cloth, all colors, all shapes of
+patches. They point into the wind and then go sideways; and they _don't_
+steer with an oar that Charon discarded thousands of years ago, that's
+painted crimson and raw violet; and the only thing they'd be good for
+would be fancy wood-carpets. Mine, or better, ours, was made of
+satinwood, and was ballasted with scrap-iron, rotten ivory, and ebony.
+There, I've told you what she was like (except for the live
+entomological collection aboard), and you may call her what you please.
+The main point is that she took the canoe aboard, and then disobeyed
+orders. Orders were to lie at anchor (which was a dainty thing of stone,
+all carved) till further orders. But she'd gotten rid of me, and she
+proposed to lie farther off, and come back (maybe) when I'd finished my
+job. So she pointed straight in for where I was standing amid my duds
+and chattels, just as if she was going to thump herself ashore--and then
+she began to slip off sideways like a misbegotten crab, and backward,
+too--until what with the darkness tumbling down, and a point o' palms, I
+lost sight of her. Why didn't I shout, and threaten, and jump up and
+down?
+
+Because I was alone on Prana Beach, between the sea and the swamp. And
+because the god was beginning to get stirred up; and because now that
+I'd gone through six weeks' fever and boils to get where I was, I wished
+I hadn't gotten there. No, I wasn't scared. You wouldn't be if you were
+alone on a beach, after sundown, deserted you may say, your legs shaky
+with being wet, and your heart hot and mad as fire because you couldn't
+digest the things you had to put into your stomach, and if you'd heard
+that the beach was the most malodorous, ghoul-haunted beach of the seas,
+and if just as you were saying to yourself that _you_ for one didn't
+believe a word of it--if, I say, just then _It_ began to cut loose--back
+of you--way off to the left--way off to the right--why you'd have been
+scared.
+
+It wasn't the noise it made so much as the fact that it could make any
+noise at all.... Shut your mouth tight and hum on the letter
+m-mmmmmmm--that's it exactly. Only It's was ten times as loud, and
+vibrating. The vibrations shook me where I stood.
+
+With the wind right, that humming must have carried a mile out to sea;
+and that's how it had gotten about that there was a god loose on Prana
+Beach. It was an It-god, the niggers all agreed. You'll have seen 'em
+carved on paddles--shanks of a man, bust of a woman, nose of a
+snapping-turtle, and mouth round like the letter O. But the Prana Beach
+one didn't show itself that first night. It hummed
+awhile--m-m-m-m-m--oh, for maybe a minute--stopped and began
+again--jumped a major fifth, held it till it must have been half burst
+for breath, and then went down the scale an octave, hitting every note
+in the middle, and giving the effect of one damned soul meeting another
+out in eternity and yelling for pure joy and malice. The finish was a
+whoop on the low note so loud that it lifted my hair. Then the howl was
+cut off as sharp and neat and sudden as I've seen a Chinaman's head
+struck from his body by the executioner at Canton--Big Wan--ever seen
+him work? Very pretty. Got to perfection what golfers call "the follow
+through."
+
+Yes. I sauntered into the nearest grove, whistling "Yankee Doodle,"
+lighted a fire, cooked supper, and turned in for the night. Not!... I
+took to the woods all right, but on my stomach. And I curled up so tight
+that my knees touched my chin. Ever try it? It's the nearest thing to
+having some one with you, when you're cold and alone. Adam must have
+had a hard-shell back and a soft-shell stomach, like an armadillo--how
+does it run?--"dillowing in his armor." Because in moments of real or
+imaginary danger it's the first instinct of Adam's sons to curl up, and
+of Eve's daughters. Ever touch a Straits Settlement Jewess on the back
+of the hand with a lighted cigarette?...
+
+As I'm telling you, I curled up good and tight, head and knees on the
+grub sack, Colt and dynamite handy, hair standing perfectly straight up,
+rope round me on the ground in a circle--I had a damn-fool notion that
+It mightn't be allowed to cross knotted ropes, and I shook with chills
+and nightmares and cramps. I could only lie on my left side, for the
+boils on my right. I couldn't keep my teeth quiet. I couldn't do
+anything that a Christian ought to do, with a heathen It-god strolling
+around. Yes, ... the thing came out on the beach, in full view of where
+I was, but I couldn't see it, because of the pitch dark. It came out,
+and made noises with its feet in the sand--up and down--up and
+down--scrunch--scrunch--something like a man walking, and not in a
+hurry. Something like it, but not exactly. The It's feet (they have
+seven toes according to the nigger paddles) didn't touch the ground as
+often as a man's would have done in walking the distance. There'd be one
+scrunch and then quite a long pause before the next. It sounded like a
+very, very big man, taking the very longest steps he could. But there
+wasn't any more mouth work. And for that I'm still offering up prayers
+of thanksgiving; for, if--say when it was just opposite where I lay, and
+not fifty yards off--it had let off anything sudden and loud, I'd have
+been killed as dead as by a stroke of lightning.
+
+Well, I was just going to break, when day did. Broke so sweet, and calm,
+and pretty; all pink landward over the black jungle, all smooth and
+baby-blue out to sea. Till the sun showed, there was a land breeze--not
+really a breeze, just a stir, a cool quiet moving of spicy smells from
+one place to another--nothing more than that. Then the sea breeze rose
+and swept the sky and ocean till they were one and the same blue, the
+blue that comes highest at Tiffany's; and little puffs of shore birds
+came in on the breeze and began to run up and down on the beach, jabbing
+their bills into the damp sand and flapping their little wings. It was
+like Eden--Eden-by-the-Sea--I wouldn't have been surprised if Eve had
+come out of the woods yawning and stretching herself. And I wouldn't
+have cared--if I'd been shaved.
+
+I took notice of all this peacefulness and quiet, twenty grains of
+quinine, some near food out of a can, and then had a good look around
+for a good place to stop, in case I got started running.
+
+I fixed on a sandy knoll that had a hollow in the top of it, and one
+twisted beach ebony to shade the hollow. At the five points of a star
+with the knoll for centre, but at safe blasting distance, I planted
+dynamite, primed and short-fused. If anything chased me I hoped to have
+time to spring one of these mines in passing, tumble into my hollow and
+curl up, with my fingers in my ears.
+
+I didn't believe in heathen gods when the sea and sky were that
+exclusive blue; but I had learned before I was fifteen years old that
+day is invariably followed by night, and that between the two there is a
+time toward the latter end of which you can believe anything. It was
+with that dusky period in view that I mined the approaches to my little
+villa at Eden-by-the-Sea.
+
+Well, after that I took the flask that had the slip of skin in it,
+unscrewed the top, pulled the rubber cork, and fished the skin out, with
+a salvage hook that I made by unbending and rebending a hair-pin....
+Don't smile. I've always had a horror of _accidentally_ finding a
+hair-pin in my pocket, and so I carry one on purpose.... See? Not an
+airy, fairy Lillian, but an honest, hard-working Jane ... good to clean
+a pipe with. So I fished out the slip of skin (with the one I had then)
+and spread it out on my knee, and translated what was written on it, for
+the thousandth time.
+
+Can you read that? The old-fashioned S's mix you up. It's straight
+modern Italian. I don't know what the ink's made of, but the skin's the
+real article--it's taken from just above the knee where a man can get at
+himself best. It runs this way, just like a "personal" in the _Herald_,
+only more so:
+
+
+     Prisoner on Prana Beach will share treasure with rescuing party.
+     Come at once.
+
+
+Isn't that just like an oil-well-in-the-South-west-Company's prospectus?
+"Only a little stock left; price of shares will be raised shortly to
+thirteen cents."
+
+I bit. It was knowing what kind of skin the ad. was written on that got
+me. I'd seen cured human hide before. In Paris they've got a
+Constitution printed on some that was peeled off an aristocrat in the
+Revolution, and I've seen a seaman's upper arm and back, with the
+tattoos, in a bottle of alcohol in a museum on Fourteenth Street, New
+York--boys under fourteen not admitted. I wasn't a day over eight when I
+saw those tattoos. However....
+
+To get that prisoner loose was the duty that I owed to humanity; to
+share the treasure was the duty that I owed to myself. So I got together
+some niggers, and the fancy craft I've described (on shares with a
+Singapore Dutchman, who was too fat to come himself, and too much
+married), and made a start.... You're bothered by my calling them
+niggers. Is that it? Well, the Mason and Dixon line ran plump through
+my father's house; but mother's room being in the south gable, I was
+born, as you may say, in the land of cotton, and consequently in my
+bright Southern lexicon the word nigger is defined as meaning anything
+black or brown. I think I said that Prana is on the west coast, and that
+may have misled you. But Africa isn't the only God-forsaken place that
+has a west coast; how about Staten Island?
+
+Malaysian houses are built mostly of reed and thatch work standing in
+shallow water on bamboo stalks, highly inflammable and subject to
+alterations by a blunt pocket-knife. So a favorite device for holding a
+man prisoner is a hole in the ground too deep and sheer for him to climb
+out of. That's why I'd brought a length of knotted rope. The dynamite
+was instead of men, which we hadn't means to hire or transport, and who
+wouldn't have landed on that beach anyhow, unless drowned and washed up.
+Now dynamite wouldn't be a pleasant thing to have round your club or
+your favorite restaurant; but in some parts of the world it makes the
+best company. It will speak up for you on occasion louder than your best
+friend, and it gives you the feeling of being Jove with a handful of
+thunderbolts. My plan was to find in what settlement there was the most
+likely prisoner, drive the inhabitants off for two or three days--one
+blast would do that, I calculated (especially if preceded and followed
+by blowings on a pocket siren)--let my rope down into his well, lift the
+treasure with him, and get away with it.
+
+This was a straight ahead job--except for the god. And in daylight it
+didn't seem as if It could be such an awful devil of a god. But It did
+have the deuce of a funny spoor, as I made haste to find out. The thing
+had five toes, like a man, which was a relief. But unlike nigger feet,
+the thumb toe and the index weren't spread. The thumb bent sharply
+inward, and mixed its pad mark with that of the index. Furthermore,
+though the impress of the toes was very deep (down-slanting like a man
+walking on tiptoe), the heel marks were also very deep, and between toe
+and heel marks there were no other marks at all. In other words, the
+thing's feet must have been arched like a croquet wicket. And It's heels
+were not rounded; they were _perfectly_ round--absolute circles they
+were, about the diameter of the smallest sized cans in which Capstan
+tobacco is sold. If ever a wooden idol had stopped squatting and gone
+out for a stroll on a beach, it would have left just such a track. Only
+it might not have felt that it had to take such peculiarly long steps.
+
+My knoll being near the south end of Prana Beach (pure patriotism I
+assure you), my village hunts must be to the northward. I had one good
+hunt, the first day, and I got near some sort of a village, a jungle
+one built over a pool, as I found afterward. The reason I gave up
+looking that day was because the god got between me and where I was
+trying to get; burst out humming, you might say, right in my face,
+though I couldn't see It, and directly I had turned and was tiptoeing
+quietly away (I remember how the tree trunks looked like teeth in a
+comb, or the nearest railroad ties from the window of an express train),
+It set up the most passionate, vindictive, triumphant vocal fireworks
+ever heard out of hell. It made black noises like Niagara Falls, and
+white noises higher than Pike's Peak. It made leaps, lighting on tones
+as a carpenter's hammer lights on nails. It ran up and down the major
+and minor diatonics, up and down the chromatic, with the speed and fury
+of a typhoon, and the attention to detail of Paderewski--at his best,
+when he makes the women faint--and with the power and volume of a church
+organ with all the stops pulled out. It shook and It trilled and It
+quavered, and It gargled as if It had a barrel of glycothermoline in
+It's mouth and had been exposed to diphtheria, and It finished--just as
+I tripped on a snake and fell--with a round bar of high C sound, that
+lasted a good minute (or until I was a quarter of a mile beyond where I
+had fallen), and was the color of butter, and could have been cut with a
+knife. And It stopped short--biff--just as if It had been chopped off.
+
+That was the end of my village hunting. Let the prisoner of Prana Beach
+drown in his hole when the rains come, let his treasure remain unlifted
+till Gabriel blows his trumpet; but let yours truly bask in the shade of
+the beach ebony, hidden from view, and fortified by dynamite--until the
+satinwood shallop should see fit to return and take him off.
+
+Except for a queer dream (queer because of the time and place, and
+because there seemed absolutely nothing to suggest it to the mind
+asleep), I put in six hours' solid sleep. In my dream I was in Lombardy
+in a dark loft where there were pears laid out to ripen; and we were
+frightened and had to keep creepy-mouse still--because the father had
+come home sooner than was expected, and was milking his goats in the
+stable under the loft, and singing, which showed that he was in liquor,
+and not his usual affable, bland self. I could hear him plainly in my
+dream, tearing the heart out of that old folk-song called _La
+Smortina_--"The Pale Girl":
+
+
+     "T' ho la scia to e son contento
+     Non m'in cresca niente, niente
+     Altro giovine hogià in mente
+     Pin belino assai di te."
+
+
+And I woke up tingling with the remembered fear (it was a mixed feeling,
+half fright, and half an insane desire to burst out laughing to see what
+the old man would do), and I looked over the rim of my hat, and there
+walking toward me, in the baby-blue and pink of the bright dawn (but a
+big way off), came a straggling line of naked niggers, headed by the
+It-god, Itself.
+
+One look told me that, one look at a great bulk of scarletness, that
+walked upright like a man. I didn't look twice, I scuttled out to my
+nearest mine, lighted the fuse, tumbled back into the hollow, fingers in
+ears, face screwed up as tight as a face can be screwed, and waited.
+
+When it was over, and things had stopped falling, I looked out again.
+The tropic dawn remained as before, but the immediate landscape was
+somewhat altered for the worse, and in the distance were neither niggers
+nor the god. It is possible that I stuck my thumbs into my armpits and
+waggled my fingers. I don't remember. But it's no mean sensation to have
+pitted yourself against a strange god, with perfectly round heels, and
+to have won out.
+
+About noon, though, the god came back, fortified perhaps by reflection,
+and more certainly by a nigger who walked behind him with a spear.
+You've seen the donkey boys in Cairo make the donkeys trot?... This time
+I put my trust in the Colt forty-five; and looked the god over, as he
+came reluctantly nearer and nearer, singing a magic.
+
+Do you know the tragedian walk as taken off on the comic opera stage,
+the termination of each strutting, dragging step accentuated by cymbals
+smashed together F-F-F? That was how the god walked. He was all in
+scarlet, with a long feather sticking straight up from a scarlet cap.
+And the magic he sang (now that you knew the sounds he made were those
+of a tenor voice, you knew that it was a glorious tenor voice) was a
+magic out of "Aïda." It was the magic that what's-his-name sings when he
+is appointed commander-in-chief of all the Egyptian forces. Now the
+niggers may have thought that their god's magics were stronger than my
+dynamite. But the god, though very, very simple, was not so simple as
+that. He was an Italian colored man, black bearded, and shaped like
+Caruso, only more so, if that is possible; and he sang, because he was a
+singing machine, but he couldn't have talked. I'll bet on that. He was
+too plumb afraid.
+
+When he reached the hole that the dynamite had made in the landscape--I
+showed myself; trying to look as much like a dove of peace as possible.
+
+"Come on alone," I called in Italian, "and have a bite of lunch."
+
+That stopped his singing, but I had to repeat. Well he had an argument
+with the nigger, that finished with all the gestures that two monkeys
+similarly situated would have made at each other, and after a time the
+nigger sat down, and the god came on alone, puffing and indignant.
+
+We talked in Dago, but I'll give the English of it, so's not to appear
+to be showing off.
+
+"Who and what in the seventh circle of hell _are_ you?" I asked.
+
+He seemed offended that I should not have known. But he gave his name,
+sure of his effect. "Signor ----" and the name sounded like that tower
+in Venice that fell down the other day.
+
+"You don't mean it!" I exclaimed joyfully. "Be seated," and, I added,
+being silly with joy and relief at having my awful devil turn into a
+silly child--"there may be some legacy--though trifling."
+
+Well, he sat down, and stuck his short, immense hirsute legs out, all
+comfy, and I, remembering the tracks on the beach, had a look at his
+feet. And I turned crimson with suppressed laughter. He had wooden
+cylinders three inches high strapped to his bare heels. They made him
+five feet five inches high instead of five feet two. They were just such
+heels (only clumsier and made of wood instead of cork and crimson
+morocco or silk) as _Siegfried_ wears for mountain climbing, dragon
+fighting, or other deeds of derring-do. And with these heels to guide
+me, I sighed, and said:
+
+"Signor Recent-Venetian-Tower, you have the most beautiful pure golden
+tenor voice that I have ever heard in my life."
+
+Have you ever been suddenly embraced by a pile-driver, and kissed on
+both cheeks by a blacking-brush? I have. Then he held me by the
+shoulders at arm's length, and looked me in the eyes as if I had been a
+long-lost son returned at last. Then he gathered a kiss in his finger
+tips and flung it to the heavens. Then he asked if by any chance I had
+any spaghetti with me. He cried when I said that I had not; but quietly,
+not harassingly. And then we got down to real business, and found out
+about each other.
+
+_He_ was the prisoner of Prana Beach. The treasure that he had to share
+with his rescuer was his voice. Two nights a week during the season, at
+two thousand a night. But--There was a great big But.
+
+Signor What-I-said-before, his voice weakened by pneumonia, had taken a
+long travelling holiday to rest up. But his voice, instead of coming
+back, grew weaker and weaker, driving him finally into a suicidal
+artistic frenzy, during which he put on his full suit of evening
+clothes, a black pearl shirt stud, a tall silk hat, in the dead of
+night, and flung himself from the stern of a P. & O. boat into the sea.
+He had no knowledge of swimming and expected to drown at once. But he
+was not built for drowning. The laws of buoyancy and displacement caused
+him to float upon his back, high out of the water, like an empty
+barrel. Nor was the water into which he had fallen as tepid as he had
+expected. From his description, with its accompaniment of shudderings
+and shiverings, the temperature must have been as low as 80° Fahrenheit,
+which is pretty sharp for dagoes. Anyhow, the double shock of the cold
+and of not drowning instantly acted on his vocal chords. Without even
+trying, he said, he knew that his voice had come back. Picture the poor
+man's despair--overboard in the ocean, wanting to die because he had
+nothing to live for, and suddenly discovering that he had everything to
+live for. He asserts that he actually forgot the cold, and thought only
+of how to preserve that glorious instrument, his voice; not for himself
+but for mankind. But he could not think out a way, and he asserted that
+a passion of vain weeping and delirium, during which he kicked himself
+warm, was followed by a noble and godlike calm, during which, lying as
+easily upon the sea as on a couch, and inspired by the thought that some
+ear might catch the notes and die the happier for it, he lifted his
+divine voice and sang a swan song. After that he sang twenty-nine
+others. And then, in the very midst of _La Bella Napoli_, with which he
+intended to close (fearing to strain his voice if he sang any more), he
+thought of sharks.
+
+Spurred by that thought, he claims to have kicked and beaten with his
+hands until he was insensible. Otherwise, he would, he said, have
+continued to float about placidly, singing swan songs at intervals
+until, at last, thinned by starvation to the sinking point, he would
+have floated no more.
+
+To shorten up. Signor You-know-what, either owing to his struggles, or
+to the sea breeze pressing against his stomach, came ashore on Prana
+Beach; was pounced upon by the niggers, stripped of his glad rags (the
+topper had been lost in the shuffle), and dropped into a hole eight feet
+deep, for safe-keeping. It was in this hole, buried in sand, that he
+found the flask I have told you about. Well, one day, for he had a bit
+of talent that way, he fell to sketching on his legs, knees, upper thigh
+and left forearm, using for ink something black that they had given him
+for breakfast. That night it rained; but next morning his drawings were
+as black and sharp as when he had made them; this, coupled with the
+flask, furnished him with an idea, a very forlorn and hopeless one, but
+an idea for all that. He had, however, nothing to write his C Q D on but
+himself, none of which (for he held himself in trust for his Maker as a
+complete whole, he explained) he intended to part with.
+
+It was in trying to climb out of the hole that he tore a flap of skin
+from his left thigh just above the knee, clean off, except for one
+thread by which it hung. In less than two days he had screwed up his
+courage to breaking that thread with a sudden jerk. He cured his bit of
+hide in a novel way. Every morning he cried on it, and when the tears
+had dried, leaving their minute residue of salt, he would work the raw
+skin with his thumb and a bit of stick he had found. Then a nigger boy,
+one beast of a hot day, lowered him a gourd of sea-water as a joke, and
+Signor What-we-agreed-on, made salt of that while the sun shone, and
+finished his job of tanning.
+
+The next time he was given a black breakfast, he wrote his hurry-call
+message and corked it into the flask. And there only remained the
+somewhat herculean task of getting that flask flung into the sea.
+
+You'll never believe how it got there finally. But I'll tell you for all
+that. A creek flowed near the dungeon in which the famous tenor was
+incarcerated. And one night of cloud-burst that creek burst its
+cerements, banks I mean, filled the singing man's prison in two jerks of
+a lamb's tail, and floated both him and his flask out of it. He grounded
+as usual, but the flask must have been rushed down to the sea. For in
+the sea it was found, calmly bobbing, and less than two years later. A
+nigger fisherman found it, and gave it to me, in exchange for a
+Waterbury watch. He tried to make me take his daughter instead, but I
+wouldn't.
+
+Signor What-you-would-forget-if-I-told-you wasn't put back in his
+dungeon till the rainy season was at an end. Instead he was picketed. A
+rope ran from his wrists, which were tied behind his back, and was
+inserted through the handles (it had a pair of them like ears just above
+the trunnions) of a small bronze cannon, that had Magellan's name and
+the arms of Spain engraved around the touch-hole. And thus picketed, he
+was rained on, joked on, and abused until dry weather. Then, it was the
+first happiness that he had had among them, they served him one day with
+a new kind of fish that had begun to run in the creek. It tasted like
+Carlton sole, he said. And it made him feel so good that, being quite by
+himself and the morning blue and warm, he began, sitting on his little
+cannon, to hum an aria. Further inspirited by his own tunefulness, he
+rose (and of course struck an attitude) and opened his mouth and sang.
+
+Oh, how good it was to hear--as he put it himself--after all those
+months of silence!
+
+Well, the people he belonged to came running up with eyes like saucers
+and mouths open, and they squatted at his feet in a semicircle, and
+women came and children. They had wonder in their faces and fear. Last
+came the old chief, who was too old to walk, and was carried always in a
+chair which two of his good-natured sons-in-law made with their hands.
+And the old chief, when he had listened awhile with his little bald
+monkey head cocked on one side, signed to be put down. And he stood on
+his feet and walked.
+
+And he took out a little khris and walked over to the Divo, and cut the
+ropes that bound him, and knelt before him and kowtowed, and pressed the
+late prisoner's toes with his forehead. Then--and this was terribly
+touching, my informant said, and reminded him of St. Petersburg--one of
+the old chief's granddaughters, a little brown slip of a girl, slender
+and shapely as a cigar, flung her arms round his neck, and hung--just
+hung. When they tried to get her away she kicked at them, but she never
+so much as once changed the expression of her upturned face, which was
+one of adoration. Well, the people hollered and made drums of their
+cheeks and beat on them, and the first thing Signor Recent-Disaster knew
+he was being dressed in a scarlet coat that had belonged to a British
+colonel dead this hundred years. The girl by now had had to let go and
+had dropped at his feet like a ripe guava--and he was being ushered into
+the largest bamboo-legged house that the place boasted, and told as
+plainly as round eyes, gesticulations, and moans can, that the house was
+his to enjoy. Then they began to give him things. First his own dress
+suit, ruined by sea-water and shrinking, his formerly boiled shirt, his
+red silk underwear still wearable, his black pearl stud and every
+stiver of gold, silver, copper, and English banknotes that had been
+found in his pockets. They gave him knives, rough silver bangles, heaps
+of elaborate mats, a handful of rather disappointing pearls, a scarlet
+head-dress with a feather that had been a famous chief's, a gun without
+a lock, and, what pleased him most (must have), a bit of looking-glass
+big enough to see half of his face in at a time. They allowed him to
+choose his own house-keeper; and, although several beauties were knocked
+down in the ensuing riot, he managed to satisfy them that his
+unalterable choice rested upon the little lady who had been the most
+convincing in her recognition of his genius, and--what's the
+line?--"Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die."
+
+Well, he offered to put me up, and show me how the gods keep house. I
+counter-offered to keep him with me, by force of dynamite, carry him
+back to civilization, and go shares on his voice, as per circular. And
+this is where the big But comes in. My offer was pestilential; he
+shunned it.
+
+"You shall have my black pearl stud for your trouble," he said. "I
+bought her years ago in a pawnshop at Aix. But _me_--no. I have found my
+niche, and my temple. But you shall be the judge of that."
+
+"You don't _want_ to escape?"
+
+His mouth curled in scorn at the very idea.
+
+"Try to think of how much spaghetti you could buy for a song."
+
+His eyes and mouth twitched. But he sighed, and shook his head.
+
+"Do you know," said he, "when you demonstrated against us with your
+dynamite it was instantly concluded that you were some new kind of a god
+come to inhabit the beach. It was proposed that I go against you singing
+a charm that should drive you away. But, as you saw, I came only at the
+spear's point. Do you think I was afraid? I was; but not of your
+godship. I had seen your tracks, I had seen the beach rise to your
+explosive, and I knew that as one Christian gentleman I had nothing on
+the lines of violence to fear from another. Your explosion was like a
+note, asking me when I should next call to bring fewer attendants. I
+_was_ afraid; I was afraid that you were not one, alone, but several,
+and that you would compel me to return with you to a world in which,
+take it for all and all, the good things, such as restaurants,
+artificial heat, Havana cigars, and Steinway pianos, are nullified by
+climatic conditions unsuited to vocal chords, fatal jealousies among
+members of the same artistic professions, and a public that listens but
+does not hear; or that hears and does not listen. But you shall stop
+with me a few days, in my house. You shall see for yourself that among
+all artists I alone enjoy an appreciation and solicitude that are better
+than gold."
+
+Signor Shall-we-let-it-go-at-that had not lied to me. And all he asked
+was, with many apologies, that I should treat him with a certain
+reverence, a little as if he were a conqueror. So all the way to the
+village I walked two paces right flank rear, and wore a solemn and
+subdued expression. My host approached the dwellings of his people with
+an exaggeration of tragi-comic stride, dragging his high-heeled feet as
+Henry Irving used, raising and advancing his chest to the bursting
+point, and holding his head so proudly that the perpendicular feather of
+his cap leaned backward at a sharp angle. With his scarlet soldier's
+coat, all burst along the seams, and not meeting by a yard over his red
+silk undershirt, with his bit of broken mirror dangling at his waist
+like a lady's jewelled "vanity set," with his china-ink black mustache
+and superb beard, he presented for all the purposes of the time and
+place an appearance in keeping with the magnificence of his voice and of
+his dreams.
+
+When we got among the houses, from which came a great peeping of shy
+eyes, the Signor suddenly raised his fingers to his throat and sounded a
+shocking b-r-rr-rrr of alarm and anxiety. Then there arose a murmur,
+almost pitiful it was so heartfelt, as of bees who fear an irreparable
+tragedy in the hive. The old chief came out of the council-house upon
+the hands of his good-natured sons-in-law, and he was full of tenderness
+and concern. I saw my friend escorted into his own dwelling by ladies
+who sighed and commiserated. But already the call for help had reached
+the tenor's slip of a wife; and she, with hands that shook, was
+preparing a compress of leaves that smelt of cinnamon and cloves. I,
+too, showed solicitude, and timidly helped my conqueror to the heaped
+mats upon which he was wont to recline in the heat of the day. He had
+made himself a pair of very round terrified eyes, and he had not taken
+the compress from his throat. But he spoke quietly, and as one possessed
+of indomitable fortitude. In Malay he told his people that it was
+"nothing, just a little--brrr--soreness and thickening," and he let slip
+such a little moan as monkeys make. To me he spoke in Italian.
+
+"I shall have to submit to a bandage," said he. "But there is nothing
+the matter with my throat" (slight monkey moan here for benefit of
+adorers), "absolutely nothing. I have invented a slight soreness so--so
+that you could see for yourself ... so that you could see for
+yourself.... If you were to count those here assembled and those
+assembled without, you would number our entire population, including
+children and babes in arms" (a slight moan while compress is being
+readjusted over Adam's apple by gentle, tremulous brown fingers), "and
+among these, my friend, are no dissenters. There is none here to stand
+forth and say that on Tuesday night Signor And-he-pronounced-it's
+singing was lacking in those golden tones for which we used to look to
+him. His voice, indeed, is but a skeleton of its former self, and shall
+we say that the public must soon tire of a singer with so pronounced a
+tendency to flat?
+
+"Here in this climate," he continued, "my voice by dint of constant and
+painstaking care and practice has actually improved. I should not have
+said that this was possible; but a man must believe experience.... And
+then these dear, amiable people are one in their acclaim of me; although
+I sometimes grieve, not for myself, but for them, to think that they can
+never _really_ know what they've got...."
+
+
+I sometimes wonder how the god of Prana Beach will be treated when he
+begins to age and to lose his voice. It worries me--a little.
+
+The black pearl stud? Of course not, you wretched materialist. I sold it
+in the first good market I came to. No good ever came of material
+possessions, and always much payment of storage bills. But I have a
+collection of memories that I am fond of.
+
+Still, on second thought, and if I had the knack of setting them
+straight on paper, I'd part even with them for a consideration,
+especially if I felt that I could reach such an appreciative audience as
+that of Prana Beach, which sits upon its heels in worship and humility
+and listens to the divine fireworks of Signor I-have-forgotten-too.
+
+
+
+
+TWO BUSINESS WOMEN
+
+
+They engaged themselves to be married when they were so young they
+couldn't tell anybody about it for fear of being laughed at; and if I
+mentioned their years to you, you would laugh at me. They thought they
+were full-grown, but they weren't even that. When they were finally
+married they couldn't either of them have worn the clothes they got
+engaged in. The day they got engaged they wore suits made of white
+woollen blankets, white knitted toques, and white knitted sashes. It was
+because they were dressed exactly alike that they first got excited
+about each other. And Cynthia said: "You look just like a snowman." And
+G. G.--which was his strange name--said: "You look just like a
+snowbird."
+
+G. G. was in Saranac for his health. Cynthia had come up for the
+holidays to skate and to skee and to coast, and to get herself engaged
+before she was full-grown to a boy who was so delicate that climate was
+more important for him than education. They met first at the rink. And
+it developed that if you crossed hands with G. G. and skated with him
+you skated almost as well as he did. He could teach a girl to waltz in
+five minutes; and he had a radiant laugh that almost moved you to tears
+when you went to bed at night and got thinking about it. Cynthia had
+never seen a boy with such a beautiful round head and such beautiful
+white teeth and such bright red cheeks. She always said that she loved
+him long before he loved her. As a matter of fact, it happened to them
+both right away. As one baby, unabashed and determined, embraces a
+strange baby--and is embraced--so, from their first meeting in the great
+cold stillness of the North Woods, their young hearts snuggled together.
+
+G. G. was different from other boys. To begin with, he had been born at
+sea. Then he had lived abroad and learned the greatest quantity of
+foreign languages and songs. Then he had tried a New England
+boarding-school and had been hurt playing games he was too frail to
+play. And doctors had stethoscoped him and shaken their heads over him.
+And after that there was much naming of names which, instead of
+frightening him, were magic to his ear--Arizona, California,
+Saranac--but, because G. G.'s father was a professional man and
+perfectly square and honest, there wasn't enough money to send G. G. far
+from New York and keep him there and visit him every now and then. So
+Saranac was the place chosen for him to get well in; and it seemed a
+little hard, because there was almost as much love of sunshine and
+warmth and flowers and music in G. G. as there was patience and courage.
+
+The day they went skeeing together--which was the day after they had
+skated together--he told Cynthia all about himself, very simply and
+naturally, as a gentleman farmer should say: "This is the dairy; this is
+the blacksmith shop; this is the chicken run." And the next day, very
+early, when they stood knee-deep in snow, armed with shot-guns and
+waiting for some dogs that thought they were hounds to drive rabbits for
+them to shoot at, he told her that nothing mattered so long as you were
+happy and knew that you were happy, because when these two stars came
+into conjunction you were bound to get well.
+
+A rabbit passed. And G. G. laid his mitten upon his lips and shook his
+head; and he whispered:
+
+"I wouldn't shoot one for anything in the world."
+
+And she said: "Neither would I."
+
+Then she said: "If you don't shoot why did you come?"
+
+"Oh, Miss Snowbird," he said, "don't I look why I came? Do I have to say
+it?"
+
+He looked and she looked. And their feet were getting colder every
+moment and their hearts warmer. Then G. G. laughed aloud--bright, sudden
+music in the forest. Snow, balanced to the fineness of a hair, fell
+from the bowed limbs of trees. Then there was such stillness as may be
+in Paradise when souls go up to the throne to be forgiven. Then, far
+off, one dog that thought he was a hound began to yap and thought he was
+belling; but still G. G. looked into the snowbird's eyes and she into
+his, deeper and deeper, until neither had any secret of soul from the
+other. So, upon an altar cloth, two wax candles burn side by side, with
+clear, pure light.
+
+Cynthia had been well brought up, but she came of rich, impatient stock,
+and never until the present moment had she thought very seriously about
+God. Now, however, when she saw the tenderness there was in G. G.'s eyes
+and the smile of serene joyousness that was upon his lips, she
+remembered the saying that God has made man--and boys--in His image--and
+understood what it meant.
+
+She said: "I know why you think you've come."
+
+"Think?" he said. "Think!"
+
+And then the middle ends of his eyebrows rose--all tender and quizzical;
+and with one mitten he clutched at his breast--just over his heart. And
+he said:
+
+"If only I could get it out I would give it to you!"
+
+Cynthia, too, began to look melting tender and wondrous quizzical; and
+she bent her right arm forward and plucked at its sleeve as if she were
+looking for something. Then, in a voice of dismay:
+
+"Only three days ago it was still there," she said; "and now it's
+gone--I've lost it."
+
+"Oh!" said G. G. "You don't suspect me of having purloined--" His voice
+broke.
+
+"We're only kids," said Cynthia.
+
+"Yes," said he; "but you're the dearest kid!"
+
+"Since you've taken my heart," said she, "you'll not want to give it
+back, will you? I think that would break it."
+
+"I oughtn't to have taken it!" said G. G.
+
+And then on his face she saw the first shadow that ever he had let her
+see of doubt and of misgiving.
+
+"Listen!" he said. "My darling! I think that I shall get well.... I
+think that, once I am well, I shall be able to work very hard. I have
+nothing. I love you so that I think even angels don't want to do right
+more than I do. Is that anything to offer? Not very much."
+
+"Nobody in all the world," said she, "will ever have the chance to offer
+me anything else--just because I'm a kid doesn't mean that I don't know
+the look of forever when I see it."
+
+"Is it really forever?" he said. "For you too?"
+
+"For me--surely!"
+
+"Ah," said he, "what shall I think of to promise you?"
+
+His face was a flash of ecstasy.
+
+"You don't even have to promise that you will get well," she said. "I
+know you will try your hardest. No matter what happens--we're final--and
+I shall stick to you always, and nothing shall take you from me, and
+nobody.... When I am of age I shall tell my papa about us and then we
+shall be married to each other! And meanwhile you shall write to me
+every day and I shall write to you three times every day!" Her breath
+came like white smoke between her parted lips and she stood valiant and
+sturdy in the snow--a strong, resolute girl, built like a
+boy--clean-cut, crystal-pure, and steel-true. A shot sounded and there
+came to them presently the pungent, acid smell of burnt powder.
+
+"And we shall never hurt things or kill them," said G. G. "And every day
+when I've been good I shall kiss your feet and your hands."
+
+"And when I've been good," she said, "you'll smile at me the way you're
+smiling now--and it won't be necessary to die and go to Heaven to see
+what the gentlemen angels look like."
+
+"But," cried G. G., "whoever heard of going to Heaven? It comes to
+people. It's here."
+
+"And for us," she said, "it's come to stay."
+
+All the young people came to the station to see Cynthia off and G. G.
+had to content himself with looking things at her. And then he went back
+to his room and undressed and went to bed. Because for a week he had
+done all sorts of things that he shouldn't have done, just to be with
+Cynthia--all the last day he had had fever and it had been very hard for
+him to look like a joyous boy angel--he knew by experience that he was
+in for a "time." It is better that we leave him behind closed doors with
+his doctors and his temperature. We may knock every morning and ask how
+he is, and we shall be told that he is no better. He was even delirious
+at times. And it is only worth while going into this setback of G. G's
+because there are miracles connected with it--his daily letter to
+Cynthia.
+
+Each day she had his letter--joyous, loving, clearly writ, and full of
+flights into silver-lined clouds and the plannings of Spanish castles.
+Each day G. G. wrote his letter and each day he descended a little
+farther into the Valley of the Shadow, until at last he came to Death
+Gate--and then rested, a voyager undecided whether to go on or to go
+back. Who may know what it cost him to write his letter, sitting there
+at the roadside!
+
+His mother was with him. It was she who took the letter from his hands
+when he sank back into his pillows; and they thought for a little that
+he had gone from that place--for good and all. It was she who put it
+into the envelope and who carried it with her own hands to the
+post-office. Because G. G. had said: "To get there, it must go by the
+night's mail, Mumsey."
+
+G. G.'s mother didn't read the letter; but you may be sure she noted
+down the name and address in her heart of hearts, and that for the girl
+who seemed to mean so much to G. G. she developed upon the spot a
+heavenly tenderness, mixed with a heavenly jealousy.
+
+
+II
+
+One day there came to G. G., in convalescence--it was after his mother
+had gone back to New York--a great, thick package containing photographs
+and a letter. I think the letter contained rouge--because it made G.
+G.'s cheeks so red.
+
+Cynthia had collected all the pictures she could find of herself in her
+father's house and sent them to G. G. There were pictures of her in the
+longest baby clothes and in the shortest. There were pictures posed for
+occasions, pictures in fancy clothes, and a quart of kodaks. He had her
+there on his knees--riding, driving, diving, skating, walking, sitting
+on steps, playing with dogs, laughing, looking sad, talking, dimpling,
+smiling. There were pictures that looked right at G. G., no matter at
+what angle he held them. There were pictures so delicious of her that
+he laughed aloud for delight.
+
+All the stages of her life passed before his eyes--over and over--all
+day long; and, instead of growing more and more tired, he grew more and
+more refreshed. He made up his spotless mind to be worthy of her and to
+make, for her to bear, a name of which nobody should be able to say
+anything unkind.
+
+If G. G. had had very little education he had made great friends with
+some of the friendliest and most valuable books that had ever been
+written. And he made up his mind, lying at full length--the livelong
+day--in the bright, cold air--his mittened hands plunged into deep
+pockets full of photographs--that, for her sake and to hasten that time
+when they might always be together, he would learn to write books,
+taking infinite pains. And he determined that these books should be as
+sweet and clean and honorable as he could make them. You see, G. G. had
+been under the weather so much and had suffered so much all alone by
+himself, with nobody to talk to, that his head was already full of
+stories about make-believe places and people that were just dying to get
+themselves written. So many things that are dead to most people had
+always been alive to him--leaves, flowers, fairies. He had always been a
+busy maker of verses, which was because melody, rhythm, and harmony had
+always been delicious to his ear. And he had had, as a little boy, a
+soprano voice that was as true as truth and almost as agile as a canary
+bird's.
+
+He decided, then, very deliberately--lying upon his back and healing
+that traitor lung of his--to be a writer. He didn't so decide entirely
+because that was what he had always wanted to be, but for many reasons.
+First place, he could say things to her through prose and verse that
+could not be expressed in sculpture, music, painting, groceries, or
+dry-goods. Second place, where she was, there his heart was sure to be;
+and where the heart is, there the best work is done. And, third place,
+he knew that the chances were against his ever living in dusty cities or
+in the places of business thereof.
+
+"I am so young," he wrote to her, "that I can begin at the beginning and
+learn to be anything--in time to be it! And so every morning now you
+shall think of G. G. out with his butterfly net, running after winged
+words. That's nonsense. I've a little pad and a big pencil, and a hot
+potato in my pocket for to warm the numb fingers at. And father's got an
+old typewriter in his office that's to be put in order for me; and
+nights I shall drum upon it and print off what was written down in the
+morning, and study to see why it's all wrong. I think I'll never write
+anything but tales about people who love each other. 'Cause a fellow
+wants to stick to what he knows about...."
+
+Though G. G. was not to see Cynthia again for a whole year he didn't
+find any trouble in loving her a little more every day. To his mind's
+eye she was almost as vivid as if she had been standing right there in
+front of him. And as for her voice, that dwelt ever in his ear, like
+those lovely airs which, once heard, are only put aside with death. You
+may have heard your grandmother lilting to herself, over her mending,
+some song of men and maidens and violets that she had listened to in her
+girlhood and could never forget.
+
+And then, of course, everything that G. G. did was a reminder of
+Cynthia. With the help of one of Doctor Trudeau's assistants, who came
+every day to see how he was getting on, he succeeded in understanding
+very well what was the matter with him and under just what conditions a
+consumptive lung heals and becomes whole. To live according to the
+letter and spirit of the doctor's advice became almost a religion with
+him.
+
+For six hours of every day he sat on the porch of the house where he had
+rooms, writing on his little pad and making friends with the keen,
+clean, healing air. Every night the windows of his bedroom stood wide
+open, so that in the morning the water in his pitcher was a solid block.
+And he ate just the things he was told to--and willed himself to like
+milk and sugar, and snow and cold, and short days!
+
+In his writing he began to see progress. He was like a musical person
+beginning to learn an instrument; for, just as surely as there are
+scales to be run upon the piano before your virtuoso can weave music,
+binding the gallery gods with delicious meshes of sound, so in
+prose-writing there must be scales run, fingerings worked out, and
+harmonies mastered. For in a page of _lo bello stile_ you will find
+trills and arpeggios, turns, grace notes, a main theme, a sub theme,
+thorough-bass, counterpoint, and form.
+
+Music is an easier art than prose, however. It comes to men as a more
+direct and concrete gift of those gods who delight in sound and the
+co-ordination of parts. The harmonies are more quickly grasped by the
+well-tuned ear. We can imagine the boy Mozart discoursing lovely music
+at the age of five; but we cannot imagine any one of such tender years
+compiling even a fifth-rate paragraph of prose.
+
+Those men who have mastered _lo bello stile_ in music can tell us pretty
+clearly how the thing is done. There be rules. But your prose masters
+either cannot formulate what they have learned--or will not.
+
+G. G. was very patient; and there were times when the putting together
+of words was fascinating, like the putting together of those picture
+puzzles which were such a fad the other day. And such reading as he did
+was all in one book--the dictionary. For hours, guided by his nice ear
+for sound, he applied himself to learning the derivatives and exact
+meanings of new words--or he looked up old words and found that they
+were new.
+
+As for his actual compositions, he had only the ambition to make them as
+workmanlike as he could. He made little landscapes; he drew little
+interiors. He tried to get people up and down stairs in the fewest words
+that would make the picture. And when he thought that he had scored a
+little success he would count the number of words he had used and
+determine to achieve the same effect with the use of only half that
+number.
+
+Well, G. G.'s lung healed again; and this time he was very careful not
+to overdo. He had gained nine pounds, he wrote to Cynthia--"saved them"
+was the way he put it; and he was determined that this new tissue, worth
+more than its weight in gold, should go to bank and earn interest for
+him--and compound interest.
+
+"Shall I get well?" he asked that great dreamer who dreamed that there
+was hope for people who had never hoped before--and who has lived to see
+his dream come true; and the great dreamer smiled and said:
+
+"G. G., if growing boys are good boys and do what they are told, and
+have any luck at all--they always get well!"
+
+Then G. G. blushed.
+
+"And when I am well can I live where I please--and--and get
+married--and all that sort of thing?"
+
+"You can live where you please, marry and have children; and if you
+aren't a good husband and a good father I dare say you'll live to be
+hanged at ninety. But if I were you, G. G., I'd stick by the Adirondacks
+until you're old enough to--know better."
+
+And G. G. went back to his rooms in great glee and typewrote a story
+that he had finished as well as he could, and sent it to a magazine. And
+six days later it came back to him, with a little note from the editor,
+who said:
+
+"There's nothing wrong with your story except youth. If you say so we'll
+print it. We like it. But, personally, and believing that I have your
+best interests at heart, I advise you to wait, to throw this story into
+your scrap basket, and to study and to labor until your mind and your
+talent are mature. For the rest, I think you are going to do some fine
+things. This present story isn't that--it's not fine. At the same time,
+it is so very good in some ways that we are willing to leave its
+publication or its destruction to your discretion."
+
+G. G. threw his story into the scrap basket and went to bed with a
+brand-new notion of editors.
+
+"Why," said he to the cold darkness--and his voice was full of awe and
+astonishment--"they're--alive!"
+
+
+III
+
+Cynthia couldn't get at G. G. and she made up her mind that she must get
+at something that belonged to him--or die. She had his letter, of
+course, and his kodaks; and these spoke the most eloquent language to
+her--no matter what they said or how they looked--but she wanted somehow
+or other to worm herself deeper into G. G.'s life. To find somebody, for
+instance, who knew all about him and would enjoy talking about him by
+the hour. Now there are never but two people who enjoy sitting by the
+hour and saying nice things about any man--and these, of course, are the
+woman who bore him and the woman who loves him. Fathers like their sons
+well enough--sometimes--and will sometimes talk about them and praise
+them; but not always. So it seemed to Cynthia that the one and only
+thing worth doing, under the circumstances, was to make friends with G.
+G.'s mother. To that end, Cynthia donned a warm coat of pony-skin and
+drove in a taxicab to G. G.'s mother's address, which she had long since
+looked up in the telephone book.
+
+"If she isn't alone," said Cynthia, "I shan't know what to say or what
+to do."
+
+And she hesitated, with her thumb hovering about the front-door
+bell--as a humming-bird hovers at a flower.
+
+Then she said: "What does it matter? Nobody's going to eat me." And she
+rang the bell.
+
+G. G.'s mother was at home. She was alone. She was sitting in G. G.'s
+father's library, where she always did sit when she was alone. It was
+where she kept most of her pictures of G. G.'s father and of G. G.,
+though she had others in her bedroom; and in her dressing-room she had a
+dapple-gray horse of wood that G. G. had galloped about on when he was
+little. She had a sweet face, full of courage and affection. And
+everything in her house was fresh and pretty, though there wasn't
+anything that could have cost very much. G. G.'s father was a lawyer. He
+was more interested in leaving a stainless name behind him than a pot of
+money. And, somehow, fruit doesn't tumble off your neighbor's tree and
+fall into your own lap--unless you climb the tree when nobody is looking
+and give the tree a sound shaking. I might have said of G. G., in the
+very beginning, that he was born of poor _and_ honest parents. It would
+have saved all this explanation.
+
+G. G.'s mother didn't make things hard for Cynthia. One glance was
+enough to tell her that dropping into the little library out of the blue
+sky was not a pretty girl but a blessed angel--not a rich man's
+daughter but a treasure. It wasn't enough to give one hand to such a
+maiden. G. G.'s mother gave her two. But she didn't kiss her. She felt
+things too deeply to kiss easily.
+
+"I've come to talk about G. G.," said Cynthia. "I couldn't help it. I
+think he's the _dearest_ boy!"
+
+She finished quite breathless--and if there had been any Jacqueminot
+roses present they might have hung their lovely heads in shame and left
+the room.
+
+"G. G. has shown me pictures of you," said his mother. "And once, when
+we thought we were going to lose him, he used his last strength to write
+to you. I mailed the letter. That is a long time ago. Nearly two years.
+
+"And I didn't know that he'd been ill in all that time," said Cynthia;
+"he never told me."
+
+"He would have cut off his hand sooner than make you anxious. That was
+why he _would_ write his daily letter to you. That one must have been
+almost as hard to write as cutting off a hand."
+
+"He writes to me every day," said Cynthia, "and I write to him; but I
+haven't seen him for a year and I don't feel as if I could stand it much
+longer. When he gets well we're going to be married. And if he doesn't
+get well pretty soon we're going to be married anyway."
+
+"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother. "You know that wouldn't be
+right!"
+
+"I don't know," said Cynthia; "and if anybody thinks I'm going to be
+tricked out of the man I love by a lot of silly little germs they are
+very much mistaken!"
+
+"But, my dear," said G. G.'s mother, "G. G. can't support a wife--not
+for a long time anyway. We have nothing to give him. And, of course, he
+can't work now--and perhaps can't for years."
+
+"I, too," said Cynthia--with proper pride--"have parents. Mine are
+rolling in money. Whenever I ask them for anything they always give it
+to me without question."
+
+"You have never asked them," said G. G.'s mother, "for a sick, penniless
+boy."
+
+"But I shall," said Cynthia, "the moment G. G.'s well--and maybe
+sooner."
+
+There was a little silence.
+
+Then G. G.'s mother leaned forward and took both of Cynthia's hands in
+hers.
+
+"I don't wonder at him," she said--"I don't. I was ever so jealous of
+you, but I'm not any more. I think you're the _dearest_ girl!"
+
+"Oh!" cried Cynthia. "I am so glad! But will G. G.'s father like me
+too?"
+
+"He has never yet failed," said G. G.'s mother, "to like with his whole
+heart anything that was stainless and beautiful."
+
+"Is he like G. G.?"
+
+"He has the same beautiful round head, but he has a rugged look that G.
+G. will never have. He has a lion look. He might have been a terrible
+tyrant if he hadn't happened, instead, to be a saint."
+
+And she showed Cynthia, side by side, pictures of the father and the
+boy.
+
+"They have such valiant eyes!" said Cynthia.
+
+"There is nothing base in my young men," said G. G.'s mother.
+
+Then the two women got right down to business and began an interminable
+conversation of praise. And sometimes G. G.'s mother's eyes cried a
+little while the rest of her face smiled and she prattled like a brook.
+And the meeting ended with a great hug, in which G. G.'s mother's tiny
+feet almost parted company with the floor.
+
+And it was arranged that they two should fly up to Saranac and be with
+G. G. for a day.
+
+
+IV
+
+It wasn't from shame that G. G. signed another name than his own to the
+stories that he was making at the rate of one every two months. He
+judged calmly and dispassionately that they were "going to be pretty
+good some day," and that it would never be necessary for him to live in
+a city. He signed his stories with an assumed name because he was full
+of dramatic instinct. He wanted to be able--just the minute he was
+well--to say to Cynthia:
+
+"Let us be married!" Then she was to say: "Of course, G. G.; but what
+are we going to live on?" And G. G. was going to say: "Ever hear of
+so-and-so?"
+
+CYNTHIA: Goodness gracious! Sakes alive! Yes; I should think I had! And,
+except for you, darlingest G. G., I think he's the very greatest man in
+all the world!
+
+G. G.: Goosey-Gander, know that he and I are one and the same
+person--and that we've saved seventeen hundred dollars to get married
+on!
+
+(Tableau not to be seen by the audience.)
+
+So far as keeping Cynthia and his father and mother in ignorance of the
+fledgling wings he was beginning to flap, G. G. succeeded admirably; but
+it might have been better to have told them all in the beginning.
+
+Now G. G.'s seventeen hundred dollars was a huge myth. He was writing
+short stories at the rate of six a year and he had picked out to do
+business with one of the most dignified magazines in the world.
+Dignified people do not squander money. The magazine in question paid G.
+G. from sixty to seventy dollars apiece for his stories and was much too
+dignified to inform him that plenty of other magazines--very frivolous
+and not in the least dignified--would have been ashamed to pay so little
+for anything but the poems, which all magazines use to fill up blank
+spaces. So, even in his own ambitious and courageous mind, a "married
+living" seemed a very long way off.
+
+He refused to be discouraged, however. His health was too good for that.
+The doctor pointed to him with pride as a patient who followed
+instructions to the letter and was not going to die of the disease which
+had brought him to Saranac. And they wrote to G. G's father--who was
+finding life very expensive--that, if he could keep G. G. at Saranac, or
+almost anywhere out of New York, for another year or two, they
+guaranteed--as much as human doctors can--that G. G. would then be as
+sound as a bell and fit to live anywhere.
+
+This pronouncement was altogether too much of a good thing for Fate. As
+G. G's father walked up-town from his office, Fate raised a dust in his
+face which, in addition to the usual ingredients of city dust, contained
+at least one thoroughly compatible pair of pneumonia germs. These went
+for their honey-moon on a pleasant, warm journey up G. G's father's left
+nostril and to house-keeping in his lungs. In a few hours they raised a
+family of several hundred thousand bouncing baby germs; and these grew
+up in a few minutes and began to set up establishments of their own
+right and left.
+
+G. G.'s father admitted that he had a "heavy cold on the chest." It was
+such a heavy cold that he became delirious, and doctors came and sent
+for nurses; and there was laid in the home of G. G.'s father the
+corner-stone of a large edifice of financial disaster.
+
+He had never had a partner. His practice came to a dead halt. The
+doctors whom G. G.'s mother called in were, of course, the best she had
+ever heard of. They would have been leaders of society if their persons
+had been as fashionable as their prices. The corner drug store made its
+modest little profit of three or four hundred per cent on the drugs
+which were telephoned for daily. The day nurse rolled up twenty-five
+dollars a week and the night nurse thirty-five. The servant's wages
+continued as usual. The price of beef, eggs, vegetables, etc., rose. The
+interest on the mortgage fell due. And it is a wonder, considering how
+much he worried, that G. G.'s father ever lived to face his obligations.
+
+Cynthia, meanwhile, having heard that G. G. was surely going to get
+well, was so happy that she couldn't contain the news. And she proceeded
+to divulge it to her father.
+
+"Papa," she said, "I think I ought to tell you that years ago, at
+Saranac--that Christmas when I went up with the Andersons--I met the
+man that I am going to marry. He was a boy then; but now we're both
+grown up and we feel just the same about each other."
+
+And she told her father G. G.'s name and that he had been very delicate,
+but that he was surely going to get well. Cynthia's father, who had
+always given her everything she asked for until now, was not at all
+enthusiastic.
+
+"I can't prevent your marrying any one you determine to marry, Cynthia,"
+he said. "Can this young man support a wife?"
+
+"How could he!" she exclaimed--"living at Saranac and not being able to
+work, and not having any money to begin with! But surely, if the way
+_we_ live is any criterion, you could spare us some money--couldn't
+you?"
+
+"You wish me to say that I will support a delicate son-in-law whom I
+have never seen? Consult your intelligence, Cynthia."
+
+"I have my allowance," she said, her lips curling.
+
+"Yes," said her father, "while you live at home and do as you're told."
+
+"Now, papa, don't tell me that you're going to behave like a lugubrious
+parent in a novel! Don't tell me that you are going to cut me off with a
+shilling!"
+
+"I shan't do that," he said gravely; "it will be without a shilling."
+But he tempered this savage statement with a faint smile.
+
+"Papa, dear, is this quite definite? Are you talking in your right mind
+and do you really mean what you say?"
+
+"Suppose you talk the matter over with your mother--she's always
+indulged you in every way. See what she says."
+
+It developed that neither of Cynthia's parents was enthusiastic at the
+prospect of her marrying a nameless young man--she had told them his
+name, but that was all she got for her pains--who hadn't a penny and who
+had had consumption, and might or might not be sound again. Personally
+they did not believe that consumption can be cured. It can be arrested
+for a time, they admitted, but it always comes back. Cynthia's mother
+even made a physiological attack on Cynthia's understanding, with the
+result that Cynthia turned indignantly pink and left the room, saying:
+
+"If the doctor thinks it's perfectly right and proper for us to marry I
+don't see the least point in listening to the opinions of excited and
+prejudiced amateurs."
+
+The ultimatum that she had from her parents was distinct, final, and
+painful.
+
+"Marry him if you like. We will neither forgive you nor support you."
+
+They were perfectly calm with her--cool, affectionate, sensible, and
+worldly, as it is right and proper for parents to be. She told them they
+were wrong-headed, old-fashioned, and unintelligent; but as long as they
+hadn't made scenes and talked loud she found that she couldn't help
+loving them almost as much as she always had; but she loved G. G. very
+much more. And having definitely decided to defy her family, to marry G.
+G. and live happily ever afterward, she consulted her check-book and
+discovered that her available munition of war was something less than
+five hundred dollars--most of it owed to her dress-maker.
+
+"Well, well!" she said; "she's always had plenty of money from me; she
+can afford to wait."
+
+And Cynthia wrote to her dress-maker, who was also her friend!
+
+
+     MY DEAR CELESTE: I have decided that you will have to afford to
+     wait for your money. I have an enterprise in view which calls for
+     all the available capital I have. Please write me a nice note and
+     say that you don't mind a bit. Otherwise we shall stop being
+     friends and I shall always get my clothes from somebody else. Let
+     me know when the new models come....
+
+
+V
+
+On her way down-town Cynthia stopped to see G. G.'s mother and found the
+whole household in the throes occasioned by its head's pneumonia.
+
+"Why haven't you let me know?" exclaimed Cynthia. "There must be so
+many little things that I could have done to help you."
+
+Though the sick man couldn't have heard them if they had shouted, the
+two women talked in whispers, with their heads very close together.
+
+"He's better," said G. G.'s mother, "but yesterday they wanted me to
+send for G. G. 'No,' I said. 'You may have given him up, but I haven't.
+If I send for my boy it would look as if I had surrendered,' And almost
+at once, if you'll believe it, he seemed to shake off something that was
+trying to strangle him and took a turn for the better; and now they say
+that, barring some long names, he will get well.... It does look, my
+dear, as if death had seen that there was no use facing a thoroughly
+determined woman."
+
+At this point, because she was very much overwrought, G. G.'s mother had
+a mild little attack of hysteria; and Cynthia beat her on the back and
+shook her and kissed her until she was over it. Then G. G.'s mother told
+Cynthia about her financial troubles.
+
+"It isn't us that matters," she said, "but that G. G. ought to have one
+more year in a first-rate climate; and it isn't going to be possible to
+give it to him. They say that he's well, my dear, absolutely well; but
+that now he should have a chance to build up and become strong and
+heavy, so that he can do a man's work in the world. As it is, we shall
+have to take him home to live; and you know what New York dust and
+climate can do to people who have been very, very ill and are still
+delicate and high-strung."
+
+"There's only one thing to do for the present," said Cynthia--"anybody
+with the least notion of business knows that--we must keep him at
+Saranac just as long as our credit holds out, mustn't we?--until the
+woman where he boards begins to act ugly and threatens to turn him out
+in the snow."
+
+"Oh, but that would be dreadful!" said G. G.'s mother. Cynthia smiled in
+a superior way.
+
+"I don't believe," she said, "that you understand the first thing about
+business. Even my father, who is a prude about bills, says that all the
+business of the country is done on credit.... Now you're not going to be
+silly, are you?--and make G. G. come to New York before he has to?"
+
+"It will have to be pretty soon, I'm afraid," said G. G.'s mother.
+
+"Sooner than run such risks with any boy of mine," said Cynthia, with a
+high color, "I'd beg, I'd borrow, I'd forge, I'd lie--I'd steal!"
+
+"Don't I know you would!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother. "My darling girl,
+you've got the noblest character--it's just shining in your eyes!"
+
+"There's another thing," said Cynthia: "I have to go down-town now on
+business, but you must telephone me around five o'clock and tell me how
+G. G.'s father is. And you must spend all your time between now and then
+trying to think up something really useful that I can do to help you.
+And"--here Cynthia became very mysterious--"I forbid you to worry about
+money until I tell you to!"
+
+Cynthia had a cousin in Wall Street; his name was Jarrocks Bell. He was
+twenty years older than Cynthia and he had been fond of her ever since
+she was born. He was a great, big, good-looking man, gruff without and
+tender within. Clever people, who hadn't made successful brokers,
+wondered how in the face of what they called his "obvious stupidity"
+Jarrocks Bell had managed to grow rich in Wall Street. The answer was
+obvious enough to any one who knew him intimately. To begin with, his
+stupidity was superficial. In the second place, he had studied bonds and
+stocks until he knew a great deal about them. Then, though a drinking
+man, he had a head like iron and was never moved by exhilaration to
+mention his own or anybody else's affairs. Furthermore, he was
+unscrupulously honest. He was so honest and blunt that people thought
+him brutal at times. Last and not least among the elements of his
+success was the fact that he himself never speculated.
+
+When the big men found out that there was in Wall Street a broker who
+didn't speculate himself, who didn't drink to excess, who was absolutely
+honest, and who never opened his mouth when it was better shut, they
+began to patronize that man's firm. In short, the moment Jarrocks Bell's
+qualities were discovered, Jarrocks Bell was made. So that now, in
+speculative years, his profits were enormous.
+
+Cynthia had always been fond of her big, blunt cousin, as he of her; and
+in her present trouble her thoughts flew to him as straight as a homing
+aeroplane to the landing-stage.
+
+Even a respectable broker's office is a noisome, embarrassing place, and
+among the clients are men whose eyes have become popped from staring at
+paper-tapes and pretty girls; but Cynthia had no more fear of men than a
+farmer's daughter has of cows, and she flashed through Jarrocks's outer
+office--preceded by a very small boy--with her color unchanged and only
+her head a little higher than usual.
+
+Jarrocks must have wondered to the point of vulgar curiosity what the
+deuce had brought Cynthia to see him in the busiest hour of a very busy
+day; but he said "Hello, Cynthia!" as naturally as if they two had been
+visiting in the same house and he had come face to face with her for the
+third or fourth time that morning.
+
+"I suppose," said Cynthia, "that you are dreadfully busy; but, Jarrocks
+dear, my affairs are so much more important to me than yours can
+possibly be to you--do you mind?"
+
+"May I smoke?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Then I don't mind. What's your affair, Cynthia--money or the heart?"
+
+"Both, Jarrocks." And she told him pretty much what the reader has
+already learned. As for Jarrocks's listening, he was a perfect study of
+himself. He laughed gruffly when he ought to have cried; and when
+Cynthia tried to be a little humorous he looked very solemn and not
+unlike the big bronze Buddha of the Japanese. Inside, however, his big
+heart was full of compassion and tenderness for his favorite girl in all
+the world. Nobody will ever know just how fond Jarrocks was of Cynthia.
+It was one of those matters on which--owing, perhaps, to his being her
+senior by twenty years--he had always thought it best to keep his mouth
+shut.
+
+"What's your plan?" he asked. "Where do I come in? I'll give you
+anything I've got." Cynthia waived the offer; it was a little unwelcome.
+
+"I've got about five hundred dollars," she said, "and I want to
+speculate with it and make a lot of money, so that I can be independent
+of papa and mamma."
+
+"Lots of people," said Jarrocks, "come to Wall Street with five hundred
+dollars, more or less, and they wish to be independent of papa and
+mamma. They end up by going to live in the Mills Hotel."
+
+"I know," said Cynthia; "but this is really important. If G. G. could
+work it would be different."
+
+"Tell me one thing," said Jarrocks: "If you weren't in love with G. G.
+what would you think of him as a candidate for your very best friend's
+hand?"
+
+Cynthia counted ten before answering.
+
+"Jarrocks, dear," she said--and he turned away from the meltingness of
+her lovely face--"he's so pure, he's so straight, he's so gentle and so
+brave, that I don't really think I can tell you what I think of him."
+
+There was silence for a moment, then Jarrocks said gruffly:
+
+"That's a clean-enough bill of health. Guess you can bring him into the
+family, Cynthia."
+
+Then he drummed with his thick, stubby fingers on the arm of his chair.
+
+"The idea," he said at last, "is to turn five hundred dollars into a
+fortune. You know I don't speculate."
+
+"But you make it easy for other people?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"If you'd come a year ago," he said, "I'd have sent you away. Just at
+the present moment your proposition isn't the darn-fool thing it
+sounds."
+
+"I knew you'd agree with me," said Cynthia complacently. "I knew you'd
+put me into something that was going 'way up."
+
+Jarrocks snorted.
+
+"Prices are at about the highest level they've ever struck and money was
+never more expensive. I think we're going to see such a tumble in values
+as was never seen before. It almost tempts me to come out of my shell
+and take a flyer--if I lose your five hundred for you, you won't squeal,
+Cynthia?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"Then I'll tell you what I think. There's nothing certain in this
+business, but if ever there was a chance to turn five hundred dollars
+into big money it's now. You've entered Wall Street, Cynthia, at what
+looks to me like the psychological moment."
+
+"That's a good omen," said Cynthia. "I believe we shall succeed. And I
+leave everything to you."
+
+Then she wrote him a check for all the money she had in the world. He
+held it between his thumb and forefinger while the ink dried.
+
+"By the way, Cynthia," he said, "do you want the account to stand in
+your own name?"
+
+She thought a moment, then laughed and told him to put it in the name of
+G. G.'s mother. "But you must report to me how things go," she said.
+
+Jarrocks called a clerk and gave him an order to sell something or
+other. In three minutes the clerk reported that "it"--just some letter
+of the alphabet--had been sold at such and such a price.
+
+For another five minutes Jarrocks denied himself to all visitors. Then
+he called for another report on the stock which he had just caused to be
+sold. It was selling "off a half."
+
+"Well, Cynthia," said Jarrocks, "you're fifty dollars richer than when
+you came. Now I've got to tell you to go. I'll look out for your
+interests as if they were my own."
+
+And Jarrocks, looking rather stupid and bored, conducted Cynthia through
+his outer offices and put her into an elevator "going down." Her face
+vanished and his heart continued to mumble and grumble, just the way a
+tooth does when it is getting ready to ache.
+
+Cynthia had entered Wall Street at an auspicious moment. Stocks were at
+that high level from which they presently tumbled to the panic
+quotations of nineteen-seven. And Jarrocks, whom the unsuccessful
+thought so very stupid, had made a very shrewd guess as to what was
+going to happen.
+
+Two weeks later he wrote Cynthia that if she could use two or three
+thousand dollars she could have them, without troubling her balance very
+perceptibly.
+
+"I thought you had a chance," he wrote. "I'm beginning to think it's a
+sure thing! Keep a stiff upper lip and first thing you know you'll have
+the laugh on mamma and papa. Give 'em my best regards."
+
+
+VI
+
+If it is wicked to gamble Cynthia was wicked. If it is wicked to lie
+Cynthia was wicked. If the money that comes out of Wall Street belonged
+originally to widows and orphans, why, that is the kind of money which
+she amassed for her own selfish purposes. Worst of all, on learning from
+Jarrocks that the Rainbow's Foot--where the pot of gold is--was almost
+in sight, this bad, wicked girl's sensations were those of unmixed
+triumph and delight!
+
+The panic of nineteen-seven is history now. Plenty of people who lost
+their money during those exciting months can explain to you how any
+fool, with the least luck, could have made buckets of it instead.
+
+As a snowball rolling down a hill of damp snow swells to gigantic
+proportions, so Cynthia's five hundred dollars descended the long slopes
+of nineteen-seven, doubling itself at almost every turn. And when, at
+last, values had so shrunk that it looked to Jarrocks as if they could
+not shrink any more, he told her that her account--which stood in the
+name of G. G.'s mother--was worth nearly four hundred thousand dollars.
+"And I think," he said, "that, if you now buy stocks outright and hold
+them as investments, your money will double again."
+
+So they put their heads together and Cynthia bought some Union Pacific
+at par and some Steel Common in the careless twenties, and other
+standard securities that were begging, almost with tears in their eyes,
+to be bought and cared for by somebody. She had the certificates of what
+she bought made out in the name of G. G.'s mother. And she went up-town
+and found G. G.'s mother alone, and said:
+
+"Oh, my dear! If anybody ever finds out _you_ will catch it!"
+
+G. G.'s mother knew there was a joke of some kind preparing at her
+expense, but she couldn't help looking a little puzzled and anxious.
+
+"It's bad enough to do what you have done," continued Cynthia; "but on
+top of it to be going to lie up and down--that does seem a little too
+awful!"
+
+"What are you going to tell me?" cried G. G.'s mother. "I know you've
+got some good news up your sleeve!"
+
+"Gambler!" cried Cynthia--"cold-blooded, reckless Wall Street
+speculator!" And the laughter that was pent up in her face burst its
+bonds, accompanied by hugs and kisses.
+
+"Now listen!" said Cynthia, as soon as she could. "On such and such a
+day, you took five hundred dollars to a Wall Street broker named
+Jarrocks Bell--you thought that conditions were right for turning into a
+Bear. You went short of the market. You kept it up for weeks and months.
+Do you know what you did? You pyramided on the way down!"
+
+"Mercy!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother, her eyes shining with wonder and
+excitement.
+
+"First thing you knew," continued Cynthia, "you were worth four hundred
+thousand dollars!"
+
+G. G.'s mother gave a little scream, as if she had seen a mouse.
+
+"And you invested it," went on Cynthia, relenting, "so that now you
+stand to double your capital; and your annual income is between thirty
+and forty thousand dollars!"
+
+After this Cynthia really did some explaining, until G. G.'s mother
+really understood what had really happened. It must be recorded that, at
+first, she was completely flabbergasted.
+
+"And you've gone and put it in my name!" she said. "But why?"
+
+"Don't you see," said Cynthia, "that if I came offering money to G. G.
+and G. G.'s father they wouldn't even sniff at it? But if you've got
+it--why, they've just got to share with you. Isn't that so?"
+
+"Y-e-e-s," admitted G. G.'s mother; "but, my dear, I can't take it.
+Even if I could, they would want to know where I'd gotten it and I'd
+have nothing to say."
+
+"Not if you're the one woman in a million that I think you are," said
+Cynthia. "Tell me, isn't your husband at his wit's end to think how to
+meet the bills for his illness and all and all? And wouldn't you raise
+your finger to bring all his miserable worries to an end? Just look at
+the matter from a business point of view! You must tell your husband and
+G. G. that what has really happened to me happened to you; that you were
+desperate; that you took the five hundred dollars to speculate with, and
+that this is the result."
+
+"But that wouldn't be true," said G. G.'s mother.
+
+"For mercy's sake," said Cynthia, "what has the truth got to do with it!
+This isn't a matter of religion or martyrdom; it's a matter of business!
+How to put an end to my husband's troubles and to enable my son to marry
+the girl he loves?--that's your problem; and the solution is--lie! Whom
+can the money come from if not from you? Not from me certainly. You must
+lie! You'd better begin in the dark, where your husband can't see your
+face--because I'm afraid you don't know how very well. But after a time
+it will get easy; and when you've told him the story two or three
+times--with details--you'll end by believing it yourself.... And, of
+course," she added, "you must make over half of the securities to G. G.,
+so that he will have enough money to support a wife."
+
+For two hours Cynthia wrestled with G. G.'s mother's conscience; but,
+when at last the struggling creature was thrown, the two women literally
+took it by the hair and dragged it around the room and beat it until it
+was deaf, dumb, and blind.
+
+And when G. G.'s father came home G. G.'s mother met him in the hall
+that was darkish, and hid her face against his--and lied to him! And as
+she lied the years began to fall from the shoulders of G. G.'s
+father--to the number of ten.
+
+
+VII
+
+Cynthia was also met in a front hall--but by her father.
+
+"I've been looking for you, Cynthia," he said gravely. "I want to talk
+to you and get your advice--no; the library is full of smoke--come in
+here."
+
+He led her into the drawing-room, which neither of them could remember
+ever having sat in before.
+
+"I've been talking with a young gentleman," said her father without
+further preliminaries, "who made himself immensely interesting to me. To
+begin with, I never saw a handsomer, more engaging specimen of young
+manhood; and, in the second place, he is the author of some stories that
+I have enjoyed in the past year more than any one's except O. Henry's.
+He doesn't write over his own name--but that's neither here nor there.
+
+"He came to me for advice. Why he selected me, a total stranger, will
+appear presently. His family isn't well off; and, though he expects to
+succeed in literature--and there's no doubt of it in my mind--he feels
+that he ought to give it up and go into something in which the financial
+prospects are brighter. I suggested a rich wife, but that seemed to hurt
+his feelings. He said it would be bad enough to marry a girl that had
+more than he had; but to marry a rich girl, when he had only the few
+hundreds a year that he can make writing stories, was an intolerable
+thought. And that's all the more creditable to him because, from what I
+can gather, he is desperately in love--and the girl is potentially
+rich."
+
+"But," said Cynthia, "what have I to do with all this?"
+
+Her father laughed. "This young fellow didn't come to me of his own
+accord. I sent for him. And I must tell you that, contrary to my
+expectations, I was charmed with him. If I had had a son I should wish
+him to be just like this youngster."
+
+Cynthia was very much puzzled.
+
+"He writes stories?" she said.
+
+"Bully stories! But he takes so much pains that his output is small."
+
+"Well," said she, "what did you tell him?"
+
+"I told him to wait."
+
+"That's conservative advice."
+
+"As a small boy," said her father, "he was very delicate; but now he's
+as sound as a bell and he looks as strong as an elk."
+
+Cynthia rose to her feet, trembling slightly.
+
+"What was the matter with him--when he was delicate?"
+
+"Consumption."
+
+She became as it were taller--and vivid with beauty.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"In the library."
+
+Cynthia put her hands on her father's shoulders.
+
+"It's all right," she said; "his family has come into quite a lot of
+money. He doesn't know it yet. They're going to give him enough to marry
+on. You still think he ought to marry--don't you?"
+
+They kissed.
+
+Cynthia flew out of the room, across the hall, and into the library.
+
+_They_ kissed!
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAP
+
+     The animals went in two by two.
+           Hurrah! Hurrah!
+
+
+Given Bower for a last name, the boys are bound to call you "Right" or
+"Left." They called me "Right" because I usually held it, one way or
+another. I was shot with luck. No matter what happened, it always worked
+out to my advantage. All inside of six months, for instance, the mate
+fell overboard and I got his job; the skipper got drunk after weathering
+a cyclone and ran the old _Boldero_ aground in "lily-pad" weather--and I
+got his. Then the owner called me in and said: "Captain Bower, what do
+you know about Noah's Ark?" And I said: "Only that 'the animals went in
+two by two. Hurrah! Hurrah!'" And the owner said: "But how did he feed
+'em--specially the meat-eaters?" And I said: "He got hold of a Hindu who
+had his arm torn off by a black panther and who now looks after the same
+at the Calcutta Zoo--and he put it up to him."
+
+"The Bible doesn't say so," said the owner.
+
+"Everything the Bible says is true," said I. "But there're heaps of true
+sayings, you know, that aren't in it at all."
+
+"Well," says the owner, "you slip out to yon Zoo and you put it up to
+yon one-armed Hindu that a white Noah named Bower has been ordered to
+carry pairs of all the Indian fauna from Singapore to Sydney; and you
+tell him to shake his black panther and 'come along with.'"
+
+"What will you pay?" I asked.
+
+The owner winked his eye. "What will I promise?" said he. "I leave that
+to you."
+
+But I wasn't bluffed. The owner always talked pagan and practised
+Christian; loved his little joke. They called him "Bond" Hadley on the
+water-front to remind themselves that his word was just as good.
+
+I settled with Yir Massir in a long confab back of the snake-house, and
+that night Hadley blew me to Ivy Green's benefit at the opera-house.
+
+Poor little girl! There weren't fifty in the audience. She couldn't act.
+I mean she couldn't draw. The whole company was on the bum and
+stone-broke. They'd scraped out of Australia and the Sandwich Islands,
+but it looked as if they'd stay in Calcutta, doing good works, such as
+mending roads for the public, to the end of time.
+
+"Ivy Green is a pretty name for a girl," said the owner.
+
+"And Ivy Green is a pretty girl," I said; "and I'll bet my horned soul
+she's a good girl."
+
+To tell the truth, I was taken with her something terrible at first
+sight. I'd often seen women that I wanted, but she was the first
+girl--and the last. It's a different sort of wanting, that. It's the
+good in you that wants--instead of the bad.
+
+Her little face was like the pansies that used to grow in mother's
+dooryard; and a dooryard is the place for pansies, not a stage. When her
+act was over the fifty present did their best; but I knew, when she'd
+finished bobbing little curtsies and smiling her pretty smile, she'd
+slip off to her dressing-room and cry like a baby. I couldn't stand it.
+There were other acts to come, but I couldn't wait.
+
+"If Ivy Green is a pretty name for a girl, Ivy Bower is a prettier name
+for a woman," I said. "I'm going behind."
+
+He looked up, angry. Then he saw that I didn't mean any harm and he
+looked down. He said nothing. I got behind by having the pull on certain
+ropes in that opera-house, and I asked a comedian with a face like a
+walrus which was Miss Green's dressing-room.
+
+"Friend of hers?" he says.
+
+"Yes," says I, "a friend."
+
+He showed me which door and I knocked. Her voice was full of worry and
+tears.
+
+"Who's there?" she said.
+
+"A friend," said I.
+
+"Pass, friend," said she.
+
+And I took it to mean "Come in," but it didn't. Still, she wasn't so
+dishabilled as to matter. She was crying and rubbing off the last of her
+paint.
+
+"Miss Green," I said, "you've made me feel so mean and miserable that I
+had to come and tell you. My name is Bower. The boys call me 'Right'
+Bower, meaning that I'm lucky and straight. It was lucky for me that I
+came to your benefit, and I hope to God that it will be lucky for you."
+
+"Yes?" she says--none too warm.
+
+"As for you, Miss Green," I said, "you're up against it, aren't you? The
+manager's broke. You don't know when you've touched any salary. There's
+been no balm in your benefit. What are you going to do?"
+
+This time she looked me over before she spoke.
+
+"I don't know," she said.
+
+"I don't have to ask," said I, blushing red, "if you're a good girl.
+It's just naturally obvious. I guess that's what put me up to butting
+in. I want to help. Will you answer three questions?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Where," said I, "will you get breakfast to-morrow?--lunch
+to-morrow?--and dinner to-morrow?"
+
+"We disband to-night," she said, "and I don't know."
+
+"I suppose you know," said I, "what happens to most white girls who get
+stranded in Indian cities?"
+
+"I know," she said, "that people get up against it so hard that they
+oughtn't to be blamed for anything they do."
+
+"They aren't," I said, "by--Christians; but it's ugly just the same.
+Now----"
+
+"And you," she said, flaring up, "think that, as long as it's got to be,
+it might as well be you! Is that your song and dance, Mr. Smarty?"
+
+I shook my head and smiled.
+
+"Don't be a little goat!" I said; and that seemed to make her take to me
+and trust me.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" she asked.
+
+"I'll tell you," I said; and I found that it wasn't easy. "First place,"
+I said, "I've got some money saved up. That will keep you on Easy Street
+till I get back from Sydney. If by that time nothing's turned up that
+you want of your own free heart and will, I'll ask you to pay me back
+by--by changing your name."
+
+She didn't quite follow.
+
+"That," said I, "gives you a chance to look around--gives you one small
+chance in a million to light on some man you can care for and who'll
+care for you and take care of you. Failing that, it would be fair enough
+for you to take me, failing a better. See?"
+
+"You mean," she said, "that if things don't straighten out, it would be
+better for me to become Mrs. Bower than walk the streets? Is that it?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"But I don't see your point of view," she cried. "Just because you're
+sorry for a girl don't mean you want to make her your wife."
+
+"It isn't sorrowing," I said. "It's wanting. It's the right kind of
+wanting. It's the wanting that would rather wait than hurt you; that
+would rather do without you than hurt you."
+
+"And you'll trust me with all your savings and go away to Australia--and
+if I find some other man that I like better you'll let me off from
+marrying you? Is that it?"
+
+"That's about it," I said.
+
+"And suppose," says she, "that you don't come back, and nobody shows up,
+and the money goes?"
+
+That was a new point of view.
+
+"Well," said I, "we've got to take some chances in this world."
+
+"We have," said she. "And now look here--I don't know how much of it's
+wanting and how much of it's fear--but if you'll take chances I will."
+
+She turned as red as a beet and looked away.
+
+"In words of two syllables," said I, "what do you mean?"
+
+"I mean," she said--and she was still as red as a beet, but this time
+she looked me in my eyes without a flinch in hers--"that if you're dead
+sure you want me--are you?--if you're dead sure, why, I'll take chances
+on my wanting you. I believe every word you've said to me. Is that
+right?"
+
+"Every word," I said. "That is right."
+
+Then we looked at each other for a long time.
+
+"What a lot we'll have to tell each other," she said, "before we're
+really acquainted. But you're sure? You're quite sure?"
+
+"Sure that I want you? Yes," I said; "not sure that you ought not to
+wait and think me over."
+
+"You've begun," she said, "with everything that's noble and generous. I
+could never look myself in the face again if I felt called upon to begin
+by being mean."
+
+"Hadn't you better think it over?" I said. "Hadn't you?"
+
+But she put her hands on my shoulders.
+
+"If an angel with wings had come with gifts," she said, "would I have
+thought them over? And just because your wings don't show----"
+
+"It isn't fair," I mumbled. "I give you a choice between the streets and
+me and you feel forced to choose me."
+
+But she pulled my head down and gave me a quick, fierce kiss.
+
+"There," said she--"was that forced? Did you force me to do that? No,"
+she said; "you needn't think you're the only person in the world that
+wants another person.... If you go to Australia I don't wait here. I go
+too. If you sink by the way, I sink. And don't you go to thinking you've
+made me a one-sided bargain.... I can cook for you and mend for you and
+save for you. And if you're sick I can nurse you. And I can black your
+boots."
+
+"I thought," said I, "that you were just a little girl that I wanted,
+but you turn out to be the whole world that I've got to have. Slip the
+rest of your canvas on and I'll hook it up for you. Then we'll find some
+one to marry us--'nless you'd rather wait."
+
+"Wait?" said she, turning her back and standing still, which most women
+haven't sense enough to do when a man's ten thumbs are trying to hook
+them up. "I've been waiting all my life for this--and you!"
+
+"And I," said I, splitting a thumb-nail, "would go through an eternity
+of hell if I knew that this was at the end of it--and you!"
+
+"What is your church?" she asked of a sudden.
+
+"Same as yours," I said, "which is----"
+
+"Does it matter," said she, "if God is in it? Do you pray?"
+
+"No," said I; "do you?"
+
+"Always," she said, "before I go to bed."
+
+"Then I will," said I; "always--before we do."
+
+"Sometimes," she said, "I've been shaken about God. Was to-night--before
+you came. But He's made good--hasn't He?"
+
+"He has," I said. "And now you're hooked up. And I wish it was to do all
+over again. I loved doing it."
+
+"Did you?" said she.
+
+Her eyes were bright and brave like two stars. She slipped her hand
+through my arm and we marched out of the opera-house. Half a dozen young
+globe-trotters were at the stage-door waiting to take a chance on Miss
+Green as she came out, but none of them spoke. We headed for the nearest
+city directory and looked up a minister.
+
+
+II
+
+I had married April; she cried when she thought she wasn't good enough
+for me; she smiled like the sun when I swore she was.
+
+I had married June; she was like an armful of roses.
+
+We weren't two; we were one. What alloy does gold make mixed with brass?
+We were that alloy. I was the brass.
+
+We travelled down to Singapore first-class, with one-armed Yir Massir to
+look after us--down the old Hoogli with the stubs of half-burned Hindus
+bobbing alongside, crows sitting on 'em and tearing off strips. We ran
+aground on all the regular old sand-bars that are never twice in the
+same place; and one dusk we saw tigers come out of the jungle to drink.
+We'd both travelled quite some, but you wouldn't have thought it. Ivy
+Bower and Right Bower had just run away from school for to see the world
+"so new and all."
+
+Some honey-moons a man keeps finding out things about his wife that he
+don't like--little tricks of temper and temperature; but I kept finding
+out things about mine that I'd never even dared to hope for. I went
+pretty near crazy with love of her. At first she was a child that had
+had a wicked, cruel nightmare--and I'd happened to be about to comfort
+her when she waked and to soothe her. Then she got over her scare and
+began to play at matrimony, putting on little airs and dignities--just
+like a child playing grown-up. Then all of a sudden it came to her, that
+tremendous love that some women have for some of us dogs of men. It was
+big as a storm, but it wasn't too big for her. Nothing that's noble and
+generous was too big for her; nor was any way of showing her love too
+little. Any little mole-hill of thoughtfulness from me was
+changed--presto!--into a chain o' mountains; but she thought in
+mountains and made mole-hills of 'em.
+
+We steamed into Singapore and I showed her the old _Boldero_, that was
+to be our home, laid against the Copra Wharf, waiting to be turned into
+an ark. The animals weren't all collected and we had a day or two to
+chase about and enjoy ourselves; but she wasn't for expensive pleasures.
+
+"Wait," she said, "till you're a little tired of me; but now, when we're
+happy just to be together walking in the dust, what's the use of
+disbursing?"
+
+"If we save till I'm tired of you," says I, "we'll be rich."
+
+"Rich it is, then," said she, "for those who will need it more."
+
+"But," says I, "the dictionary says that a skunk is a man that
+economizes on his honey-moon."
+
+"If you're bound to blow yourself," says she, "let's trot down to the
+Hongkong-Shanghai Bank and buy some shares in something."
+
+"But," says I, "you have no engagement ring."
+
+"And I'm not engaged," says she. "I'm a married woman."
+
+"You're a married child."
+
+"My husband's arm around my waist is my ring," says she; "his heart is
+my jewel."
+
+Even if it had been broad daylight and people looking, I'd have put her
+ring on her at that. But it was dark, in a park of trees and
+benches--just like Central Park.
+
+"With this ring," says I, "I thee guard from all evil."
+
+"But there is no evil," said she. "The world's all new; it's been given
+a fresh start. There's no evil. The apple's back on the tree of
+knowledge. Eden's come back--and it's spring in Eden."
+
+"And among other items," says I, "that we've invoiced for Sydney is a
+python thirty feet long."
+
+"Look!" says she.
+
+A girl sat against one of the stems of a banyan, and a Tommy lay on his
+back with his head in her lap. She was playing with his hair. You could
+just see them for the dark.
+
+"'And they lived on the square like a true married pair,'" says I.
+
+"Can't people be naughty and good?" says she.
+
+"No," says I; "good and naughty only."
+
+"Suppose," says she, "you and I felt about each other the way we do, but
+you were married to a rich widow in Lisbon and I was married to a wicked
+old Jew in Malta--would that make you Satan and me Jezebel?"
+
+"No," says I; "only me. Nothing could change you." She thought a little.
+
+"No," says she; "I don't think anything could. But there isn't any
+wicked old Jew. You know that."
+
+"And you know about the rich widow?"
+
+"What about her?" This said sharp, with a tug at my arm to unwrap it.
+
+"She was born in Singapore," said I, "of a silly goose by an idle
+thought. And two minutes later she died."
+
+"There's nothing that can ever hurt us--is there?--nothing that's
+happened and gone before?"
+
+Man that is born of woman ought not to have that question put up to him;
+but she didn't let me answer.
+
+"Because, if there is," she said, "it's lucky I'm here to look after
+us."
+
+"Could I do anything that you wouldn't forgive?"
+
+"If you turned away from me," she said, "I'd die--but I'd forgive."
+
+Next daylight she was leaning on the rail of the _Boldero_ watching the
+animals come over the side and laughing to see them turn their heads to
+listen to what old Yir Massir said to them in Hindustani. He spoke words
+of comfort, telling them not to be afraid; and they listened. Even
+Bahut, the big elephant, as the slings tightened and he swung dizzily
+heavenward, cocked his moth-eaten ears to listen and refrained from
+whimpering, though the pit of his stomach was cold with fear; and he
+worked his toes when there was nothing under them but water.
+
+"The elephant is the strongest of all things," I said, "and the most
+gentle."
+
+Her little fingers pressed my arm, which was like marble in those days.
+
+"No," said she--"the man!"
+
+
+III
+
+That voyage was good, so far as it went, but there's no use talking
+about it, because what came afterward was better. We'd no sooner backed
+off the Copra Wharf and headed down the straits, leaving a trail of
+smoke and tiger smell, than Ivy went to house-keeping on the _Boldero_.
+There are great house-keepers, just as there are great poets and actors.
+It takes genius; that's all. And Ivy had that kind of genius. Yir Massir
+had a Hindu saying that fitted her like a glove. He looked in upon her
+work of preparing and systematizing for the cramped weeks at sea and
+said: "The little mem-sahib is a born woman."
+
+That's just what she is. There are born idiots and born leaders. Some
+are born male and some female; but a born woman is the rarest thing in
+the world, the most useful and the most precious. She had never kept
+house, but there was nothing for her to learn. She worked things so that
+whenever I could come off duty she was at leisure to give all her care
+and thought to me.
+
+There was never a millionaire who had more speckless white suits than I
+had, though it's a matter almost of routine for officers to go dirty on
+anything but the swell liners. Holes in socks grew together under her
+fingers, so that you had to look close to see where they'd been. She
+even kept a kind of dwarf hibiscus, with bright red flowers, alive and
+flourishing in the thick salt air; and she was always slipping into the
+galley to give a new, tasty turn to the old sea-standbys.
+
+The crew, engineer, and stokers were all Chinks. Hadley always put his
+trust in them and they come cheap. We had forty coolies who berthed
+forward, going out on contract to work on a new government dry-dock at
+Paiulu. I don't mind a Chink myself, so long as he keeps his habits to
+himself and doesn't over-smoke; but they're not sociable. Except for Yir
+Massir and myself, there was no one aboard for Ivy to talk to. Yir
+Massir's duty kept him busy with the health of the collection for the
+Sydney Zoo, and Ivy found time to help, to advise, and to learn. They
+made as much fuss between them over the beasts as if they had been
+babies; and the donkey-engine was busy most of the day hoisting cages to
+the main-deck and lowering them again, so that the beasts could have a
+better look at the sea and a bit of sun and fresh air. As it was, a good
+many of the beasts and all the birds roomed on the main-deck all the
+time. Sometimes Yir Massir would take out a chetah--a nasty, snarling,
+pin-headed piece of long-legged malice--and walk him up and down on a
+dog-chain, same as a woman walks her King Charlie. He gave the monkeys
+all the liberty they could use and abuse; it was good sport to see them
+chase themselves and each other over the masts and upper-works.
+
+The most you can say of going out with a big tonnage of beasts is that,
+if you're healthy and have no nerves, you can just stand it. Sometimes
+they'll all howl together for five or six hours at a time; sometimes
+they'll all be logy and still as death, except one tiger, who can't make
+his wants understood and who'll whine and rumble about them all round
+the clock. I don't know which is worse, the chorus or the solo. And
+then, of course, the smell side to the situation isn't a matter for
+print. If I say that we had twenty hogsheads of disinfectants and
+deodorizers along it's all you need know. Anyhow, according to Yir
+Massir, it was the smell that killed big Bahut's mate. And she'd been
+brought up in an Indian village and ought to have been used to all the
+smells, from A to Z.
+
+One elephant more or less doesn't matter to me, especially when it's
+insured, but Yir Massir's grief and self-reproach were appalling; and
+Ivy felt badly too. It was as much for her sake as Yir Massir's that I
+read a part of the burial service out of the prayer-book and committed
+the body of "this our sister" to the deep. It may have been
+sacrilegious, but I don't care. It comforted Ivy some and Yir Massir a
+heap. And it did this to me, that I can't look at a beast now without
+thinking that--well, that there's not such an awful lot of difference
+between two legs and four, and that maybe God put Himself out just as
+much to make one as the other.
+
+We swung her overside by heavy tackle. What with the roll of the ship
+and the fact that she swung feet down, she looked alive; and the funeral
+looked more like a drowning than a burial.
+
+We had no weights to sink her; and when I gave the word to cut loose she
+made a splash like a small tidal wave and then floated.
+
+We could see her for an hour, like a bit of a slate-colored island with
+white gulls sitting on it.
+
+And that night Yir Massir waited on us looking like some old crazy loon
+out of the Bible. He'd made himself a prickly shirt of sackcloth and had
+smeared his black head and brown face with gray ashes. Big Bahut
+whimpered all night and trumpeted as if his heart were broken.
+
+
+IV
+
+I've often noticed that when things happen it's in bunches. The tenth
+day south of the line we had a look at almost all the sea-events that
+are made into woodcuts for the high-school geographies. For days we'd
+seen nothing except sapphire-blue sea, big swells rolling under a satin
+finish without breaking through, and a baby-blue sky. On the morning of
+the tenth the sea was streaked with broad, oily bands, like State roads,
+and near and far were whales travelling south at about ten knots an
+hour, as if they had a long way to go.
+
+We saw heaps of porpoises and heaps of flying-fish; some birds; unhewn
+timber--a nasty lot of it--and big floats of sea-weed. We saw a whale
+being pounded to death by a killer; and in the afternoon as perfect an
+example of a brand-new coral island as was ever seen. It looked like a
+ring of white snow floating on the water, and inside the ring was a
+careened two-master--just the ribs and stumps left. There was a
+water-spout miles off to port, and there was a kind of electric jump and
+thrill to the baked air that made these things seem important, like
+omens in ancient times. Besides, the beasts, from Bahut the elephant to
+little Assam the mongoose, put in the whole day at practising the noises
+of complaint and uneasiness. Then, directly it was dark, we slipped into
+a "white sea." That's a rare sight and it has never been very well
+explained. The water looks as though it had been mixed with a quantity
+of milk, but when you dip it up it's just water.
+
+About midnight we ran out of this and Ivy and I turned in. The sky was
+clear as a bell and even the beasts were quiet. I hadn't been asleep
+ten minutes and Ivy not at all, when all at once hell broke loose. There
+was a bump that nearly drove my head through a bulkhead; though only
+half awake I could feel to the cold marrow of my bones that the old
+_Boldero_ was down by the head. The beasts knew it and the Chinks. Never
+since Babel was there such pandemonium on earth or sea. By a struck
+match I saw Ivy running out of the cabin and slipping on her
+bath-wrapper as she went. I called to her, but she didn't answer. I
+didn't want to think of anything but Ivy, but I had to let her go and
+think of the ship.
+
+There wasn't much use in thinking. The old _Boldero_ was settling by the
+head and the pumps couldn't hold up the inflood. In fifteen minutes I
+knew that it was all up with us--or all down, rather--and I ordered the
+boats over and began to run about like a maniac, looking for Ivy and
+calling to her. And why do you suppose I couldn't find her? She was
+hiding--hiding from me!
+
+She'd heard of captains of sinking ships sending off their wives and
+children and sweethearts and staying behind to drown out of a mistaken
+notion of duty. She'd got it into her head that I was that kind of
+captain and she'd hid so that she couldn't be sent away; but it was all
+my fault really. If I'd hurried her on deck the minute I did find her
+we'd have been in time to leave with the boats. But I stopped for
+explanations and to give her a bit of a lecture; so when we got on deck
+there were the boats swarming with Chinks slipping off to windward--and
+there at our feet was Yir Massir, lying in his own blood and brains, a
+wicked, long knife in his hand and the thread outpiece of a Chink's
+pigtail between his teeth.
+
+I like to think that he'd tried to make them wait for us, but I don't
+know. Anyhow, there we were, alone on a sinking deck and all through
+with earthly affairs as I reckoned it. But Ivy reckoned differently.
+
+"Why are they rowing in that direction?" she says. "They won't get
+anywhere."
+
+"Why not?" says I.
+
+She jerked her thumb to leeward.
+
+"Don't you feel that it's over there?--the land?" she says. "Just over
+there."
+
+"Why, no, bless you!" says I. "I don't have any feeling about it.... Now
+then, we've got to hustle around and find something that will float us.
+We want to get out of this before the old _Boldero_ goes and sucks us
+down after."
+
+"There's the life-raft," says she; "they left that."
+
+"Yes," says I; "if we can get it overboard. It weighs a ton. You make up
+a bundle of food on the jump, Ivy, and I'll try to rig a tackle."
+
+When the raft was floating quietly alongside I felt better. It looked
+then as if we were to have a little more run for our money.
+
+We worked like a couple of furies loading on food and water, Ivy
+lowering and I lashing fast.
+
+"There," says I at last; "she won't take any more. Come along. I can
+help you down better from here."
+
+"We've got to let the beasts loose," says she.
+
+"Why?" says I.
+
+"Oh, just to give 'em a chance," she says.
+
+So I climbs back to where she was standing.
+
+"It's rot!" I says. "But if you say so----"
+
+"There's loads of time," says she--"we're not settling so fast. Besides,
+even if I'm wrong about the land, they'll know. They'll show us which
+way to go. Big Bahut, he knows."
+
+"It don't matter," I says. "We can't work the raft any way but to
+leeward--not one man can't."
+
+"If the beasts go the other way," says she, "one man must try and one
+woman."
+
+"Oh, we'll try," says I, "right enough. We'll try."
+
+The first beast we loosed was the python. Ivy did the loosing and I
+stood by with a big rifle to guard against trouble; but, bless you,
+there was no need. One and all, the beasts knew the old _Boldero_ was
+doomed, and one and all they cried and begged and made eyes and signs to
+be turned loose. As for knowing where the nearest land was--well, if
+you'd seen the python, when he came to the surface, make a couple of
+loopy turns to get his bearings and his wriggles in order, and then hike
+off to leeward in a bee-line--you'd have believed that he--well, that he
+knew what he was talking about.
+
+And the beasts, one and all, big and little, the minute they were
+loosed, wanted to get overboard--even the cats; and off they went to
+leeward in the first flush of dawn, horned heads, cat heads, pig
+heads--the darnedest game of follow-my-leader that ever the skies looked
+down on. And the birds, white and colored, streaked out over the beasts.
+There was a kind of wonder to it all that eased the pinch of fear. Ivy
+clapped her hands and jumped up and down like a child when it sees the
+grand entry in Buffalo Bill's show for the first time--or the last, for
+that matter.
+
+There was some talk of taking a tow-line from around Bahut's neck to the
+raft; but the morning breeze was freshening and with a sail rigged the
+raft would swim pretty fast herself. Anyway, we couldn't fix it to get
+big Bahut overboard. The best we could do was to turn him loose, open
+all the hatches, and trust to his finding a way out when the _Boldero_
+settled.
+
+He did, bless him! We weren't two hundred yards clear when the _Boldero_
+gave a kind of shudder and went down by the bows, Bahut yelling bloody
+murder. Then, just when we'd given him up for lost, he shot up from the
+depths, half-way out of water. After blowing his nose and getting his
+bearings he came after the raft like a good old tugboat.
+
+We stood up, Ivy and I did, and cheered him as he caught up with us and
+foamed by.
+
+
+The worst kind of remembering is remembering what you've forgotten. I
+got redder and redder. It didn't seem as if I could tell Ivy; but I did.
+First I says, hopeful:
+
+"Have you forgotten anything?"
+
+She shakes her head.
+
+"I have," says I. "I've left my rifle, but I've got plenty of
+cartridges. I've got a box of candles, but I've forgotten to bring
+matches. A nice, thoughtful husband you've got!"
+
+
+V
+
+The beasts knew.
+
+There was land just around the first turn of the world--land that had
+what might be hills when you got to 'em and that was pale gray against
+the sun, with all the upper-works gilded; but it wasn't big land. You
+could see the north and south limits; and the trees on the hills could
+probably see the ocean to the east.
+
+They were funny trees, those; and others just like them had come down
+to the cove to meet us when we landed. They were a kind of pine and the
+branches grew in layers, with long spaces between. Since then I've seen
+trees just like them, but very little, in florists' windows; only the
+florists' trees have broad scarlet sashes round their waists, by way of
+decoration, maybe, or out of deference to Anthony Comstock.
+
+The cove had been worked out by a brook that came loafing down a turfy
+valley, with trees single and in spinneys, for all the world like an
+English park; and at the upper end of the valley, cutting the island in
+half lengthwise, as we learned later, the little wooded hills rolled
+north and south, and low spurs ran out from them, so as to make the
+valley a valley instead of a plain.
+
+There were flocks of goats in the valley, which was what made the grass
+so turfy, I suppose; and our own deer and antelopes were browsing near
+them, friendly as you please. Near at hand big Bahut, who had been the
+last but us to land, was quietly munching the top of a broad-leafed tree
+that he'd pulled down; but the cats and riffraff had melted into the
+landscape. So had the birds, except a pair of jungle-fowl, who'd found
+seed near the cove and were picking it up as fast as they could and
+putting it away.
+
+"Well," says I, "it's an island, sure, Ivy. The first thing to do is to
+find out who lives on it, owns it, and dispenses its hospitality, and
+make up to them."
+
+But she shook her head and said seriously:
+
+"I've a feeling, Right," she says--"a kind of hunch--that there's nobody
+on it but us."
+
+I laughed at her then, but half a day's tramping proved that she was
+right. I tell you women have ways of knowing things that we men haven't.
+The fact is, civilization slides off 'em like water off a duck; and at
+heart and by instinct they are people of the cave-dwelling period--on
+cut-and-dried terms with ghosts and spirits, all the unseen sources of
+knowledge that man has grown away from.
+
+I had sure proofs of this in the way Ivy took to the cave we found in a
+bunch of volcano rock that lifted sheer out of the cove and had bright
+flowers smiling out of all its pockets. No society lady ever entered her
+brand-new marble house at Newport with half the happiness.
+
+Ivy was crazy about the cave and never tired of pointing out its
+advantages. She went to house-keeping without any of the utensils, as
+keen and eager as she'd gone to it on the poor old _Boldero_, where at
+least there were pots and pans and pepper.
+
+We had grub to last a few weeks, a pair of blankets, the clothes we
+stood in, and an axe. I had, besides, a heavy clasp-knife, a watch, and
+seven sovereigns. The first thing Ivy insisted on was a change of
+clothes.
+
+"These we stand in," says she, "are the only presentable things we've
+got, and Heaven only knows how long they've got to last us for best."
+
+"We could throw modesty to the winds," I suggested.
+
+"Of course you can do as you please," she said. "I don't care one way or
+the other about the modesty; but I've got a skin that looks on the sun
+with distinct aversion, and I don't propose to go through a course of
+yellow blisters--and then turn black."
+
+"I've seen islanders weave cloth out of palm fibre--most any kind," I
+said. "It's clumsy and airy; but if you think it would do----"
+
+"It sounds scratchy."
+
+"It is, but it's good for the circulation."
+
+Well, we made a kind of cloth and cut it into shapes, and knotted the
+shapes together with more fibre; then we folded up our best and only
+Sunday-go-to-meeting suits and put the fibre things on; and then we went
+down to the cove to look at ourselves in the water. And Ivy laughed.
+
+"We're not clothed," she said; "we're thatched; and yet--and yet--it's
+accident, of course, but this skirt has got a certain hang that----"
+
+"Whatever that skirt's got," I said, "these pants haven't; but if you're
+happy I am."
+
+Well, there's worse situations than desert-islanding it with the one
+woman in the world. I even know one man who claims he was cast away with
+a perfect stranger that he hated the sight of at first--a terribly
+small-minded, conventional woman--and still he had the time of his life.
+They got to like each other over a mutual taste for cribbage, which they
+played for sea-shells, yellow with a pink edge, until the woman went
+broke and got heavily in debt to the man. He was nice about it and let
+her off. He says the affair must have ended in matrimony, only she took
+a month to think it over; during that month they were picked up and
+carried to Honolulu; then they quarrelled and never saw each other
+again.
+
+"Ivy," said I one day, "we'll be picked up by a passing steamer some
+day, of course, but meanwhile I'd rather be here with you than any place
+I can name."
+
+"It's Eden," she said, "and I'd like to live like this always. But----"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"But people grow old," she said, "and one dies before another. That's
+what's wrong with Eden."
+
+I laughed at her.
+
+"Old! You and I? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, Ivy Bower."
+
+"Right Bower," says she, "you don't understand----"
+
+"How not understand?"
+
+"You don't understand that Right Bower and Ivy Bower aren't the only
+people on this island."
+
+She didn't turn a fiery red and bolt--the way young wives do in stories.
+She looked at me with steady, brave, considering eyes.
+
+"Don't worry, dear," she says after a time; "everything will be all
+right. I know it will."
+
+"I know it too." I lied.
+
+Know it? I was cold with fright.
+
+"Don't be afraid," said she. "And--and meanwhile there's dinner to be
+got ready--and you can have a go at your firesticks."
+
+It was my ambition to get fire by friction. Now and then I got the
+sticks to smoke and I hoped that practice would give me the little extra
+speed and cunning that makes for flame. I'd always been pretty good at
+games, if a little slow to learn.
+
+
+VI
+
+You'd think anxiety about Ivy'd have been the hardest thing to bear in
+the life we were living; and so it would have been if she'd showed any
+anxiety about herself. Not she. You might have thought she was looking
+forward to a Christmas-box from home. If she was ever scared it was
+when I wasn't looking. No--it was the beasts that made us anxious.
+
+At first we'd go for long walks and make explorations up and down the
+island. The beasts hid from us according to the wild nature that's in
+them. You could only tell from fresh tracks in damp places that they
+hadn't utterly disappeared. Now and then we saw deer and antelopes far
+off; and at night, of course, there was always something doing in the
+way of a chorus. Beasts that gave our end of the island the go-by
+daytimes paid us visits nights and sat under the windows, you may say,
+and sang their songs.
+
+It seemed natural after a time to be cooped up in a big green prison
+with a lot of loose wild things that could bite and tear you to pieces
+if they thought of it. We were hard to scare. What scared me first was
+this: When we got to the island it was alive with goats. Well, these
+just casually disappeared. Then, one morning, bright and early, I came
+on the big python in the act of swallowing a baby antelope. It gave me a
+horrid start and set me thinking. How long could the island support a
+menagerie? What would the meat-eaters do when they'd killed off all the
+easy meat--finished up the deer and antelopes and all? Would they fight
+it out among themselves--big tiger eat little tiger--until only the
+fittest one survived? And what would that fittest one do if he got good
+and hungry and began to think that I'd make a square meal for him--or
+Ivy?
+
+I reached two conclusions--and the cave about the same time. First, I
+wouldn't tell Ivy I was scared. Second, I'd make fire by friction or
+otherwise--or bust. Once I got fire, I'd never let it go out. I set to
+work with the firesticks right off, and Ivy came and stood by and looked
+on.
+
+"Never saw you put so much elbow-grease into anything," she said.
+"What's the matter with you, anyway?"
+
+"It's a game," I grunted, "and these two fellows will have me beat if I
+don't look lively."
+
+"Right Bower," she says then, slow and deliberate, "I can see you're
+upside down about something. Tell Ivy."
+
+"Look," says I--"smoke! I never got it so quick before." I spun the
+pointed stick between the palms of my hands harder than ever and gloated
+over the wisp of smoke that came from where it was boring into the flat
+stick.
+
+"Make a bow," says Ivy. "Loop the bowstring round the hand-piece and
+you'll get more friction with less work."
+
+"By gorry!" says I; "you're right. I remember a picture in a
+geography--'Native Drilling a Conch Shell.' Fool that I am to forget!"
+
+"Guess you and I learned out of the same geography," said Ivy.
+
+"Only I didn't learn," said I. "I'm off to cut something tough to make
+the bow."
+
+"Don't go far," she says.
+
+"Why not?" said I--the sporty way a man does when he pretends that he's
+going to take a night off with the boys and play poker.
+
+"Because," she says smiling, "I'm afraid the beasts will get me while
+you're gone."
+
+"Rats!" says I.
+
+"Tigers!" says she. "Oh, Right, you unplumbable old idiot! Do you think
+you can come into this cave and hide anything from me under that
+transparent face of yours? The minute you came in and hemmed and hawed,
+and said as you had nothing to do you guessed you'd have a go with the
+firesticks--I knew. What scared you?"
+
+I surrendered and told her.
+
+"... And then," she said, "you think maybe they'll hurt--us?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Why, it's war," she said. "I've read enough about war to know that
+there are two safe rules to follow. First, declare war yourself while
+the other fellow's thinking about it; and then strike him before he's
+even heard that you have declared it. That sounds mixed, but it's easy
+enough. We'll declare war on the dangerous beasts while I'm still in the
+months of hop, skip, and jump."
+
+"A certain woman," said I, "wouldn't let the beasts go down in the old
+_Boldero_, as would have been beneficial for all parties."
+
+"This is different," she said. "This island's got to be a safe place for
+a little child to play in or Ivy Bower's got to be told the reason why."
+
+"You're dead right, Ivy dear," I says, "and always was. But how? I'm
+cursed if I know how to kill a tiger without a rifle.... Let's get fire
+first and put the citadel in a state of siege. Then we'll try our hand
+at traps, snares, and pitfalls. I'm strong, but I'm cursed if I want to
+fall on a tiger with nothing in my hands but a knife or an axe."
+
+"All I care about," said Ivy, "is to get everything settled, so that
+when the time comes we can be comfortable and plenty domestic."
+
+She sat in the mouth of the cave and looked over the smooth cove to the
+rolling ocean beyond; and she had the expression of a little girl
+playing at being married with a little boy friend in the playhouse that
+her father had just given her for her birthday.
+
+I got a piece of springy wood to make a bow with, and sat by her shaping
+it with my knife. That night we got fire. Ivy caught some fish in the
+cove and we cooked them; and--thanks, O Lord!--how good they were! We
+sat up very late comparing impressions, each saying how each felt when
+the smoke began to show sparks and when the tinder pieces finally
+caught, and how each had felt when the broiled smell of the fish had
+begun to go abroad in the land. We told each other of all the good
+things we had eaten in our day, but how this surpassed them all. And
+later we told each other all our favorite names--boy names in case it
+should be a boy and girl names in case it shouldn't.
+
+Then, suddenly, something being hunted by something tore by in the
+dark--not very far off. The sweat came off me in buckets, and I heaped
+wood on the fire and flung burning brands into the night, this way and
+that, as far as I could fling them. Ivy said I was like Jupiter trying
+to hurl thunder-bolts, after the invention of Christianity, and not
+rightly understanding why they wouldn't explode any more.
+
+
+VII
+
+The pines of the island were full of pitch and a branch would burn
+torch-like for a long time. I kept a bundle of such handy, the short
+ends sharpened so's you could stick 'em round wherever the ground was
+soft enough and have an effect of altar candles in a draughty church. If
+there was occasion to leave the cave at night I'd carry one of the
+torches and feel as safe as if it had been an elephant rifle.
+
+We made a kind of a dooryard in front of the cave's mouth, with a
+stockade that we borrowed from Robinson Crusoe, driving pointed stakes
+close-serried and hoping they'd take root and sprout; but they didn't.
+Between times I made finger-drawings in the sand of plans for tiger
+traps and pitfalls. I couldn't dig pits, but I knew of two that might
+have been made to my order, a volcano having taken the contract. They
+were deep as wells, sheer-sided; anything that fell in would stay in. I
+made a wattle-work of branches and palm fibre to serve as lids for these
+nature-made tiger jars. The idea was to toss dead fish out to the middle
+of the lids for bait; then for one of the big cats to smell the fish,
+step out to get it, and fall through. Once in, it would be child's work
+to stone him to death.
+
+Another trap I made was more complicated and was a scheme to drop trees
+heavy enough to break a camel's back or whatever touched the trigger
+that kept them from falling. It was the devil's own job to make that
+trap. First place, I couldn't cut a tree big enough and lift it to a
+strategic position; so I had to fell trees in such a way that they'd be
+caught half-way to the ground by other trees. Then I'd have to clear
+away branches and roots so that when the trees did fall the rest of the
+way it would be clean, plumb, and sudden. It was a wonderful trap when
+it was finished and it was the most dangerous work of art I ever saw. If
+you touched any of a dozen triggers you stood to have a whole grove of
+trees come banging down on top of you--same as if you went for a walk in
+the woods and a tornado came along and blew the woods down. If the big
+cats had known how frightfully dangerous that trap was they'd have
+jumped overboard and left the island by swimming. I made two other traps
+something like it--the best contractor in New York wouldn't have
+undertaken to build one just like it at any price--and then it came
+around to be the seventh day, so to speak; and, like the six-day bicycle
+rider, I rested.
+
+"Days," is only a fashion of speaking. I was months getting my five
+death-traps into working order. I couldn't work steadily because there
+was heaps of cavework to do besides, fish to be caught, wood to be cut
+for the fire, and all; and then, dozens of times, I'd suddenly get
+scared about Ivy and go running back to the cave to see if she was all
+right. I might have known better; she was always all right and much
+better plucked than I was.
+
+Well, sir, my traps wouldn't work. The fish rotted on the wattle-lids of
+the pitfalls, but the beasts wouldn't try for 'em. They were getting
+ravenous, too--ready to attack big Bahut even; but they wouldn't step
+out on those wattles and they wouldn't step under my balanced trees.
+They'd beat about the neighborhood of the danger and I've found many a
+padmark within six inches of the edge of things. I even baited with a
+live kid. It belonged to the Thibet goats and I had a hard time catching
+it; and after it had bleated all night and done its baby best to be
+tiger food I turned it loose and it ran off with its mammy. She, poor
+soul, had gone right into the trap to be with her baby and, owing to the
+direct intervention of Providence, hadn't sprung the thing.
+
+The next fancy bait I tried was a chetah--dead. I found him just after
+his accident, not far from the cave. He was still warm; and he was
+flat--very flat, like a rug made of chetah skin. He had some shreds of
+elephant-hide tangled in his claws. It looked to me as if he'd gotten
+desperate with hunger and had pounced on big Bahut--pshaw! the story was
+in plain print: "Ouch!" says big Bahut. "A flea has bitten me. Here's
+where I play dead," and--rolls over. Result: one neat and very flat rug
+made out of chetah.
+
+I showed the rug to Ivy and then carried it off to the woods and spread
+it in my first and fanciest trap. Then I allowed I'd have a look at the
+pitfalls, which I hadn't visited for a couple of days--and I was a fool
+to do it. I'd told Ivy where I was going to spread the chetah and that
+after that I'd come straight home. Well, the day seemed young and I
+thought if I hurried I could go home the roundabout way by the pitfalls
+in such good time that Ivy wouldn't know the difference. Well, sir, I
+came to the first pitfall--and, lo and behold! something had been and
+taken the bait and got away with it without so much as putting a foot
+through the wattling. I'd woven it too strong. So I thought I'd just
+weaken it up a little--it wouldn't take five minutes. I tried it with my
+foot--very gingerly. Yes, it was too strong--much too strong. I put more
+weight into that foot--and bang, smash, crash--bump! There I was at the
+bottom of the pit, with half the wattling on top of me.
+
+The depth of that hole was full twenty-five feet; the sides were as
+smooth as bottle-glass; dusk was turning into dark. But these things
+weren't the worst of it. I'd told Ivy that I'd do one thing--and I'd
+gone and done another. I'd lied to her and I'd put her in for a time of
+anxiety, and then fright, that might kill her.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I wasted what little daylight was left trying to climb out, using
+nothing but hands and feet. And then I sat down and cursed myself for a
+triple-plated, copper-riveted, patent-applied-for fool. Nothing would
+have been easier, given light, than to take the wattling that had fallen
+into the pit with me to pieces, build a pole--sort of a split-bamboo
+fishing-rod on a big scale--shin up and go home. But to turn that trick
+in the dark wasn't any fun. I did it though--twice. I made the first
+pole too light and it smashed when I was half-way up. A splinter jabbed
+into my thigh and drew blood. That complicated matters. The smell of the
+blood went out of the pit and travelled around the island like a
+sandwich man saying: "Fine supply of fresh meat about to come out of
+Right Bower's pet pitfall; second on the left."
+
+When I'd shinned to the top of the second pole I built and crawled over
+the rim of the pit--there was a tiger sitting, waiting, very patient. I
+could just make him out in the starlight. He was mighty lean and looked
+like a hungry gutter-cat on a big scale. Some people are afraid to be
+alone in the dark. I'm not. Well, I just knelt there--I'd risen to my
+knees--and stared at him. And then I began to take in a long breath--I
+swelled and swelled with it. It's a wonder I didn't use up all the air
+on the island and create a vacuum--in which case the tiger would have
+blown up. I remember wondering what that big breath was going to do when
+it came out. I didn't know. I had no plan. I looked at the tiger and he
+looked at me and whined--like a spoiled spaniel asking for sugar. That
+was too much. I thought of Ivy, maybe needing me as she'd never needed
+any one before--and I looked at that stinking cat that meant to keep me
+from her. I made one jump at him--'stead of him at me--and at the same
+time I let out the big breath I'd drawn in a screech that very likely
+was heard in Jericho.
+
+The tiger just vanished like a Cheshire cat in a book I read once, and I
+was running through the night for home and Ivy. But the fire at the cave
+was dying, and Ivy was gone.
+
+Well, of course she'd have gone to look for me.... It was then that I
+began to whimper and cry. I lit a pine-torch, flung some wood on the
+embers, and went out to look for her--whimpering all the time. I'd told
+her that I was going out to bait a certain trap and would then come
+straight home. So of course she'd have gone straight to that trap--and
+it was there I found her.
+
+The torch showed her where she sat, right near the dead chetah, in the
+very centre of the trap--triggers all about her--to touch one of which
+spelt death; and all around the trap, in a ring--like an audience at a
+one-ring circus--were the meat-eaters--the tigers--the lions--the
+leopards--and, worst of all, the pigs. There she sat and there they
+sat--and no one moved--except me with the torch.
+
+She lifted her great eyes to me and she smiled. All the beasts looked at
+me and turned away their eyes from the light and blinked and shifted;
+and the old he-lion coughed. They wouldn't come near me because of the
+torch--and they wouldn't go near Ivy because of the trap. They knew it
+was a trap. They always had known it and so had Ivy. That was why she
+had gone into it when so many deaths looked at her in so many
+ways--because she knew that in there she'd be safe. All along she'd
+known that my old traps and pitfalls wouldn't catch anything; but she'd
+never said so--and she'd never laughed at them or at me. I could find it
+in my heart to call her a perfect wife--just by that one fact of tact
+alone; but there are other facts--other reasons--millions of them.
+
+Suddenly from somewhere near Ivy there came a thin, piping sound.
+
+"It's your little son talking to you," says Ivy, as calm as if she was
+sitting up in a four-poster.
+
+"My little son!" I says. That was all for a minute. Then I says:
+
+"Are you all right?"
+
+And she says:
+
+"Sure I am--now that I know you are."
+
+I turned my torch fire-end down and it began to blaze and sputter and
+presently roar. Then I steps over to the lion and he doesn't move; and I
+points the torch at his dirty face--and lunges.
+
+Ever see a kitten enjoying a fit? That was what happened to him. Then I
+ran about, beating and poking and shouting and burning. It was like
+Ulysses cleaning the house of suitors and handmaids. All the beasts ran;
+and some of 'em ran a long way, I guess, and climbed trees.
+
+I stuck the torch point-end in the ground, stepped into the trap, and
+lifted my family out. All the time I prayed aloud, saying: "Lord on
+high, keep Right Bower from touching his blamed foot against any of
+these triggers and dropping the forest on top of all he holds in his
+arms!" Ivy, she rubbed her cheek against mine to show confidence--and
+then we were safe out and I picked up the torch and carried the whole
+kit and boodle, family, torch, happiness--much too big to tote--and
+belief in God's goodness, watchfulness, and mercy, home to our cave.
+
+
+Right Bower added some uneventful details of the few days following--the
+ship's boat that put into the island for water and took them off, and
+so on. Then he asked me if I'd like to meet Mrs. Bower, and I went
+forward with him and was presented.
+
+She was deep in a steamer-chair, half covered with a somewhat gay
+assortment of steamer-rugs. I had noticed her before, in passing, and
+had mistaken her for a child.
+
+Bower beamed over us for a while and then left us and we talked for
+hours--about Bower, the children, and the home in East Orange to which
+they were returning after a holiday at Aix; but she wouldn't talk much
+about the island. "Right," she said, "was all the time so venturesome
+that from morning till night I died of worry and anxiety. Right says the
+Lord does just the right thing for the right people at the right
+time--always. That's his creed.... Sometimes," she said, "I wonder
+what's become of big Bahut. He was such a--white elephant!"
+
+Mrs. Gordon-Colfax took me to task for spending so much of the afternoon
+with Mrs. Bower.
+
+"Who," said she, "was that common little person you were flirting
+with?--and why?"
+
+"She's a Mrs. Bower," I said. "She has a mission."
+
+"I could tell that," said Mrs. Gordon-Colfax, "from the way she turned
+up her eyes at you."
+
+"As long as she doesn't turn up her nose at me--" I began; but Mrs.
+Gordon-Colfax put in:
+
+"The Lord did that for her."
+
+"And," I said, "so she was saying. She said the Lord does just the right
+thing for the right person at the right time.... Now, your nose is
+beautifully Greek; but, to be honest, it turns up ever so much more than
+hers does."
+
+"Oh, well," said Mrs. Gordon-Colfax, "I hate common people--and I can't
+help it. Let's have a bite in the grill."
+
+"Sorry," I said; "I'm dining with the Bowers."
+
+"You have a strong stomach," said she.
+
+"I have," I said, "but a weak heart--and they are going to strengthen it
+for me."
+
+And there arose thenceforth a coolness between Mrs. Gordon-Colfax and
+me, which proves once more that the Lord does just the right thing for
+the right people at the right time.
+
+
+
+
+SAPPHIRA
+
+
+Mr. Hemingway had transacted a great deal of business with Miss
+Tennant's father; otherwise he must have shunned the proposition upon
+which she came to him. Indeed, wrinkling his bushy brows, he as much as
+told her that he was a banker and not a pawnbroker.
+
+Outside, the main street of Aiken, broad enough to have made five New
+England streets, lay red and glaring in the sun. The least restless
+shifting of feet by horses and mules tied to hitching-posts raised
+clouds of dust, immense reddish ghosts that could not be laid. In the
+bank itself, ordinarily a cool retreat, smelling faintly of tobacco
+juice deposited by some of its clients, the mercury was swelling toward
+ninety. It was April Fools' day, and unless Miss Tennant was cool,
+nobody was. She looked cool. If the temperature had been 40° below zero
+she would have looked warm; but she would have been dressed differently.
+
+It was her great gift always to look the weather and the occasion; no
+matter how or what she really felt. On the present occasion she wore a
+very simple, inexpensive muslin, flowered with faint mauve lilacs, and a
+wide, floppy straw-hat trimmed with the same. She had driven into town,
+half a mile or more, without getting a speck of dust upon herself. Even
+the corners of her eyes were like those of a newly laundered baby. She
+smelled of tooth-powder (precipitated chalk and orris root), as was her
+custom, and she wore no ring or ornament of any value. Indeed, such
+jewels as she possessed, a graceful diamond necklace, a pearl collar, a
+pearl pendant, and two cabochon sapphire rings, lay on the table between
+her and Mr. Hemingway.
+
+"I'm not asking the bank to do this for me," she said, and she looked
+extra lovely (on purpose, of course). "I'm asking you----"
+
+Mr. Hemingway poked the cluster of jewels very gingerly with his
+forefinger as if they were a lizard.
+
+"And, of course," she said, "they are worth twice the money; maybe three
+or four times."
+
+"Perhaps," said Mr. Hemingway, "you will take offence if I suggest that
+your father----"
+
+The muslin over her shoulders tightened the least in the world. She had
+shrugged them.
+
+"Of course," she said, "papa would do it; but he would insist on
+reasons. My reasons involve another, Mr. Hemingway, and so it would not
+be honorable for me to give them."
+
+"And yet," said the banker, twinkling, "your reasons would tempt me to
+accommodate you with the loan you ask for far more than your
+collateral."
+
+"Oh," she said, "you are a business man. I could give you reasons, and
+be sure they would go no further--even if you thought them funny. But if
+papa heard them, and thought them funny, as he would, he would play the
+sieve. I don't want this money for myself, Mr. Hemingway."
+
+"They never do," said he.
+
+She laughed.
+
+"I wish to lend it in turn," she said, "to a person who has been
+reckless, and who is in trouble, but in whom I believe.... But perhaps,"
+she went on, "the person, who is very proud, will take offence at my
+offer of help.... In which case, Mr. Hemingway, I should return you the
+money to-morrow."
+
+"This person--" he began, twinkling.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I couldn't bear to be teased. The person is a young
+gentleman. Any interest that I take in him is a business interest, pure
+and simple. I believe that, tided over his present difficulties, he will
+steady down and become a credit to his sex. Can I say more than that?"
+She smiled drolly.
+
+"Men who are a credit to their sex," said Mr. Hemingway, "are not rare,
+but young gentlemen----"
+
+"This one," said she, "has in him the makings of a man. Just now he is
+discouraged."
+
+"Is he taking anything for it?" asked Mr. Hemingway with some sarcasm.
+
+"Buckets," said Miss Tennant simply.
+
+"Was it cards?" he asked.
+
+"Cards, and betting--and the hopeless optimism of youth," said she.
+
+"And you wish to lend him five thousand dollars, and your interest in
+him is platonic?"
+
+"Nothing so ardent," said she demurely. "I wish him to pay his debts, to
+give me his word that he will neither drink nor gamble until he has paid
+back the debt to me, and I shall suggest that he go out to one of those
+big Western States and become a man."
+
+"If anybody," said Mr. Hemingway with gallantry, "could lead a young
+gentleman to so sweeping a reform, it would be yourself."
+
+"There is no sequence of generations," said Miss Tennant, "long enough
+to eradicate a drop of Irish blood."
+
+Mr. Hemingway swept the jewels together and wrapped them in the
+tissue-paper in which she had brought them.
+
+"Are you going to put them in your safe--or return them to me?" she
+asked plaintively.
+
+Mr. Hemingway affected gruffness.
+
+"I am thanking God fervently, ma'am," said he, "that you didn't ask me
+for more. You'll have to give me your note. By the way, are you of age?"
+
+Her charming eyes narrowed, and she laughed at him.
+
+"People," she said, "are already beginning to say, 'she will hardly
+marry now.' But it's how old we feel, Mr. Hemingway, isn't it?"
+
+"I feel about seven," said he, "and foolish at that."
+
+"And I," said she, "will be twenty-five for the second time on my next
+birthday."
+
+"And, by the way," she said, when the details of the loan had been
+arranged and she had stuffed the five thousand dollars into the palm of
+a wash glove, "nobody must know about this, because I shall have to say
+that--my gewgaws have been stolen."
+
+"But that will give Aiken a black eye," said he.
+
+"I'm afraid it can't be helped, Mr. Hemingway. Papa will ask point-blank
+why I never wear the pearls he gave me, and I shall have to anticipate."
+
+"How?" he asked.
+
+"Oh," she said demurely, "to-night or to-morrow night I shall rouse the
+household with screams, and claim that I woke and saw a man bending over
+my dressing-table--a man with a beautiful white mustache and imperial."
+
+Mr. Hemingway's right hand flew to his mouth as if to hide these
+well-ordered appendages, and he laughed.
+
+"Is the truth nothing to you?" he said.
+
+"In a business matter pure and simple," she said, after a moment's
+reflection, "it is nothing--absolutely nothing."
+
+"Not being found out by one's parents is hardly a business matter,"
+said Mr. Hemingway.
+
+"Oh," said she with a shiver, "as a little girl I went into the hands of
+a receiver at least once a month----"
+
+"A hand of iron in a velvet glove," murmured Mr. Hemingway.
+
+"Oh, no," she said, "a leather slipper in a nervous hand.... But how can
+I thank you?"
+
+She rose, still demure and cool, but with a strong sparkling in her eyes
+as from a difficult matter successfully adjusted.
+
+"You could make the burglar a clean-shaven man," Mr. Hemingway
+suggested.
+
+"I will," she said. "I will make him look like anybody you say."
+
+"God forbid," said he. "I have no enemies. But, seriously, Miss Tennant,
+if you possibly can, will you do without a burglary, for the good name
+of Aiken?"
+
+"I will do what I can," she said, "but I can't make promises."
+
+When she had gone, one of the directors pushed open the door of Mr.
+Hemingway's office and tiptoed in.
+
+"Well," said he, "for an old graybeard! You've been flirting fifty
+minutes, you sinner."
+
+"I haven't," said Mr. Hemingway, twisting his mustache and looking
+roguish. "I've been discussing a little matter of business with Miss
+Tennant."
+
+"_What_ business?"
+
+"Well, it wasn't any of yours, Frank, at the time, and I'm dinned if I
+think it is now. But if you must know, she came in to complain of the
+milk that your dairy has been supplying lately. She said it was the kind
+of thing you'd expect in the North, but for a Southern gentleman to put
+water in anything----"
+
+"You go to Augusta," said the director (it is several degrees hotter
+than Aiken). "Everybody knows that spoons stand up in the milk from my
+dairy, and as for the cream----"
+
+In the fall from grace of David Larkin there was involved no great show
+of natural depravity. The difference between a young man who goes right
+and a young man who goes wrong may be no more than the half of one per
+cent. And I do not know why we show the vicious such contempt and the
+virtuous such admiration. Larkin's was the case of a young man who tried
+to do what he was not old enough, strong enough, or wise enough to "get
+away with," as the saying is. Aiken did not corrupt him; he was corrupt
+when he came, with a bank account of thirty-five hundred dollars
+snatched from the lap of Dame Fortune, at a moment when she was minding
+some other small boy. Horses running up to their form, spectacular
+bridge hands (not well played), and bets upon every subject that can be
+thought of had all contributed. Then Larkin caught a cold in his nose,
+so that it ran all day and all night; and because the Browns had invited
+him to Aiken for a fortnight whenever he cared to come, he seized upon
+the excuse of his cold and boarded the first train. He was no sooner in
+Aiken than Dame Fortune ceased minding the other small boy, and turned
+her petulant eyes upon Larkin. Forthwith he began to lose.
+
+Let no man who does not personally know what a run of bad luck is judge
+another. What color is a lemon? Why, it is lemon-colored, to be sure.
+And behold, fortune produces you a lemon black as the ace of spades.
+When fortune goes against you, you cannot be right. The favorite falls
+down; the great jockey uses bad judgment for the first time in his life;
+the foot-ball team that ought to win is overtrained; the yacht carries
+away her bowsprit; your four kings are brought face to face, after much
+"hiking," with four aces; the cigarette that you try to flick into the
+fireplace hits the slender andiron and bounces out upon the rug; the
+liquor that you carried so amiably and sensibly in New York mixes with
+the exciting air of the place where the young lady you are attentive to
+lives, and you make four asses of yourself and seven fools, and wake up
+with your first torturing headache and your first humiliating apology.
+Americans (with the unfortunate exception of us who make a business of
+it) are the greatest phrase-makers the world has ever known. Larkin's
+judgment was good; he was a modest young fellow of very decent
+instincts, he was neither a born gambler nor a born drinker; but, in the
+American phrase, "he was _in_ wrong."
+
+Bad luck is not a good excuse for a failure in character; but God knows
+how wickedly provocative thereof it can be. The elders of the Aiken Club
+did not notice that Larkin was slipping from grace, because his slipping
+was gradual; but they noticed all of a sudden, with pity, chagrin (for
+they liked him), and kindly contempt, that he had fallen. Forthwith a
+wave of reform swept over the Aiken Club, or it amounted to that. Rich
+men who did not care a hang about what they won or lost refused to play
+for high stakes; Larkin's invitations to cocktails were very largely
+refused; no bets were made in his presence (and I must say that this was
+a great cause of languishment in certain men's conversation), and the
+young man was mildly and properly snubbed. This locking of the stable
+door, however, had the misfortune to happen just after the horse had
+bolted. Larkin had run through the most of his money; he did not know
+how he was to pay his bed and board at Willcox's, where he was now
+stopping; his family were in no position to help him; he knew that he
+was beginning to be looked on with contempt; he thought that he was
+seriously in love with Miss Tennant. He could not see any way out of
+anything; knew that a disgraceful crash was imminent, and for all these
+troubles he took the wrong medicine. Not the least foolish part of this
+was that it was medicine for which he would be unable to pay when the
+club bill fell due. From after breakfast until late at night he kept
+himself, not drunk, but stimulated.... And then one day the president of
+the club spoke to him very kindly--and the next day wouldn't speak to
+him at all.
+
+The proper course would have been for Larkin to open his heart to any of
+a dozen men. Any one of them would have straightened him out mentally
+and financially in one moment, and forgotten about it the next. But
+Larkin was too young, too foolish, and too full of false pride to make
+confessions to any one who could help him; and he was quite ignorant of
+the genuine kindness and wisdom that lurks in the average rich man, if
+once you can get his ear.
+
+But one night, being sure they could not be construed into an appeal for
+help, or anything but a sympathetic scolding, which he thought would be
+enjoyable (and because of a full moon, perhaps, and a whole chorus of
+mocking-birds pouring out their souls in song, and because of an arbor
+covered with the yellow jasmine that smells to heaven, and a little
+sweeter), he made his sorry confessions into the lovely pink hollow of
+Miss Tennant's ear.
+
+Instead of a scolding he received sympathy and understanding; and he
+misconstrued the fact that she caught his hand in hers and squeezed it
+very hard; and did not know that he had misconstrued that fact until he
+found that it was her cheek that he had kissed instead of her hastily
+averted lips.
+
+This rebuff did not prevent him from crowning the story of his young
+life with further confessions. And it is on record that when Larkin came
+into the brightly lighted club there was dust upon the knees of his
+trousers.
+
+"I _am_ fond of you, David," she had said, "and in spite of all the mess
+you have made of things, I believe in you; but even if I were fonder
+than fondest of you, I should despise myself if I listened to you--now."
+
+But she did not sleep all night for thinking how she could be of real,
+material help to the young man, and cause him to turn into the straight,
+narrow path that always leads to success and sometimes to achievement.
+
+Every spring the Mannings, who have nothing against them except that
+they live on the wrong side of town, give a wistaria party. The Mannings
+live for the blossoming of the wistaria which covers their charming
+porticoed house from top to toe and fills their grounds. Ever since they
+can remember they have specialized in wistaria; and they are not young,
+and wistaria grows fast. The fine old trees that stand in the Mannings'
+grounds are merely lofty trellises for the vines, white and mauve, to
+sport upon. The Mannings' garden cost less money, perhaps, than any
+notable garden in Aiken; and when in full bloom it is, perhaps, the most
+beautiful garden in the world. To appreciate wistaria, one vine with a
+spread of fifty feet bearing ten thousand racemes of blossoms a foot
+long is not enough; you must enter and disappear into a region of such
+vines, and then loaf and stroll with an untroubled nose and your heart's
+desire.
+
+Even Larkin, when he paused under the towering entrance vines, a mauve
+and a white, forgot his troubles. He filled his lungs with the delicious
+fragrance, and years after the consciousness of it would come upon him
+suddenly. And then coming upon tea-tables standing in the open and
+covered with good things, and finding, among the white flannel and
+muslin guests, Miss Tennant, very obviously on the lookout for him, his
+cup was full. When they had drunk very deep of orangeade, and eaten jam
+sandwiches followed by chicken sandwiches and walnut cake, they went
+strolling (Miss Tennant still looking completely ethereal--a creature
+that lived on the odor of flowers and kind thoughts rather than the more
+material edibles mentioned above), and then Larkin felt that his cup was
+overflowing.
+
+Either because the day was hot or because of the sandwiches, they found
+exclusive shade and sat in it, upon a white seat that looked like
+marble--at a distance. Larkin once more filled his lungs with the breath
+of wistaria and was for letting it out in further confessions of what he
+felt to be his heart's ultimate depths. But Miss Tennant was too quick
+for him. She drew five one-thousand-dollar bills from the palm of her
+glove and put them in his hand.
+
+"There," she said.
+
+Larkin looked at the money and fell into a dark mood.
+
+"What is this for?" he said presently.
+
+"This is a loan," said she, "from me to you; to be a tiding over of
+present difficulties, a reminder of much that has been pleasant in the
+past, and an earnest of future well-doing. Good luck to you, David."
+
+"I wish I could take it," said the young man with a swift, slanting
+smile. "And at least I can crawl upon my stomach at your feet, and pull
+my forelock and heap dust upon my head.... God bless you!" And he
+returned the bills to her.
+
+She smiled cheerfully but a little disdainfully.
+
+"Very well, then," said she. "I tear them up."
+
+"Oh!" cried Larkin. "Don't make a mess of a beautiful incident."
+
+"Then take them."
+
+"No."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Oh, you know as well as I do that a man can't borrow from a girl."
+
+"A man?" asked Miss Tennant simply, as if she doubted having heard
+correctly. Then, as he nodded, she turned a pair of eyes upon him that
+were at once kind, pained, and deeply thoughtful. And she began to speak
+in a quiet, repressed way upon the theme that he had suggested.
+
+"A man," she said; "what is a man? I can answer better by telling you
+what a man is not. A man is not a creature who loafs when he ought to be
+at work, who loses money that he hasn't got, who drinks liquor that he
+cannot carry, and who upon such a noble groundwork feels justified in
+making love to a decent, self-respecting girl. That is not a _man_,
+David. A man would have no need of any help from me.... But you--you are
+a child that has escaped from its nurse, a bird that has fallen out of
+its nest before it has learned to fly, and you have done nothing but
+foolish things.... But somehow I have learned to suspect you of a better
+self, where, half-strangled with foolishnesses and extravagance, there
+lurks a certain contrition and a certain sweetness.... God knows I
+should like to see you a man...."
+
+Larkin jumped to his feet, and all of him that showed was crimson, and
+he could have cried. But he felt no anger, and he kept his eyes upon
+hers.
+
+"Thank you," he said; "may I have them?"
+
+He stuffed the bills into his pocket.
+
+"I have no security," he said. "But I will give you my word of honor
+neither to drink, neither to gamble, neither to loaf, nor to make love
+until I have paid you back interest and principal."
+
+"Where will you go? What will you do, David?"
+
+"West--God knows. I _will_ do something.... You see that I can't say any
+thanks, don't you? That I am almost choking, and that at any moment I
+might burst into sobs?"
+
+They were silent, and she looked into his face unconsciously while he
+mastered his agitation. He sat down beside her presently, his elbows on
+his knees, his chin deep in his hands.
+
+"Is God blessing you by any chance?" he said. "Do you feel anything of
+the kind? Because I am asking Him to--so very hard. I shall ask Him to a
+million times every day until I die.... Would it be possible for one who
+has deserved nothing, but who would like it for the strengthingest,
+beautifulest memory...."
+
+"Quick, then," said she, "some one's coming."
+
+That very night screams pierced to every corner of the Tennants' great
+house on the Whiskey Road. Those whom screams affect in one way sprang
+from bed; those whom they affect in another hid under the bedclothes.
+Mr. Tennant himself, a man of sharp temper and implacable courage,
+dashed from his room in a suit of blue-and-white pajamas, and overturned
+a Chippendale cabinet worth a thousand dollars; young Mr. Tennant barked
+both shins on a wood-box and dropped a loaded Colt revolver into the
+well of the stair; Mrs. Tennant was longer in appearing, having tarried
+to try the effect upon her nerves and color sense of three divers
+wrappers. The butler, an Admirable Crichton of a man, came, bearing a
+bucket of water in case the house was on fire. Mrs. Tennant's French
+maid carried a case of her mistress's jewels, and seemed determined to
+leave.
+
+Miss Tennant stood in the door-way of her room. She was pale and greatly
+agitated, but her eyes shone with courage and resolve. Her arched,
+blue-veined feet were thrust into a pair of red Turkish slippers turning
+up at the toes. A mandarin robe of dragoned blue brocade was flung over
+her night-gown. In one hand she had a golf club--a niblick.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, when her father was sufficiently recovered from
+overturning the cabinet to listen, "there was a man in my room."
+
+
+     Mr. Tennant }          { furiously.
+     Young Mr.   }          {
+     Tennant     }          { sleepily.
+                 }          {
+     The butler  } "A man?" { as if he thought she
+                 }          { meant to say a fire.
+     The French  }          {
+     maid        }          { blushing crimson.
+
+
+Then, and again all together:
+
+
+     Mr. Tennant--        "Which way did he go?"
+     Young Mr. Tennant--  "Which man?"
+     The butler--         "A white man?"
+     The French maid (with a kind of ecstasy)--
+                          "A man!"
+
+
+"Out the window!" cried Miss Tennant.
+
+Her father and brother dashed downstairs and out into the grounds. The
+butler hurried to the telephone (still carrying his bucket of water) and
+rang Central and asked for the chief of police. Central answered, after
+a long interval, that the chief of police was out of order, and rang
+off.
+
+Meanwhile, Mrs. Tennant arrived, and, having coldly recovered her
+jewel-case from the custody of the French maid, prepared to be told the
+details of what hadn't happened.
+
+"He was bending over my dressing-table, mamma," said Miss Tennant. "I
+could see him plainly in the moonlight; he had a mask, and was smooth
+shaven, and he wore gloves."
+
+"I wonder why he wore gloves," mused Mrs. Tennant.
+
+"I suppose," said Miss Tennant, "that he had heard of the Bertillon
+system, and was afraid of being tracked by his finger-marks."
+
+"Did he say anything?"
+
+"Not to me, I think," said Miss Tennant, "but he kept mumbling to
+himself so I could hear: 'Slit her damn throat if she makes a move; slit
+it right into the backbone.' So, of course, I didn't make a move--I
+thought he was talking to a confederate whom I couldn't see."
+
+"Why a _confederate_?" asked Mrs. Tennant. "Oh, I see--you mean a sort
+of partner."
+
+"But there was only the one," said Miss Tennant. "And when he had filled
+his pockets and was gone by the window--I thought it was safe to scream,
+and I screamed."
+
+"Have you looked to see what he took?"
+
+"No. But my jewels were all knocking about on the dressing-table. I
+suppose he got them."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Tennant, "let's be thankful that he didn't get mine."
+
+"And only to think," said Miss Tennant, "that only last night papa
+asked me why I had given up wearing my pearls, and was put out about it,
+and I promised to wear them oftener!"
+
+"Never mind, my dear," said her mother confidentially; "if you are sorry
+enough long enough your father will buy you others. He can be
+wonderfully generous if you keep at him."
+
+"Oh," said Miss Tennant, "I feel sure that they will be recovered some
+day--it may not be to-morrow, or next day--but somehow--some time I feel
+sure that they will come back. Of course papa must offer a reward."
+
+"I wonder how much he will offer!"
+
+"Oh, a good round sum. I shall suggest five thousand dollars, if he asks
+me."
+
+
+The next day Miss Tennant despatched the following note to Mr.
+Hemingway:
+
+
+     DEAR, KIND MR. HEMINGWAY:
+
+     You have heard of the great robbery and of my dreadful fright. But
+     there is no use crying about it. It is one of those dreadful
+     things, I suppose, that simply _have_ to happen. The burglar was
+     smooth-shaven. How awful that this should have to happen in Aiken
+     of all cities. In Aiken where we never have felt hitherto that it
+     was ever necessary to lock the door. I suppose Mr. Powell's nice
+     hardware store will do an enormous business now in patent bolts.
+     Papa is going to offer five thousand dollars' reward for the return
+     of my jewels, and no questions asked. Do you know, I have a
+     feeling that you are going to be instrumental in finding the stolen
+     goods. I have a feeling that the thief (if he has any sense at all)
+     will negotiate through you for their return. And I am sure the
+     thief would never have taken them if he had known how badly it
+     would make me feel, and what a blow he was striking at the good
+     name of Aiken.
+
+     I am, dear Mr. Hemingway, contritely and sincerely yours,
+
+     SAPPHIRA TENNANT
+     (formerly Dolly Tennant).
+
+
+But Mr. Hemingway refused to touch the reward, and Miss Tennant remained
+in his debt for the full amount of her loan. She began at once to save
+what she could from her allowance. And she called this fund her
+"conscience money."
+
+Miss Tennant and David Larkin did not meet again until the moment of the
+latter's departure from Aiken. And she was only one of a number who
+drove to the station to see him off. Possibly to guard against his
+impulsive nature, she remained in her runabout during the brief
+farewell. And what they said to each other might have been (and probably
+was) heard by others.
+
+Aiken felt that it had misjudged Larkin, and he departed in high favor.
+He had paid what he owed, so Aiken confessed to having misjudged his
+resources. He had suddenly stopped short in all evil ways, so Aiken
+confessed to having misjudged his strength of character. He had
+announced that he was going out West to seek the bubble wealth in the
+mouth of an Idaho apple valley, so Aiken cheered him on and wished him
+well. And when Aiken beheld the calmness of his farewells to Miss
+Tennant, Aiken said: "And he seems to have gotten over that."
+
+But Larkin had done nothing of the kind, and he said to himself, as he
+lay feverish and restless in a stuffy upper berth: "It isn't because
+she's so beautiful or so kind; it's because she always speaks the truth.
+Most girls lie about everything, not in so many words, perhaps, but in
+fact. She doesn't. She lets you know what she thinks, and where you
+stand ... and I didn't stand very high."
+
+Despair seized him. How is it possible to go into a strange world, with
+only nine hundred dollars in your pocket, and carve a fortune? "When can
+I pay her back? What must I do if I fail?..." Then came thoughts that
+were as grains of comfort. Was her lending him money philanthropy pure
+and simple, an act emanating from her love of mankind? Was it not rather
+an act emanating from affection for a particular man? If so, that
+man--misguided boy, bird tumbled out of the nest, child that had escaped
+from its nurse--was not hard to find. "I could lay my finger on him,"
+thought Larkin, and he did so--five fingers, somewhat grandiosely upon
+the chest. A gas lamp peered at him over the curtain pole; snores shook
+the imprisoned atmosphere of the car. And Larkin's thoughts flitted from
+the past and future to the present.
+
+A question that he now asked himself was: "Do women snore?" And: "If
+people cannot travel in drawing-rooms, why do they travel at all?" The
+safety of his nine hundred dollars worried him; he knelt up to look in
+the inside pocket of his jacket, and bumped his head, a dull, solid
+bump. Pale golden stars, shaped like the enlarged pictures of
+snow-flakes, streamed across his consciousness. But the money was safe.
+
+Already his nostrils were irritable with cinders; he attempted to blow
+them clear, and failed. He was terribly thirsty. He wished very much to
+smoke. Whichever way he turned, the frogs on the uppers of his pajamas
+made painful holes in him. He woke at last with two coarse blankets
+wrapped firmly about his head and shoulders and the rest of him
+half-naked, gritty with cinders, and as cold as a well curb. Through the
+ventilators (tightly closed) daylight was struggling with gas-light. The
+car smelled of stale steam and man. The car wheels played a headachy
+tune to the metre of the Phoebe-Snow-upon-the-road-of-anthracite
+verses. David cursed Phoebe Snow, and determined that if ever God
+vouchsafed him a honey-moon it should be upon the clean, fresh ocean.
+
+There had been wistaria in Aiken. There was snow in New York. There was
+a hurricane in Chicago. But in the smoker bound West there was a fine
+old gentleman in a blue-serge suit and white spats who took a fancy to
+David, just when David had about come to the conclusion that nothing in
+the world looked friendly except suicide.
+
+If David had learned nothing else from Miss Tennant, he had learned to
+speak the truth. "Any employer that I am ever to have," he resolved,
+"shall know all that there is to be known about me. I shall not try to
+create the usual impression of a young man seeking his fortune in the
+West purely for amusement." And so, when the preliminaries of
+smoking-room acquaintance had been made--the cigar offered and refused,
+and one's reasons for or against smoking plainly stated--David was
+offered (and accepted) the opportunity to tell the story of his life.
+
+David shook his head at a brilliantly labelled cigar eight inches long.
+
+"I love to smoke," he said, "but I've promised not to."
+
+"Better habit than liquor," suggested the old gentleman in the white
+spats.
+
+"I've promised not to drink."
+
+"Men who don't smoke and who don't drink," said the old gentleman,
+"usually spend their time running after the girls. My name is Uriah
+Grey."
+
+"Mine is David Larkin," said David, and he smiled cheerfully, "and I've
+promised not to make love."
+
+"What--never?" exclaimed Mr. Grey.
+
+"Not until I have a right to," said David.
+
+Mr. Grey drew three brightly bound volumes from between his leg and the
+arm of his chair, and intimated that he was about to make them a subject
+of remark.
+
+"I love stories," he said, "and in the hope of a story I paid a dollar
+and a half for each of three novels. This one tells you how to prepare
+rotten meat for the market. This one tells you when and where to find
+your neighbor's wife without being caught. And in this one a noble young
+Chicagoan describes the life of society persons in the effete East."
+
+"Whom he does not know from Adam," said David.
+
+"Whom he does not distinguish from Adam," corrected Mr. Grey. "But I was
+thinking that I am disappointed in my appetite for stories, and that
+just now you made a most enticing beginning as--'I, Roger Slyweather of
+Slyweather Hall, Blankshire, England, having at the age of twenty-two or
+thereabouts made solemn promise neither to smoke nor to drink, nor to
+make love, did set forth upon a blustering day in April....'"
+
+"Oh," said David, "if it's my story you want, I don't mind a bit. It
+will chasten me to tell it, and you can stop me the minute you are
+bored."
+
+And then, slip by slip and bet by bet, he told his story, withholding
+only the sex of that dear friend who had loaned him the five thousand
+dollars, and to whom he had bound himself by promises.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Grey, when David had finished, "I don't know your
+holding-out powers, Larkin, but you do certainly speak the truth without
+mincing."
+
+"That," said David, "is a promise I have made to myself in admiration of
+and emulation of my friend. But I have had my little lesson, and I shall
+keep the other promises until I have made good."
+
+"And then?" Mr. Grey beamed.
+
+"Then," said David, "I shall smoke and I shall make love."
+
+"But no liquor."
+
+David laughed.
+
+"I have a secret clause in my pledge," said he; "it is not to touch
+liquor except on the personal invitation of my future father-in-law,
+whoever he may be." But he had Dolly Tennant's father in his mind, and
+the joke seemed good to him.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Grey, "I don't know as I'd go into apple-growing. You
+haven't got enough capital."
+
+"But," said David, "I intend to begin at the bottom and work up."
+
+"When I was a youngster," said Mr. Grey, "I began at the bottom of an
+apple tree and worked my way to the top. There I found a wasp's nest.
+Then I fell and broke both arms. That was a lesson to me. Don't go up
+for your pile, my boy. Go down. Go down into the beautiful earth, and
+take out the precious metals."
+
+"Good Heavens!" exclaimed David; "you're _the_ Mr. Grey of Denver."
+
+"I have a car hitched on to this train," said the magnate; "I'd be very
+glad of your company at dinner--seven-thirty. It's not every young man
+that I'd invite. But seeing that you're under bond not to make love
+until you've made good, I can see no objection to introducing you to my
+granddaughter."
+
+
+"Grandpa," said Miss Violet Grey, who was sixteen, spoiled, and
+exquisite, "make that poor boy stop off at Denver, and do something for
+him."
+
+"Since when," said her grandfather, "have you been so down on apples,
+miss?"
+
+"Oh," said she with an approving shudder, "all good women fear
+them--like so much poison."
+
+"But," said Mr. Grey (Mr. "Iron Grey," some called him), "if I take this
+young fellow up, it won't be to put him down in a drawing-room, but in a
+hole a thousand feet deep, or thereabouts."
+
+"And when he comes out," said she, "I shall have returned from being
+finished in Europe."
+
+"Don't know what there is so attractive about these young Eastern
+ne'er-do-weels," said the old gentleman, "but this one has got a certain
+something...."
+
+"It's his inimitable truthfulness," said she.
+
+"Not to me," said her grandfather, "so much as the way he says _w_
+instead of _r_ and at the same time gives the impression of having the
+makings of a man in him...."
+
+"Oh," she said, "make him, grandpa, do!"
+
+"And if I make him?" The old gentleman smiled provokingly.
+
+"Why," said she, "then I'll break him."
+
+"Or," said her grandfather, who was used to her sudden fancies and
+subsequent disenchantments, "or else you'll shake him."
+
+Then he pulled her ears for her and sent her to bed.
+
+
+In one matter David was, from the beginning of his new career, firmly
+resolved. He would in no case write Miss Tennant of his hopes and fears.
+If he was to be promoted she was not to hear of it until after the fact;
+and she should not be troubled with the sordid details of his
+savings-bank account. As to fears, very great at first, these dwindled,
+became atrophied, and were consumed in the fire of work from the moment
+when that work changed from a daily nuisance to a daily miracle, at once
+the exercise and the reward of intelligence. His work, really light at
+first, seemed stupendous to him because he did not understand it. As
+his understanding grew, he was given heavier work, and behold! it seemed
+more light. He discovered that great books had been written upon every
+phase of bringing forth metal from the great mother earth; and he
+snatched from long days of toil time for more toil, and burned his lamp
+into the night, so that he might add theory to practice.
+
+I should like to say that David's swift upward career owed thanks
+entirely to his own good habits, newly discovered gifts for mining
+engineering, and industry; but a strict regard for the truth prevents.
+Upon his own resources and talents he must have succeeded in the end;
+but his success was the swifter for the interest, and presently
+affection, that Uriah Grey himself contributed toward it. In short,
+David's chances came to him as soon as he was strong enough to handle
+them, and were even created on purpose for him; whereas, if he had had
+no one behind him, he must have had to wait interminably for them. But
+the main point, of course, is that, as soon as he began to understand
+what was required of him, he began to make good.
+
+His field work ended about the time that Miss Violet Grey returned from
+Europe "completely finished and done up," as she put it herself, and he
+became a fixture of growing importance in Mr. Grey's main offices in
+Denver and a thrill in Denver society. His baby _w_'s instead of rolling
+_r_'s thrilled the ladies; his good habits coupled with his manliness
+and success thrilled the men.
+
+"He doesn't drink," said one.
+
+"He doesn't smoke," said another.
+
+"He doesn't bet," said a third.
+
+"He can look the saints in the face," said a fourth; and a fifth,
+looking up, thumped upon a bell that would summon a waiter, and with
+emphasis said:
+
+"And we _like_ to have him around!"
+
+Among the youngest and most enthusiastic men it even became the habit to
+copy David in certain things. He was responsible for a small wave of
+reform in Denver, as he had once been in Aiken; but for the opposite
+cause. Little dialogues like the following might frequently be heard in
+the clubs:
+
+"Have a drink, Billy?"
+
+"Thanks; I don't drink."
+
+"Cigar, Sam?"
+
+"Thanks (with a moan); don't smoke."
+
+"Betcherfivedollars, Ned."
+
+"Sorry, old man; I don't bet."
+
+Or, in a lowered voice:
+
+"Say, let's drop round to----"
+
+"I've (chillingly) cut out all that sort of thing."
+
+Platonic friendships became the rage. David himself, as leader,
+maintained a dozen such, chiefest of which was with the newly finished
+Miss Grey. At first her very soul revolted against a friendship of this
+sort. She was lovely, and she knew it; with lovely clothes she made
+herself even lovelier, and she knew this, too. She was young, and she
+rejoiced in it. And she had always been a spoiled darling, and she
+wished to be made much of, to cause a dozen hearts to beat in the breast
+where but one beat before, to be followed, waited on, adored, bowed down
+to, and worshipped. She wished yellow-flowering jealousy to sprout in
+David's heart instead of the calm and loyal friendliness to which alone
+the soil seemed adapted. She knew that he often wrote letters to a Miss
+Tennant; and she would have liked very much to have this Miss Tennant in
+her power, and to have scalped her there and then.
+
+This was only at first, when she merely fancied David rather more than
+other young men. But a time came when her fancy was stronger for him
+than that; and then it seemed to her that even his platonic friendship
+was worth more than all the great passions of history rolled into one.
+Then from the character of that spoiled young lady were wiped clean
+away, as the sponge wipes marks from a slate, vanity, whims, temper,
+tantrums, thoughtlessness, and arrogance, and in their places appeared
+the opposites. She sought out hard spots in people's lives and made them
+soft; sympathy and gentleness radiated from her; thoughtfulness and
+steadfastness.
+
+Her grandfather, who had been reading Ibsen, remarked to himself: "It
+may be artistically and dramatically inexcusable for the ingénue
+suddenly to become the heroine--but _I_ like it. As to the cause----"
+and the old gentleman rested in his deep chair till far into the night,
+twiddling his thumbs and thinking long thoughts. Finally, frowning and
+troubled, he rose and went off to his bed.
+
+"Is it," thought he, "because he gave his word not to make love until he
+had made good--or is it because he really doesn't give a damn about poor
+little Vi? If it's the first reason, why he's absolved from that
+promise, because he has made good, and every day he's making better. But
+if it's the second reason, why then this world is a wicked, dreary
+place. Poor little Vi--poor little Vi ... only two things in the whole
+universe that she can't get--the moon, and David--the moon, and
+David----"
+
+
+About noon the next day, David requested speech with his chief.
+
+"Well?" said Uriah. The old man looked worn and feeble. He had had a
+sorrowful night.
+
+"I haven't had a vacation in a year," said David. "Will you give me
+three weeks, sir?"
+
+"Want to go back East and pay off your obligations?"
+
+David nodded.
+
+"I have the money and interest in hand," said he.
+
+Mr. Grey smiled.
+
+"I suppose you'll come back smoking like a chimney, drinking like a
+fish, betting like a book-maker, and keeping a whole chorus in
+picture-hats."
+
+"I think I'll not even smoke," said David. "About a month ago the last
+traces of hankering left me, and I feel like a free man at last."
+
+"But you'll be making love right and left," said Mr. Grey cheerfully,
+but with a shrewd eye upon the young man's expression of face.
+
+David looked grave and troubled. He appeared to be turning over
+difficult matters in his mind. Then he smiled gayly.
+
+"At least I shall be free to make love if I want to."
+
+"Nonsense," said Mr. Grey. "People don't make love because they want to.
+They do it because they have to."
+
+Again David looked troubled, and a little sad, perhaps.
+
+"True," said he. And he walked meditatively back to his own desk, took
+up a pen, meditated for a long time, and then wrote:
+
+
+     Best friend that any man ever had in the world! I shall be in
+     Aiken on the twenty-fifth, bringing with me that which I owe, and
+     can pay, and deeply conscious of that deeper debt that I owe, but
+     never can hope to pay. But I will do what I can. I will not now
+     take back the promises I gave, unless you wish; I will not do
+     anything that you do not wish. And if all the service and devotion
+     that is in me for the rest of time seem worth having to you, they
+     are yours. But you know that.
+
+     DAVID.
+
+
+This, looking white, tired, and austere, he reread, folded, enveloped,
+stamped, sealed, and addressed to Miss Tennant.
+
+
+Neither the hand which Miss Tennant laid on his, nor the cigarette which
+she lighted for him, completely mollified Mr. Billy McAllen. He was no
+longer young enough to dance with pleasure to a maiden's whims. The
+experience of dancing from New York to Newport and back, and over the
+deep ocean and back, and up and down Europe and back with the late Mrs.
+McAllen--now Mrs. Jimmie Greenleaf--had sufficed. He would walk to the
+altar any day with Miss Tennant, but he would not dance.
+
+"You have so many secrets with yourself," he complained, "and I'm so
+very reasonable."
+
+"True, Billy," said Miss Tennant. "But if I put up with your secrets,
+you should put up with mine."
+
+"I have none," said he, "unless you are rudely referring to the fact
+that I gave my wife such grounds for divorce as every gentleman must be
+prepared to give to a lady who has tired of him. I might have contracted
+a pleasant liaison; but I didn't. I merely drove up and down Piccadilly
+with a notorious woman until the courts were sufficiently scandalized.
+You know that."
+
+"But is it nothing," she said, "to have me feel this way toward you?"
+And she leaned and rested her lovely cheek against his.
+
+"At least, Dolly," said he, more gently, "announce our engagement, and
+marry me inside of six months. I've been patient for eighteen. It would
+have been easy if you had given a good reason...."
+
+"My reason," said she, "will be in Aiken to-morrow."
+
+"You speak with such assurance," said he, smiling, "that I feel sure
+your reason is not travelling by the Southern. And you'll tell me the
+reason to-morrow?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Not to-morrow, Billy--now."
+
+He made no comment, fearing that she might seize upon any as a pretext
+for putting him off. But he slipped an arm around her waist.
+
+"Tighter if you like," she said. "I don't mind. My reason, Billy, is a
+young man. Don't let your arm slacken that way. I don't see any one or
+anything beyond you in any direction in this world. You know that.
+There is nothing in the expression 'a young man' to turn you suddenly
+cold toward me. Don't be a goose.... Not so tight." They laughed
+happily. "I will even tell you his name," she resumed--"David Larkin;
+and I was a little gone on him, and he was over ears with me. You
+weren't in Aiken the year he was. Well, he misbehaved something
+dreadful, Billy; betted himself into a deep, deep hole, and tried to
+float himself out. I took him in hand, loaned him money, and took his
+solemn word that he would not even make love until he had paid me back.
+There was no real understanding between us, only----"
+
+"Only?" McAllen was troubled.
+
+"Only I think he couldn't have changed suddenly from a little fool into
+a man if _he_ hadn't felt that there was an understanding. And his
+letters, one every week, confirm that; though he's very careful, because
+of his promise, not to make love in them.... You see, he's been working
+his head off--there's no way out of it, Billy--for me.... If you hadn't
+crossed my humble path I think I should have possessed enough sentiment
+for David to have been--the reward."
+
+"But there _was_ no understanding."
+
+"No. Not in so many words. But at the last talk we had together he was
+humble and pathetic and rather manly, and I did a very foolish thing."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh," she said with a blush, "I sat still."
+
+"Let me blot it out," said McAllen, drawing her very close.
+
+"But I can only remember up to seven," said she, "and I am afraid that
+nothing can blot them out as far as David is concerned. He will come
+to-morrow as sure that I have been faithful to him as that he has been
+faithful to me.... It's all very dreadful.... He will pay me back the
+money, and the interest; and then I shall give him back the promises
+that he gave, and then he will make love to me...."
+
+She sighed, and said that the thought of the pickle she had got herself
+into made her temples ache. McAllen kissed them for her.
+
+"But why," he said, "when you got to care for me, didn't you let this
+young man learn gradually in your letters to him that--that it was all
+off?"
+
+"I was afraid, don't you see," said she, "that if the incentive was
+suddenly taken away from him--he might go to pieces. And I was fond of
+him, and I am proud to think that he has made good for my sake, and the
+letters.... Oh, Billy, it's a dreadful mess. My letters to him have been
+rather warm, I am afraid."
+
+"Damn!" said McAllen.
+
+"Damn!" said Miss Tennant.
+
+"If he would have gone to pieces before this," said McAllen, "why not
+now?--after you tell him, I mean."
+
+"Why not?" said she dismally. "But if he does, Billy, I can only be
+dreadfully sorry. I'm certainly not going to wreck our happiness just to
+keep him on the war-path."
+
+"But you'll not be weak, Dolly?"
+
+"How!--weak?"
+
+"He'll be very sad and miserable--you won't be carried away? You won't,
+upon the impulse of the moment, feel that it is your duty to go on
+saving him?... If that should happen, Dolly, _I_ should go to pieces."
+
+"Must I tell him," she said, "that I never really cared? He will think
+me such a--a liar. And I'm not a liar, Billy, am I? I'm just unlucky."
+
+"I don't believe," said he tenderly, "that you ever told a story in your
+whole sweet life."
+
+"Oh," she cried, "I _do_ love you when you say things like that to
+me.... Let's not talk about horrid things any more, and mistakes, and
+bugbears.... If we're going to show up at the golf club tea.... It's
+Mrs. Carrol's to-day and we promised her to come."
+
+"Oh," said McAllen, "we need not start for ten minutes.... When will you
+marry me?"
+
+"In May," she said.
+
+"_Good_ girl," said he.
+
+"Billy," she said presently, "it was _all_ the first Mrs. Billy's
+fault--wasn't it?"
+
+"No, dear," said he, "it wasn't. It's never all of anybody's fault. Do
+you care?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you afraid?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How much?"
+
+"So much," and she made the gesture that a baby makes when you ask, "How
+big's the baby?"
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"Dolly."
+
+"Whose girl are you?"
+
+"I'm Billy McAllen's girl."
+
+"All of you?"
+
+She grew very serious in a moment.
+
+"All of me, Billy--all that is straight in me, all that is crooked, all
+that is white, all that is black...."
+
+But he would not be serious.
+
+"How about this hand? Is that mine?"
+
+"Yours."
+
+He kissed it.
+
+"This cheek?"
+
+"Yours."
+
+"And this?"
+
+"Yours."
+
+"These eyes?"
+
+"Both yours."
+
+He closed them, first one, then the other.
+
+Then a kind of trembling seized him, so that it was evident in his
+speech.
+
+"This mouth, Dolly?"
+
+"Mumm."
+
+And so, as the romantic school has it, "the long day dragged slowly on."
+
+
+David may have thought it pure chance that he should find Dolly Tennant
+alone. But it was not. She had given the matter not a little strategy
+and arrangement. Why, however, in view of her relations with McAllen,
+she should have made herself as attractive as possible to the eye is for
+other women to say.
+
+It was to be April in a few days, and March was going out like a fiery
+dragon. The long, broad shadow of the terrace awning helped to darken
+the Tennants' drawing-room, and Venetian blinds, half-drawn, made a kind
+of cool dusk, in which it came natural to speak in a lowered voice, and
+to move quietly, as if some one were sick in the house. Miss Tennant sat
+very low, with her hands clasped over her knees; a brocade and Irish
+lace work-bag spilled its contents at her feet. She wore a twig of tea
+olive in her dress so that the whole room smelled of ripe peaches. She
+had never looked lovelier or more desirable.
+
+"David!" she exclaimed. Her tone at once expressed delight at seeing
+him, and was an apology for remaining languidly seated. And she looked
+him over in a critical, maternal way.
+
+"If you hadn't sent in your name," she said, "I should never have known
+you. You stand taller and broader, David. You filled the door-way. But
+you're not really much bigger, now that I look at you. It's your
+character that has grown.... I'm _so_ proud of you."
+
+David was very pale. It may have been from his long journey. But he at
+least did not know, because he said that he didn't when she asked him.
+
+"And now," she said, "you must tell me all that you haven't written."
+
+"Not quite yet," said David. "There is first a little matter of
+business...."
+
+"Oh--" she protested.
+
+But David counted out his debt to her methodically, with the accrued
+interest.
+
+"Put it in my work-bag," she said.
+
+"Did you ever expect to see it again?"
+
+"Yes, David."
+
+"Thank you," he said.
+
+"But I," she said, "I, too, have things of yours to return."
+
+"Of mine?" He lifted his eyebrows expectantly.
+
+She waved a hand, white and clean as a cherry blossom, toward a
+claw-footed table on which stood decanters, ice, soda, cigarettes,
+cigars, and matches.
+
+"Your collateral," she said.
+
+"Oh," said David. "But I have decided not to be a backslider."
+
+"I know," she said. "But in business--as a matter of form."
+
+"Oh," said David, "if it's a matter of form, it must be complied with."
+
+He stepped to the table, smiling charmingly, and poured from the nearest
+decanter into a glass, added ice and soda, and lifting the mixture
+touched it to his lips, and murmured, "To you."
+
+Then he put a cigarette in his mouth, and, after drawing the one breath
+that served to light it, flicked it, with perfect accuracy, half across
+the room and into the fireplace.
+
+Still smiling, he walked slowly toward Miss Tennant, who was really
+excited to know what he would do next.
+
+"Betcher two cents it snows to-morrow," said he.
+
+"Done with you, David," she took him up merrily. And after that a
+painful silence came over them. David set his jaws.
+
+"I gave you one more promise," he said. "Is that, too, returned?"
+
+"Of course," she said, "all the promises you gave are herewith
+returned."
+
+"Then I may make love?" he asked very gently.
+
+She did not answer for some moments, and then, steeling herself, for she
+thought that she must hurt him:
+
+"Yes, David," she said slowly, "you may--as a matter of form."
+
+"Only in that way?"
+
+"In that way only, David--to me."
+
+"I thought--I thought," said the young man in confusion.
+
+"I made you think so," she said generously. "Let all of the punishment,
+that can, be heaped on me ... David...." There was a deep appeal in her
+voice as for mercy and forgiveness.
+
+"Then," said he, "you never did care--at all."
+
+But even at this juncture Miss Tennant could not speak the truth.
+
+"Never, David--never at all--at least not in _that_ way," she said. "If
+I let you think so it was because I thought it would help you to be
+strong and to succeed.... God knows I think I was wrong to let you think
+so...."
+
+But she broke off suddenly a stream of extenuation that was welling in
+her mind; for David did not look like a man about to be cut off in the
+heyday of his youth by despair.
+
+She had the tenderest heart; and in a moment the truth blossomed
+therein--a truth that brought her pleasure, bewilderment, and was not
+unmixed with mortification.
+
+"The man," she said gently, "has found him another girl!"
+
+The man bowed his head and blushed.
+
+"But I have kept my promise, Dolly."
+
+"Of course you have, you poor, dear, long-suffering soul. Oh, David,
+when I think what I have been taking for granted I am humiliated, and
+ashamed--but I am glad, too. I cannot tell you how glad."
+
+A pair of white gloves, still showing the shape of her hands, lay in the
+chair where Miss Tennant had tossed them. David brought her one of these
+gloves.
+
+"Put it on," he said.
+
+When she had done so, he took her gloved hand in his and kissed it.
+
+"As a matter of form," he said.
+
+She laughed easily, though the blush of humiliation had not yet left her
+cheeks.
+
+"Tell me," she said, "what you would have done, David, if--if I _did_
+care."
+
+"God punish me," he said gravely, "oh, best friend that ever a man had
+in the world, if I should not then have made you a good husband."
+
+
+Not long after McAllen was with her.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"Well," said she, "there was a train that he could catch. And I suppose
+he caught it."
+
+"How did he--er, behave?"
+
+"Considering the circumstances," said she, "he behaved very well."
+
+"Is he hard hit?"
+
+She considered a while; but the strict truth was not in that young lady.
+
+"I think," she said, "that you may say that he is hard hit--very hard
+hit."
+
+"Poor soul," said Billy tenderly.
+
+"Oh, Billy!" she exclaimed, "I feel so false and so old."
+
+"Old!" he cried. "You! You at twenty-five say that to me at----"
+
+"It isn't as if I was _just_ twenty-five, Billy," and she burst out
+laughing. "The terrible part of it is that I'm still twenty-five."
+
+But he only smiled and smiled. She seemed like a little child to him,
+all innocence, and inexperience, and candor.
+
+Then as her laughter merged into tears he knelt and caught her in his
+arms.
+
+"Dolly--Dolly!" he said in a choking voice. "What is your name?"
+
+"Dolly." The tears came slowly.
+
+"Whose girl are you?"
+
+"I'm Billy McAllen's girl." The tears ceased.
+
+"All of you?"
+
+"All of me.... Oh, Billy--love me always--only love me...."
+
+And for these two the afternoon dragged slowly on, and very much as
+usual.
+
+
+"You are two days ahead of schedule, David. I'm glad to see you."
+
+Though Uriah Grey's smile was bland and simple, beneath it lay a
+complicated maze of speculation; and the old man endeavored to read in
+the young man's face the answers to those questions which so greatly
+concerned him. Uriah Grey's eyesight was famous for two things: for its
+miraculous, almost chemical ability to detect the metals in ore and the
+gold in men. He sighed; but not so that David could hear. The magnate
+detected happiness where less than two weeks before he had read doubt,
+hesitation, and a kind of dumb misery.
+
+"You have had a pleasant holiday?"
+
+"A happy one, Mr. Grey." David's eyes twinkled and sparkled.
+
+"Tell me about it."
+
+"Well, sir, I paid my debts and got back my collateral."
+
+"Well, sir?"
+
+"I tasted whiskey," said David. "I lighted a cigarette, I registered a
+bet of two cents upon the weather, and I made love."
+
+Uriah Grey with difficulty suppressed a moan.
+
+"Did you!" he said dully.
+
+"Yes," said David. "I kissed the glove upon a lady's hand." He laughed.
+"It smelled of gasoline," he said.
+
+Mr. Grey grunted.
+
+"And what are your plans?"
+
+"What!" cried David offendedly. "Are you through with me?"
+
+"No, my boy--no."
+
+David hesitated.
+
+"Mr. Grey," he began, and paused.
+
+"Well, sir?"
+
+"It is now lawful for me to make love," said David; "but I should do so
+with a better grace if I had your permission and approval."
+
+Mr. Grey was puzzled.
+
+"What have I to do with it?"
+
+"You have a granddaughter...."
+
+"What!" thundered the old man. "You want to make love to my
+granddaughter!"
+
+"Yes," said David boldly, "and I wonder what you are going to say."
+
+"I have only one word to say--Hurry!"
+
+
+"David!"
+
+Spools of silk rattled from her lap to the floor. She was frankly and
+childishly delighted to see him again, and she hurried to him and gave
+him both her hands. But he looked so happy that her heart misgave her
+for a moment, and then she read his eyes aright, just as long since he
+must have read the confession in hers. At this juncture in their lives
+there could not have been detected in either of them the least show of
+hesitation or embarrassment. It was as if two travellers in the desert,
+dying of thirst, should meet, and each conceive in hallucination that
+the other was a spring of sweet water.
+
+Presently David was looking into the lovely face that he held between
+his hands. He had by this time squeezed her shoulders, patted her back,
+kissed her feet, her dress, her hands, her eyes, and pawed her hair.
+They were both very short of breath.
+
+"Violet," he gasped, "what is your name?"
+
+"Violet."
+
+"Whose girl are you?"
+
+"I'm David Larkin's girl."
+
+"All of you?"
+
+"All--all--all----"
+
+It was the beginning of another of those long, tedious afternoons. But
+to the young people concerned it seemed that never until then had such
+words as they spoke to each other been spoken, or such feelings of
+almost insupportable tenderness and adoration been experienced.
+
+Yet back there in Aiken, Sapphira was experiencing the same feelings,
+and thinking the same thoughts about them; and so was Billy McAllen. And
+when you think that he had already been divorced once, and that
+Sapphira, as she herself (for once truthfully) confessed, was still
+twenty-five, it gives you as high an opinion of the little bare god--as
+he deserves.
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIDE'S DEAD
+
+
+I
+
+Only Farallone's face was untroubled. His big, bold eyes held a kind of
+grim humor, and he rolled them unblinkingly from the groom to the bride,
+and back again. His duck trousers, drenched and stained with sea-water,
+clung to the great muscles of his legs, particles of damp sand glistened
+upon his naked feet, and the hairless bronze of his chest and columnar
+throat glowed through the openings of his torn and buttonless shirt.
+Except for the life and vitality that literally sparkled from him, he
+was more like a statue of a shipwrecked sailor than the real article
+itself. Yet he had not the proper attributes of a shipwrecked sailor.
+There was neither despair upon his countenance nor hunger; instead a
+kind of enjoyment, and the expression of one who has been set free.
+Indeed, he must have secured a kind of liberty, for after the years of
+serving one master and another, he had, in our recent struggle with the
+sea, but served himself. His was the mind and his the hand that had
+brought us at length to that desert coast. He it was that had extended
+to us the ghost of a chance. He who so recently had been but one of
+forty in the groom's luxurious employ; a polisher of brass, a
+holy-stoner of decks, a wage-earning paragon who was not permitted to
+think, was now a thinker and a strategist, a wage-taker from no man, and
+the obvious master of us three.
+
+The bride slept on the sand where Farallone had laid her. Her stained
+and draggled clothes were beginning to dry and her hair to blaze in the
+pulsing rays of the sun. Her breath came and went with the long-drawn
+placidity of deep sleep. One shoe had been torn from her by the surf,
+and through a tear in her left stocking blinked a pink and tiny toe. Her
+face lay upon her arm and was hidden by it, and by her blazing hair. In
+the loose-jointed abandon of exhaustion and sleep she had the effect of
+a flower that has wilted; the color and the fabric were still lovely,
+but the robust erectness and crispness were gone. The groom, almost
+unmanned and wholly forlorn, sat beside her in a kind of huddled
+attitude, as if he was very cold. He had drawn his knees close to his
+chest, and held them in that position with thin, clasped fingers. His
+hair, which he wore rather long, was in a wild tangle, and his neat
+eye-glasses with their black cord looked absurdly out of keeping with
+his general dishevelment. The groom, never strong or robust, looked as
+if he had shrunk. The bride, too, looked as if she had shrunk, and I
+certainly felt as if I had. But, however strong the contrast between us
+three small humans and the vast stretches of empty ocean and desert
+coast, there was no diminution about Farallone, but the contrary. I have
+never seen the presence of a man loom so strongly and so large. He sat
+upon his rock with a kind of vastness, so bold and strong he seemed, so
+utterly unperturbed.
+
+Suddenly the groom, a kind of querulous shiver in his voice, spoke.
+
+"The brandy, Farallone, the brandy."
+
+The big sailor rolled his bold eyes from the groom to the bride, but
+returned no answer.
+
+The groom's voice rose to a note of vexation.
+
+"I said I wanted the brandy," he said.
+
+Farallone's voice was large and free like a fresh breeze.
+
+"I heard you," said he.
+
+"Well," snapped the groom, "get it."
+
+"Get it yourself," said Farallone quickly, and he fell to whistling in a
+major key.
+
+The groom, born and accustomed to command, was on his feet shaking with
+fury.
+
+"You damned insolent loafer--" he shouted.
+
+"Cut it out--cut it out," said the big sailor, "you'll wake her."
+
+The groom's voice sank to an angry whisper.
+
+"Are you going to do what I tell you or not?"
+
+"Not," said Farallone.
+
+"I'll"--the groom's voice loudened--his eye sought an ally in mine. But
+I turned my face away and pretended that I had not seen or heard. There
+had been born in my breast suddenly a cold unreasoning fear of Farallone
+and of what he might do to us weaklings. I heard no more words and,
+venturing a look, saw that the groom was seating himself once more by
+the bride.
+
+"If you sit on the other side of her," said Farallone, "you'll keep the
+sun off her head."
+
+He turned his bold eyes on me and winked one of them. And I was so taken
+by surprise that I winked back and could have kicked myself for doing
+so.
+
+
+II
+
+Farallone helped the bride to her feet. "That's right," he said with a
+kind of nursely playfulness, and he turned to the groom.
+
+"Because I told you to help yourself," he said, "doesn't mean that I'm
+not going to do the lion's share of everything. I am. I'm fit. You and
+the writer man aren't. But you must do just a little more than you're
+able, and that's all we'll ask of you. Everybody works this voyage
+except the woman."
+
+"I can work," said the bride.
+
+"Rot!" said Farallone. "We'll ask you to walk ahead, like a kind of
+north star. Only we'll tell you which way to turn. Do you see that
+sugar-loaf? You head for that. Vamoose! We'll overhaul you."
+
+The bride moved upon the desert alone, her face toward an easterly hill
+that had given Farallone his figure of the sugar-loaf. She had no longer
+the effect of a wilted flower, but walked with quick, considered steps.
+What the groom carried and what I carried is of little moment. Our packs
+united would not have made the half of the lumbersome weight that
+Farallone swung upon his giant shoulders.
+
+"Follow the woman," said he, and we began to march upon the
+shoe-and-stocking track of the bride. Farallone, rolling like a ship (I
+had many a look at him over my shoulder) brought up the rear. From time
+to time he flung forward a phrase to us in explanation of his rebellious
+attitude.
+
+"I take command because I'm fit; you're not. I give the orders because I
+can get 'em obeyed; you can't." And, again: "You don't know east from
+west; I do."
+
+All the morning he kept firing disagreeable and very personal remarks at
+us. His proposition that we were not in any way fit for anything he
+enlarged upon and illustrated. He flung the groom's unemployed ancestry
+at him; he likened the groom to Rome at the time of the fall, which he
+attributed to luxury; he informed me that only men who were unable to
+work, or in any way help themselves, wrote books. "The woman's worth the
+two of you," he said. "Her people were workers. See it in her stride.
+She could milk a cow if she had one. If anything happens to me she'll
+give the orders. Mark my words. She's got a head on her shoulders, she
+has."
+
+The bride halted suddenly in her tracks and, turning, faced the groom.
+
+"Are you going to allow this man's insolence to run on forever?" she
+said.
+
+The groom frowned at her and shook his head covertly.
+
+"Pooh," said the bride, and I think I heard her call him "_my
+champion_," in a bitter whisper. She walked straight back to Farallone
+and looked him fearlessly in the face.
+
+"The bigger a man is, Mr. Farallone," she said, "and the stronger, the
+more he ought to mind his manners. We are grateful to you for all you
+have done, but if you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head, then the
+sooner we part company the better."
+
+For a full minute the fearless eyes snapped at Farallone, then, suddenly
+abashed, softened, and turned away.
+
+"There mustn't be any more mutiny," said Farallone. "But you've got
+sand, you have. I could love a woman like you. How did you come to hitch
+your wagon to little Nicodemus there? He's no star. You deserved a man.
+You've got sand, and when your poor feet go back on you, as they will in
+this swill (here he kicked the burning sand), I'll carry you. But if you
+hadn't spoken up so pert, I wouldn't. Now you walk ahead and pretend
+you're Christopher Columbus De Soto Peary leading a flock of sheep to
+the Fountain of Eternal Youth.... Bear to the left of the sage-brush,
+there's a tarantula under it...."
+
+We went forward a few steps, when suddenly I heard Farallone's voice in
+my ear. "Isn't she splendid?" he said, and at the same time he thumped
+me so violently between the shoulders that I stumbled and fell. For a
+moment all fear of the man left me on the wings of rage, and I was for
+attacking him with my fists. But something in his steady eye brought me
+to my senses.
+
+"Why did you do that?" I meant to speak sharply, but I think I whined.
+
+"Because," said Farallone, "when the woman spoke up to me you began to
+brindle and act lion-like and bold. For a minute you looked
+dangerous--for a little feller. So I patted your back, in a friendly
+way--as a kind of reminder--a feeble reminder."
+
+We had dropped behind the others. The groom had caught up with the
+bride, and from his nervous, irritable gestures I gathered that the poor
+soul was trying to explain and to ingratiate himself. But she walked on,
+steadily averted, you might say, her head very high, her shoulders drawn
+back. The groom, his eyes intent upon her averted face, kept stumbling
+with his feet.
+
+"Just look," said Farallone in a friendly voice. "Those whom God hath
+joined together. What did the press say of it?"
+
+"I don't remember," I said.
+
+"You lie," said Farallone. "The press called it an ideal match. My God!"
+he cried--and so loudly that the bride and the groom must have
+heard--"think of being a woman like that and getting hitched to a little
+bit of a fuss with a few fine feathers"; and with a kind of sing-song he
+began to misquote and extemporize:
+
+
+     "Just for a handful of silver she left me,
+        Just for a yacht and a mansion of stone,
+     Just for a little fool nest of fine feathers
+        She wed Nicodemus and left me alone."
+
+
+"But she'd never seen me," he went on, and mused for a moment. "Having
+seen me--do you guess what she's saying to herself? She's saying: 'Thank
+God I'm not too old to begin life over again,' or thinking it. Look at
+him! Even you wouldn't have been such a joke. I've a mind to kick the
+life out of him. One little kick with bare toes. Life? There's no life
+in him--nothing but a jenny-wren."
+
+The groom, who must have heard at least the half of Farallone's speech,
+stopped suddenly and waited for us to come up. His face was red and
+white--blotchy with rage and vindictiveness. When we were within ten
+feet of him he suddenly drew a revolver and fired it point-blank at
+Farallone. He had no time for a second shot. Farallone caught his wrist
+and shook it till the revolver spun through the air and fell at a
+distance. Then Farallone seated himself and, drawing the groom across
+his knee, spanked him. Since the beginning of the world children have
+been punished by spankings, and the event is memorable, if at all, as a
+something rather comical and domestic. But to see a grown man spanked
+for the crime of attempted murder is horrible. Farallone's fury got the
+better of him, and the blows resounded in the desert. I grappled his
+arm, and the recoil of it flung me head over heels. When Farallone had
+finished, the groom could not stand. He rolled in the sands, moaning and
+hiding his face.
+
+The bride was white as paper; but she had no eye for the groom.
+
+"Did he miss you?" she said.
+
+"No," said Farallone, "he hit me--Nicodemus hit me."
+
+"Where?" said the bride.
+
+"In the arm."
+
+Indeed, the left sleeve of Farallone's shirt was glittering with blood.
+
+"I will bandage it for you," she said, "if you will tell me how."
+
+Farallone ripped open the sleeve of his shirt.
+
+"What shall I bandage it with?" asked the bride.
+
+"Anything," said Farallone.
+
+The bride turned her back on us, stooped, and we heard a sound of
+tearing. When she had bandaged Farallone's wound (it was in the flesh
+and the bullet had been extracted by its own impetus) she looked him
+gravely in the face.
+
+"What's the use of goading him?" she said gently.
+
+"Look," said Farallone.
+
+The groom was reaching for the fallen revolver.
+
+"Drop it," bellowed Farallone.
+
+The groom's hand, which had been on the point of grasping the revolver's
+stock, jerked away. The bride walked to the revolver and picked it up.
+She handed it to Farallone.
+
+"Now," she said, "that all the power is with you, you will not go on
+abusing it."
+
+"_You_ carry it," said Farallone, "and any time _you_ think I ought to
+be shot, why, you just shoot me. I won't say a word."
+
+"Do you mean it?" said the bride.
+
+"I cross my heart," said Farallone.
+
+"I sha'n't forget," said the bride. She took the revolver and dropped it
+into the pocket of her jacket.
+
+"Vamoose!" said Farallone. And we resumed our march.
+
+
+III
+
+The line between the desert and the blossoming hills was as distinctly
+drawn as that between a lake and its shore. The sage-brush, closer
+massed than any through which we had yet passed, seemed to have gathered
+itself for a serried assault upon the lovely verdure beyond. Outposts of
+the sage-brush, its unsung heroes, perhaps, showed here and there among
+ferns and wild roses--leafless, gaunt, and dead; one knotted specimen
+even had planted its banner of desolation in the shade of a wild lilac
+and there died. A twittering of birds gladdened our dusty ears, and from
+afar there came a splashing of water. Our feet, burned by the desert
+sands, torn by yucca and cactus, trod now upon a cool and delicious
+moss, above which nodded the delicate blossoms of the shooting-star,
+swung at the ends of strong and delicate stems. In the shadows the
+chocolate lilies and trilliums dully glinted, and flag flowers trooped
+in the sunlight. The resinous paradisiacal smell of tarweed and
+bay-tree refreshed us, and the wonder of life was a something strong
+and tangible like bread and wine.
+
+The wine of it rushed in particular to Farallone's head; his brain
+became flooded with it; his feet cavorted upon the moss; his bellowed
+singing awoke the echoes, and the whole heavenly choir of the birds
+answered him.
+
+"You, Nicodemus," he cried gayly, "thought that man was given a nose to
+be a tripod for his eye-glasses--but now--oh, smell--smell!"
+
+His great bulk under its mighty pack tripped lightly, dancingly at the
+bride's elbow. Now his agile fingers nipped some tiny, scarce
+perceivable flower to delight her eye, and now his great hand scooped up
+whole sheaves of strong-growing columbine, and flung them where her feet
+must tread. He made her see great beauties and minute, and whatever had
+a look of smelling sweet he crushed in his hands for her to smell.
+
+He was no longer that limb of Satan, that sardonic bully of the desert
+days, but a gay wood-god intent upon the gentle ways of wooing. At first
+the bride turned away her senses from his offerings to eye and nostril;
+for a time she made shift to turn aside from the flowers that he cast
+for her feet to tread. But after a time, like one in a trance, she began
+to yield up her indifference and aloofness. The magic of the riotous
+spring began to intoxicate her. I saw her turn to the sailor and smile
+a gracious smile. And after awhile she began to talk with him.
+
+We came at length to a bright stream, from whose guileless
+superabundance Farallone, with a bent pin and a speck of red cloth,
+jerked a string of gaudy rainbow-trout. He made a fire and began to
+broil them; the bride searched the vicinal woods for dried branches to
+feed the fire. The groom knelt by the brook and washed the dust from his
+face and ears, snuffing the cool water into his dusty nose and blowing
+it out.
+
+And I lay in the shade and wondered by what courses the brook found its
+way to what sea or lake; whether it touched in its wanderings only the
+virginal wilderness, or flowed at length among the habitations of men.
+
+Farallone, of a sudden, jerked up his head from the broiling and
+answered my unspoken questions.
+
+"A man," he said, "who followed this brook could come in a few days to
+the river Maria Cleofas, and following that, to the town of that name,
+in a matter of ten days more. I tell you," he went on, "because some day
+some of you may be going that voyage; no ill-found voyage
+either--spring-water and trout all the way to the river; and all the
+rest of the way river-water and trout; and at this season birds' eggs in
+the reeds and a turtlelike terrapin, and Brodeia roots and wild onion,
+and young sassafras--a child could do it. Eat that...." he tossed me
+with his fingers a split, sputtering, piping hot trout....
+
+We spent the rest of that day and the night following by the stream.
+Farallone was in a riotous good-humor, and the fear of him grew less in
+us until we felt at ease and could take an unmixed pleasure in the
+loafing.
+
+Early the next morning he was astir, and began to prepare himself for
+further marching, but for the rest of us he said there would be one day
+more of rest.
+
+"Who knows," he said, "but this is Sunday?"
+
+"Where are you going?" asked the bride politely.
+
+"Me?" said Farallone, and he laughed. "I'm going house-hunting--not for
+a house, of course, but for a site. It's not so easy to pick out just
+the place where you want to spend the balance of your days. The
+neighborhood's easy, but the exact spot's hard." He spoke now directly
+to the bride, and as if her opinion was law to him. "There must be sun
+and shade, mustn't there? Spring-water?--running water? A hill handy to
+take the view from? An easterly slope to be out of the trades? A big
+tree or two.... I'll find 'em all before dark. I'll be back by dark or
+at late moonrise, and you rest yourselves, because to-morrow or the next
+day we go at house-raising."
+
+Had he left us then and there, I think that we would have waited for
+him. He had us, so to speak, abjectly under his thumbs. His word had
+come to be our law, since it was but child's play for him to enforce it.
+But it so happened that he now took a step which was to call into life
+and action that last vestige of manhood and independence that flickered
+in the groom and me. For suddenly, and not till after a moment of
+consideration, he took a step toward the bride, caught her around the
+waist, crushed her to his breast, and kissed her on the mouth.
+
+But she must have bitten him, for the tender passion changed in him to
+an unmanly fury.
+
+"You damned cat!" he cried; and he struck her heavily upon the face with
+his open palm. Not once only, but twice, three, four times, till she
+fell at his feet.
+
+By that the groom and I, poor, helpless atoms, had made shift to grapple
+with him. I heard his giant laugh. I had one glimpse of the groom's face
+rushing at mine--and then it was as if showers of stars fell about me.
+What little strength I had was loosened from my joints, and more than
+half-senseless I fell full length upon my back. Farallone had foiled our
+attack by the simple method of catching us by the hair and knocking our
+heads together.
+
+I could hear his great mocking laugh resounding through the forest.
+
+"Let him go," I heard the groom moan.
+
+The bride laughed. It was a very curious laugh. I could not make it out.
+There seemed to be no anger in it, and yet how, I wondered, could there
+be anything else?
+
+
+IV
+
+When distance had blotted from our ears the sound of Farallone's
+laughter, and when we had humbled ourselves to the bride for allowing
+her to be maltreated, I told the groom what Farallone had said about a
+man who should follow the stream by which we were encamped.
+
+"See," I said, "we have a whole day's start of him. Even he can't make
+that up. We must go at once, and there mustn't be any letting up till we
+get somewhere."
+
+The groom was all for running away, and the bride, silent and white,
+acquiesced with a nod. We made three light packs, and started--_bolted_
+is the better word.
+
+For a mile or more, so thick was the underwood, we walked in the bed of
+the stream; now freely, where it was smooth-spread sand, and now where
+it narrowed and deepened among rocks, scramblingly and with many a
+splashing stumble. The bride met her various mishaps with a kind of
+silent disdain; she made no complaints, not even comments. She made me
+think of a sleep-walker. There was a set, far-off, cold expression upon
+her usually gentle and vivacious face, and once or twice it occurred to
+me that she went with us unwillingly. But when I remembered the
+humiliation that Farallone had put upon her and the blows that he had
+struck her, I could not well credit the recurrent doubt of her
+willingness. The groom, on the other hand, recovered his long-lost
+spirits with immeasurable rapidity. He talked gayly and bravely, and you
+would have said that he was a man who had never had occasion to be
+ashamed of himself. He went ahead, the bride following next, and he kept
+giving a constant string of advices and imperatives. "That stone's
+loose"; "keep to the left, there's a hole." "Splash--dash--damn, look
+out for that one." Branches that hung low across our course he bent and
+held back until the bride had passed. Now he turned and smiled in her
+face, and now he offered her the helping hand. But she met his
+courtesies, and the whole punctilious fabric of his behavior, with the
+utmost absence and nonchalance. He had, it seemed, been too long in
+contempt to recover soon his former position of husband and beloved. For
+long days she had contemplated his naked soul, limited, weak, incapable.
+He had shown a certain capacity for sudden, explosive temper, but not
+for courage of any kind, or force. Nor had he played the gentleman in
+his helplessness. Nor had I. We had not in us the stuff of heroes; at
+first sight of instruments of torture we were of those who would confess
+to anything, abjure, swear falsely, beg for mercy, change our so-called
+religions--anything. The bride had learned to despise us from the bottom
+of her heart. She despised us still. And I would have staked my last
+dollar, or, better, my hopes of escaping from Farallone, that as man and
+wife she and the groom would never live together again. I felt terribly
+sorry for the groom. He had, as had I, been utterly inefficient,
+helpless, babyish, and cowardly--yet the odds against us had seemed
+overwhelming. But now as we journeyed down the river, and the distance
+between us and Farallone grew more, I kept thinking of men whom I had
+known; men physically weaker than the groom and I, who, had Farallone
+offered to bully them, would have fought him and endured his torture
+till they died. In my immediate past, then, there was nothing of which I
+was not burningly ashamed, and in the not-too-distant future I hoped to
+separate from the bride and the groom, and never see them or hear of
+them in this world again. At that, I had a real affection for the bride,
+a real admiration. On the yacht, before trouble showed me up, we had
+bid fair to become fast and enduring friends. But that was all over--a
+bud, nipped by the frost of conduct and circumstance, or ever the fruit
+could so much as set. For many days now I had avoided her eye; I had
+avoided addressing her; I had exerted my ingenuity to keep out of her
+sight. It is a terrible thing for a man to be thrown daily into the
+society of a woman who has found him out, and who despises him, mind,
+soul, marrow, and bone.
+
+The stream broke at length from the forest and, swelled by a sizable
+tributary, flowed broad and deep into a rolling, park-like landscape.
+Grass spread over the country's undulations and looked in the distance
+like well-kept lawns; and at wide intervals splendidly grown live-oaks
+lent an effect of calculated planting. Here our flight, for our muscles
+were hardened to walking, became easy and swift. I think there were
+hours when we must have covered our four miles, and even on long, upward
+slopes we must have made better than three. There is in swift walking,
+when the muscles are hard, the wind long, and the atmosphere
+exhilarating, a buoyant rhythm that more, perhaps, than merited success,
+or valorous conduct, smoothes out the creases in a man's soul. And so
+quick is a man to recover from his own baseness, and to ape outwardly
+his transient inner feelings, that I found myself presently, walking
+with a high head and a mind full of martial thoughts.
+
+All that day, except for a short halt at noon, we followed the river
+across the great natural park; now paralleling its convolutions, and now
+cutting diagonals. Late in the afternoon we came to the end of the park
+land. A more or less precipitous formation of glistening quartz marked
+its boundary, and into a fissure of this the stream, now a small river,
+plunged with accelerated speed. The going became difficult. The walls of
+the fissure through which the river rushed were smooth and water-worn,
+impossible to ascend; and between the brink of the river and the base of
+the walls were congestions of boulders, jammed drift-wood, and tangled
+alder bushes. There were times when we had to crawl upon our hands and
+knees, under one log and over the next. To add to our difficulties
+darkness was swiftly falling, and we were glad, indeed, when the wall of
+the fissure leaned at length so far from the perpendicular that we were
+able to scramble up it. We found ourselves upon a levelish little meadow
+of grass. In the centre of it there grew a monstrous and gigantic
+live-oak, between two of whose roots there glittered a spring. On all
+sides of the meadow, except on that toward the river, were
+superimpending cliffs of quartz. Along the base of these was a dense
+growth of bushes.
+
+"We'll rest here," said the groom. "What a place. It's a natural
+fortress. Only one way into it." He stood looking down at the noisy
+river and considering the steep slope we had just climbed. "See this
+boulder?" he said. "It's wobbly. If that damned longshoreman tries to
+get us here, all we've got to do is to choose the psychological moment
+and push it over on him."
+
+The groom looked quite bellicose and daring. Suddenly he flung his
+fragment of a cap high into the air and at the very top of his lungs
+cried: "Liberty!"
+
+The echoes answered him, and the glorious, abused word was tossed from
+cliff to cliff, across the river and back, and presently died away.
+
+At that, from the very branches of the great oak that stood in the
+centre of the meadow there burst a titanic clap of laughter, and
+Farallone, literally bursting with merriment, dropped lightly into our
+midst.
+
+I can only speak for myself. I was frightened--I say it deliberately and
+truthfully--_almost_ into a fit. And for fully five minutes I could not
+command either of my legs. The groom, I believe, screamed. The bride
+became whiter than paper--then suddenly the color rushed into her
+cheeks, and she laughed. She laughed until she had to sit down, until
+the tears literally gushed from her eyes. It was not hysterics
+either--could it have been amusement? After a while, and many prolonged
+gasps and relapses, she stopped.
+
+"This," said Farallone, "is my building site. Do you like it?"
+
+"Oh, oh," said the bride, "I think it's the m--most am--ma--musing site
+I ever saw," and she went into another uncontrollable burst of laughter.
+
+"Oh--oh," she said at length, and her shining eyes were turned from the
+groom to me, and back and forth between us, "if you _could_ have seen
+your faces!"
+
+
+V
+
+It seemed strange to us, an alteration in the logical and natural, but
+neither the groom nor I received corporal punishment for our attempt at
+escape. Farallone had read our minds like an open book; he had, as it
+were, put us up to the escapade in order to have the pure joy of
+thwarting us. That we should have been drawn to his exact waiting-place
+like needles to the magnet had a smack of the supernatural, but was in
+reality a simple and explicable happening. For if we had not ascended to
+the little meadow, Farallone, alertly watching, would have descended
+from it, and surprised us at some further point. That we should have
+caught no glimpse of his great bulk anywhere ahead of us in the day-long
+stretch of open, park-like country was also easily explained. For
+Farallone had made the most of the journey in the stream itself,
+drifting with a log.
+
+And although, as I have said, we were not to receive corporal
+punishment, Farallone visited his power upon us in other ways. He would
+not at first admit that we had intended to escape, but kept praising us
+for having followed him so loyally and devotedly, for saving him the
+trouble of a return journey, and for thinking to bring along the bulk of
+our worldly possessions. Tiring at length of this, he switched to the
+opposite point of view. He goaded us nearly to madness with his
+criticisms of our inefficiency, and he mocked repeatedly the groom's
+ill-timed cry of Liberty.
+
+"Liberty!" he said, "you never knew, you never will know, what that
+is--you miserable little pin-head. Liberty is for great natures.
+
+
+     'Stone walls do not a prison make,
+        Nor iron bars a cage.'
+
+
+But the woman shall know what liberty is. If she had wanted to leave me
+there was nothing to stop her. Do you think she'd have followed the
+river, leaving a broad trail? Do you think she'd have walked right into
+this meadow--unless she hadn't cared? Not she. Did you ask her advice,
+you self-sufficiencies? Not you. You were the men-folk, you thought, and
+you were to have the ordering of everything. You make me sick, the pair
+of you...."
+
+He kept us awake until far into the night with his jibes and his
+laughter.
+
+"Well," he said lastly, "good-night, girls. I'm about sick of you, and
+in the morning we part company...."
+
+At the break of dawn he waked us from heavy sleep--me with a cuff, the
+groom with a kick, the bride with a feline touch upon the hair.
+
+"And now," said he, "be off."
+
+He caught the bride by the shoulder.
+
+"Not _you_," he said.
+
+"I am to stay?" she asked, as if to settle some trivial and unimportant
+point.
+
+"Do you ask?" said he; "Was man meant to live alone? This will be enough
+home for us." And he turned to the groom. "Get," he said savagely.
+
+"Mr. Farallone," said the bride--she was very white, but calm,
+apparently, and collected--"you have had your joke. Let us go now, or
+better, come with us. We will forget our former differences, and you
+will never regret your future kindnesses."
+
+"Don't you _want_ to stay?" exclaimed Farallone in a tone of
+astonishment.
+
+"If I did," said the bride gently, "I could not, and I would not."
+
+"What's to stop you?" asked Farallone.
+
+"My place is with my husband," said the bride, "whom I have sworn to
+love, and to honor, and to obey."
+
+"Woman," said Farallone, "do you love him, do you honor him?"
+
+She pondered a moment, then held her head high.
+
+"I do," she said.
+
+"God bless you," cried the groom.
+
+"Rats," said Farallone, and he laughed bitterly. "But you'll get over
+it," he went on. "Let's have no more words." He turned to the groom and
+to me.
+
+"Will you climb down the cliff or shall I throw you?"
+
+"Let us all go," said the bride, and she caught at his trembling arm,
+"and I will bless you, and wish you all good things--and kiss you
+good-by."
+
+"If you go," said Farallone, and his great voice trembled, "I die. You
+are everything. You know that. Would I have hit you if I hadn't loved
+you so--poor little cheek!" His voice became a kind of mumble.
+
+"Let us go," said the bride, "if you love me."
+
+"Not _you_," said Farallone, "while I live. I would not be such a fool.
+Don't you know that in a little while you'll be glad?"
+
+"Is that your final word?" said the bride.
+
+"It must be," said Farallone. "Are you not a gift to me from God?"
+
+"I think you must be mad," said the bride.
+
+"I am unalterable," said Farallone, "as God made me--I _am_. And you
+are mine to take."
+
+"Do you remember," said the bride, "what you said when you gave me the
+revolver? You said that if ever I thought it best to shoot you--you
+would let me do it."
+
+"I remember," said Farallone, and he smiled.
+
+"That was just talk, of course?" said the bride.
+
+"It was not," said Farallone; "shoot me."
+
+"Let us go," said the bride. Her voice faltered.
+
+"Not you," said Farallone, "while I live."
+
+His voice, low and gentle, had in it a kind of far-off sadness. He
+turned his eyes from the bride and looked the rising sun in the face. He
+turned back to her and smiled.
+
+"You haven't the heart to shoot me," he said. "My darling."
+
+"Let us go."
+
+"_Let--you--go!_" He laughed. "_Send--away--my--mate!_"
+
+His eyes clouded and became vacant. He blinked them rapidly and raised
+his hand to his brow. It seemed to me that in that instant, suddenly
+come and suddenly gone, I perceived a look of insanity in his face. The
+bride, too, perhaps, saw something of the kind, for like a flash she had
+the revolver out and cocked it.
+
+"Splendid," cried Farallone, and his eyes blazed with a tremendous love
+and admiration. "This is something like," he cried. "Two forces face to
+face--a man and a bullet--love behind them both. Ah, you do love
+me--don't you?"
+
+"Let us go," said the bride. Her voice shook violently.
+
+"Not you," said Farallone, "while I live."
+
+He took a step toward her, his eyes dancing and smiling. "Do you know,"
+he said, "I don't know if you'll do it or not. By my soul, I don't know.
+This is living, this is. This is gambling. I'll do nothing violent," he
+said, "until my hands are touching you. I'll move toward you slowly one
+slow step at a time--with my arms open--like this--you'll have plenty of
+chance to shoot me--we'll see if you'll do it."
+
+"We shall see," said the bride.
+
+They faced each other motionless. Then Farallone, his eyes glorious with
+excitement and passion, his arms open, moved toward her one slow,
+deliberate step.
+
+"Wait," he cried suddenly. "This is too good for _them_." He jerked his
+thumb toward the groom and me. "This is a sight for gods--not jackasses.
+Go down to the river," he said to us. "If you hear a shot come back. If
+you hear a scream--then as you value your miserable hides--get!"
+
+We did not move.
+
+The bride, her voice tense and high-pitched, turned to us.
+
+"Do as you're told," she cried, "or I shall ask this man to throw you
+over the cliff." She stamped her foot.
+
+"And this man," said Farallone, "will do as he's told."
+
+There was nothing for it. We left them alone in the meadow and descended
+the cliff to the river. And there we stood for what seemed the ages of
+ages, listening and trembling.
+
+A faint, far-off detonation, followed swiftly by louder and fainter
+echoes, broke suddenly upon the rushing noises of the river. We
+commenced feverishly to scramble back up the cliff. Half-way to the top
+we heard another shot, a second later a third, and after a longer
+interval, as if to put a quietus upon some final show of life--a fourth.
+
+A nebulous drift of smoke hung above the meadow.
+
+Farallone lay upon his face at the bride's feet. The groom sprang to her
+side and threw a trembling arm about her.
+
+"Come away," he cried, "come away."
+
+But the bride freed herself gently from his encircling arm, and her eyes
+still bent upon Farallone----
+
+"Not till I have buried my dead," she said.
+
+
+
+
+HOLDING HANDS
+
+
+At first nobody knew him; then the Hotchkisses knew him, and then it
+seemed as if everybody had always known him. He had run the gauntlet of
+gossip and come through without a scratch. He was first noticed sitting
+in the warm corner made by Willcox's annex and the covered passage that
+leads to the main building. Pairs or trios of people, bareheaded, their
+tennis clothes (it was a tennis year) mostly covered from view by clumsy
+coonskin coats, passing Willcox's in dilapidated runabouts drawn by
+uncurried horses, a nigger boy sitting in the back of each, his thin
+legs dangling, had glimpses of him through the driveway gap in the tall
+Amor privet hedge that is between Willcox's and the road. These pairs or
+trios having seen would break in upon whatever else they may have been
+saying to make such remarks as: "He can't be, or he wouldn't be at
+Willcox's"; or, contradictorily: "He must be, or he'd do something
+besides sit in the sun"; or, "Don't they always have to drink lots of
+milk?" or, "Anyway, they're quite positive that it's not catching"; or,
+"Poor boy, what nice hair he's got."
+
+With the old-timers the new-comer, whose case was otherwise so
+doubtful, had one thing in common: a coonskin coat. It was handsome of
+its kind, unusually long, voluminous, and black. The upturned collar
+came above his ears, and in the opening his face showed thin and white,
+and his eyes, always intent upon the book in his lap, had a look of
+being closed. Two things distinguished him from other men: his great
+length of limb and the color and close-cropped, almost moulded, effect
+of his hair. It was the color of old Domingo mahogany, and showed off
+the contour of his fine round head with excellent effect.
+
+The suspicion that this interesting young man was a consumptive was set
+aside by Willcox himself. He told Mrs. Bainbridge, who asked (on account
+of her little children who, et cetera, et cetera), that Mr. Masters was
+recuperating from a very stubborn attack of typhoid. But was Mr. Willcox
+quite sure? Yes, Mr. Willcox had to be sure of just such things. So Mrs.
+Bainbridge drove out to Miss Langrais' tea at the golf club, and passed
+on the glad tidings with an addition of circumstantial detail. Mister
+Masters (people found that it was quite good fun to say this, with
+assorted intonations) had been sick for many months at--she thought--the
+New York Hospital. Sometimes his temperature had touched a hundred and
+fifteen degrees and sometimes he had not had any temperature at all.
+There was quite a romance involved, "his trained nurse, my dear, not one
+of the ordinary creatures, but a born lady in impoverished
+circumstances," et cetera, et cetera. And later, when even Mister
+Masters himself had contradicted these brightly colored statements, Mrs.
+Bainbridge continued to believe them. Even among wealthy and idle women
+she was remarkable for the number of impossible things she could believe
+before breakfast, and after. But she never made these things seem even
+half plausible to others, and so she wasn't dangerous.
+
+Mister Masters never remembered to have passed so lonely and dreary a
+February. The sunny South was a medicine that had been prescribed and
+that had to be swallowed. Aiken on the label had looked inviting enough,
+but he found the contents of the bottle distasteful in the extreme. "The
+South is sunny," he wrote to his mother, "but oh, my great jumping
+grandmother, how seldom! And it's cold, mummy, like being beaten with
+whips. And it rains--well, if it rained cats and dogs a fellow wouldn't
+mind. Maybe they'd speak to him, but it rains solid cold water, and it
+hits the windows the way waves hit the port-holes at sea; and the only
+thing that stops the rain is a wind that comes all the way from Alaska
+for the purpose. In protected corners the sun has a certain warmth. But
+the other morning the waiter put my milk on the wrong side of my chair,
+in the shade, namely, and when I went to drink it it was frozen solid.
+You were right about the people here all being kind; they are all the
+same kind. I know them all now--by sight; but not by name, except, of
+course, some who are stopping at Willcox's. We have had three ice
+storms--_'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen blühen?_' I am getting to
+_kennst_ it very well. But Willcox, who keeps a record of such things,
+says that this is the coldest winter Aiken has known since last winter!
+
+"But in spite of all this there is a truth that must be spoken. I feel a
+thousand times better and stronger than when I came. And yesterday,
+exercising in the privacy of my room, I discovered that there are once
+more calves upon my legs. This is truth, too. I have no one to talk to
+but your letters. So don't stint me. Stint me with money if you can
+(here I defy you), but for the love of Heaven keep me posted. If you
+will promise to write every day I will tell you the name of the
+prettiest girl in Aiken. She goes by eight times every day, and she
+looks my way out of the corner of her eye. And I pretend to be reading
+and try very hard to look handsome and interesting.... Mother! ... just
+now I rested my hand on the arm of my chair and the wood felt hot to the
+touch! It's high noon and the sun's been on it since eight o'clock, but
+still it seems very wonderful. Willcox says that the winter is
+practically over; but I begged him not to hurry...."
+
+Such was the usual trend of his letters. But that one dated March 7
+began with the following astonishing statement:
+
+"I love Aiken ..." and went on to explain why.
+
+But Mister Masters was not allowed to love Aiken until he had come
+through the whole gauntlet of gossip. It had first been suggested that
+he was a consumptive and a menace ("though of course one feels terribly
+sorry for them, my dear"). This had been disproved. Then it was spread
+about that he belonged to a wealthy family of Masters from the upper
+West Side ("very well in their way, no doubt, and the backbone of the
+country, my dear, but one doesn't seem to get on with them, and I
+shouldn't think they'd come to Aiken of all places"). But a gentleman
+who knew the West Side Masters, root and branch, shook his head to this,
+and went so far as to say, "Not much, he isn't"; and went further and
+shuddered. Then it got about that Mister Masters was poor (and that made
+people suspicious of him). Then it got about that he was rich (and that
+made them even more so). Then that he wrote for a living (and that was
+nearly as bad as to say that he cheated at cards--or at least it was the
+kind of thing that _they_ didn't do). And then, finally, the real truth
+about him, or something like it, got out; and the hatchet of suspicion
+was buried, and there was peace in Aiken. In that Aiken of whose peace
+the judge, referring to a pock-marked mulatto girl, had thundered that
+it should not be disturbed for any woman--"no--not even were she Helen
+of Troy."
+
+This was the truth that got out about Mister Masters. He was a nephew of
+the late Bishop Masters. His mother, on whom he was dependent, was very
+rich; she had once been prominent in society. He was thirty, and was
+good at games. He did not work at anything.
+
+So he was something that Aiken could understand and appreciate: a young
+man who was well-born, who didn't have to work--and who didn't _want_
+to.
+
+But old Mrs. Hotchkiss did not know of these things when, one bright day
+in passing Willcox's (she was on one good foot, one rheumatic foot, and
+a long black cane with a gold handle), she noticed the young man pale
+and rather sad-looking in his fur coat and steamer-rug, his eyes on his
+book, and stopped abruptly and spoke to him through the gap in the
+hedge.
+
+"I hope you'll forgive an old woman for scraping an acquaintance," she
+piped in her brisk, cheerful voice, "but I want to know if you're
+getting better, and I thought the best way to find out was to stop and
+ask."
+
+Mister Masters's steamer-rug fell from about his long legs and his face
+became rosy, for he was very shy.
+
+"Indeed I am," he said, "ever so much. And thank you for asking."
+
+"I'm tired," said the old lady, "of seeing you always sitting by
+yourself, dead tired of it. I shall come for you this afternoon at four
+in my carriage, and take you for a drive...."
+
+"It was abrupt," Mister Masters wrote to his mother, "but it was kind.
+When I had done blushing and scraping with my feet and pulling my
+forelock, we had the nicest little talk. And she remembered you in the
+old days at Lenox, and said why hadn't I told her before. And then she
+asked if I liked Aiken, and, seeing how the land lay, I lied and said I
+loved it. And she said that that was her nice, sensible young fellow, or
+words to that effect. And then she asked me why, and I said because it
+has such a fine climate; and then she laughed in my face, and said that
+I was without reverence for her age--not a man--a scalawag.
+
+"And do you know, Mrs. Hotchkiss is like one of those magic keys in
+fairy stories? All doors open to her. Between you and me I have been
+thinking Aiken's floating population snobbish, purse-proud, and
+generally absurd. And instead, the place seems to exist so that kindness
+and hospitality may not fail on earth. Of course I'm not up to genuine
+sprees, such as dining out and sitting up till half-past ten or eleven.
+But I can go to luncheons, and watch other people play tennis, and poke
+about gardens with old ladies, and guess when particular flowers will be
+out, and learn the names of birds and of hostile bushes that prick and
+of friendly bushes that don't.
+
+"All the cold weather has gone to glory; and it's really spring because
+the roosters crow all night. Mrs. Hotchkiss says it's because they are
+roosters and immoral. But I think they're crowing because they've
+survived the winter. I am...."
+
+Aiken took a great fancy to Mister Masters. First because Aiken was
+giving him a good time; and second because he was really good company
+when you got him well cornered and his habitual fright had worn off. He
+was the shyest, most frightened six-footer in the memory of Aiken. If
+you spoke to him suddenly he blushed, and if you prepared him by first
+clearing your throat he blushed just the same. And he had a crooked,
+embarrassed smile that was a delight to see.
+
+But gradually he became almost at ease with nearly everybody; and in the
+shyest, gentlest way enjoyed himself hugely. But the prettiest girl in
+Aiken had very hard work with him.
+
+As a stag fights when brought to bay, so Mister Masters when driven into
+a corner could talk as well and as freely as the next man; but on his
+own initiative there was, as we Americans say, "nothing doing." Whether
+or not the prettiest girl in Aiken ever rolled off a log is unknown;
+but such an act would have been no more difficult for her than to corner
+Mister Masters. The man courted cornering, especially by her. But given
+the desired situation, neither could make anything of it. Mister
+Masters's tongue became forthwith as helpless as a man tied hand and
+foot and gagged. He had nothing with which to pay for the delight of
+being cornered but his rosiest, steadiest blush and his crookedest and
+most embarrassed smile. But he retained a certain activity of mind and
+within himself was positively voluble with what he would say if he only
+could.
+
+I don't mean that the pair sat or stood or walked in absolute silence.
+Indeed, little Miss Blythe could never be silent for a long period nor
+permit it in others, but I mean that with the lines and the machinery of
+a North Atlantic liner, their craft of propinquity made about as much
+progress as a scow. Nevertheless, though neither was really aware of
+this, each kept saying things, that cannot be put into words, to the
+other; otherwise the very first cornering of Mister Masters by little
+Miss Blythe must have been the last. But even as it was way back at the
+beginning of things, and always will be, Beauty spoke to Handsome and
+Handsome up and spoke back.
+
+"No," said little Miss Blythe, upon being sharply cross-questioned by
+Mrs. Hotchkiss, "he practically never does say anything."
+
+Mrs. Hotchkiss dug a little round hole in the sand with her long black
+cane, and made an insulting face at little Miss Blythe.
+
+"Some men," said she, "can't say 'Boo' to a goose."
+
+If other countries produce girls like little Miss Blythe, I have never
+met a specimen; and I feel very sure that foreign young ladies do not
+become personages at the age of seventeen. When she met Mister Masters
+she had been a personage for six years, and it was time for her to yield
+her high place to another; to marry, to bear children, and to prove that
+all the little matters for which she was celebrated were merely passing
+phases and glitterings of a character which fundamentally was composed
+of simple and noble traits.
+
+Little Miss Blythe had many brothers and sisters; no money, as we reckon
+money; and only such prospects as she herself might choose from
+innumerable offers. She was little; her figure looked best in athletic
+clothes (low neck didn't do well with her, because her face was tanned
+so brown) and she was strong and quick as a pony. All the year round she
+kept herself in the pink of condition ("overkept herself" some said)
+dancing, walking, running, swimming, playing all games and eating to
+match. She had a beautiful, clean-cut face, not delicate and to be
+hidden and coaxed by veils and soft things, but a face that looked
+beautiful above a severe Eton collar, and at any distance. She had the
+bright, wide eyes of a collected athlete, unbelievably blue, and the
+whites of them were only matched for whiteness by her teeth (the deep
+tan of her skin heightened this effect, perhaps); and it was said by one
+admirer that if she were to be in a dark room and were to press the
+button of a kodak and to smile at one and the same instant, there would
+be a picture taken.
+
+She had friends in almost every country-clubbed city in America.
+Whenever, and almost wherever, a horse show was held she was there to
+show the horses of some magnate or other to the best advantage. Between
+times she won tennis tournaments and swimming matches, or tried her hand
+at hunting or polo (these things in secret because her father had
+forbidden them), and the people who continually pressed hospitality upon
+her said that they were repaid a thousand-fold. In the first place, it
+was a distinction to have her. "Who are the Ebers?" "Why, don't you
+know? They are the people Miss Blythe is stopping with."
+
+She was always good-natured; she never kept anybody waiting; and she
+must have known five thousand people well enough to call them by their
+first names. But what really distinguished her most from other young
+women was that her success in inspiring others with admiration and
+affection was not confined to men; she had the same effect upon all
+women, old and young, and all children.
+
+Foolish people said that she had no heart, merely because no one had as
+yet touched it. Wise people said that when she did fall in love sparks
+would fly. Hitherto her friendships with men, whatever the men in
+question may have wished, had existed upon a basis of good-natured
+banter and prowess in games. Men were absolutely necessary to Miss
+Blythe to play games with, because women who could "give her a game"
+were rare as ivory-billed woodpeckers. It was even thought by some, as
+an instance, that little Miss Blythe could beat the famous Miss May
+Sutton once out of three times at lawn-tennis. But Miss Sutton, with the
+good-natured and indomitable aggression of her genius, set this
+supposition at rest. Little Miss Blythe could not beat Miss Sutton once
+out of three or three hundred times. But for all that, little Miss
+Blythe was a splendid player and a master of strokes and strategy.
+
+Nothing would have astonished her world more than to learn that little
+Miss Blythe had a secret, darkly hidden quality of which she was
+dreadfully ashamed. At heart she was nothing if not sentimental and
+romantic. And often when she was thought to be sleeping the dreamless
+sleep of the trained athlete who stores up energy for the morrow's
+contest, she was sitting at the windows in her night-gown, looking at
+the moon (in hers) and weaving all sorts of absurd adventures about
+herself and her particular fancy of the moment.
+
+It would be a surprise and pleasure to some men, a tragedy perhaps to
+others, if they should learn that little Miss Blythe had fancied them
+all at different times, almost to the boiling point, and that in her own
+deeply concealed imagination Jim had rescued her from pirates and Jack
+from a burning hotel, or that just as her family were selling her to a
+rich widower, John had appeared on his favorite hunter and carried her
+off. The truth is that little Miss Blythe had engaged in a hundred love
+affairs concerning which no one but herself was the wiser.
+
+And at twenty-three it was high time for her to marry and settle down.
+First because she couldn't go on playing games and showing horses
+forever, and second because she wanted to. But with whom she wanted to
+marry and settle down she could not for the life of her have said.
+Sometimes she thought that it would be with Mr. Blagdon. He _was_ rich
+and he _was_ a widower; but wherever she went he managed to go, and he
+had some of the finest horses in the world, and he wouldn't take no for
+an answer. Sometimes she said to the moon:
+
+"I'll give myself a year, and if at the end of that time I don't like
+anybody better than Bob, why...." Or, in a different mood, "I'm tired of
+everything I do; if he happens to ask me to-morrow I'll say yes." Or,
+"I've ridden his horses, and broken his golf clubs, and borrowed his
+guns (and he won't lend them to anybody else), and I suppose I've got to
+pay him back." Or, "I really _do_ like him a lot," or "I really don't
+like him at all."
+
+Then there came into this young woman's life Mister Masters. And he
+blushed his blush and smiled his crooked smile and looked at her when
+she wasn't looking at him (and she knew that he was looking) and was
+unable to say as much as "Boo" to her; and in the hidden springs of her
+nature that which she had always longed for happened, and became, and
+was. And one night she said to the moon: "I know it isn't proper for me
+to be so attentive to him, and I know everybody is talking about it,
+but--" and she rested her beautiful brown chin on her shapely, strong,
+brown hands, and a tear like a diamond stood in each of her unbelievably
+blue eyes, and she looked at the moon, and said: "But it's Harry Masters
+or--_bust_!"
+
+
+Mr. Bob Blagdon, the rich widower, had been content to play a waiting
+game; for he knew very well that beneath her good-nature little Miss
+Blythe had a proud temper and was to be won rather by the man who should
+make himself indispensable to her than by him who should be forever
+pestering her with speaking and pleading his cause. She is an honest
+girl, he told himself, and without thinking of consequences she is
+always putting herself under obligations to me. Let her ride down
+lover's lane with young Blank or young Dash, she will not be able to
+forget that she is on my favorite mare. In his soul he felt a certain
+proprietorship in little Miss Blythe; but to this his ruddy,
+dark-mustached face and slow-moving eyes were a screen.
+
+Mr. Blagdon had always gone after what he wanted in a kind of slow,
+indifferent way that begot confidence in himself and in the beholder;
+and (in the case of Miss Blythe) a kind of panic in the object sought.
+She liked him because she was used to him, and because he could and
+would talk sense upon subjects which interested her. But she was afraid
+of him because she knew that he expected her to marry him some day, and
+because she knew that other people, including her own family, expected
+this of her. Sometimes she felt ready to take unto herself all the
+horses and country places and automobiles and yachts, and in a life
+lived regardless of expense to bury and forget her better self. But more
+often, like a fly caught in a spider's web, she wished by one desperate
+effort (even should it cost her a wing, to carry out the figure) to free
+herself once and forever from the entanglement.
+
+It was pleasant enough in the web. The strands were soft and silky;
+they held rather by persuasion than by force. And had it not been for
+the spider she could have lived out her life in the web without any very
+desperate regrets. But it was never quite possible to forget the spider;
+and that in his own time he would approach slowly and deliberately, sure
+of himself and of little Miss Fly....
+
+But, after all, the spider in the case was not such a terrible fellow.
+Just because a man wants a girl that doesn't want him, and means to have
+her, he hasn't necessarily earned a hard name. Such a man as often as
+not becomes one-half of a very happy marriage. And Mr. Bob Blagdon was
+considered an exceptionally good fellow. In his heart, though I have
+never heard him say so openly, I think he actually looked down on people
+who gambled and drank to excess, and who were uneducated and had
+acquired (whatever they may have been born with) perfectly empty heads.
+I think that he had a sound and sensible virtue; one ear for one side of
+an argument, and one for the other.
+
+There is no reason to doubt that he was a good husband to his first
+wife, and wished to replace her with little Miss Blythe, not to supplant
+her. To his three young children he was more of a grandfather than a
+father; though strong-willed and even stubborn, he was unable half the
+time to say no to them. And I have seen him going on all-fours with the
+youngest child perched on his back kicking him in the ribs and urging
+him to canter. So if he intended by the strength of his will and of his
+riches to compel little Miss Blythe to marry (and to be happy with him;
+he thought he could manage that, too), it is only one blot on a decent
+and upright character. And it is unjust to have called him spider.
+
+But when Mister Masters entered (so timidly to the eye, but really so
+masterfully) into little Miss Blythe's life, she could no longer
+tolerate the idea of marrying Mr. Blagdon. All in a twinkle she knew
+that horses and yachts and great riches could never make up to her for
+the loss of a long, bashful youth with a crooked smile. You can't be
+really happy if you are shivering with cold; you can't be really happy
+if you are dripping with heat. And she knew that without Mister Masters
+she must always be one thing or the other--too cold or too hot, never
+quite comfortable.
+
+Her own mind was made up from the first; even to going through any
+number of awful scenes with Blagdon. But as time passed and her
+attentions (I shall have to call it that) to Mister Masters made no
+visible progress, there were times when she was obliged to think that
+she would never marry anybody at all. But in her heart she knew that
+Masters was attracted by her, and to this strand of knowledge she clung
+so as not to be drowned in a sea of despair.
+
+Her position was one of extreme difficulty and delicacy. Sometimes
+Mister Masters came near her of his own accord, and remained in bashful
+silence; but more often she was obliged to have recourse to "accidents"
+in order to bring about propinquity. And even when propinquity had been
+established there was never any progress made that could be favorably
+noted. Behind her back, for instance, when she was playing tennis and he
+was looking on, he was quite bold in his admiration of her. And whereas
+most people's eyes when they are watching tennis follow the flight of
+the ball, Mister Masters's faithful eyes never left the person of his
+favorite player.
+
+One reason for his awful bashfulness and silence was that certain
+people, who seemed to know, had told him in the very beginning that it
+was only a question of time before little Miss Blythe would become Mrs.
+Bob Blagdon. "She's always been fond of him," they said, "and of course
+he can give her everything worth having." So when he was with her he
+felt as if he was with an engaged girl, and his real feelings not being
+proper to express in any way under such circumstances, and his nature
+being single and without deceit, he was put in a quandary that defied
+solution.
+
+But what was hidden from Mister Masters was presently obvious to Mr.
+Blagdon and to others. So the spider, sleepily watching the automatic
+enmeshment of the fly, may spring into alert and formidable action at
+seeing a powerful beetle blunder into the web and threaten by his
+stupid, aimless struggles to set the fly at liberty and to destroy the
+whole fabric spun with care and toil.
+
+To a man in love there is no redder danger signal than a sight of the
+object of his affections standing or sitting contentedly with another
+man and neither of them saying as much as "Boo" to the other. He may,
+with more equanimity, regard and countenance a genuine flirtation, full
+of laughter and eye-making. The first time Mr. Blagdon saw them together
+he thought; the second time he felt; the third time he came forward
+graciously smiling. The web might be in danger from the beetle; the fly
+at the point of kicking up her heels and flying gayly away; but it may
+be in the power of the spider to spin enough fresh threads on the spur
+of the moment to rebind the fly, and even to make prisoner the doughty
+beetle.
+
+"Don't you ride, Mister Masters?" said Mr. Blagdon.
+
+"Of course," said the shy one, blushing. "But I'm not to do anything
+violent before June."
+
+"Sorry," said Mr. Blagdon, "because I've a string of ponies that are
+eating their heads off. I'd be delighted to mount you."
+
+But Mister Masters smiled with unusual crookedness and stammered his
+thanks and his regrets. And so that thread came to nothing.
+
+The spider attempted three more threads; but little Miss Blythe looked
+serenely up.
+
+"I never saw such a fellow as you, Bob," said she, "for putting other
+people under obligations. When I think of the weight of my personal ones
+I shudder." She smiled innocently and looked up into his face. "When
+people can't pay their debts they have to go through bankruptcy, don't
+they? And then their debts all have to be forgiven."
+
+Mr. Blagdon felt as if an icy cold hand had been suddenly laid upon the
+most sensitive part of his back; but his expression underwent no change.
+His slow eyes continued to look into the beautiful, brightly colored
+face that was turned up to him.
+
+"Very honorable bankrupts," said he carelessly, "always pay what they
+can on the dollar."
+
+Presently he strolled away, easy and nonchalant; but inwardly he carried
+a load of dread and he saw clearly that he must learn where he stood
+with little Miss Blythe, or not know the feeling of easiness from one
+day to the next. Better, he thought, to be the recipient of a painful
+and undeserved ultimatum, than to breakfast, lunch, and dine with
+uncertainty.
+
+The next day, there being some dozens of people almost in earshot, Mr.
+Blagdon had an opportunity to speak to little Miss Blythe. Under the
+circumstances, the last thing she expected was a declaration; they were
+in full view of everybody; anybody might stroll up and interrupt. So
+what Mr. Blagdon had to say came to her with something the effect of
+sudden thunder from a clear sky.
+
+"Phyllis," said he, "you have been looking about you since you were
+seventeen. Will I do?"
+
+"Oh, Bob!" she protested.
+
+"I have tried to do," said he, not without a fine ring of manliness.
+"Have I made good?"
+
+She smiled bravely and looked as nonchalant as possible; but her heart
+was beating heavily.
+
+"I've liked being good friends--_so_ much," she said. "Don't spoil it."
+
+"I tell her," said he, "that in all the world there is only the one
+girl--only the one. And she says--Don't spoil it.'"
+
+"Bob----"
+
+"I will _make_ you happy," he said.... "Has it never entered your dear
+head that some time you must give me an answer?"
+
+She nodded her dear head, for she was very honest.
+
+"I suppose so," she said.
+
+"Well," said he.
+
+"In my mind," she said, "I have never been able to give you the same
+answer twice...."
+
+"A decision is expected from us," said he. "People are growing tired of
+our long backing and filling."
+
+"People! Do they matter?"
+
+"They matter a great deal. And you know it."
+
+"Yes. I suppose they do. Let me off for now, Bob. People are looking at
+us...."
+
+"I want an answer."
+
+But she would not be coerced.
+
+"You shall have one, but not now. I'm not sure what it will be."
+
+"If you can't be sure now, can you ever be sure?"
+
+"Yes. Give me two weeks. I shall think about nothing else."
+
+"Thank you," he said. "Two weeks.... That will be full moon.... I shall
+ask all Aiken to a picnic in the woods, weather permitting ... and--and
+if your answer is to be my happiness, why, you shall come up to me, and
+say, 'Bob--drive me home, will you?'"
+
+"And if it's the other answer, Bob?"
+
+He smiled in his usual bantering way.
+
+"If it's the other, Phyllis--why--you--you can walk home."
+
+She laughed joyously, and he laughed, just as if nothing but what was
+light and amusing was in question between them.
+
+
+Along the Whiskey Road nearly the whole floating population of Aiken
+moved on horseback or on wheels. Every fourth or fifth runabout carried
+a lantern; but the presence in the long, wide-gapped procession of
+other vehicles or equestrians was denoted only by the sounds of voices.
+Half a dozen family squabbles, half a dozen flirtations (which would
+result in family squabbles), and half a dozen genuine romances were
+moving through the sweet-smelling dark to Mr. Bob Blagdon's picnic in
+Red Oak Hollow. Only three of the guests knew where Red Oak Hollow was,
+and two of these were sure that they could only find it by daylight; but
+the third, a noted hunter and pigeon shot, rode at the head of the
+procession, and pretended (he was forty-five with the heart of a child)
+that he was Buffalo Bill leading a lost wagon-train to water. And though
+nobody could see him for the darkness, he played his part with minute
+attention to detail, listening, pulling up short, scowling to right and
+left, wetting a finger and holding it up to see from which direction the
+air was moving. He was so intent upon bringing his convoy safely through
+a hostile country that the sounds of laughter or of people in one
+runabout calling gayly to people in another were a genuine annoyance to
+him.
+
+Mr. Bob Blagdon had preceded his guests by half an hour, and was already
+at the scene of the picnic. Fate, or perhaps the weather bureau at
+Washington, had favored him with just the conditions he would have
+wished for. The night was hot without heaviness; in the forenoon of
+that day there had been a shower, just wet enough to keep the surfaces
+of roads from rising in dust. It was now clear and bestarred, and
+perhaps a shade less dark than when he had started. Furthermore, it was
+so still that candles burned without flickering. He surveyed his
+preparations with satisfaction. And because he was fastidious in
+entertainment this meant a great deal.
+
+A table thirty feet long, and low to the ground so that people sitting
+on rugs or cushions could eat from it with comfort, stood beneath the
+giant red oak that gave a name to the hollow. The white damask with
+which it was laid and the silver and cut glass gleamed in the light of
+dozens of candles. The flowers were Maréchal Niel roses in a long bank
+of molten gold.
+
+Except for the lanterns at the serving tables, dimly to be seen through
+a dense hedgelike growth of Kalmia latifolia, there were no other lights
+in the hollow; so that the dinner-table had the effect of standing in a
+cave; for where the gleam of the candles ended, the surrounding darkness
+appeared solid like a wall.
+
+It might have been a secret meeting of smugglers or pirates, the
+Georgian silver on the table representing years of daring theft; it
+seemed as if blood must have been spilled for the wonderful glass and
+linen and porcelain. Even those guests most hardened in luxury and
+extravagance looked twice at Mr. Bob Blagdon's picnic preparations
+before they could find words with which to compliment him upon them; and
+the less experienced were beside themselves with enthusiasm and delight.
+But Mr. Bob Blagdon was wondering what little Miss Blythe would think
+and say, and he thought it unkind of her, under the circumstances, to be
+the last to arrive. Unkind, because her doing so was either a good omen
+or an evil one, and he could not make up his mind which.
+
+The guests were not homogeneously dressed. Some of the men were in
+dinner clothes; some were in full evening dress; some wore dinner coats
+above riding breeches and boots; some had come bareheaded, some with
+hats which they did not propose to remove. Half the women were in low
+neck and short sleeves; one with short curly hair was breeched and
+booted like a man; others wore what I suppose may be called theatre
+gowns; and a few who were pretty enough to stand it wore clothes suited
+to the hazards of a picnic in the woods.
+
+Mr. Blagdon's servants wore his racing colors, blue and silver,
+knee-breeches, black silk stockings, pumps with silver buckles, and
+powdered hair. They were men picked for their height, wooden faces, and
+well-turned calves. They moved and behaved as if utterly untouched and
+uninterested in their unusual and romantic surroundings; they were like
+jinns summoned for the occasion by the rubbing of a magic lamp.
+
+At the last moment, when to have been any later would have been either
+rude or accidental, little Miss Blythe's voice was heard calling from
+the darkness and asking which of two roads she should take. Half a dozen
+men rushed off to guide her, and presently she came blinking into the
+circle of light, followed by Mister Masters, who smiled his crookedest
+smile and stumbled on a root so that he was cruelly embarrassed.
+
+Little Miss Blythe blinked at the lights and looked very beautiful. She
+was all in white and wore no hat. She had a red rose at her throat. She
+was grave for her--and silent.
+
+The truth was that she had during the last ten minutes made up her mind
+to ask Mr. Bob Blagdon to drive her home when the picnic should be over.
+She had asked Mister Masters to drive out with her; and how much that
+had delighted him nobody knew (alas!) except Mister Masters himself. She
+had during the last few weeks given him every opportunity which her
+somewhat unconventional soul could sanction. In a hundred ways she had
+showed him that she liked him immensely; and well--if he liked her in
+the same way, he would have managed to show it, in spite of his shyness.
+The drive out had been a failure. They had gotten no further in
+conversation than the beauty and the sweet smells of the night. And
+finally, but God alone knows with what reluctance, she had given him up
+as a bad job.
+
+The long table with its dozens of candles looked like a huge altar, and
+she was Iphigenia come to the sacrifice. She had never heard of
+Iphigenia, but that doesn't matter. At Mister Masters, now seated near
+the other end of the table, she lifted shy eyes; but he was looking at
+his plate and crumbling a piece of bread. It was like saying good-by.
+She was silent for a moment; then, smiling with a kind of reckless
+gayety, she lifted her glass of champagne and turned to the host.
+
+"To you!" she said.
+
+Delight swelled in the breast of Mr. Bob Blagdon. He raised his hand,
+and from a neighboring thicket there rose abruptly the music of banjos
+and guitars and the loud, sweet singing of negroes.
+
+Aiken will always remember that dinner in the woods for its beauty and
+for its gayety. Two or three men, funny by gift and habit, were at their
+very best; and fortune adapted the wits of others to the occasion. So
+that the most unexpected persons became humorous for once in their
+lives, and said things worth remembering. People gather together for one
+of three reasons: to make laws, to break them, or to laugh. The first
+sort of gathering is nearly always funny, and if the last isn't, why
+then, to be sure, it is a failure. Mr. Bob Blagdon's picnic was an
+uproarious success. Now and then somebody's whole soul seemed to go
+into a laugh, in which others could not help joining, until
+uncontrollable snorts resounded in the hollow and eyes became blinded
+with tears.
+
+And then suddenly, toward dessert, laughter died away and nothing was to
+be heard but such exclamations as: "For Heaven's sake, look at the
+moon!" "Did you ever see anything like it?"
+
+Mr. Blagdon had paid money to the owner of Red Oak Hollow for permission
+to remove certain trees and thickets that would otherwise have
+obstructed his guests' view of the moonrise. At the end of the vista
+thus obtained the upper rim of the moon now appeared, as in a frame.
+And, watching in silence, Mr. Blagdon's guests saw the amazing luminary
+emerge, as it were, from the earth like a bright and blameless soul from
+the grave, and sail clear, presently, and upward into untroubled space;
+a glory, serene, smiling, and unanswerable.
+
+No one remembered to have seen the moon so large or so bright. Atomized
+silver poured like tides of light into the surrounding woods; and at the
+same time heavenly odors of flowers began to move hither and thither, to
+change places, to return, and pass, like disembodied spirits engaged in
+some tranquil and celestial dance.
+
+And it became cooler, so that women called for light wraps and men tied
+sweaters round their necks by the arms. Then at a long distance from
+the dinner-table a bonfire began to flicker, and then grow bright and
+red. And it was discovered that rugs and cushions had been placed (not
+too near the fire) for people to sit on while they drank their coffee
+and liquors, and that there were logs to lean against, and boxes of
+cigars and cigarettes where they could most easily be reached.
+
+It was only a question now of how long the guests would care to stay. As
+a gathering the picnic was over. Some did not use the rugs and cushions
+that had been provided for them, but strolled away into the woods. A
+number of slightly intoxicated gentlemen felt it their duty to gather
+about their host and entertain him. Two married couples brought candles
+from the dinner-table and began a best two out of three at bridge.
+Sometimes two men and one woman would sit together with their backs
+against a log; but always after a few minutes one of the men would go
+away "to get something" and would not return.
+
+It was not wholly by accident that Mister Masters found himself alone
+with little Miss Blythe. Emboldened by the gayety of the dinner, and
+then by the wonder of the moon, he had had the courage to hurry to her
+side; and though there his courage had failed utterly, his action had
+been such as to deter others from joining her. So, for there was nothing
+else to do, they found a thick rug and sat upon it, and leaned their
+backs against a log.
+
+Little Miss Blythe had not yet asked Mr. Blagdon to drive her home.
+Though she had made up her mind to do so, it would only be at the last
+possible moment of the twelfth hour. It was now that eleventh hour in
+which heroines are rescued by bold lovers. But Mister Masters was no
+bolder than a mouse. And the moon sailed higher and higher in the
+heavens.
+
+"Isn't it wonderful?" said little Miss Blythe.
+
+"Wonderful!"
+
+"Just smell it!"
+
+"Umm."
+
+Her sad, rather frightened eyes wandered over to the noisy group of
+which Mr. Bob Blagdon was the grave and silent centre. He knew that
+little Miss Blythe would keep her promise. He believed in his heart that
+her decision would be favorable to him; but he was watching her where
+she sat with Masters and knew that his belief in what she would decide
+was not strong enough to make him altogether happy.
+
+"_And_ he was old enough to be her father!" repeated the gentleman in
+the Scotch deer-stalker who had been gossiping. Mr. Blagdon smiled, but
+the words hurt--"old enough to be her father." "My God," he thought,
+"_I_ am old enough--just!" But then he comforted himself with "Why not?
+It's how old a man feels, not how old he is."
+
+Then his eyes caught little Miss Blythe's, but she turned hers instantly
+away.
+
+"This will be the end of the season," she said.
+
+Mister Masters assented. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked.
+
+"Do you see old Mr. Black over there?" she said. "He's pretending not to
+watch us, but he's watching us like a lynx.... Did you ever start a
+piece of news?"
+
+"Never," said Mister Masters.
+
+"It would be rather fun," said little Miss Blythe. "For instance, if we
+held hands for a moment Mr. Black would see it, and five minutes later
+everybody would know about it."
+
+Mister Masters screwed his courage up to the sticking point, and took
+her hand in his. Both looked toward Mr. Black as if inviting him to
+notice them. Mr. Black was seen almost instantly to whisper to the
+nearest gentleman.
+
+"There," said little Miss Blythe, and was for withdrawing her hand. But
+Masters's fingers tightened upon it, and she could feel the pulses
+beating in their tips. She knew that people were looking, but she felt
+brazen, unabashed, and happy. Mister Masters's grip tightened; it said:
+"My master has a dozen hearts, and they are all beating--for _you_." To
+return that pressure was not an act of little Miss Blythe's will. She
+could not help herself. Her hand said to Masters: "With the heart--with
+the soul." Then she was frightened and ashamed, and had a rush of color
+to the face.
+
+"Let go," she whispered.
+
+But Masters leaned toward her, and though he was trembling with fear and
+awe and wonder, he found a certain courage and his voice was wonderfully
+gentle and tender, and he smiled and he whispered: "Boo!"
+
+
+Only then did he set her hand free. For one reason there was no need now
+of so slight a bondage; for another, Mr. Bob Blagdon was approaching
+them, a little pale but smiling. He held out his hand to little Miss
+Blythe, and she took it.
+
+"Phyllis," said he, "I know your face so well that there is no need for
+me to ask, and for you--to deny." He smiled upon her gently, though it
+cost him an effort. "I wanted her for myself," he turned to Masters with
+charming frankness, "but even an old man's selfish desires are not proof
+against the eloquence of youth, and I find a certain happiness in saying
+from the bottom of my heart--bless you, my children...."
+
+The two young people stood before him with bowed heads.
+
+"I am going to send you the silver and glass from the table," said he,
+"for a wedding present to remind you of my picnic...." He looked upward
+at the moon. "If I could," said he, "I would give you that."
+
+Then the three stood in silence and looked upward at the moon.
+
+
+
+
+THE CLAWS OF THE TIGER
+
+
+What her given name was in the old country has never reached me; but
+when her family had learned a little English, and had begun to affect
+the manners and characteristics of their more Americanized
+acquaintances, they called her Daisy. She was the only daughter; her age
+was less than that of two brothers, and she was older than three. The
+family consisted of these six, Mr. and Mrs. Obloski, the parents,
+Grandfather Pinnievitch, and Great-grandmother Brenda--a woman so old,
+so shrunken, so bearded, and so eager to live that her like was not to
+be found in the city.
+
+Upon settling in America two chief problems seemed to confront the
+family: to make a living and to educate the five boys. The first problem
+was solved for a time by The Organization. Obloski was told by an
+interpreter that he would be taken care of if he and his father-in-law
+voted as directed and as often as is decent under a wise and paternal
+system of government. To Obloski, who had about as much idea what the
+franchise stands for as The Organization had, this seemed an agreeable
+arrangement. Work was found for him, at a wage. He worked with immense
+vigor, for the wage seemed good. Soon, however, he perceived that older
+Americans (of his own nationality) were laughing at him. Then he did not
+work so hard; but the wage, froth of the city treasury, came to him just
+the same. He ceased working, and pottered. Still he received pay. He
+ceased pottering. He joined a saloon. And he became the right-hand man
+of a right-hand man of a right-hand man who was a right-hand man of a
+very important man who was--left-handed.
+
+The two older boys were at school in a school; the three others were at
+school in the street. Mrs. Obloski was occupied with a seventh child,
+whose sex was not yet determined. Grandfather Pinnievitch was learning
+to smoke three cigars for five cents; and Great-grandmother Brenda sat
+in the sun, stroking her beard and clinging to life. Nose and chin
+almost obstructed the direct passage to Mrs. Brenda's mouth. She looked
+as if she had gone far in an attempt to smell her own chin, and would
+soon succeed.
+
+But for Daisy there was neither school, nor play in the street, nor
+sitting in the sun. She cooked, and she washed the dishes, and she did
+the mending, and she made the beds, and she slept in one of the beds
+with her three younger brothers. In spite of the great wage so easily
+won the Obloskis were very poor, for New York. All would be well when
+the two older boys had finished school and begun to vote. They were
+thirteen and fourteen, but the school records had them as fifteen and
+sixteen, for the interpreter had explained to their father that a man
+cannot vote until he is twenty-one.
+
+Daisy was twelve, but she had room in her heart for all her family, and
+for a doll besides. This was of rags; and on the way from Castle Garden
+to the tenement she had found it, neglected, forsaken--starving,
+perhaps--in a gutter. In its single garment, in its woollen hair, and
+upon its maculate body the doll carried, perhaps, the germs of typhoid,
+of pneumonia, of tetanus, and of consumption; but all night it lay in
+the arms of its little mother, and was not permitted to harm her or
+hers.
+
+The Obloskis, with the exception of Mrs. Brenda, were a handsome
+family--the grandfather, indeed, was an old beauty in his way, with
+streaming white hair and beard, and eyes that reminded you of locomotive
+headlights seen far off down a dark tunnel; but their good features were
+marred by an expression of hardness, of greed, of unsatisfied desire.
+And Mr. Obloski's face was beginning to bloat with drink. It was only
+natural that Daisy, upon whom all the work was put, should have been too
+busy to look hard or greedy. She had no time to brood upon life or to
+think upon unattainable things. She had only time to cook, time to wash
+the dishes, to mend the clothes, to make the beds, and to play the
+mother to her little brothers and to her doll. And so, and naturally, as
+the skin upon her little hands thickened and grew rough and red, the
+expression in her great eyes became more and more luminous, translucent,
+and joyous.
+
+Even to a class of people whose standards of beauty differ, perhaps,
+from ours, she promised to be very beautiful. She was a
+brown-and-crimson beauty, with ocean-blue eyes and teeth dazzling white,
+like the snow on mountains when the sun shines. And though she was only
+twelve, her name, underlined, was in the note-book of many an ambitious
+young man. I knew a young man who was a missionary in that quarter of
+the city (indeed, it was through him that this story reached me), an
+earnest, Christian, upstanding, and, I am afraid, futile young man, who,
+for a while, thought he had fallen in love with her, and talked of
+having his aunt adopt her, sending her to school, ladyizing her. He had
+a very pretty little romance mapped out. She would develop into an
+ornament to any society, he said. Her beauty--he snapped his
+fingers--had nothing to do with his infatuation. She had a soul, a great
+soul. This it was that had so moved him. "You should see her," he said,
+"with her kid brother, and the whole family shooting-match. I know;
+lots of little girls have the instinct of mothering things--but it's
+more in her case, it amounts to genius--and she's so clever, and so
+quick, and in spite of all the wicked hard work they put upon her she
+sings a little, and laughs a little, and mothers them all the time--the
+selfish beasts!"
+
+My friend's pipe-dreams came to nothing. He drifted out of missionizing,
+through a sudden hobby for chemistry, into orchids; sickened of having
+them turn black just when they ought to have bloomed; ran for Congress
+and was defeated; decided that the country was going to the dogs, went
+to live in England, and is now spending his time in a vigorous and, I am
+afraid, vain attempt to get himself elected to a first-class London
+club. He is quite a charming man--and quite unnecessary. I mention all
+this, being myself enough of a pipe-dreamer to think that, if he had not
+been frightened out of his ideas about Daisy, life might have dealt more
+handsomely with them both.
+
+As Obloski became more useful to the great organization that owned him
+he received proportionately larger pay; but as he drank proportionately
+more, his family remained in much its usual straits. Presently Obloski
+fell off in utility, allowing choice newly landed men of his nationality
+to miss the polls. Then strange things happened. The great man (who was
+left-handed) spoke an order mingled with the awful names of gods. Then
+certain shares, underwritten by his right-hand man, clamored for
+promised cash. A blue pallor appeared in the cheeks of the right-hand
+man, and he spoke an order, so that a contract for leaving the pavement
+of a certain city street exactly as it was went elsewhere. The defrauded
+contractor swore very bitterly, and reduced the salary of his right-hand
+man. This one caused a raid of police to ascend into the disorderly
+house of his. This one in turn punished his right-hand man; until
+finally the lowest of all in the scale, save only Mr. Obloski, remarked
+to the latter, pressing for his wage, that money was "heap scarce." And
+Mr. Obloski, upon opening his envelope, discovered that it contained but
+the half of that to which he had accustomed his appetite. Than Obloski
+there was none lower. Therefore, to pass on the shiver of pain that had
+descended to him from the throne, he worked upon his feelings with raw
+whiskey, then went home to his family and broke its workings to bits.
+Daisy should go sit in an employment agency until she was employed and
+earning money. The youngest boy and the next youngest should sell
+newspapers upon the street. Mrs. Obloski should stop mourning for the
+baby which she had rolled into a better world three years before, and do
+the housework. The better to fit her for this, for she was lazy and not
+strong, he kicked her in the ribs until she fainted, and removed
+thereby any possibility of her making good the loss for which her
+proneness to luxurious rolling had been directly responsible.
+
+So Daisy, who was now nearly sixteen, went to sit with other young women
+in a row: some were older than she, one or two younger; but no one of
+the others was lovely to look at or had a joyous face.
+
+
+II
+
+After about an hour's waiting in an atmosphere of sour garments
+disguised by cheap perfumery, employment came to Daisy in the stout form
+of a middle aged, showily dressed woman, decisive in speech, and rich,
+apparently, who desired a waitress.
+
+"I want something cheap and green," she explained to the manager. "I
+form 'em then to suit myself." Her eyes, small, quick, and decided,
+flashed along the row of candidates, and selected Daisy without so much
+as one glance at the next girl beyond. "There's my article, Mrs.
+Goldsmith," she said.
+
+Mrs. Goldsmith shook her head and whispered something.
+
+The wealthy lady frowned. "Seventy-five?" she said. "That's ridiculous."
+
+"My Gott!" exclaimed Mrs. Goldsmith. "Ain't she fresh? Loog at her.
+Ain't she a fresh, sweet liddle-thing?"
+
+"Well, she looks fresh enough," said the lady, "but I don't go on looks.
+But I'll soon find out if what you say is true. And then I'll pay you
+seventy-five. Meanwhile"--as Mrs. Goldsmith began to protest--"there's
+nothing in it--nothing in it."
+
+"But I haf your bromice--to pay up."
+
+The lady bowed grandly.
+
+"You are sugh an old customer--" Thus Mrs. Goldsmith explained her
+weakness in yielding.
+
+Daisy, carrying her few possessions in a newspaper bundle, walked
+lightly at the side of her new employer.
+
+"My name is Mrs. Holt, Daisy," said the lady. "And I think we'll hit
+things off, if you always try to do just what I tell you."
+
+Daisy was in high spirits. It was wonderful to have found work so easily
+and so soon. She was to receive three dollars a week. She could not
+understand her good fortune. Again and again Mrs. Holt's hard eyes
+flicked over the joyous, brightly colored young face. Less often an
+expression not altogether hard accompanied such surveys. For although
+Mrs. Holt knew that she had found a pearl among swine, her feelings of
+elation were not altogether free from a curious and most unaccustomed
+tinge of regret.
+
+"But I must get you a better dress than that," she said. "I want my
+help to look cared for and smart. I don't mean you're not neat and clean
+looking; but maybe you've something newer and nicer in your bundle?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Daisy. "I have my Sunday dress. That is almost new."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Holt, "I'll have a look at it. This is where I live."
+
+She opened the front door with a latch-key; and to Daisy it seemed as if
+paradise had been opened--from the carved walnut rack, upon which
+entering angels might hang their hats and coats, to the carpet upon the
+stair and the curtains of purple plush that, slightly parted, disclosed
+glimpses of an inner and more sumptuous paradise upon the right--a grand
+crayon of Mrs. Holt herself, life-size, upon an easel of bamboo; chairs
+and sofas with tremendously stuffed seats and backs and arms, a
+tapestry-work fire-screen--a purple puppy against a pink-and-yellow
+ground.
+
+"I'll take you up to your room right off," said Mrs. Holt, "and you can
+show me your other dress, and I'll tell you if it's nice enough."
+
+So up they went three flights. But it was in no garret that Daisy was to
+sleep. Mrs. Holt conducted her into a large, high-ceilinged,
+old-fashioned room. To be sure, it was ill lighted and ill
+ventilated--giving on a court; but its furniture, from the
+marble-topped wash-stand to the great double bed, was very grand and
+overpowering. Daisy could only gape with wonder and delight. To call
+such a room her own, to earn three dollars a week--with a golden promise
+of more later on if she proved a good girl--it was all very much too
+wonderful to be true.
+
+"Now, Daisy, let me see your Sunday dress--open the bundle on the bed
+there."
+
+Daisy, obedient and swift (but blushing, for she knew that her dress
+would look very humble in such surroundings), untied the string and
+opened the parcel. But it was not the Sunday dress that caught Mrs.
+Holt's eye. She spoke in the voice of one the most of whose breath has
+suddenly been snatched away.
+
+"And what," she exclaimed, "for mercy sake, is _that_?"
+
+"That," said Daisy, already in an anguish lest it be taken from her, "is
+my doll."
+
+Mrs. Holt took the doll in her hands and turned it over and back. She
+looked at it, her head bent, for quite a long time. Then, all of a
+sudden, she made a curious sound in the back of her throat that sounded
+like a cross between a choke and a sob. Then she spoke swiftly--and like
+one ashamed:
+
+"You won't suit me, girlie--I can see that. Wrap up those things again,
+and--No, you mustn't go back to Goldsmith's--she's a bad woman--you
+wouldn't understand. Can't you go back home? No?... They need what you
+can earn.... Here, you go to Hauptman's employment agency and tell him I
+sent you. No.... You're too blazing innocent. I'll go with you. I've got
+some influence. I'll see to it that he gets a job for you from some one
+who--who'll let you alone."
+
+"But," said Daisy, gone quite white with disappointment, "I would have
+tried so hard to please you, Mrs. Holt. I----"
+
+"You don't know what you're saying, child," exclaimed Mrs. Holt. "I--I
+don't need you. I've got trouble here." She touched what appeared to be
+an ample bosom. "One-half's the real thing and one-half's just padding.
+I'm not long for this world, and you've cost me a pretty penny, my dear;
+but it's all right. I don't need _you_!"
+
+So Mrs. Holt took Daisy to Hauptman's agency. And he, standing in fear
+of Mrs. Holt, found employment for her as waitress in a Polish
+restaurant. Here the work was cruel and hard, and the management
+thunderous and savage; but the dangers of the place were not machine
+made, and Daisy could sleep at home.
+
+
+III
+
+Daisy had not been at work in the restaurant many weeks before the
+proprietor perceived that business was increasing. The four tables to
+which Daisy attended were nearly always full, and the other waitresses
+were beginning to show symptoms of jealousy and nerves. More dishes were
+smashed; more orders went wrong; and Daisy, a smooth, quick, eager
+worker, was frequently delayed and thrown out of her stride, so to
+speak, by malicious stratagems and tricks. But Linnevitch, the
+proprietor, had a clear mind and an excellent knowledge of human nature.
+He got rid of his cash-girl, and put Daisy in her place; and this in
+face of the fact that Daisy had had the scantiest practice with figures
+and was at first dismally slow in the making of change. But Linnevitch
+bore with her, and encouraged her. If now and then she made too much
+change, he forgave her. He had only to look at the full tables to
+forget. For every nickel that she lost for him, she brought a new
+customer. And soon, too, she became at ease with money, and sure of her
+subtraction. Linnevitch advanced her sufficient funds to buy a neat
+black dress; he insisted that she wear a white turnover collar and white
+cuffs. The plain severity of this costume set off the bright coloring
+of her face and hair to wonderful advantage. In the dingy, ill-lighted
+restaurant she was like that serene, golden, glowing light that
+Rembrandt alone has known how to place among shadows. And her temper was
+so sweet, and her disposition so childlike and gentle, that one by one
+the waitresses who hated her for her popularity and her quick success
+forgave her and began to like her. They discussed her a great deal among
+themselves, and wondered what would become of her. Something good, they
+prophesied; for under all the guilelessness and simplicity she was able.
+And you had to look but once into those eyes to know that she was
+string-straight. Among the waitresses was no very potent or instructed
+imagination. They could not formulate the steps upon which Daisy should
+rise, nor name the happy height to which she should ascend. They knew
+that she was exceptional; no common pottery like themselves, but of that
+fine clay of which even porcelain is made. It was common talk among them
+that Linnevitch was in love with her; and, recalling what had been the
+event in the case of the Barnhelm girl, and of Lotta Gorski, they knew
+that Linnevitch sometimes put pleasure ahead of business. Yet it was
+their common belief that the more he pined after Daisy the less she had
+to fear from him.
+
+A new look had come into the man's protruding eyes. Either prosperity or
+Daisy, or both, had changed him for the better. The place no longer
+echoed with thunderous assaults upon slight faults. The words, "If you
+will, please, Helena"; "Well, well, pick it up," fell now from his lips,
+or the even more reassuring and courteous, "Never mind; I say, never
+mind."
+
+Meanwhile, if her position and work in the restaurant were pleasant
+enough, Daisy's evenings and nights at home were hard to bear. Her
+mother, sick, bitter, and made to work against her will, had no tolerant
+words for her. Grandfather Pinnievitch, deprived of even pipe tobacco by
+his bibulous son-in-law, whined and complained by the hour. Old Mrs.
+Brenda declared that she was being starved to death, and she reviled
+whomever came near her. The oldest boy had left school in disgrace,
+together with a classmate of the opposite sex, whom he abandoned shortly
+at a profit. The family had turned him off at first; had then seen that
+he had in spite of this an air of prosperity; invited him to live at
+home once more, and were told that he was done with them. His first
+venture in the business of pandering had been a success; a company,
+always on the lookout for bright young men, offered him good pay, work
+intricate but interesting, and that protection without which crime would
+not be profitable.
+
+Yes, in the secure shadow of The Organization's secret dark wings, there
+was room even for this obscure young Pole, fatherless, now, and
+motherless. For The Organization stands at the gates of the young
+Republic to welcome in the unfortunate of all nations, to find work for
+them, and security. Let your bent be what it will, if only you will
+serve the master, young immigrant, you may safely follow that bent to
+the uttermost dregs in which it ends. Whatever you wish to be, that you
+may become, provided only that your ambition is sordid, criminal, and
+unchaste.
+
+Mr. Obloski was now an incorrigible drunkard. He could no longer be
+relied on to cast even his own vote once, should the occasion for voting
+arise. So The Great Organization spat Obloski aside. He threatened
+certain reprisals and tale-bearings. He was promptly arrested for a
+theft which not only he had not committed, but which had never been
+committed at all. The Organization spared itself the expense of actually
+putting him in jail; but he had felt the power of the claws. He would
+threaten no more.
+
+To support the family on Daisy's earnings and the younger boys'
+newspaper sellings, and at the same time to keep drunk from morning to
+night, taxed his talents to the utmost. There were times when he had to
+give blows instead of bread. But he did his best, and was as patient and
+long-suffering as possible with those who sapped his income and kept him
+down.
+
+One night, in a peculiarly speculative mood, he addressed his business
+instincts to Daisy. "Fourteen dollars a month!" he said. "And there are
+girls without half your looks--right here in this city--that earn as
+much in a night. What good are you?"
+
+I cannot say that Daisy was so innocent as not to gather his meaning.
+She sat and looked at him, a terrible pathos in her great eyes, and said
+nothing.
+
+"Well," said her father, "what good are you?"
+
+"No good," said Daisy gently.
+
+That night she hugged her old doll to her breast and wept bitterly, but
+very quietly, so as not to waken her brothers. The next morning, very
+early, she made a parcel of her belongings, and carried it with her to
+the restaurant. The glass door with its dingy gilt lettering was being
+unlocked for the day by Mr. Linnevitch. He was surprised to see her a
+full half-hour before opening time.
+
+"Mr. Linnevitch," said Daisy, "things are so that I can't stay at home
+any more. I will send them the money, but I have to find another place
+to live."
+
+"We got a little room," he said; "you can have if Mrs. Linnevitch says
+so. I was going to give you more pay. We give you that room
+instead--eh?"
+
+Mrs. Linnevitch gave her consent. She was a dreary, weary woman of
+American birth. When she was alone with her husband she never upbraided
+him for his infidelities, or referred to them. But later, on this
+particular day, having a chance to speak, she said:
+
+"I hope you ain't going to bother this one, Linne?"
+
+He patted his wife's bony back and shook his head. "The better as I know
+that girl, Minnie," he said, "the sorrier I am for what I used to be
+doing sometimes. You and her is going to have a square deal."
+
+"I bin up to put her room straight," said Mrs. Linnevitch. "She's got a
+doll."
+
+She delivered this for what it was worth, in an uninterested,
+emotionless voice.
+
+"I tell you what she ought to have got," said her husband. "She ought to
+have got now a good husband, and some live dolls--eh?"
+
+
+IV
+
+New customers were not uncommon in the restaurant, but the young man who
+dropped in for noon dinner upon the following Friday was of a plumage
+gayer than any to which the waitresses and habitués of the place were
+accustomed. To Daisy, sitting at her high cashier's desk, like a young
+queen enthroned, he seemed to have something of the nature of a prince
+from a far country. She watched him eat. She saw in his cuffs the glint
+of gold; she noted with what elegance he held his little fingers aloof
+from his hands. She noted the polish and cleanliness of his nails, the
+shortness of his recent hair-cut, the great breadth of his shoulders
+(they were his coat's shoulders, but she did not know this), the
+narrowness of his waist, the interesting pallor of his face.
+
+Not until the restaurant was well filled did any one have the audacity
+to sit at the stranger's table. His elegance and refinement were as a
+barrier between him and all that was rude and coarse. If he glanced
+about the place, taking notes in his turn of this and that, it was
+covertly and quietly and without offence. His eyes passed across Daisy's
+without resting or any show of interest. Once or twice he spoke quietly
+to the girl who waited on him, his eyebrows slightly raised, as if he
+were finding fault but without anger. For the first time in her life
+Daisy had a sensation of jealousy; but in the pale nostalgic form,
+rather than the yellow corrosive.
+
+Though the interesting stranger had been one of the earliest arrivals,
+he ate slowly, busied himself with important-looking papers out of his
+coat-pockets, and was the last to go. He paid his bill, and if he looked
+at Daisy while she made change it was in an absent-minded, uninterested
+way.
+
+She had an access of boldness. "I hope you liked your dinner," she said.
+
+"I?" The young man came out of the clouds. "Oh, yes. Very nice." He
+thanked her as courteously for his change as if his receiving any at all
+was purely a matter for her discretion to decide, wished her good
+afternoon, and went out.
+
+The waitresses were gathered about the one who had served the stranger.
+It seemed that he had made her a present of a dime. It was vaguely known
+that up-town, in more favored restaurants, a system of tipping
+prevailed; but in Linnevitch's this was the first instance in a long
+history. The stranger's stock, as they say, went up by leaps and bounds.
+Then, on removing the cloth from the table at which he had dined, there
+was discovered a heart-shaped locket that resembled gold. The girls were
+for opening it, and at least one ill-kept thumb-nail was painfully
+broken over backward in the attempt. Daisy joined the group. She was
+authoritative for the first time in her life.
+
+"He wouldn't like us to open it," she said.
+
+A dispute arose, presently a clamor; Linnevitch came in. There was a
+silence.
+
+Linnevitch examined the locket. "Trible-plate," he said judicially.
+"Maybe there's a name and address inside." As the locket opened for his
+strong thumb-nail, Daisy gave out a little sound as of pain. Linnevitch
+stood looking into the locket, smiling.
+
+"Only hair," he said presently, and closed the thing with a snap, "Put
+that in the cash-drawer," he said, "until it is called for."
+
+Daisy turned the key on the locket and wondered what color the hair
+was. The stranger, of course, had a sweetheart, and of course the hair
+was hers. Was it brown, chestnut, red, blond, black? Beneath each of
+these colors in turn she imagined a face.
+
+Long before the first habitués had arrived for supper Daisy was at her
+place. All the afternoon her imagination had been so fed, and her
+curiosity thereby so aroused, that she was prepared, in the face of what
+she knew at heart was proper, to open the locket and see, at least, the
+color of the magic hair. But she still hesitated, and for a long time.
+Finally, however, overmastered, she drew out the cash-drawer a little
+way and managed, without taking it out, to open the locket. The lock of
+hair which it contained was white as snow.
+
+Daisy rested, chin on hands, looking into space. She had almost always
+been happy in a negative way, or, better, contented. Now she was
+positively happy. But she could not have explained why. She had closed
+the locket gently and tenderly, revering the white hairs and the filial
+piety that had enshrined them in gold ("triple-plated gold, at that!").
+And when presently the stranger entered to recover his property, Daisy
+felt as if she had always known him, and that there was nothing to know
+of him but good.
+
+He was greatly and gravely concerned for his loss, but when Daisy,
+without speaking, opened the cash-drawer and handed him his property,
+he gave her a brilliant smile of gratitude.
+
+"One of the girls found it under your table," she said.
+
+"Is she here now?" he asked. "But never mind; you'll thank her for me,
+won't you? And--" A hand that seemed wonderfully ready for financial
+emergencies slipped into a trousers pocket and pulled from a great roll
+of various denominations a dollar bill. "Thank her and give her that,"
+he said. Then, and thus belittling the transaction, "I have to be in
+this part of the city quite often on business," he said, "and I don't
+mind saying that I like to take my meals among honest people. You can
+tell the boss that I intend to patronize this place."
+
+He turned to go, but the fact that she had been included as being one of
+honest people troubled Daisy.
+
+"Excuse me," she said. He turned back. "It was wrong for me to do it,"
+she said, blushing deeply, and looking him full in the face with her
+great, honest eyes. "I opened your locket. And looked in."
+
+"Did you?" said the young man. He did not seem to mind in the least. "I
+do, often. That lock of hair," he said, rather solemn now, and a little
+sad, perhaps, "was my mother's."
+
+He now allowed his eyes to rest on Daisy's beautiful face for, perhaps,
+the first time.
+
+"In a city like this," he said, "there's always temptations to do
+wrong, but I think having this" (he touched his breast pocket where the
+locket was) "helps me to do what mother would have liked me to."
+
+He brushed the corner of one eye with the back of his hand. Perhaps
+there was a tear in it. Perhaps a cinder.
+
+
+V
+
+It came to be known in the restaurant that the stranger's name was
+Barstow, and very soon he had ceased to be a stranger. His business in
+that quarter of the city, whatever it may have been, was at first
+intermittent; he would take, perhaps, three meals in a week at
+Linnevitch's; latterly he often came twice in one day. Always orderly
+and quiet, Barstow gradually, however, established pleasant and even
+joking terms with the waitresses. But with Daisy he never joked. He
+called the other girls by their first names, as became a social
+superior, but Daisy was always Miss Obloski to him. With Linnevitch
+alone he made no headway. Linnevitch maintained a pointedly surly and
+repellent attitude, as if he really wished to turn away a profitable
+patronage. And Barstow learned to leave the proprietor severely alone.
+
+One night, after Barstow had received his change, he remained for a few
+minutes talking with Daisy. "What do you find to do with yourself
+evenings, Miss Obloski?" he asked.
+
+"I generally sit with Mr. and Mrs. Linnevitch and sew," she answered.
+
+"That's not a very exciting life for a young lady. Don't you ever take
+in a show, or go to a dance?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Don't you like to dance?"
+
+"I know I'd like it," she said with enthusiasm; "but I never had a
+chance to try."
+
+"You haven't!" exclaimed Barstow. "What a shame! Some night, if you
+like, I'll take you to an academy--a nice quiet one, mostly for
+beginners--where they give lessons. If you'd like, I'll teach you
+myself."
+
+Delight showed in Daisy's face.
+
+"Good!" said Barstow. "It's a go. How about to-n--" He broke off short.
+Linnevitch, very surly and very big, was within hearing, although his
+attention appeared elsewhere.
+
+"Some time soon, then," said Barstow in a lower voice, and aloud, "Well,
+good-night, Miss Obloski."
+
+Her eyes were upon the glass door and the darkness beyond into which
+Barstow had disappeared. She was returned to earth by Linnevitch's voice
+close to her ear. It was gentle and understanding.
+
+"You like dot feller--eh?"
+
+Daisy blushed very crimson, but her great eyes were steadfast and
+without guile. "I like him very much, Mr. Linnevitch."
+
+"Not too much--eh?"
+
+Daisy did not answer. She did not know the answer.
+
+"Liddle girl," said Linnevitch kindly, "you don't know noddings. What
+was he saying to you, just now?"
+
+"He said some evening he'd take me to an academy and learn me dancing,"
+said Daisy.
+
+"He said dot, did he?" said Linnevitch. "I say don't have nodding to do
+with them academies. You ask Mrs. Linnevitch to tell you some
+stories--eh?"
+
+"But he didn't mean a regular dance-hall," said Daisy. "He said a place
+for beginners."
+
+"For beginners!" said Linnevitch with infinite sarcasm. And then with a
+really tender paternalism, "If I am your father, I beat you sometimes
+for a liddle fool--eh?"
+
+Mrs. Linnevitch was more explicit. "I've knowed hundreds of girls that
+was taught to dance," she said. "First they go to the hall, and then
+they go to hell."
+
+Daisy defended her favorite character. "Any man," she said, "that
+carries a lock of his mother's white hair with him to help keep him
+straight is good enough for me, I guess."
+
+"How do you know it is not hair of some old man's beard to fool you? Or
+some goat--eh? How do you know it make him keep straight--eh?"
+
+Linnevitch began to mimic the quiet voice and elegant manner of Barstow:
+"Good-morning, Miss Obloski, I have just given one dollar to a poor
+cribble.... Oh, how do you do to-day, Miss Obloski? My mouth is full of
+butter, but it don't seem to melt.... Oh, Miss Obloski, I am ready to
+faint with disgust. I have just seen a man drink one stein of beer. I am
+a temptation this evening--let me just look in dot locket and save
+myself."
+
+Daisy was not amused. She was even angry with Linnevitch, but too gentle
+to show it. Presently she said good-night and went to bed.
+
+"_Now_," said Mrs. Linnevitch, "she'll go with that young feller sure.
+The way you mocked him made her mad. I've got eyes in my head. Whatever
+she used to think, now she thinks he's a live saint."
+
+"I wonder, now?" said Linnevitch. A few minutes' wondering must have
+brought him into agreement with his wife, for presently he toiled up
+three flights of stairs and knocked at Daisy's door.
+
+"Daisy," he said.
+
+"What is it, Mr. Linnevitch?" If her voice had not been tearful it would
+have been cold.
+
+The man winced. "Mebbe that young feller is O. K.," he said. "I have
+come just to say that. Mebbe he is. But you just let me look him up a
+liddle bit--eh?"
+
+He did not catch her answer.
+
+"You promise me that--eh? Mrs. Linnevitch and me, we want to do what is
+right and best. We don't want our liddle Daisy to make no mistakes."
+
+He had no answer but the sounds that go with tears. He knew by this that
+his mockings and insinuations had been forgiven.
+
+"Good-night, liddle girl," he said. "Sleep tight." His own voice broke.
+"I be your popper--eh?" he said.
+
+
+To Barstow's surprise and disappointment, when he named a time for her
+first lesson in dancing Daisy refused to go.
+
+"Mrs. Linnevitch thinks I better not be going out nights, Mr. Barstow,"
+she said. "But thank you ever so much, all the same."
+
+"Well," said Barstow, "I'm disappointed. But that's nothing, if you're
+not."
+
+Daisy blushed. "But I am," she said.
+
+"Then," said he, "never mind what _they_ say. Come on!"
+
+Daisy shook her head. "I promised."
+
+"Look here, Miss Obloski, what's wrong? Let's be honest, whatever else
+we are. Is it because they _know_ something against me, because they
+_think_ they do, or because they _know_ that they don't?"
+
+"It's that," said Daisy. "Mr. Linnevitch don't want me to be going out
+with any one he don't know about."
+
+Barstow was obviously relieved. "Thank you," he said. "That's all square
+now. It isn't Mrs. Linnevitch; it's the boss. It isn't going out in
+general; it's going out with me!"
+
+Then he surprised her. "The boss is absolutely right," he said. "I'm for
+him, and, Miss Obloski, I won't ask you to trust me until I've proved to
+Linnevitch that I'm a proper guardian----"
+
+"It's only Mr. Linnevitch," said Daisy, smiling very sweetly. "It's not
+me. _I_ trust you." Her eyes were like two serene stars.
+
+Barstow leaned closer and spoke lower. "Miss Obloski," he said,
+"Daisy"--and he lingered on the name--"there's only one thing you could
+say that I'd rather hear."
+
+Daisy wanted to ask what that was. But there was no natural coquetry in
+the girl. She did not dare.
+
+She did not see him again for three whole days; but she fed upon his
+last words to her until she was ready, and even eager, to say that other
+thing which alone he would rather hear than that she trusted him.
+
+Between breakfast and dinner on the fourth day a tremendous great man,
+thick in the chest and stomach, wearing a frock coat and a glossy silk
+hat, entered the restaurant. The man's face, a miracle of close shaving,
+had the same descending look of heaviness as his body. But it was a
+strong, commanding face in spite of the pouched eyes and the drooping
+flesh about the jaws and chin. Daisy, busy with her book-keeping, looked
+up and smiled, with her strong instinct for friendliness.
+
+The gentleman removed his hat. Most of his head was bald. "You'll be
+Miss Obloski," he said. "The top o' the mornin' to you, miss. My boy has
+often spoken of you. I call him my boy bekase he's been like a son to
+me--like a son. Is Linnevitch in? Never mind, I know the way."
+
+He opened, without knocking upon it, the door which led from the
+restaurant into the Linnevitches' parlor. Evidently a great man. And how
+beautifully and touchingly he had spoken of Barstow! Daisy returned to
+her addition. Two and three are six and seven are twelve and four are
+nineteen. Then she frowned and tried again.
+
+The great man was a long time closeted with Linnevitch. She could hear
+their voices, now loud and angry, now subdued. But she could not gather
+what they were talking about.
+
+At length the two emerged from the parlor--Linnevitch flushed, red,
+sullen, and browbeaten; the stranger grandly at ease, an unlighted cigar
+in his mouth. He took off his hat to Daisy, bent his brows upon her with
+an admiring glance, and passed out into the sunlight.
+
+"Who was it?" said Daisy.
+
+"That," said Linnevitch, "is Cullinan, the boss--Bull Cullinan. Once he
+was a policeman, and now he is a millionaire."
+
+There was a curious mixture of contempt, of fear, and of adulation in
+Linnevitch's voice.
+
+"He is come here," he said, "to tell me about that young feller."
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Daisy. "Mr. Barstow?"
+
+Linnevitch did not meet her eye. "I am wrong," he said, "and that young
+feller is O. K."
+
+When Daisy came back from her first dancing lesson, Mr. and Mrs.
+Linnevitch were sitting up for her. Her gayety and high spirits seemed
+to move the couple, especially Linnevitch, deeply. He insisted that she
+eat some crackers and drink a glass of milk. He was wonderfully gentle,
+almost tender, in his manner; but whenever she looked at him he looked
+away.
+
+
+VI
+
+It was as if heaven had opened before Daisy. The blood in her veins
+moved to the rhythm of dance music; her vision was being fed upon color
+and light. And, for she was still a child, she was taken great wonders
+to behold: dogs that rode upon bicycles, men who played upon fifty
+instruments, clowns that caused whole theatres to roar with laughter,
+ladies that dove from dizzy heights, bears that drank beer, Apollos that
+seemed to have been born turning wonderful somersaults. And always at
+her side was her man, her well-beloved, to explain and to protect. He
+was careful of her, careful as a man is careful who carries a glass of
+water filled to overflowing without losing a drop. And if little by
+little he explained what he called "life" to her, it was with delicacy,
+with gravity--even, as it seemed, with sorrow.
+
+His kisses filled her at first with a wonderful tenderness; at last with
+desire, so that her eyes narrowed and she breathed quickly. At this
+point in their relations Barstow put off his pleading, cajoling manner,
+and began, little by little, to play the master. In the matter of dress
+and deportment he issued orders now instead of suggestions; and she only
+worshipped him the more.
+
+When he knew in his heart that she could refuse him nothing he proposed
+marriage. Or rather, he issued a mandate. He had led her to a seat after
+a romping dance. She was highly flushed with the exercise and the
+contact, a little in disarray, breathing fast, a wonderful look of
+exaltation and promise in her face. He was white, as always, methodic,
+and cool--the man who arranges, who makes light of difficulties, who
+gives orders; the man who has money in his pocket.
+
+"Kid," he whispered, "when the restaurant closes to-morrow night I am
+going to take you to see a friend of mine--an alderman."
+
+She smiled brightly, lips parted in expectation. She knew by experience
+that he would presently tell her why.
+
+"You're to quit Linnevitch for good," he said. "So have your things
+ready."
+
+Although the place was so crowded that whirling couples occasionally
+bumped into their knees or stumbled over their feet, Barstow took her
+hand with the naïve and easy manner of those East Siders whom he
+affected to despise.
+
+"You didn't guess we were going to be married so soon, did you?" he
+said.
+
+She pressed his hand. Her eyes were round with wonder.
+
+"At first," he went on, "we'll look about before we go to
+house-keeping. I've taken nice rooms for us--a parlor and bedroom suite.
+Then we can take our time looking until we find just the right
+house-keeping flat."
+
+"Oh," she said, "are you sure you want me?"
+
+He teased her. He said, "Oh, I don't know" and "I wouldn't wonder," and
+pursed up his lips in scorn; but at the same time he regarded her out of
+the corners of roguish eyes. "Say, kid," he said presently--and his
+gravity betokened the importance of the matter--"Cullinan's dead for it.
+He's going to be a witness, and afterward he's going to blow us to
+supper--just us two. How's that?"
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, "that's fine!"
+
+The next morning Daisy told Mr. and Mrs. Linnevitch that she was to be
+married as soon as the restaurant closed. But they had schooled
+themselves by now to expect this event, and said very little.
+Linnevitch, however, was very quiet all day. Every now and then an
+expression little short of murderous came into his face, to be followed
+by a vacant, dazed look, and this in turn by sudden uncontrollable
+starts of horror. At these times he might have stood for "Judas
+beginning to realize what he has done."
+
+Barstow, carrying Daisy's parcel, went out first. He was always tactful.
+Daisy flung herself into Mrs. Linnevitch's arms. The undemonstrative
+woman shed tears and kissed her. Linnevitch could not speak. And when
+Daisy had gone at last, the couple stood and looked at the floor between
+them. So I have seen a father and mother stand and look into the coffin
+of their only child.
+
+If the reader's suspicions have been aroused, let me set them at rest.
+The marriage was genuine. It was performed in good faith by a genuine
+alderman. The groom and the great Mr. Cullinan even went so far as to
+disport genuine and generous white boutonnières. Daisy cried a little;
+the words that she had to say seemed so wonderful to her, a new
+revelation, as it were, of the kingdom and glory of love. But when she
+was promising to cleave to Barstow in sickness and peril till death
+parted them, her heart beat with a great, valiant fierceness. So the
+heart of the female tiger beats in tenderness for her young.
+
+Barstow was excited and nervous, as became a groom. Even the great Mr.
+Cullinan shook a little under the paternal jocoseness with which he came
+forward to kiss the bride.
+
+There was a supper waiting in the parlor of the rooms which Barstow had
+hired: cold meats, salad, fruit, and a bottle of champagne. While the
+gentlemen divested themselves of their hats and overcoats, Daisy carried
+her parcel into the bedroom and opened it on the bureau. Then she took
+off her hat and tidied her hair. She hardly recognized the face that
+looked out of the mirror. She had never, before that moment, realized
+that she was beautiful, that she had something to give to the man she
+loved that was worth giving. Her eyes fell upon her old doll, the
+companion of so many years. She laughed a happy little laugh. She had
+grown up. The doll was only a doll now. But she kissed it, because she
+loved it still. And she put it carefully away in a drawer, lest the
+sight of a childishness offend the lord and master.
+
+As she passed the great double bed, with its two snow-white pillows, her
+knees weakened. It was like a hint to perform a neglected duty. She
+knelt, and prayed God to let her make Barstow happy forever and ever.
+Then, beautiful and abashed, she joined the gentlemen.
+
+As she seated herself with dignity, as became a good housewife presiding
+at her own table, the two gentlemen lifted their glasses of champagne.
+There was a full glass beside Daisy's plate. Her fingers closed lightly
+about the stem; but she looked to Barstow for orders. "Ought I?" she
+said.
+
+"Sure," said he, "a little champagne--won't hurt you."
+
+No, Daisy; only what was in the champagne. She had her little moment of
+exhilaration, of self-delighting ease and vivacity--then dizziness,
+then awful nausea, and awful fear, and oblivion.
+
+The great Mr. Cullinan--Bull Cullinan--caught her as she was falling. He
+regarded the bridegroom with eyes in which there was no expression
+whatever.
+
+"Get out!" he said.
+
+And then he was alone with her, and safe, in the dark shadow of the
+wings.
+
+
+
+
+GROWING UP
+
+
+The children were all down in the salt-marsh playing at
+marriage-by-capture. It was a very good play. You ran just as fast after
+the ugly girls as the pretty ones, and you didn't have to abide by the
+result. One little girl got so excited that she fell into the river, and
+it was Andramark who pulled her out, and beat her on the back till she
+stopped choking. It may be well to remember that she was named Tassel
+Top, a figure taken from the Indian-corn ear when it is in silk.
+
+Andramark was the name of the boy. He was the seventh son of Squirrel
+Eyes, and all his six brothers were dead, because they had been born in
+hard times, or had fallen out of trees, or had been drowned. To grow up
+in an Indian village, especially when it is travelling, is very
+difficult. Sometimes a boy's mother has to work so hard that she runs
+plumb out of milk; and sometimes he gets playing too roughly with the
+other boys, and gets wounded, and blood-poisoning sets in; or he finds a
+dead fish and cooks it and eats it, and ptomaine poisoning sets in; or
+he catches too much cold on a full stomach, or too much malaria on an
+empty one. Or he tries to win glory by stealing a bear cub when its
+mother isn't looking, or a neighboring tribe drops in between days for
+an unfriendly visit, and some big painted devil knocks him over the head
+and takes his scalp home to his own little boy to play with.
+
+Contrariwise, if he does manage to grow up and reach man's estate he's
+got something to brag of. Only he doesn't do it; because the first thing
+that people learn who have to live very intimately together is that bore
+and boaster are synonymous terms. So he never brags of what he has
+accomplished in the way of deeds and experiences until he is married.
+And then only in the privacy of his own lodge, when that big hickory
+stick which he keeps for the purpose assures him of the beloved one's
+best ears and most flattering attention.
+
+Andramark's father was worse than dead. He had been tried in the
+council-lodge by the elders, and had been found guilty of something
+which need not be gone into here, and driven forth into the wilderness
+which surrounded the summer village to shift for himself. By the same
+judgment the culprit's wife, Squirrel Eyes, was pronounced a widow. Most
+women in her position would have been ambitious to marry again, but
+Squirrel Eyes's only ambition was to raise her seventh son to be the
+pride and support of her old age. She had had quite enough of marriage,
+she would have thanked you.
+
+So, when Andramark was thirteen years old, and very swift and husky for
+his age, Squirrel Eyes went to the Wisest Medicine-man, and begged him
+to take her boy in hand and make a man of him.
+
+"Woman," the Wisest Medicine-man had said, "fifteen is the very greenest
+age at which boys are made men, but seeing that you are a widow, and
+without support, it may be that something can be done. We will look into
+the matter."
+
+That was why Owl Eyes, the Wisest Medicine-man, invited two of his
+cronies to sit with him on the bluff overlooking the salt-marsh and
+watch the children playing at marriage-by-capture.
+
+Those old men were among the best judges of sports and form living. They
+could remember three generations of hunters and fighters. They had all
+the records for jumping, swimming under water, spear-throwing,
+axe-throwing, and bow-shooting at their tongues' ends. And they knew the
+pedigree for many, many generations of every child at that moment
+playing in the meadow, and into just what sort of man or woman that
+child should grow, with good luck and proper training.
+
+Owl Eyes did not call his two cronies' attention to Andramark. If there
+was any precocity in the lad it would show of itself, and nothing would
+escape their black, jewel-like, inscrutable eyes. When Tassel Top fell
+into the river the aged pair laughed heartily, and when Andramark,
+without changing his stride, followed her in and fished her out, one of
+them said, "That's a quick boy," and the other said, "Why hasn't that
+girl been taught to swim?" Owl Eyes said, "That's a big boy for only
+thirteen--that Andramark."
+
+In the next event Andramark from scratch ran through a field--some of
+the boys were older and taller than himself--and captured yet another
+wife, who, because she expected and longed to be caught by some other
+boy, promptly boxed--the air where his ears had been. Andramark,
+smiling, caught both her hands in one of his, tripped her over a neatly
+placed foot, threw her, face down, and seated himself quietly on the
+small of her back and rubbed her nose in the mud.
+
+The other children, laughing and shouting, rushed to the rescue.
+Simultaneously Andramark, also laughing, was on his feet, running and
+dodging. Twice he passed through the whole mob of his pursuers without,
+so it seemed to the aged watchers on the bluff, being touched. Then,
+having won some ten yards clear of them, he wheeled about and stood with
+folded arms. A great lad foremost in the pursuit reached for him, was
+caught instead by the outstretched hand and jerked forward on his face.
+Some of the children laughed so hard that they had to stop running.
+Others redoubled their efforts to close with the once more darting,
+dodging, and squirming Andramark, who, however, threading through them
+for the third and last time in the most mocking and insulting manner,
+headed straight for the bluff a little to the right of where his elders
+and betters were seated with their legs hanging over, leaped at a
+dangling wild grape-vine, squirmed to the top, turned, and prepared to
+defend his position against any one insolent enough to assail it.
+
+The children, crowded at the base of the little bluff, looked up.
+Andramark looked down. With one hand and the tip of his nose he made the
+insulting gesture which is older than antiquity.
+
+Meanwhile, Owl Eyes had left his front-row seat, and not even a waving
+of the grasses showed that he was crawling upon Andramark from behind.
+
+Owl Eyes's idea was to push the boy over the bluff as a lesson to him
+never to concentrate himself too much on one thing at a time. But just
+at the crucial moment Andramark leaped to one side, and it was a
+completely flabbergasted old gentleman who descended through the air in
+his stead upon a scattering flock of children. Owl Eyes, still agile at
+eighty, gathered himself into a ball, jerked violently with his head
+and arms, and managed to land on his feet. But he was very much shaken,
+and nobody laughed. He turned and looked up at Andramark, and Andramark
+looked down.
+
+"I couldn't help it," said Andramark. "I knew you were there all the
+time."
+
+Owl Eyes's two cronies grinned behind their hands.
+
+"Come down," said Owl Eyes sternly.
+
+Andramark leaped and landed lightly, and stood with folded arms and
+looked straight into the eyes of the Wisest Medicine-man. Everybody made
+sure that there was going to be one heap big beating, and there were not
+wanting those who would have volunteered to fetch a stick, even from a
+great distance. But Owl Eyes was not called the Wisest Medicine-man for
+nothing. His first thought had been, "I will beat the life out of this
+boy." But then (it was a strict rule that he always followed) he recited
+to himself the first three stanzas of the Rain-Maker's song, and had a
+new and wiser thought. This he spoke aloud.
+
+"Boy," he said, "beginning to-morrow I myself shall take you in hand and
+make a man of you. You will be at the medicine-lodge at noon. Meanwhile
+go to your mother's lodge and tell her from me to give you a sound
+beating."
+
+The children marvelled, the boys envied, and Andramark, his head very
+high, his heart thumping, passed among them and went home to his mother
+and repeated what the Wisest Medicine-man had said.
+
+"And you are to give me a sound beating, mother," said Andramark,
+"because after to-day they will begin making a man of me, and when I am
+a man it will be the other way around, and I shall have to beat you."
+
+His back was bare, and he bent forward so that his mother could beat
+him. And she took down from the lodge-pole a heavy whip of raw buckskin.
+It was not so heavy as her heart.
+
+Then she raised the whip and said:
+
+"A blow for the carrying," and she struck; "a blow for the bearing," and
+she struck; "a blow for the milking," and she struck; "a blow for lies
+spoken," and she did _not_ strike; "a blow for food stolen," and she did
+_not_ strike.
+
+And she went through the whole litany of the beating ceremonial and
+struck such blows as the law demanded, and spared those she honestly
+could spare, and when in doubt she quibbled--struck, but struck lightly.
+
+When the beating was over they sat down facing each other and talked.
+And Squirrel Eyes said: "What must be, must. The next few days will soon
+be over."
+
+And Andramark shuddered (he was alone with his mother) and said, "If I
+show that they hurt me they will never let me be a man."
+
+And Squirrel Eyes did her best to comfort him and put courage in his
+heart, just as modern mothers do for sons who are about to have a tooth
+pulled or a tonsil taken out.
+
+The next day at noon sharp Andramark stood before the entrance of the
+medicine-lodge with his arms folded; and all his boy and girl friends
+watched him from a distance. And all the boys envied him, and all the
+girls wished that they were boys. Andramark stood very still, almost
+without swaying, for the better part of an hour. His body was nicely
+greased, and he resembled a wet terra-cotta statue. A few mosquitoes
+were fattening themselves on him, and a bite in the small of his back
+itched so that he wanted very much to squirm and wriggle. But that would
+have been almost as bad an offence against ceremonial as complaining of
+hunger during the fast or shedding tears under the torture.
+
+Andramark had never seen the inside of the medicine-lodge; but it was
+well known to be very dark, and to contain skulls and thigh-bones of
+famous enemies, and devil-masks, and horns and rattles and other
+disturbing and ghostly properties. Of what would happen to him when he
+had passed between the flaps of the lodge and was alone with the
+medicine-men he did not know. But he reasoned that if they really
+wanted to make a man of him they would not really try to kill him or
+maim him. And he was strong in the determination, no matter what should
+happen, to show neither surprise, fear, nor pain.
+
+A quiet voice spoke suddenly, just within the flaps of the lodge:
+
+"Who is standing without?"
+
+"The boy Andramark."
+
+"What do you wish of us?"
+
+"To be made a man."
+
+"Then say farewell to your companions of childhood."
+
+Andramark turned toward the boys and girls who were watching him. Their
+faces swam a little before his eyes, and he felt a big lump coming
+slowly up in his throat. He raised his right arm to its full length,
+palm forward, and said:
+
+"Farewell, O children; I shall never play with you any more."
+
+Then the children set up a great howl of lamentation, which was all part
+of the ceremonial, and Andramark turned and found that the flaps of the
+lodge had been drawn aside, and that within there was thick darkness and
+the sound of men breathing.
+
+"Come in, Andramark."
+
+The flaps of the lodge fell together behind him. Fingers touched his
+shoulder and guided him in the dark, and then a voice told him to sit
+down. His quick eyes, already accustomed to the darkness, recognized one
+after another the eleven medicine-men of his tribe. They were seated
+cross-legged in a semicircle, and one of them was thumbing tobacco into
+the bowl of a poppy-red pipe. Some of the medicine-men had rattles handy
+in their laps, others devil-horns. They were all smiling and looking
+kindly at the little boy who sat all alone by himself facing them. Then
+old Owl Eyes, who was the central medicine-man of the eleven, spoke.
+
+"In this lodge," he said, "no harm will befall you. But lest the women
+and children grow to think lightly of manhood there will be from time to
+time much din and devil-noises."
+
+At that the eleven medicine-men began to rock their bodies and groan
+like lost souls (they groaned louder and louder, with a kind of awful
+rhythm), and to shake the devil-rattles, which were dried gourds,
+brightly painted, and containing teeth of famous enemies, and one of the
+medicine-men tossed a devil-horn to Andramark, and the boy put it to his
+lips and blew for all he was worth. It was quite obvious that the
+medicine-men were just having fun, not with him, but with all the women
+and children of the village who were outside listening--at a safe
+distance, of course--and imagining that the medicine-lodge was at that
+moment a scene of the most awful visitations and terrors. And all that
+afternoon, at intervals, the ghastly uproar was repeated, until
+Andramark's lips were chapped with blowing the devil-horn and his
+insides felt very shaky. But between times the business of the
+medicine-men with Andramark was very serious, and they talked to him
+like so many fathers, and he listened with both ears and pulled at the
+poppy-red medicine-pipe whenever it was passed to him.
+
+They lectured him upon anatomy and hygiene; upon tribal laws and
+intertribal laws; and always they explained "why" as well as they could,
+and if they didn't know "why" they said it must be right because it's
+always been done that way. Sometimes they said things that made him feel
+very self-conscious and uncomfortable. And sometimes they became so
+interesting that it was the other way round.
+
+"The gulf," said Owl Eyes, "between the race of men and the races of
+women and children is knowledge. For, whereas many squaws and little
+children possess courage, knowledge is kept from them, even as the
+first-run shad of the spring. The duty of the child is to acquire
+strength and skill, of the woman to bear children, to labor in the
+corn-field, and to keep the lodge. But the duty of man is to hunt, and
+to fight, and to make medicine, to know, and to keep knowledge to
+himself. Hence the saying that whatever man betrays the secrets of the
+council-lodge to a squaw is a squaw himself. Hitherto, Andramark, you
+have been a talkative child, but henceforth you will watch your tongue
+as a warrior watches the prisoner that he is bringing to his village for
+torture. When a man ceases to be a mystery to the women and children he
+ceases to be a man. Do not tell them what has passed in the
+medicine-lodge, but let it appear that you could discourse of ghostly
+mysteries and devilish visitations and other dread wonders--if you
+would; so that even to the mother that bore you you will be henceforward
+and forever a thing apart, a thing above, a thing beyond."
+
+And the old medicine-man who sat on Owl Eyes's left cleared his throat
+and said:
+
+"When a man's wife is in torment, it is as well for him to nod his head
+and let her believe that she does not know what suffering is."
+
+Another said:
+
+"Should a man's child ask what the moon is made of, let that man answer
+that it is made of foolish questions, but at the same time let him
+smile, as much as to say that he could give the truthful answer--if he
+would."
+
+Another said:
+
+"When you lie to women and children, lie foolishly, so that they may
+know that you are making sport of them and may be ashamed. In this way a
+man may keep the whole of his knowledge to himself, like a basket of
+corn hidden in a place of his own secret choosing."
+
+Still another pulled one flap of the lodge a little so that a ray of
+light entered. He held his hand in the ray and said:
+
+"The palm of my hand is in darkness, the back is in light. It is the
+same with all acts and happenings--there is a bright side and a dark
+side. Never be so foolish as to look on the dark side of things; there
+may be somewhat there worth discovering, but it is in vain to look
+because it cannot be seen."
+
+And Owl Eyes said:
+
+"It will be well now to rest ourselves from seriousness with more din
+and devil-noises. And after that we shall lead the man-boy Andramark to
+the Lodge of Nettles, there to sit alone for a space and to turn over in
+his mind all that we have said to him."
+
+"One thing more." This from a very little medicine-man who had done very
+little talking. "When you run the gauntlet of the women and children
+from the Hot Lodge to the river, watch neither their eyes nor their
+whips; watch only their feet, lest you be tripped and thrown at the very
+threshold of manhood."
+
+Nettles, thistles, and last year's burdocks and sandspurs strewed the
+floor of the lodge to which Andramark was now taken. And he was told
+that he must not thrust these to one side and make himself comfortable
+upon the bare ground. He might sit, or stand, or lie down; he might walk
+about; but he mustn't think of going to sleep, or, indeed, of anything
+but the knowledge and mysteries which had been revealed to him in the
+medicine-lodge.
+
+All that night, all the next day, and all the next night he meditated.
+For the first six hours he meditated on knowledge, mystery, and the
+whole duty of man, just as he had been told to do. And he only stopped
+once to listen to a flute-player who had stolen into the forest back of
+the lodge and was trying to tell some young squaw how much he loved her
+and how lonely he was without her. The flute had only four notes and one
+of them was out of order; but Andramark had been brought up on that sort
+of music and it sounded very beautiful to him. Still, he only listened
+with one ear, Indian fashion. The other was busy taking in all the other
+noises of the night and the village. Somebody passed by the Lodge of
+Nettles, walking very slowly and softly. "A man," thought Andramark,
+"would not make any noise at all. A child would be in bed."
+
+The slow, soft steps were nearing the forest back of the lodge,
+quickening a little. Contrariwise, the flute was being played more and
+more slowly. Each of its three good notes was a stab at the feelings,
+and so, for that matter, was the note that had gone wrong. An owl
+hooted. Andramark smiled. If he had been born enough hundreds of years
+later he might have said, "You can't fool me!"
+
+The flute-playing stopped abruptly. Andramark forgot all about the
+nettles and sat down. Then he stood up.
+
+He meditated on war and women, just as he had been told to do. Then,
+because he was thirsty, he meditated upon suffering. And he finished the
+night meditating--upon an empty stomach.
+
+Light filtered under the skirts of the lodge. He heard the early women
+going to their work in the fields. The young leaves were on the oaks,
+and it was corn-planting time. Even very old corn, however, tastes very
+good prepared in any number of different ways. Andramark agreed with
+himself that when he gave himself in marriage it would be to a woman who
+was a thoroughly good cook. But quite raw food is acceptable at times.
+It is pleasant to crack quail eggs between the teeth, or to rip the roe
+out of a fresh-caught shad with your forefinger and just let it melt in
+your mouth.
+
+The light brightened. It was a fine day. It grew warm in the lodge, hot,
+intolerably hot. The skins of which it was made exhaled a smoky, meaty
+smell. Andramark was tempted to see if he couldn't suck a little
+nourishment out of them. A shadow lapped the skirts of the lodge and
+crawled upward. It became cool, cold. The boy, almost naked, began to
+shiver and shake. He swung his arms as cab-drivers do, and tried very
+hard to meditate upon the art of being a man.
+
+During the second night one of his former companions crept up to the
+lodge and spoke to him under its skirts. "Sst! Heh! What does it feel
+like to be a man?"--chuckled and withdrew.
+
+Andramark said to himself the Indian for "I'll lay for that boy." He was
+very angry. He had been gratuitously insulted in the midst of his new
+dignities.
+
+Suddenly the flaps of the lodge were opened and some one leaned in and
+set something upon the floor. Andramark did not move. His nostrils
+dilated, and he said to himself, "Venison--broiled to the second."
+
+In the morning he saw that there was not only venison, but a bowl of
+water, and a soft bearskin upon which he might stretch himself and
+sleep. His lips curled with a great scorn. And he remained standing and
+aloof from the temptations. And meditated upon the privileges of being a
+man.
+
+About noon he began to have visitors. At first they were vague, dark
+spots that hopped and ziddied in the overheated air. But these became,
+with careful looking, all sorts of devils and evil spirits, and beasts
+the like of which were not in the experience of any living man. There
+were creatures made like men, only that they were covered with long,
+silky hair and had cry-baby faces and long tails. And there was a vague,
+yellowish beast, very terrible, something like a huge cat, only that it
+had curling tusks like a very big wild pig. And there were other things
+that looked like men, only that they were quite white, as if they had
+been most awfully frightened. And suddenly Andramark imagined that he
+was hanging to a tree, but not by his hands or his feet, and the limb to
+which he was hanging broke, and, after falling for two or three days, he
+landed on his feet among burs and nettles that were spread over the
+floor of a lodge.
+
+The child had slept standing up, and had evolved from his
+subconsciousness, as children will, beasts and conditions that had
+existed when the whole human race was a frightened cry-baby in its
+cradle. He had never heard of a monkey or a sabre-tooth tiger; but he
+had managed to see a sort of vision of them both, and had dreamed that
+he was a monkey hanging by his tail.
+
+He was very faint and sick when the medicine-men came for him. But it
+did not show in his face, and he walked firmly among them to the great
+Torture Lodge, his head very high and the ghost of a smile hovering
+about his mouth.
+
+It was a grim business that waited him in the Torture Lodge. He was
+strung up by his thumbs to a peg high up the great lodge pole, and drawn
+taut by thongs from his big toes to another peg in the base of the pole,
+and then, without any unnecessary delays, for every step in the
+proceeding was according to a ceremonial that was almost as old as
+suffering, they gave him, what with blunt flint-knives and lighted
+slivers of pitch-pine, a very good working idea of hell. They told him,
+without words, which are the very tenderest and most nervous places in
+all the human anatomy, and showed him how simple it is to give a little
+boy all the sensations of major operations without actually removing his
+arms and legs. And they talked to him. They told him that because he
+came of a somewhat timorous family they were letting him off very
+easily; that they weren't really hurting him, because it was evident
+from the look of him that at the first hint of real pain he would scream
+and cry. And then suddenly, just when the child was passing through the
+ultimate border-land of endurance, they cut him down, and praised him,
+and said that he had behaved splendidly, and had taken to torture as a
+young duck takes to water. And poor little Andramark found that under
+the circumstances kindness was the very hardest thing of all to bear.
+One after another great lumps rushed up his throat, and he began to
+tremble and totter and struggle with the corners of his mouth.
+
+Old Owl Eyes, who had tortured plenty of brave boys in his day, was
+ready for this phase. He caught up a great bowl of ice-cold spring-water
+and emptied it with all his strength against Andramark's bloody back.
+The shock of that sudden icy blow brought the boy's runaway nerves back
+into hand. He shook himself, drew a long breath, and, without a quiver
+anywhere, smiled.
+
+And the old men were as glad as he was that the very necessary trial by
+torture was at an end. And, blowing triumphantly upon devil-horns and
+shaking devil-rattles, they carried him the whole length of the village
+to the base of the hill where the Hot Lodge was.
+
+This was a little cave, in the mouth of which was a spring, said to be
+very full of Big Medicine. The entrance to the cave was closed by a
+heavy arras of bearskins, three or four thick, and the ground in front
+was thickly strewn with round and flat stones cracked and blackened by
+fire. From the cave to the fifteen-foot bluff overhanging a deep pool of
+the river the ground was level, and worn in a smooth band eight or ten
+feet wide as by the trampling of many feet.
+
+Andramark, stark naked and still bleeding in many places, sat
+cross-legged in the cave, at the very rim of the medicine-spring. His
+head hung forward on his chest. All his muscles were soft and relaxed.
+After a while the hangings of the cave entrance were drawn a little to
+one side and a stone plumped into the spring with a savage hiss;
+another followed--another--and another and another. Steam began to rise
+from the surface of the spring, little bubbles darted up from the bottom
+and burst. More hot stones were thrown into the water. Steam, soft and
+caressing, filled the cave. The temperature rose by leaps and bounds.
+The roots of Andramark's hair began to tickle--the tickling became
+unendurable, and ceased suddenly as the sweat burst from every pore of
+his body. His eyes closed; in his heart it was as if love-music were
+being played upon a flute. He was no longer conscious of hunger or
+thirst. He yielded, body and soul, to the sensuous miracle of the steam,
+and slept.
+
+He was awakened by many shrill voices that laughed and dared him to come
+out.
+
+"It's only one big beating," he said, rose, stepped over the spring,
+pushed through the bearskins, and stood gleaming and steaming in the
+fading light.
+
+The gantlet that he was to run extended from the cave to the bluff
+overhanging the river. He looked the length of the double row of
+grinning women and children--the active agents in what was to come. Back
+of the women and children were warriors and old men, their faces relaxed
+into holiday expressions. Toward the river end of the gauntlet were
+stationed the youngest, the most vigorous, the most fun-loving of the
+women, and the larger boys, with only a negligible sprinkling of really
+little children. Every woman and child in the two rows was armed with a
+savage-looking whip of willow, hickory, or even green brier, and the
+still more savage intention of using these whips to the utmost extent of
+their speed and accuracy in striking.
+
+Upon a signal Andramark darted forward and was lost in a whistling
+smother. It was as if an untrimmed hedge had suddenly gone mad.
+Andramark made the best of a bad business, guarded his face and the top
+of his head with his arms, ran swiftly, but not too swiftly, and kept
+his eyes out for feet that were thrust forward to trip him.
+
+A dozen feet ahead he saw a pair of little moccasins that were familiar
+to him. As he passed them he looked into their owner's face, and
+wondered why, of all the little girls in the village, Tassel Top alone
+did not use her whip on him.
+
+At last, half blinded, lurching as he ran, he came to the edge of the
+bluff, and dived, almost without a splash, into the deep, fresh water.
+The cold of it stung his overheated, bleeding body like a swarm of wild
+bees, and it is possible that when he reached the Canoe Beach the water
+in his eyes was not all fresh. Here, however, smiling chiefs and
+warriors surrounded the stoic, and welcomed him to their number with
+kind words and grunts of approval. And then, because he that had been
+but a moment before a naked child was now a naked man, and no fit
+spectacle for women and children, they formed a bright-colored moving
+screen about him and conducted him to the great council-lodge. There
+they eased his wounds with pleasant greases, and dressed him in softest
+buckskin, and gave him just as much food as it was safe for him to
+eat--a couple of quail eggs and a little dish of corn and freshwater
+mussels baked.
+
+And after that they sent him home armed with a big stick. And there was
+his mother, squatting on the floor of their lodge, with her back bared
+in readiness for a good beating. But Andramark closed the lodge-flaps,
+and dropped his big stick, and began to blubber and sob. And his mother
+leaped up and caught him in her arms; and then--once a mother, always
+tactful--she began to howl and yell, just as if she were actually
+receiving the ceremonial beating which was her due. And the neighbors
+pricked up their ears and chuckled, and said the Indian for "Squirrel
+Eyes is getting what was coming to her."
+
+Maybe Andramark didn't sleep that night, and maybe he did. And all the
+dreams that he dreamed were pleasant, and he got the best of everybody
+in them, and he woke next morning to a pleasant smell of broiling shad,
+and lay on his back blinking and yawning, and wondering why of all the
+little girls in the village Tassel Top alone had not used her whip on
+him.
+
+
+
+
+THE BATTLE OF AIKEN
+
+
+At the Palmetto Golf Club one bright, warm day in January they held a
+tournament which came to be known as the Battle of Aiken. Colonel Bogey,
+however, was not in command.
+
+Each contestant's caddie was provided with a stick cleft at one end and
+pointed at the other. In the cleft was stuck a square of white
+card-board on which was printed the contestant's name, Colonel Bogey's
+record for the course, the contestant's handicap, and the sum of these
+two. Thus:
+
+
+     A. B. Smith
+     78 + 9 = 87
+
+
+And the winner was to be he who travelled farthest around the links in
+the number of strokes allotted to him.
+
+Old Major Jennings did not understand, and Jimmy Traquair, the
+professional, explained.
+
+"Do you know what the bogey for the course is?" said he. "It's
+seventy-eight. Do you know what your handicap is? It's twenty."
+
+Old Major Jennings winced slightly. His handicap had never seemed quite
+adequate to him.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"Well," said Jimmie, who ever tempered his speech to his hearer's
+understanding, "what's twenty added to seventy-eight?"
+
+"Eighty-eight--ninety-eight," said old Major Jennings (but not
+conceitedly).
+
+"Right," said Jimmie. "Well, you start at the first tee and play
+ninety-eight strokes. Where the ball lies after the ninety-eighth, you
+plant the card with your name on it. And that's all."
+
+"Suppose after my ninety-eighth stroke that my ball lies in the pond?"
+said old Major Jennings with a certain timid conviction. The pond hole
+is only the twelfth, and Jimmie wanted to laugh, but did not.
+
+"If that happens," he said, "you'll have to report it, I'm afraid, to
+the Green Committee. Who are you going around with?"
+
+"I haven't got anybody to go around with," said the major. "I didn't
+know there was going to be a tournament till it was too late to ask any
+one to play with me."
+
+This conversation took place in the new shop, a place all windows,
+sunshine, labels, varnishes, vises, files, grips, and clubs of exquisite
+workmanship. At one of the benches a grave-eyed young negro, aproned and
+concentrated, was enamelling the head of a driver with shellac. Sudden
+cannon fire would not have shaken his hand. In one corner a rosy lad
+with curly yellow hair dangled his legs from the height of a
+packing-case and chewed gum. He had been born with a golden spoon in his
+mouth, and was learning golf from the inside. Sometimes he winked with
+one eye. But these silent comments were hidden from the major.
+
+"I don't care about the tournament," said the latter, his loose lip
+trembling slightly. "I'll just practice a little."
+
+"Don't be in a hurry, sir," said Jimmie sympathetically; "General
+Bullwigg hasn't any one to go around with either. And if you don't
+mind----"
+
+"Bullwigg," said the major vaguely; "I used to know a Bullwigg."
+
+"He's a very fine gentleman indeed, sir," said Jimmie. "Same handicap as
+yourself, sir, and if you don't mind----"
+
+"Where is he from?" asked the major.
+
+"I don't know, sir. Mr. Bowers extended the privileges of the club to
+him. He's stopping at the Park in the Pines."
+
+"Oh!" said the major, and then with a certain dignity and resolution:
+"If Mr. Bowers knows him, and if _he_ doesn't mind, I'm sure I don't. Is
+he here?"
+
+"He's waiting at the first tee," said Jimmie, and he averted his face.
+
+At the first tee old Major Jennings found a portly, red-faced gentleman,
+with fierce, bushy eyebrows, who seemed prepared to play golf under any
+condition of circumstance and weather. He had two caddies. One carried a
+monstrous bag, which, in addition to twice the usual number of clubs,
+contained a crook-handled walking-stick and a crook-handled umbrella;
+the other carried over his right arm a greatcoat, in case the June-like
+weather should turn cold, and over his left a mackintosh, in case rain
+should fall from the cloudless, azure heavens. The gentleman himself was
+swinging a wooden club, with pudgy vehemence, at an imaginary ball. Upon
+his countenance was that expression of fortitude which wins battles and
+championships. Old Major Jennings approached timidly. He was very shy.
+In the distance he saw two of his intimate friends finishing out the
+first hole. Except for himself and the well-prepared stranger they had
+been the last pair to start, and the old major's pale blue eyes clung to
+them as those of a shipwrecked mariner may cling to ships upon the
+horizon. Then he pulled himself together and said:
+
+"General Bullwigg, I presume."
+
+"The very man," said the general, and the two gentlemen lifted their
+plaid golfing caps and bowed to each other. Owing to extreme diffidence,
+Major Jennings did not volunteer his own name; owing to the fact that he
+seldom thought of anything but himself, General Bullwigg did not ask it.
+
+Major Jennings was impatient to be off, but it was General Bullwigg's
+honor, and he could not compel that gentleman to drive until he was
+quite ready. General Bullwigg apostrophized the weather and the links.
+He spoke at some length of "_My_ game," "_My_ swing," "_My_ wrist
+motion," "_My_ notion of getting out of a bunker." He told an anecdote
+which reminded him of another. He touched briefly upon the manufacture
+of balls, the principle of imparting pure back-spin; the best seed for
+Northern greens, the best sand for Southern. And then, by way of adding
+insult to injury, he stepped up to his ball and, with due consideration
+for his age and stomach, drove it far and straight.
+
+"Fine shot, sir," was Major Jennings's comment.
+
+"I've seen better, sir," said General Bullwigg. "But I won't take it
+over."
+
+Major Jennings teed up his ball, and addressed it, and waggled, and
+shifted his feet, and had just received that sudden inner knowledge that
+the time was come to strike, when General Bullwigg interrupted him.
+
+"My first visit to Aiken," said he, "was in the 60's. But that was no
+visit of pleasure. No, sir. Along the brow of this hill upon which we
+are standing was an earthwork. In the pines yonder, back of the first
+green, was a battery. In those days we did not fight it out with the
+pacific putter, but with bullets and bayonets."
+
+"Were you in the battle of Aiken?" asked the major, so quietly as to
+make the question sound purely perfunctory.
+
+General Bullwigg laughed, as strong men laugh, from the stomach, and
+with a sweeping gesture of his left hand appeared to dismiss a hundred
+flatterers.
+
+"I have heard men say," said he, "that I _was_ the battle of Aiken."
+
+With an involuntary shudder Major Jennings hastily addressed his ball,
+swung jerkily, and topped it feebly down the hill. Then, smiling a
+sickly smile, he said:
+
+"We're off."
+
+"Get a good one?" asked General Bullwigg. "I wasn't looking."
+
+"Not a very good one," said Major Jennings, inwardly writhing, "but
+straight--perfectly straight. A little on top."
+
+They sagged down the hill, the major in a pained silence, the general
+describing, with sweeping gestures, the positions of the various troops
+among the surrounding hills at the beginning of the battle of Aiken.
+
+"In those days," he went on, "I was second lieutenant in the gallant
+Twenty-ninth; but it often happens that a young man has an old head on
+his shoulders, and as one after the other of my superior
+officers--superior in rank--bit the dust---- That ball is badly cupped.
+You will hardly get it away with a brassy; if I were you I should play
+my niblick. Well out, sir! A fine recovery! On this very spot I saw a
+bomb burst. The air was filled with arms and legs. It seemed as if they
+would never come down. I shall play my brassy spoon, Purnell, the one
+with the yellow head. I see you don't carry a spoon. Most invaluable
+club. There are days when I can do anything with a spoon. I used to own
+one of which I often said that it could do anything but talk."
+
+Major Jennings shuddered as if he were very cold; while General Bullwigg
+swung his spoon and made another fine shot. He had a perfect four for
+the first hole, to Major Jennings's imperfect and doddering seven.
+
+"The enemy," said General Bullwigg, "had a breastwork of pine logs all
+along this line. I remember the general said to me: 'Bullwigg,' he said,
+'to get them out of that timber is like getting rats out of the walls of
+a house.' And I said: 'General----'"
+
+"It's your honor," the major interrupted mildly.
+
+But General Bullwigg would not drive until he had brought his anecdote
+to a self-laudatory end. And his ball was not half through its course
+before he had begun another. The major, compelled to listen, again
+foozled, and a dull red began to mantle his whole face. And in his
+peaceful and affable heart there waxed a sullen, feverish rage against
+his companion.
+
+The battle of Aiken was on.
+
+Sing, O chaste and reluctant Muse, the battle of Aiken! Only don't sing
+it! State it, as is the fashion of our glorious times, in humble and
+perishable prose. Fling grammar of which nothing is now known to the
+demnition bow-wows, and state how in the beginning General Bullwigg had
+an advantage of many strokes, not wasted, over his self-effacing
+companion. State how, because of the general's incessant chatter, the
+gentle and gallant major foozled shot after shot; how once his ball hid
+in a jasmine bower, once behind the stem of a tree, and once in a sort
+of cavern over which the broom straw waved. But omit not, O truthful and
+ecstatic one, to mention that dull rage which grew from small beginnings
+in the major's breast until it became furious and all-consuming, like a
+prairie fire. At this stage your narrative becomes heroic, and it might
+be in order for you, O capable and delectable one, to switch from humble
+stating to loud singing. Only don't do it. State on. State how the rage
+into which he had fallen served to lend precision to the major's eye,
+steel to his wrist, rhythm to his tempo, and fiery ambition to his
+gentle and retiring soul. He is filled with memories of daring: of other
+battles in other days. He remembers what times he sought the bubble
+reputation in the cannon's mouth, and spiked the aforementioned cannon's
+touch-hole into the bargain. And he remembers the greater war that he
+fought single-handed for a number of years against the demon rum.
+
+State, too, exquisite Parnassian, and keep stating, how that General
+Bullwigg did incessantly talk, prattle, jabber, joke, boast, praise
+himself, stand in the wrong place, and rehearse the noble deeds that he
+himself had performed in the first battle of Aiken. And state how the
+major answered him less and less frequently, but more and more loudly
+and curtly--but I see that you are exhausted, and, thanking you kindly,
+I shall resume the narrative myself.
+
+They came to the pond hole, which was the twelfth; the general, still
+upon his interminable reminiscences of his own military glory, stood up
+to drive, and was visited by his first real disaster. He swung--and he
+looked up. His ball, beaten downward into the hard clay tee, leaped
+forward with a sound as of a stone breaking in two and dove swiftly into
+the centre of the pond. The major spoke never a word. For the first time
+during the long dreary round his risibles were tickled and he wanted to
+laugh. Instead he concentrated all his faculties upon his ball and made
+a fine drive.
+
+Not so the general with his second attempt. Again he found water, and
+fell into a panic at the sudden losing of so many invaluable strokes
+(not to mention two brand-new balls at seventy-five cents each).
+
+It was at the pond hole that the major's luck began to ameliorate. For
+the first time in his life he made it in three--a long approach close to
+the green; a short mashie shot that trickled into the very cup. And it
+was at the pond hole that the general, who had hitherto played far above
+his ordinary form, began to go to pieces. He was a little dashed in
+spirit, but not in eloquence.
+
+Going to the long fourteenth, they found the first evidence of those who
+had gone before. In the very midst of the fair green they saw, shining
+afar, like a white tombstone, stuck in its cleft stick, the card of the
+first competitor to use up the whole of his allotted strokes. They
+paused a moment to read:
+
+
+     Sacred to the Memory of
+          W. H. Lands
+          78 + 6 = 84
+       Who Sliced Himself
+           to Pieces
+
+
+Forty yards beyond, another obituary confronted them:
+
+
+       In Loving Memory of
+         J. C. Nappin
+         78 + 10 = 88
+     Died of a Broken Mashie
+       And of Such is the
+       Kingdom of Heaven
+
+
+"Ha!" said General Bullwigg. "He little realizes that here where he has
+pinned his little joke in the lap of mother earth I have seen the dead
+men lie as thick as kindlings in a wood-yard. Sir, across this very fair
+green there were no less than three desperate charges, unremembered and
+unsung, of which I may say without boasting that Magna Pars Fui. But for
+the desperation of our last charge the battle must have been lost----"
+
+
+             Damn the memory of
+                 E. Hewett
+                78 + 10 = 88
+                Couldn't Put
+
+                  Here Lies
+                  G. Norris
+                78 + 10 = 88
+     A Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted
+
+
+The little tombstones came thick and fast now. The fairway to the
+seventeenth, most excellent of all four-shot holes, was dotted with
+them, and it actually began to look as if General Bullwigg or Major
+Jennings (they were now on even terms) might be the winner.
+
+It was that psychological moment when of all things a contestant most
+desires silence. Major Jennings was determined to triumph over his
+boastful companion. And he was full of courage and resolve. They had
+reached the seventeenth green in the same number of strokes from the
+first tee. That is to say, each had used up ninety-five of his allotted
+ninety-eight. Neither holed his approach put, and the match, so far as
+they two were concerned, resolved itself into a driving contest. If
+General Bullwigg drove the farther with his one remaining stroke he
+would beat the major, and vice versa. As for the other competitors,
+there was but one who had reached the eighteenth tee, and he, as his
+tombstone showed, had played his last stroke neither far nor well.
+
+For the major the suspense was terrible. He had never won a tournament.
+He had never had so golden an opportunity to down a boaster. But it was
+General Bullwigg's honor, and it occurred to him that the time was riper
+for talk than play.
+
+"You may think that I am nervous," he said. "But I am not. During one
+period of the battle of Aiken the firing between ourselves on this spot
+and the enemy intrenched where the club-house now stands, and spreading
+right and left in a half-moon, was fast and furious. Once they charged
+up to our guns; but we drove them back, and after that charge yonder
+fair green was one infernal shambles of dead and dying. Among the
+wounded was one of the enemy's general officers; he whipped and thrashed
+and squirmed like a newly landed fish and screamed for water. It was
+terrible; it was unendurable. Next to me in the trench was a young
+fellow named--named Jennings----"
+
+"Jennings?" said the major breathlessly. "And what did he do?"
+
+"He," said General Bullwigg. "Nothing. He said, however, and he was
+careful not to show his head above the top of the trench: 'I can't stand
+this,' he said; 'somebody's got to bring that poor fellow in.' As for
+me, I only needed the suggestion. I jumped out of the trench and ran
+forward, exposing myself to the fire of both armies. When, however, I
+reached the general officer, and my purpose was plain, the firing ceased
+upon both sides, and the enemy stood up and cheered me."
+
+General Bullwigg teed his ball and drove it far.
+
+Major Jennings bit his lip; it was hardly within his ability to hit so
+long a ball.
+
+"This--er--Jennings," said he, "seems to have been a coward."
+
+General Bullwigg shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Have I got it straight?" asked Major Jennings. "It was you who brought
+in the general officer, and not--er--this--er--Jennings who did it?"
+
+"I thought I had made it clear," said General Bullwigg stiffly. And he
+repeated the anecdote from the beginning. Major Jennings's comment was
+simply this:
+
+"So _that_ was the way of it, was it?"
+
+A deep crimson suffused him. He looked as if he were going to burst. He
+teed his ball. He trembled. He addressed. He swung back, and then with
+all the rage, indignation, and accuracy of which he was
+capable--forward. It was the longest drive he had ever made. His ball
+lay a good yard beyond the General's. He had beaten all competitors, but
+that was nothing. He had beaten his companion, and that was worth more
+to him than all the wealth of Ormuzd and of Ind. He had won the second
+battle of Aiken.
+
+In silence he took his tombstone from his caddie's hand, in silence
+wrote upon it, in silence planted it where his ball had stopped. General
+Bullwigg bent himself stiffly to see what the fortunate winner had
+written. And this was what he read:
+
+
+            Sacred to the Memory of
+                E. O. Jennings
+                 78 + 20 = 98
+     Late Major in the Gallant 29th, Talked to
+               Death by a Liar
+
+
+As for the gallant major (still far from mollified), he turned his back
+upon a foe for the first time in his life and made off--almost running.
+
+
+
+
+AN IDYL OF PELHAM BAY PARK
+
+
+"It's real country out there," Fannie Davis had said. "Buttercups and
+daisies. Come on, Lila! I won't go if you won't."
+
+This sudden demonstration of friendship was too much for Lila. She
+forgot that she had no stylish dress for the occasion, or that her
+mother could not very well spare her for a whole day, and she promised
+to be ready at nine o'clock on the following Sunday morning.
+
+"Fannie Davis," she explained to her mother, "has asked me to go out to
+Pelham Bay Park with her Sunday. And finally I said I would. I feel
+sometimes as if I'd blow up if I didn't get a breath of fresh air after
+all this hot spell."
+
+She set her pretty mouth defiantly. She expected an argument. But he
+mother only shrugged her shoulders and said,
+
+"We could make your blue dress look real nice with a few trimmings."
+
+They discussed ways and means until long after the younger children were
+in bed and asleep.
+
+By Saturday night the dress was ready, and Lila had turned her week's
+wages back into the coffers of the department store where she worked in
+exchange for a pair of near-silk brown stockings and a pair of stylish
+oxford ties of patent leather.
+
+"You look like a show-girl," was Fannie's enthusiastic comment. "I
+wouldn't have believed it of you. Why, Lila, you're a regular little
+peach!"
+
+Lila became crimson with joy.
+
+They boarded the subway for Simpson Street. The atmosphere was hot and
+rancid. The two girls found standing-room only. Whenever the express
+curved they were thrown violently from one side of the car to the other.
+A young man who stood near them made a point on these occasions of
+laying a hand on Lila's waist to steady her. She didn't know whether it
+was proper to be angry or grateful.
+
+"Don't pay any attention to him," said Fannie; "he's just trying to be
+fresh, and he doesn't know how."
+
+She said it loud enough for the young man to hear. Lila was very much
+frightened.
+
+They left the subway at Simpson Street and boarded a jammed trolley-car
+for Westchester. Fannie paid all the fares.
+
+"It's my treat," she said; "I'm flush. Gee, ain't it hot! I wish we'd
+brought our bathing-suits."
+
+Much to Lila's relief the young man who had annoyed her was no longer
+visible. Fannie talked all the way to Westchester in so loud a voice
+that nearly everybody in the car could hear her. Lila was shocked and
+awed by her friend's showiness and indifference.
+
+From Westchester they were to walk the two hot miles to the park.
+Already Lila's new shoes had blistered her feet. But she did not mention
+this. It was her own fault. She had deliberately bought shoes that were
+half a size too small.
+
+In the main street of Westchester they prinked, smoothing each other's
+rumpled dresses and straightening each other's peach-basket hats.
+
+"Lila," said Fannie, "everybody's looking at you. I say you're _too_
+pretty. Lucky for me I've got my young man where I want him, or else
+you'd take him away from me."
+
+"I would not!" exclaimed Lila, "and it's you they're looking at."
+
+Fannie was delighted. "_Do_ I look nice?" she wheedled.
+
+"You look sweet!"
+
+As a matter of fact, Fannie looked bold and handsome. Her clothes were
+too expensive for her station in life. Her mother suspected how she came
+by them, but was so afraid of actually knowing that she never brought
+the point to an issue; only sighed in secret and tried not to see or
+understand.
+
+Now and then motors passed through the crowds straggling to the park,
+and in exchange for gratuitous insults from small boys and girls left
+behind them long trails of thick dust and the choking smell of burnt
+gasoline. In the sun the mercury was at one hundred and twenty degrees.
+
+"There's a hog for you," exclaimed Fannie. She indicated a stout man in
+shirt-sleeves. He had his coat over one arm, his collar and necktie
+protruding from the breast pocket. His wife, a meagre woman, panted at
+his side. She carried two heavy children, one of them not yet born.
+
+Half the people carried paper parcels or little suitcases made of straw
+in which were bathing-suits and sandwiches. It would be low tide, but
+between floating islands of swill and sewage there would be water, salt,
+wet, and cool.
+
+"My mother," said Fannie, "doesn't like me to come to these places
+alone. It's a real nice crowd uses Pelham Park, but there's always a
+sprinkling of freshies."
+
+"Is that why you invited me?" said Lila gayly. Inwardly she flattered
+herself to think that she had been asked for herself alone. But Fannie's
+answer had in it something of a slap in the face.
+
+"Well," said this one, "mother forbade me to come alone. But I do want
+to get better acquainted with you. Honest."
+
+They rested for a while sitting on a stone wall in the shade of a tree.
+
+"My mother," said Fannie grandly, "thinks everybody's rotten, including
+me. My God!" she went on angrily, "do me and you work six days of the
+week only to be bossed about on the seventh? I tell you I won't stand it
+much longer. I'm going to cut loose. Nothing but work, work, work, and
+scold, scold, scold."
+
+"If I had all the pretty things you've got," said Lila gently, "I don't
+believe I'd complain."
+
+Fannie blushed. "It's hard work and skimping does it," she said. "Ever
+think of marrying, kid?"
+
+Lila admitted that she had.
+
+"Got a beau?"
+
+Lila blushed and shook her head.
+
+"You have, too. Own up. What's he like?"
+
+Lila continued to deny and protest. But she enjoyed being teased upon
+such a subject.
+
+"Well, if you haven't," said Fannie at last, "I have. It's a dead
+secret, kid. I wouldn't tell a soul but you. He's got heaps of money,
+and he's been after me--to marry him--for nearly a year."
+
+"Do you like him?"
+
+"I'm just crazy about him."
+
+"Then why don't you marry him?"
+
+"Well," Fannie temporized, "you never want to be in a rush about these
+things."
+
+Fannie sighed, and was silent. She might have married the young man in
+question if she had played her cards better. And she knew it, now that
+it was too late, and there could not be a new deal. He had wanted her,
+even at the price of marriage. He was still fond of her. And he was very
+generous with his money. She met him whenever she could. He would be
+waiting for her now at the entrance to the park.
+
+"He's got a motor-boat," she explained to Lila, "that he wants to show
+me. She's a cabin launch, almost new. You won't mind?"
+
+"Mind? Are you going out for a sail with him, and leave me?"
+
+"Well, the truth is," said Fannie, "I've just about made up my mind to
+say yes, and of course if there was a third party around he couldn't
+bring the matter up, could he? We wouldn't be out long."
+
+"Don't mind me," said Lila. Inwardly she was terribly hurt and
+disappointed. "I'll just sit in the shade and wish you joy."
+
+"I wouldn't play it so low down on you," said Fannie, "only my whole
+future's mixed up in it. We'll be back in lots of time to eat."
+
+Lila walked with them to the end of the pier at the bathing-beach. The
+water was full of people and rubbish. The former seemed to be enjoying
+themselves immensely and for the most part innocently, though now and
+then some young girl would shriek aloud in a sort of delighted terror as
+her best young man, swimming under water, tugged suddenly at her
+bathing-skirt or pinched the calf of her leg.
+
+Lila watched Fannie and her young man embark in a tiny rowboat and row
+out to a clumsy cabin catboat from which the mast had been removed and
+in whose cockpit a low-power, loud-popping motor had been installed. The
+young man started the motor, and presently his clumsy craft was dragging
+herself, like a crippled duck, down Pelham Bay toward the more open
+water of Long Island Sound.
+
+Lila felt herself abandoned. She would have gone straight home but for
+the long walk to Westchester and the fact that she had no car fare. She
+could have cried. The heat on the end of the dock and the glare from the
+water were intolerable. She was already faint with hunger, and her shoes
+pinched her so that she could hardly walk without whimpering. It seemed
+to her that she had never seen so many people at once. And in all the
+crowds she hadn't a single friend or acquaintance. Several men, seeing
+that she was without male escort, tried to get to know her, but gave up,
+discouraged by her shy, frightened face. She was pretty, yes. But a
+doll. No sport in her. Such was their mental attitude.
+
+"She might have left me the sandwiches," thought Lila. "Suppose the
+motor breaks down!"
+
+Which was just what it was going to do--'way out there in the sound. It
+always did sooner or later when Fannie was on board. She seemed to have
+been born with an influence for evil over men and gas-engines.
+
+At the other side of green lawns on which were a running-track, swings,
+trapezes, parallel bars, and a ball-field, were woods. The shade, from
+where she was, looked black and cold. She walked slowly and timidly
+toward it. She could cool herself and return in time to meet Fannie. But
+she returned sooner than she had expected.
+
+She found a smooth stone in the woods and sat down. After the sun there
+was a certain coolness. She fanned herself with some leaves. They were
+poison-ivy, but she did not know that. The perspiration dried on her
+face. There were curious whining, humming sounds in the woods. She began
+to scratch her ankles and wrists. Her ankles especially tickled and
+itched to the point of anguish. She was the delightful centre of
+interest to a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. She leaped to her feet and
+fought them wildly with her branch of poison-ivy. Then she started to
+run and almost stepped on a man who was lying face up in the underwood,
+peacefully snoring. She screamed faintly and hurried on. Some of the
+bolder mosquitoes followed her into the sunlight, but it was too hot
+even for them, and one by one they dropped behind and returned to the
+woods. The drunken man continued his comfortable sleep. The mosquitoes
+did not trouble him. It is unknown why.
+
+Lila returned to the end of the dock and saw far off a white speck that
+may or may not have been the motor-boat in which Fannie had gone for a
+"sail."
+
+If there hadn't been so many people about Lila must have sat down and
+cried. The warmth of affection which she had felt that morning for
+Fannie had changed into hatred. Three times she returned to the end of
+the dock.
+
+All over the park were groups of people eating sandwiches and
+hard-boiled eggs. They shouted and joked. Under certain circumstances,
+not the least of sports is eating. Lila was so angry and hungry and
+abused that she forgot her sore feet. She couldn't stay still. She must
+have walked--coming and going--a good many miles in all.
+
+At last, exhausted as she had never been even after a day at the
+department store during the Christmas rush, she found a deep niche
+between two rough rocks on the beach, over which the tide was now gently
+rising, and sank into it. The rocks and the sand between them gave out
+coolness; the sun shone on her head and shoulders, but with less than
+its meridianal fury. She could look down Pelham Bay and see most of the
+waters between Fort Schuyler and City Island. Boats of all sorts and
+descriptions came and went. But there was no sign of that in which
+Fannie had embarked.
+
+Lila fell asleep. It became quiet in the park. The people were dragging
+themselves wearily home, dishevelled, dirty, sour with sweat. The sun
+went down, copper-red and sullen. The trunks of trees showed ebony black
+against it, swarms of infinitesimal gnats rose from the beaches, and
+made life hideous to the stragglers still in the park.
+
+Lila was awakened by the tide wetting her feet. She rose on stiff,
+aching legs. There was a kink in her back; one arm, against which she
+had rested heavily, was asleep.
+
+"Fannie," Lila thought with a kind of falling despair, "must have come
+back, looked for me, given me up, and gone home."
+
+In the midst of Pelham Bay a fire twinkled, burning low. It looked like
+a camp-fire deserted and dying in the centre of a great open plain. Lila
+gave it no more than a somnambulant look. It told her nothing: no story
+of sudden frenzied terror, of inextinguishable, unescapable flames, of
+young people in the midst of health and the vain and wicked pursuit of
+happiness, half-burned to death, half-drowned. It told her no story of
+guilt providentially punished, or accidentally.
+
+She had slept through all the shouting and screaming. The boats that had
+attempted rescue had withdrawn; there remained only the hull of a
+converted catboat, gasoline-soaked, burnt to the water's edge, a
+cinder--still smouldering.
+
+Somewhere under the placid waters, gathering speed in the tidal
+currents, slowing down and swinging in the eddies, was all that remained
+of Fannie Davis, food for crabs, eels, dogfish, lobsters, and all the
+thousand and one scavengers of Atlantic bays, blackened shreds of
+garments still clinging to her.
+
+
+II
+
+Next to Pelham Bay Park toward the south is a handsome private property.
+On the low boundary wall of this, facing the road and directly under a
+ragged cherry-tree, Lila seated herself. She was "all in." She must wait
+until a vehicle of some sort passed and beg for a lift. She was
+half-starved; her feet could no longer carry her. A motor thrilled by at
+high speed, a fiery, stinking dragon in the night. Mosquitoes tormented
+her. She had no strength with which to oppose them. The hand in which
+she had held the poison-ivy was beginning to itch and swell.
+
+A second motor approached slowly and came to a halt. A young man got
+out, opened one of the headlights, struck a match, and lighted it. Then
+he lighted the other. The low stone wall on which Lila sat and Lila
+herself were embraced by the ring of illumination. It must have been
+obvious to any one but a fool that Lila was out of place in her
+surroundings; her peach-basket hat, the oxford ties of which she had
+been so proud, told a story of city breeding. Her face, innocent and
+childlike, was very touching.
+
+The young man shut off his motor, so that there was a sudden silence.
+"Want a lift somewhere?" he asked cheerfully.
+
+Lila could not remember when she had been too young to be warned against
+the advances of strange men. "They give you a high old time, and then
+they expect to be paid for it," had been so dinned into her that if she
+had given the young man a sharp "No" for an answer it would have been
+almost instinctive. Training and admonition rose strong within her. She
+felt that she was going to refuse help. The thought was intolerable.
+Wherefore, instead of answering, she burst into tears.
+
+A moment later the young man was sitting by her side, and she was
+pouring her tale of a day gone wrong into amused but sympathetic ears.
+
+His voice and choice of words belonged to a world into which she had
+never looked. She could not help trusting him and believing that he was
+good--even when he put his arm around her and let her finish her cry on
+his shoulder.
+
+"And your friend left you--and you've got no car fare, and you've had
+nothing to eat, and you can't walk any more because your shoes are too
+tight. And you live----?"
+
+She told him.
+
+"I could take you right home to your mother," he said, "but I won't.
+That would be a good ending to a day gone wrong, but not the best.
+Come."
+
+He supported her to his motor, a high-power runabout, and helped her in.
+Never before had she sat in such reclining comfort. It was better than
+sitting up in bed.
+
+"We'll send your mother a telegram from New Rochelle so that she won't
+worry," he said. "Just you let yourself go and try to enjoy everything.
+Fortunately I know of a shoe store in New Rochelle. It won't be open;
+but the proprietor has rooms above the store, and he'll be glad to make
+a sale even if it is Sunday. The first principle to be observed in a
+pleasant outing is a pair of comfortable feet."
+
+"But I have no money," protested Lila.
+
+"I have," said the young man; "too much, some people think."
+
+Lila had been taught that if she accepted presents from young men she
+put herself more or less in their power.
+
+They whirled noiselessly across Pelham Bridge. Lila had given up in the
+matter of accepting a present of shoes. In so doing she feared that she
+had committed herself definitely to the paths that lead to destruction.
+And when, having tried in vain to get a table at two inns between New
+Rochelle and Larchmont, the young man said that he would take her to his
+own home to dinner, she felt sure of it. But she was too tired to care,
+and in the padded seat, and the new easy shoes, too blissfully
+comfortable. They had sent her mother a telegram. The young man had
+composed it. He had told the mother not to worry. "I'm dining out and
+won't be home till late."
+
+"We won't say how late," he had explained with an ingenuous smile,
+"because we don't know, do we?"
+
+They had gone to a drug store, and the clerk had bound a soothing
+dressing on Lila's poisoned hand.
+
+They turned from the main road into a long avenue over which trees met
+in a continuous arch. The place was all a-twinkle with fireflies. Box,
+roses, and honeysuckle filled the air with delicious odors--then strong,
+pungent, bracing as wine, the smell of salt-marshes, and coldness off
+the water. On a point of land among trees many lights glowed.
+
+"That's my place," said the young man.
+
+"We'll have dinner on the terrace--deep water comes right up to it.
+There's no wind to-night. The candles won't even flicker."
+
+As if the stopping of the automobile had been a signal, the front door
+swung quietly open and a Chinese butler in white linen appeared against
+a background of soft coloring and subdued lights.
+
+As Lila entered the house her knees shook a little. She felt that she
+was definitely committing herself to what she must always regret. She
+was a fly walking deliberately into a spider's parlor. That the young
+man hitherto had behaved most circumspectly, she dared not count in his
+favor. Was it not always so in the beginning? He seemed like a jolly,
+kindly boy. She had the impulse to scream and to run out of the house,
+to hide in the shrubbery, to throw herself into the water. Her heart
+beat like that of a trapped bird. She heard the front door close behind
+her.
+
+"I think you'd be more comfy," said the young man, "if you took off your
+hat, don't you? Dinner'll be ready in about ten minutes. Fong will show
+you where to go."
+
+She followed the Chinaman up a flight of broad low steps. Their feet
+made no sound on the thick carpeting. He held open the door of a
+bedroom. It was all white and delicate and blue. Through a door at the
+farther end she had a glimpse of white porcelain and shining nickel.
+
+Her first act when the Chinaman had gone was to lock the door by which
+she had entered. Then she looked from each of the windows in turn. The
+terrace was beneath her, brick with a balustrade of white, with white
+urns. The young man, bareheaded, paced the terrace like a sentinel. He
+was smoking a cigarette.
+
+To the left was a round table, set for two. She could see that the
+chairs were of white wicker, with deep, soft cushions. In the centre of
+the table was a bowl of red roses. Four candles burned upright in
+massive silver candlesticks.
+
+She took off her hat mechanically, washed her face and the hand that had
+not been bandaged, and "did" her hair. She looked wonderfully pretty in
+the big mirror over the dressing-table. The heavy ivory brushes looked
+enormous in her delicate hands. Her eyes were great and round like those
+of a startled deer.
+
+She heard his voice calling to her from the terrace: "Hello, up there!
+Got everything you want? Dinner's ready when you are."
+
+She hesitated a long time with her hand on the door-key. But what was a
+locked door in an isolated house to a bad man? She drew a deep breath,
+turned the key, waited a little longer, and then, as a person steps into
+a very cold bath, pushed the door open and went out.
+
+He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. She went down slowly,
+her hand on the rail. She had no idea that she was making an exquisite
+picture. She knew only that she was frightened.
+
+"It's turned cool," said the young man. He caught up a light scarf of
+Chinese embroidery and laid it lightly about her shoulders. She looked
+him for the first time squarely in the face. She saw chiefly a pair of
+rather small, deep-set blue eyes; at the outer corners were
+multitudinous little wrinkles, dug by smiling. The eyes were clear as a
+child's, full of compassionate laughter.
+
+A feeling of perfect security came over her. She thanked Heaven that she
+had not made a ridiculous scene. The chimes of a tall clock broke the
+silence with music.
+
+He offered her his arm, and she laid her fingers on it.
+
+"I think we are served," he said, and led her to the terrace. He was
+solicitous about placing cushions to the best advantage for her. He took
+one from his own chair, and, on one knee, put it under her feet. He
+smiled at her across the bowl of roses.
+
+"How old are you?" he said. "You look like a man's kid sister."
+
+She told him that she was seventeen and that she had worked for two
+years in a department store.
+
+"My father was a farmer," she said, "but he lost one arm, and couldn't
+make it pay. So we had to come to the city."
+
+"Is your father living?"
+
+"Yes. But he says he is dead. He can't find any work to do. Mother
+works like a horse, though, and so does Bert, and so do I. The others
+are at school."
+
+"Do you like your work?"
+
+"Only for what it brings in."
+
+"What does it bring in?"
+
+"Six dollars a week."
+
+The young man smiled. "Never mind," he said; "eat your soup."
+
+It did her good, that soup. It was strong and very hot. It put heart
+into her. When she had finished, he laughed gleefully.
+
+"It's all very well to talk about rice-powder, and cucumber-cream, and
+beauty-sleeps, but all you needed to make you look perfectly lovely was
+a cup of soup. That scarf's becoming to you, too."
+
+She blushed happily. She had lost all fear of him.
+
+"What are you pinching yourself for?" he asked.
+
+"To see if I'm awake."
+
+"You are," he said, "wide awake. Take my word for it, and I hope you're
+having a good time."
+
+The Chinaman poured something light and sparkling into her glass from a
+bottle dressed in a napkin. Misgivings returned to her. She had heard of
+girls being drugged.
+
+"You don't have to drink it," said the young man. "I had some served
+because dinner doesn't look like dinner without champagne. Still, after
+the thoroughly unhappy day you've put in, I think a mouthful or two
+would do you good."
+
+She lifted the glass of champagne, smiled, drank, and choked. He laughed
+at her merrily.
+
+All through dinner he kept lighting cigarettes and throwing them away.
+Between times he ate with great relish and heartiness.
+
+Lila was in heaven. All her doubts and fears had vanished. She felt
+thoroughly at home, as if she had always been used to service and linen
+and silver and courtesy.
+
+They had coffee, and then they strolled about in the moonlight, while
+the young man smoked a very long cigar.
+
+He looked at his watch, and sighed. "Well, Miss," he said, "if we're to
+get you safe home to your mother!"
+
+"I won't be a minute," she said.
+
+"You know the way?"
+
+She ran upstairs, and, having put on her hat, decided that it looked
+cheap and vulgar, and took it off again.
+
+He wrapped her in a soft white polo-coat for the long run to New York.
+She looked back at the lights of his house. Would she ever see them
+again, or smell the salt and the box and the roses?
+
+By the time they had reached the Zoological Gardens at Fordham she had
+fallen blissfully asleep. He ran the car with considerate slowness, and
+looked at her very often. She waked as they crossed the river. Her eyes
+shrank from the piled serried buildings of Manhattan. The air was no
+longer clean and delicious to the lungs.
+
+"Have I been asleep?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh," she cried, "how could I! How could I! I've missed some of it. And
+it never happened before, and it will never happen again."
+
+"Not in the same way, perhaps," he said gravely. "But how do you know? I
+think you are one girl in ten million, and to you all things are
+possible."
+
+"How many men in ten million are like you?" she asked.
+
+"Men are all pretty much alike," he said. "They have good impulses and
+bad."
+
+In the stark darkness between the outer and the inner door of the
+tenement in which she lived, there was an awkward, troubled silence. He
+wished very much to kiss her, but had made up his mind that he would
+not. She thought that he might, and had made up her mind that if he
+attempted to she would resist. She was not in the least afraid of him
+any more, but of herself.
+
+He kissed her, and she did not resist.
+
+"Good-night," he said, and then with a half-laugh, "Which is your
+bell?"
+
+She found it and rang it. Presently there was a rusty click, and the
+inner door opened an inch or so. Neither of them spoke for a full
+minute. Then she, her face aflame in the darkness:
+
+"When you came I was only a little fool who'd bought a pair of shoes
+that were too tight for her. I didn't _know_ anything. I'm wise now. I
+know that I'm dreaming, and that if I wake up before the dream is ended
+I shall die."
+
+She tried to laugh gayly and could not.
+
+"I've made things harder for you instead of easier," he said. "I'm
+terribly sorry. I meant well."
+
+"Oh, it isn't that," she said. "Thank you a thousand thousand times. And
+good-night."
+
+"Wait," he said. "Will you play with me again some time? How about
+Saturday?"
+
+"No," she said. "It wouldn't be fair--to me. Good-night."
+
+She passed through the inner door and up the narrow creaking stair to
+the dark tenement in which she lived; she could hear the restless
+breathing of her sleeping family.
+
+"Oh, my God!" she thought, "if it weren't for _them_!"
+
+As for the young man, having lighted a long cigar, he entered his car
+and drove off, muttering to himself:
+
+"Damnation! Why does a girl like that _have_ a family!"
+
+He never saw her again, nor was he ever haunted by the thought that he
+had perhaps spoiled her whole life as thoroughly as if he had taken
+advantage of her ignorance and her innocence.
+
+
+
+
+BACK THERE IN THE GRASS
+
+
+It was spring in the South Seas when, for the first time, I went ashore
+at Batengo, which is the Polynesian village, and the only one on the big
+grass island of the same name. There is a cable station just up the
+beach from the village, and a good-natured young chap named Graves had
+charge of it. He was an upstanding, clean-cut fellow, as the fact that
+he had been among the islands for three years without falling into any
+of their ways proved. The interior of the corrugated iron house in which
+he lived, for instance, was bachelor from A to Z. And if that wasn't a
+sufficient alibi, my pointer dog, Don, who dislikes anything Polynesian
+or Melanesian, took to him at once. And they established a romping
+friendship. He gave us lunch on the porch, and because he had not seen a
+white man for two months, or a liver-and-white dog for two years, he
+told us the entire story of his young life, with reminiscences of early
+childhood and plans for the future thrown in.
+
+The future was very simple. There was a girl coming out to him from the
+States by the next steamer but one; the captain of that steamer would
+join them together in holy wedlock, and after that the Lord would
+provide.
+
+"My dear fellow," he said, "you think I'm asking her to share a very
+lonely sort of life, but if you could imagine all the--the affection and
+gentleness, and thoughtfulness that I've got stored up to pour out at
+her feet for the rest of our lives, you wouldn't be a bit afraid for her
+happiness. If a man spends his whole time and imagination thinking up
+ways to make a girl happy and occupied, he can think up a whole lot....
+I'd like ever so much to show her to you."
+
+He led the way to his bedroom, and stood in silent rapture before a
+large photograph that leaned against the wall over his dressing-table.
+
+She didn't look to me like the sort of girl a cable agent would happen
+to marry. She looked like a swell--the real thing--beautiful and simple
+and unaffected.
+
+"Yes," he said, "isn't she?"
+
+I hadn't spoken a word. Now I said:
+
+"It's easy to see why you aren't lonely with that wonderful girl to look
+at. Is she really coming out by the next steamer but one? It's hard to
+believe because she's so much too good to be true."
+
+"Yes," he said, "isn't she?"
+
+"The usual cable agent," I said, "keeps from going mad by having a dog
+or a cat or some pet or other to talk to. But I can understand a
+photograph like this being all-sufficient to any man--even if he had
+never seen the original. Allow me to shake hands with you."
+
+Then I got him away from the girl, because my time was short and I
+wanted to find out about some things that were important to _me_.
+
+"You haven't asked me my business in these parts," I said, "but I'll
+tell you. I'm collecting grasses for the Bronx Botanical Garden."
+
+"Then, by Jove!" said Graves, "you have certainly come to the right
+place. There used to be a tree on this island, but the last man who saw
+it died in 1789--Grass! The place is all grass: there are fifty kinds
+right around my house here."
+
+"I've noticed only eighteen," I said, "but that isn't the point. The
+point is: when do the Batengo Island grasses begin to go to seed?" And I
+smiled.
+
+"You think you've got me stumped, don't you?" he said. "That a mere
+cable agent wouldn't notice such things. Well, that grass there," and he
+pointed--"beach nut we call it--is the first to ripen seed, and, as far
+as I know, it does it just six weeks from now."
+
+"Are you just making things up to impress me?"
+
+"No, sir, I am not. I know to the minute. You see, I'm a victim of
+hay-fever."
+
+"In that case," I said, "expect me back about the time your nose begins
+to run."
+
+"Really?" And his whole face lighted up. "I'm delighted. Only six
+weeks. Why, then, if you'll stay round for only five or six weeks _more_
+you'll be here for the wedding."
+
+"I'll make it if I possibly can," I said. "I want to see if that girl's
+really true."
+
+"Anything I can do to help you while you're gone? I've got loads of
+spare time----"
+
+"If you knew anything about grasses----"
+
+"I don't. But I'll blow back into the interior and look around. I've
+been meaning to right along, just for fun. But I can never get any of
+_them_ to go with me."
+
+"The natives?"
+
+"Yes. Poor lot. They're committing race suicide as fast as they can.
+There are more wooden gods than people in Batengo village, and the
+superstition's so thick you could cut it with a knife. All the manly
+virtues have perished.... Aloiu!"
+
+The boy who did Graves's chores for him came lazily out of the house.
+
+"Aloiu," said Graves, "just run back into the island to the top of that
+hill--see?--that one over there--and fetch a handful of grass for this
+gentleman. He'll give you five dollars for it."
+
+Aloiu grinned sheepishly and shook his head.
+
+"Fifty dollars?"
+
+Aloiu shook his head with even more firmness, and I whistled. Fifty
+dollars would have made him the Rockefeller-Carnegie-Morgan of those
+parts.
+
+"All right, coward," said Graves cheerfully. "Run away and play with the
+other children.... Now, isn't that curious? Neither love, money, nor
+insult will drag one of them a mile from the beach. They say that if you
+go 'back there in the grass' something awful will happen to you."
+
+"As what?" I asked.
+
+"The last man to try it," said Graves, "in the memory of the oldest
+inhabitant was a woman. When they found her she was all black and
+swollen--at least that's what they say. Something had bitten her just
+above the ankle."
+
+"Nonsense," I said, "there are no snakes in the whole Batengo group."
+
+"They didn't say it was a snake," said Graves. "They said the marks of
+the bite were like those that would be made by the teeth of a very
+little--child."
+
+Graves rose and stretched himself.
+
+"What's the use of arguing with people that tell yarns like that! All
+the same, if you're bent on making expeditions back into the grass,
+you'll make 'em alone, unless the cable breaks and I'm free to make 'em
+with you."
+
+Five weeks later I was once more coasting along the wavering hills of
+Batengo Island, with a sharp eye out for a first sight of the cable
+station and Graves. Five weeks with no company but Kanakas and a
+pointer dog makes one white man pretty keen for the society of another.
+Furthermore, at our one meeting I had taken a great shine to Graves and
+to the charming young lady who was to brave a life in the South Seas for
+his sake. If I was eager to get ashore, Don was more so. I had a
+shot-gun across my knees with which to salute the cable station, and the
+sight of that weapon, coupled with toothsome memories of a recent big
+hunt down on Forked Peak, had set the dog quivering from stem to stern,
+to crouching, wagging his tail till it disappeared, and beating sudden
+tattoos upon the deck with his forepaws. And when at last we rounded on
+the cable station and I let off both barrels, he began to bark and race
+about the schooner like a thing possessed.
+
+The salute brought Graves out of his house. He stood on the porch waving
+a handkerchief, and I called to him through a megaphone; hoped that he
+was well, said how glad I was to see him, and asked him to meet me in
+Batengo village.
+
+Even at that distance I detected a something irresolute in his manner;
+and a few minutes later when he had fetched a hat out of the house,
+locked the door, and headed toward the village, he looked more like a
+soldier marching to battle than a man walking half a mile to greet a
+friend.
+
+"That's funny," I said to Don. "He's coming to meet us in spite of the
+fact that he'd much rather not. Oh, well!"
+
+I left the schooner while she was still under way, and reached the beach
+before Graves came up. There were too many strange brown men to suit
+Don, and he kept very close to my legs. When Graves arrived the natives
+fell away from him as if he had been a leper. He wore a sort of sickly
+smile, and when he spoke the dog stiffened his legs and growled
+menacingly.
+
+"Don!" I exclaimed sternly, and the dog cowered, but the spines along
+his back bristled and he kept a menacing eye upon Graves. The man's face
+looked drawn and rather angry. The frank boyishness was clean out of it.
+He had been strained by something or other to the breaking-point--so
+much was evident.
+
+"My dear fellow," I said, "what the devil is the matter?"
+
+Graves looked to right and left, and the islanders shrank still farther
+away from him.
+
+"You can see for yourself," he said curtly. "I'm taboo." And then, with
+a little break in his voice: "Even your dog feels it. Don, good boy!
+Come here, sir!"
+
+Don growled quietly.
+
+"You see!"
+
+"Don," I said sharply, "this man is my friend and yours. Pat him,
+Graves."
+
+Graves reached forward and patted Don's head and talked to him
+soothingly.
+
+But although Don did not growl or menace, he shivered under the caress
+and was unhappy.
+
+"So you're taboo!" I said cheerfully. "That's the result of anything,
+from stringing pink and yellow shells on the same string to murdering
+your uncle's grandmother-in-law. Which have _you_ done?"
+
+"I've been back there in the grass," he said, "and because--because
+nothing happened to me I'm taboo."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"As far as they know--yes."
+
+"Well!" said I, "my business will take me back there for days at a time,
+so I'll be taboo, too. Then there'll be two of us. Did you find any
+curious grasses for me?"
+
+"I don't know about grasses," he said, "but I found something very
+curious that I want to show you and ask your advice about. Are you going
+to share my house?"
+
+"I think I'll keep head-quarters on the schooner," I said, "but if
+you'll put me up now and then for a meal or for the night----"
+
+"I'll put you up for lunch right now," he said, "if you'll come. I'm my
+own cook and bottle-washer since the taboo, but I must say the change
+isn't for the worse so far as food goes."
+
+He was looking and speaking more cheerfully.
+
+"May I bring Don?"
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"Why--yes--of course."
+
+"If you'd rather not?"
+
+"No, bring him. I want to make friends again if I can."
+
+So we started for Graves's house, Don very close at my heels.
+
+"Graves," I said, "surely a taboo by a lot of fool islanders hasn't
+upset you. There's something on your mind. Bad news?"
+
+"Oh, no," he said. "She's coming. It's other things. I'll tell you by
+and by--everything. Don't mind me. I'm all right. Listen to the wind in
+the grass. That sound day and night is enough to put a man off his
+feed."
+
+"You say you found something very curious back there in the grass?"
+
+"I found, among other things, a stone monolith. It's fallen down, but
+it's almost as big as the Flatiron Building in New York. It's ancient as
+days--all carved--it's a sort of woman, I think. But we'll go back one
+day and have a look at it. Then, of course, I saw all the different
+kinds of grasses in the world--they'd interest you more--but I'm such a
+punk botanist that I gave up trying to tell 'em apart. I like the
+flowers best--there's millions of 'em--down among the grass.... I tell
+you, old man, this island is the greatest curiosity-shop in the whole
+world."
+
+He unlocked the door of his house and stood aside for me to go in first.
+
+"Shut up, Don!"
+
+The dog growled savagely, but I banged him with my open hand across the
+snout, and he quieted down and followed into the house, all tense and
+watchful.
+
+On the shelf where Graves kept his books, with its legs hanging over,
+was what I took to be an idol of some light brownish wood--say
+sandalwood, with a touch of pink. But it was the most lifelike and
+astounding piece of carving I ever saw in the islands or out of them. It
+was about a foot high, and represented a Polynesian woman in the prime
+of life, say, fifteen or sixteen years old, only the features were finer
+and cleaner carved. It was a nude, in an attitude of easy repose--the
+legs hanging, the toes dangling--the hands resting, palms downward, on
+the blotter, the trunk relaxed. The eyes, which were a kind of steely
+blue, seemed to have been made, depth upon depth, of some wonderful
+translucent enamel, and to make his work still more realistic the artist
+had planted the statuette's eyebrows, eyelashes, and scalp with real
+hair, very soft and silky, brown on the head and black for the lashes
+and eyebrows. The thing was so lifelike that it frightened me. And when
+Don began to growl like distant thunder I didn't blame him. But I leaned
+over and caught him by the collar, because it was evident that he wanted
+to get at that statuette and destroy it.
+
+When I looked up the statuette's eyes had moved. They were turned
+downward upon the dog, with cool curiosity and indifference. A kind of
+shudder went through me. And then, lo and behold, the statuette's tiny
+brown breasts rose and fell slowly, and a long breath came out of its
+nostrils.
+
+I backed violently into Graves, dragging Don with me and half-choking
+him. "My God Almighty!" I said. "It's alive!"
+
+"Isn't she!" said he. "I caught her back there in the grass--the little
+minx. And when I heard your signal I put her up there to keep her out of
+mischief. It's too high for her to jump--and she's very sore about it."
+
+"You found her in the grass," I said. "For God's sake!--are there more
+of them?"
+
+"Thick as quail," said he, "but it's hard to get a sight of 'em. But
+_you_ were overcome by curiosity, weren't you, old girl? You came out to
+have a look at the big white giant and he caught you with his thumb and
+forefinger by the scruff of the neck--so you couldn't bite him--and here
+you are."
+
+The womankin's lips parted and I saw a flash of white teeth. She looked
+up into Graves's face and the steely eyes softened. It was evident that
+she was very fond of him.
+
+"Rum sort of a pet," said Graves. "What?"
+
+"Rum?" I said. "It's horrible--it isn't decent--it--it ought to be
+taboo. Don's got it sized up right. He--he wants to kill it."
+
+"Please don't keep calling her It," said Graves. "She wouldn't like
+it--if she understood." Then he whispered words that were Greek to me,
+and the womankin laughed aloud. Her laugh was sweet and tinkly, like the
+upper notes of a spinet.
+
+"You can speak her language?"
+
+"A few words--Tog ma Lao?"
+
+"Na!"
+
+"Aba Ton sug ato."
+
+"Nan Tane dom ud lon anea!"
+
+It sounded like that--only all whispered and very soft. It sounded a
+little like the wind in the grass.
+
+"She says she isn't afraid of the dog," said Graves, "and that he'd
+better let her alone."
+
+"I almost hope he won't," said I. "Come outside. I don't like her. I
+think I've got a touch of the horrors."
+
+Graves remained behind a moment to lift the womankin down from the
+shelf, and when he rejoined me I had made up my mind to talk to him like
+a father.
+
+"Graves," I said, "although that creature in there is only a foot high,
+it isn't a pig or a monkey, it's a woman, and you're guilty of what's
+considered a pretty ugly crime at home--abduction. You've stolen this
+woman away from kith and kin, and the least you can do is to carry her
+back where you found her and turn her loose. Let me ask you one
+thing--what would Miss Chester think?"
+
+"Oh, that doesn't worry me," said Graves. "But I _am_ worried--worried
+sick. It's early--shall we talk now, or wait till after lunch?"
+
+"Now," I said.
+
+"Well," said he, "you left me pretty well enthused on the subject of
+botany--so I went back there twice to look up grasses for you. The
+second time I went I got to a deep sort of valley where the grass is
+waist-high--that, by the way, is where the big monolith is--and that
+place was alive with things that were frightened and ran. I could see
+the directions they took by the way the grass tops acted. There were
+lots of loose stones about and I began to throw 'em to see if I could
+knock one of the things over. Suddenly all at once I saw a pair of
+bright little eyes peering out of a bunch of grass--I let fly at them,
+and something gave a sort of moan and thrashed about in the grass--and
+then lay still. I went to look, and found that I'd stunned--_her_. She
+came to and tried to bite me, but I had her by the scruff of the neck
+and she couldn't. Further, she was sick with being hit in the chest with
+the stone, and first thing I knew she keeled over in the palm of my hand
+in a dead faint. I couldn't find any water or anything--and I didn't
+want her to die--so I brought her home. She was sick for a week--and I
+took care of her--as I would a sick pup--and she began to get well and
+want to play and romp and poke into everything. She'd get the lower
+drawer of my desk open and hide in it--or crawl into a rubber boot and
+play house. And she got to be right good company--same as any pet
+does--a cat or a dog--or a monkey--and naturally, she being so small, I
+couldn't think of her as anything but a sort of little beast that I'd
+caught and tamed.... You see how it all happened, don't you? Might have
+happened to anybody."
+
+"Why, yes," I said. "If she didn't give a man the horrors right at the
+start--I can understand making a sort of pet of her--but, man, there's
+only one thing to do. Be persuaded. Take her back where you found her,
+and turn her loose."
+
+"Well and good," said Graves. "I tried that, and next morning I found
+her at my door, sobbing--horrible, dry sobs--no tears.... You've said
+one thing that's full of sense: she isn't a pig--or a monkey--she's a
+woman."
+
+"You don't mean to say," said I, "that that mite of a thing is in love
+with you?"
+
+"I don't know what else you'd call it."
+
+"Graves," I said, "Miss Chester arrives by the next steamer. In the
+meanwhile something has got to be done."
+
+"What?" said he hopelessly.
+
+"I don't know," I said. "Let me think."
+
+The dog Don laid his head heavily on my knee, as if he wished to offer a
+solution of the difficulty.
+
+A week before Miss Chester's steamer was due the situation had not
+changed. Graves's pet was as much a fixture of Graves's house as the
+front door. And a man was never confronted with a more serious problem.
+Twice he carried her back into the grass and deserted her, and each time
+she returned and was found sobbing--horrible, dry sobs--on the porch.
+And a number of times we took her, or Graves did, in the pocket of his
+jacket, upon systematic searches for her people. Doubtless she could
+have helped us to find them, but she wouldn't. She was very sullen on
+these expeditions and frightened. When Graves tried to put her down she
+would cling to him, and it took real force to pry her loose.
+
+In the open she could run like a rat; and in open country it would have
+been impossible to desert her; she would have followed at Graves's heels
+as fast as he could move them. But forcing through the thick grass
+tired her after a few hundred yards, and she would gradually drop
+farther and farther behind--sobbing. There was a pathetic side to it.
+
+She hated me; and made no bones about it; but there was an armed truce
+between us. She feared my influence over Graves, and I feared her--well,
+just as some people fear rats or snakes. Things utterly out of the
+normal always do worry me, and Bo, which was the name Graves had learned
+for her, was, so far as I know, unique in human experience. In
+appearance she was like an unusually good-looking island girl observed
+through the wrong end of an opera-glass, but in habit and action she was
+different. She would catch flies and little grasshoppers and eat them
+all alive and kicking, and if you teased her more than she liked her
+ears would flatten the way a cat's do, and she would hiss like a
+snapping-turtle, and show her teeth.
+
+But one got accustomed to her. Even poor Don learned that it was not his
+duty to punish her with one bound and a snap. But he would never let her
+touch him, believing that in her case discretion was the better part of
+valor. If she approached him he withdrew, always with dignity, but
+equally with determination. He knew in his heart that something about
+her was horribly wrong and against nature. I knew it, too, and I think
+Graves began to suspect it.
+
+Well, a day came when Graves, who had been up since dawn, saw the smoke
+of a steamer along the horizon, and began to fire off his revolver so
+that I, too, might wake and participate in his joy. I made tea and went
+ashore.
+
+"It's _her_ steamer," he said.
+
+"Yes," said I, "and we've got to decide something."
+
+"About Bo?"
+
+"Suppose I take her off your hands--for a week or so--till you and Miss
+Chester have settled down and put your house in order. Then Miss
+Chester--Mrs. Graves, that is--can decide what is to be done. I admit
+that I'd rather wash my hands of the business--but I'm the only white
+man available, and I propose to stand by my race. Don't say a word to
+Bo--just bring her out to the schooner and leave her."
+
+In the upshot Graves accepted my offer, and while Bo, fairly bristling
+with excitement and curiosity, was exploring the farther corners of my
+cabin, we slipped out and locked the door on her. The minute she knew
+what had happened she began to tear around and raise Cain. It sounded a
+little like a cat having a fit.
+
+Graves was white and unhappy. "Let's get away quick," he said; "I feel
+like a skunk."
+
+But Miss Chester was everything that her photograph said about her, and
+more too, so that the trick he had played Bo was very soon a negligible
+weight on Graves's mind.
+
+If the wedding was quick and business-like, it was also jolly and
+romantic. The oldest passenger gave the bride away. All the crew came
+aft and sang "The Voice That Breathed O'er E-den That Earliest
+Wedding-Day"--to the tune called "Blairgowrie." They had worked it up in
+secret for a surprise. And the bride's dove-brown eyes got a little
+teary. I was best man. The captain read the service, and choked
+occasionally. As for Graves--I had never thought him handsome--well,
+with his brown face and white linen suit, he made me think, and I'm sure
+I don't know why, of St. Michael--that time he overcame Lucifer. The
+captain blew us to breakfast, with champagne and a cake, and then the
+happy pair went ashore in a boat full of the bride's trousseau, and the
+crew manned the bulwarks and gave three cheers, and then something like
+twenty-seven more, and last thing of all the brass cannon was fired, and
+the little square flags that spell G-o-o-d L-u-c-k were run up on the
+signal halyards.
+
+As for me, I went back to my schooner feeling blue and lonely. I knew
+little about women and less about love. It didn't seem quite fair. For
+once I hated my profession--seed-gatherer to a body of scientific
+gentlemen whom I had never seen. Well, there's nothing so good for the
+blues as putting things in order.
+
+I cleaned my rifle and revolver. I wrote up my note-book. I developed
+some plates; I studied a brand-new book on South Sea grasses that had
+been sent out to me, and I found some mistakes. I went ashore with Don,
+and had a long walk on the beach--in the opposite direction from
+Graves's house, of course--and I sent Don into the water after sticks,
+and he seemed to enjoy it, and so I stripped and went in with him. Then
+I dried in the sun, and had a match with my hands to see which could
+find the tiniest shell. Toward dusk we returned to the schooner and had
+dinner, and after that I went into my cabin to see how Bo was getting
+on.
+
+She flew at me like a cat, and if I hadn't jerked my foot back she must
+have bitten me. As it was, her teeth tore a piece out of my trousers.
+I'm afraid I kicked her. Anyway, I heard her land with a crash in a far
+corner. I struck a match and lighted candles--they are cooler than
+lamps--very warily--one eye on Bo. She had retreated under a chair and
+looked out--very sullen and angry. I sat down and began to talk to her.
+"It's no use," I said, "you're trying to bite and scratch, because
+you're only as big as a minute. So come out here and make friends. I
+don't like you and you don't like me; but we're going to be thrown
+together for quite some time, so we'd better make the best of it. You
+come out here and behave pretty and I'll give you a bit of gingersnap."
+
+The last word was intelligible to her, and she came a little way out
+from under the chair. I had a bit of gingersnap in my pocket, left over
+from treating Don, and I tossed it on the floor midway between us. She
+darted forward and ate it with quick bites.
+
+Well, then, she looked up, and her eyes asked--just as plain as day:
+"Why are things thus? Why have I come to live with you? I don't like
+you. I want to go back to Graves."
+
+I couldn't explain very well, and just shook my head and then went on
+trying to make friends--it was no use. She hated me, and after a time I
+got bored. I threw a pillow on the floor for her to sleep on, and left
+her. Well, the minute the door was shut and locked she began to sob. You
+could hear her for quite a distance, and I couldn't stand it. So I went
+back--and talked to her as nicely and soothingly as I could. But she
+wouldn't even look at me--just lay face down--heaving and sobbing.
+
+Now I don't like little creatures that snap--so when I picked her up it
+was by the scruff of the neck. She had to face me then, and I saw that
+in spite of all the sobbing her eyes were perfectly dry. That struck me
+as curious. I examined them through a pocket magnifying-glass, and
+discovered that they had no tear-ducts. Of course she couldn't cry.
+Perhaps I squeezed the back of her neck harder than I meant to--anyway,
+her lips began to draw back and her teeth to show.
+
+It was exactly at that second that I recalled the legend Graves had told
+me about the island woman being found dead, and all black and swollen,
+back there in the grass, with teeth marks on her that looked as if they
+had been made by a very little child.
+
+I forced Bo's mouth wide open and looked in. Then I reached for a candle
+and held it steadily between her face and mine. She struggled furiously
+so that I had to put down the candle and catch her legs together in my
+free hand. But I had seen enough. I felt wet and cold all over. For if
+the swollen glands at the base of the deeply grooved canines meant
+anything, that which I held between my hands was not a woman--but a
+snake.
+
+I put her in a wooden box that had contained soap and nailed slats over
+the top. And, personally, I was quite willing to put scrap-iron in the
+box with her and fling it overboard. But I did not feel quite justified
+without consulting Graves.
+
+As an extra precaution in case of accidents, I overhauled my
+medicine-chest and made up a little package for the breast pocket--a
+lancet, a rubber bandage, and a pill-box full of permanganate crystals.
+I had still much collecting to do, "back there in the grass," and I did
+not propose to step on any of Bo's cousins or her sisters or her
+aunts--without having some of the elementary first-aids to the
+snake-bitten handy.
+
+It was a lovely starry night, and I determined to sleep on deck. Before
+turning in I went to have a look at Bo. Having nailed her in a box
+securely, as I thought, I must have left my cabin door ajar. Anyhow she
+was gone. She must have braced her back against one side of the box, her
+feet against the other, and burst it open. I had most certainly
+underestimated her strength and resources.
+
+The crew, warned of peril, searched the whole schooner over, slowly and
+methodically, lighted by lanterns. We could not find her. Well, swimming
+comes natural to snakes.
+
+I went ashore as quickly as I could get a boat manned and rowed. I took
+Don on a leash, a shot-gun loaded, and both pockets of my jacket full of
+cartridges. We ran swiftly along the beach, Don and I, and then turned
+into the grass to make a short cut for Graves's house. All of a sudden
+Don began to tremble with eagerness and nuzzle and sniff among the roots
+of the grass. He was "making game."
+
+"Good Don," I said, "good boy--hunt her up! Find her!"
+
+The moon had risen. I saw two figures standing in the porch of Graves's
+house. I was about to call to them and warn Graves that Bo was loose and
+dangerous--when a scream--shrill and frightful--rang in my ears. I saw
+Graves turn to his bride and catch her in his arms.
+
+When I came up she had collected her senses and was behaving splendidly.
+While Graves fetched a lantern and water she sat down on the porch, her
+back against the house, and undid her garter, so that I could pull the
+stocking off her bitten foot. Her instep, into which Bo's venomous teeth
+had sunk, was already swollen and discolored. I slashed the teeth-marks
+this way and that with my lancet. And Mrs. Graves kept saying: "All
+right--all right--don't mind me--do what's best."
+
+Don's leash had wedged between two of the porch planks, and all the time
+we were working over Mrs. Graves he whined and struggled to get loose.
+
+"Graves," I said, when we had done what we could, "if your wife begins
+to seem faint, give her brandy--just a very little--at a time--and--I
+think we were in time--and for God's sake don't ever let her know _why_
+she was bitten--or by _what_----"
+
+Then I turned and freed Don and took off his leash.
+
+The moonlight was now very white and brilliant. In the sandy path that
+led from Graves's porch I saw the print of feet--shaped just like human
+feet--less than an inch long. I made Don smell them, and said:
+
+"Hunt close, boy! Hunt close!"
+
+Thus hunting, we moved slowly through the grass toward the interior of
+the island. The scent grew hotter--suddenly Don began to move more
+stiffly--as if he had the rheumatism--his eyes straight ahead saw
+something that I could not see--the tip of his tail vibrated
+furiously--he sank lower and lower--his legs worked more and more
+stiffly--his head was thrust forward to the full stretch of his neck
+toward a thick clump of grass. In the act of taking a wary step he came
+to a dead halt--his right forepaw just clear of the ground. The tip of
+his tail stopped vibrating. The tail itself stood straight out behind
+him and became rigid like a bar of iron. I never saw a stancher point.
+
+"Steady, boy!"
+
+I pushed forward the safety of my shot-gun and stood at attention.
+
+
+"How is she?"
+
+"Seems to be pulling through. I heard you fire both barrels. What luck?"
+
+
+
+
+ASABRI
+
+
+Asabri, head of the great banking house of Asabri Brothers in Rome, had
+been a great sportsman in his youth. But by middle-age he had grown a
+little tired, you may say; so that whereas formerly he had depended upon
+his own exertions for pleasure and exhilaration, he looked now with
+favor upon automobiles, motor-boats, and saddle-horses.
+
+Almost every afternoon he rode alone in the Campagna, covering great
+distances on his stanch Irish mare, Biddy. She was the handsomest horse
+in Rome; her master was the handsomest man. He looked like some old
+Roman consul going out to govern and civilize. Peasants whom he passed
+touched their hats to him automatically. His face in repose was a sort
+of command.
+
+One day as he rode out of Rome he saw that fog was gathering; and he
+resolved, for there was an inexhaustible well of boyishness within him,
+to get lost in it. He had no engagement for that night; his family had
+already left Rome for their villa on Lake Como. Nobody would worry about
+him except Luigi, his valet. And as for this one, Asabri said to
+himself: "He is a spoiled child of fortune; let him worry for once."
+
+He did not believe in fever; he believed in a good digestion and good
+habits. He knew every inch of the Campagna, or thought he did; and he
+knew that under the magic of fog the most familiar parts of it became
+unfamiliar and strange. He had lost himself upon it once or twice
+before, to his great pleasure and exhilaration. He had felt like some
+daring explorer in an unknown country. He thought that perhaps he might
+be forced to spend the night in some peasant's home smelling of cheese
+and goats. He would reward his hosts in the morning beyond the dreams of
+their undoubted avarice. There would be a beautiful daughter with a
+golden voice: he would see to it that she became a famous singer. He
+would give the father a piece of fertile land with an ample house upon
+it. Every day the happy family would go down on their knees and pray for
+his soul. He knew of nothing more delicious than to surprise unexpecting
+and deserving people with stable benefactions. And besides, if only for
+the sake of his boyhood, he loved dearly the smell of cheese and goats.
+
+A goat had been his foster-mother; it was to her that he attributed his
+splendid constitution and activity, which had filled in the spaces
+between his financial successes with pleasure. As he trotted on into the
+fog he tried to recall having knowingly done harm to somebody or other;
+and because he could not, his face of a Roman emperor took on a great
+look of peace.
+
+"Biddy," he said after a time, in English (she was an Irish horse, and
+English was the nearest he could get to her native language), "this is
+no common Roman mist; it's a genuine fog that has been sucked up Tiber
+from the salt sea. You can smell salt and fish. We shall be lost,
+possibly for a long time. There will be no hot mash for you to-night.
+You will eat what goats eat and be very grateful. Perhaps you will meet
+some rural donkey during our adventures, and I must ask you to use the
+poor little beast's rustic ignorance with the greatest tact and
+forbearance. You will tell her tales of cities and travels; but do not
+lie to excess, or appear condescending, lest you find her rude wits a
+match for your own and are ashamed."
+
+Asabri did not spend the night in a peasant's hut. Biddy did not meet
+any country donkey to swap yarns with. But inasmuch as the pair lost
+themselves thoroughly, it must be admitted that some of the banker's
+wishes came true.
+
+He had not counted on two things. At dinner-time he was hungry; at
+supper-time he was ravenous. And he no longer thought of losing himself
+on purpose, but made all the efforts in his power to get back to Rome.
+
+"Good Heavens," he muttered, "we ought to have stumbled on something by
+this time."
+
+Biddy might have answered: "I've done some stumbling, thank you, and
+thanks to you." But she didn't. Instead, she lifted her head and ears,
+looked to the left, snorted, and shied. She shied very carefully,
+however, because she did not know what she might shy into; and Asabri
+laughed.
+
+There was a glimmering point of light off to the left, and he urged
+Biddy toward it. He saw presently that it was a fire built against a
+ruined and unfamiliar tomb.
+
+The fire was cooking something in a kettle. There was a smell of garlic.
+Three young men sat cross-legged, watching the fire and the kettle.
+Against the tomb leaned three long guns, very old and dangerous.
+
+"Brigands!" smiled Asabri, and he hailed them:
+
+"Ho there! Wake up! I am a squadron of police attacking you from the
+rear."
+
+He rode unarmed into their midst and slid unconcernedly from his saddle
+to the ground.
+
+"Put up your weapons, brothers," he said; "I was joking. It seems that I
+am in danger, not you."
+
+The young men, upon whom "brigand" was written in no uncertain signs,
+were very much embarrassed. One of them smiled nervously and showed a
+great many very white teeth.
+
+"Lucky for us," he said, "that you weren't what you said you were."
+
+"Yes," said Asabri; "I should have potted the lot of you with one
+volley and reported at head-quarters that it had been necessary, owing
+to the stubborn resistance which you offered."
+
+The three young men smiled sheepishly.
+
+"I see that you are familiar with the ways of the police," said one of
+them.
+
+"May I sit with you?" Asabri asked. "Thanks."
+
+He sat in silence for a moment; and the three young men examined with
+great respect the man's splendid round head, and his face of a Roman
+emperor.
+
+"Whose tomb is this?" he asked them.
+
+"It is ours," said the one who had first smiled. "It used to hallow the
+remains of Attulius Cimber."
+
+"Oho!" said Asabri. "Attulius Cimber, a direct ancestor of my friend and
+associate Sullandenti. And tell me how far is it to Rome?"
+
+"A long way. You could not find the half of it to-night."
+
+"Brothers," said Asabri, "has business been good? I ask for a reason."
+
+"The reason, sir?"
+
+"Why," said he, "I thought, if I should not be considered grasping, to
+ask you for a mouthful of soup."
+
+Confusion seized the brigands. They protested that they were ungrateful
+dogs to keep the noble guest upon the tenterhooks of hunger. They called
+upon God to smite them down for inhospitable ne'er-do-weels. They plied
+him with soup, with black bread; they roasted strips of goat's flesh for
+him; and from the hollow of the tomb they fetched bottles of red wine in
+straw jackets.
+
+Presently Asabri sighed, and offered them cigarettes from a gold case.
+
+"For what I have received," said he, "may a courteous and thoughtful God
+make me truly thankful.... I wish that I could offer you, in return for
+your hospitality, something more substantial than cigarettes. The case?
+If it were any case but that one! A present from my wife."
+
+He drew from its pocket a gold repeater upon which his initials were
+traced in brilliants.
+
+"Midnight. Listen!"
+
+He pressed a spring, and the exquisite chimes of the watch spoke in the
+stillness like the bells of a fairy church.
+
+"And this," he said, "was a present from my mother, who is dead."
+
+The three brigands crossed themselves, and expressed the regrets which
+good-breeding required of them. The one that had been the last to help
+himself to a cigarette now returned the case to Asabri, with a bow and a
+mumbling of thanks.
+
+"What a jolly life you lead," exclaimed the banker. "Tell me, you have
+had some good hauls lately? What?"
+
+The oldest of the three, a dark, taciturn youth, answered, "The
+gentleman is a great joker."
+
+"Believe me," said Asabri, "it is from habit--not from the heart. When I
+rode out from Rome to-day, it was with the intention never to return.
+When I came upon you and saw your long guns and suspected your
+profession in life, I said: 'Good! Perhaps these young men will murder
+me for my watch and cigarette case and the loose silver in my breeches
+pocket, and save me a world of trouble----'"
+
+The three brigands protested that nothing had ever been farther from
+their thoughts.
+
+"Instead of which," he went on, "you have fed me and put heart in me. I
+shall return to Rome in the morning and face whatever music my own
+infatuated foolishness has set going. Do you understand anything of
+finance?"
+
+The taciturn brigand grinned sheepishly.
+
+He said that he had had one once; but that the priest had touched it
+with a holy relic and it had gone away. "It was on the back of my neck,"
+he said.
+
+Asabri laughed.
+
+"I should have said banking," said he, "stocks and bonds."
+
+The brigands admitted that they knew nothing of these things. Asabri
+sighed.
+
+"Two months ago," he said, "I was a rich man. To-day I have nothing. In
+a few days it will be known that I have nothing; and then, my
+friends--the deluge. Such is finance. From great beginnings, lame
+endings. And yet the converse may be true. I have seen great endings
+come of small beginnings. Even now there is a chance for a man with a
+little capital...."
+
+He raised his eyes and hands to heaven.
+
+"Oh," he cried, "if I could touch even five thousand lire I could
+retrieve my own fortunes and make the fortunes of whomsoever advanced me
+the money."
+
+The sullen brigand had been doing a sum on his fingers.
+
+"How so, excellency?" he asked.
+
+"Oh," said Asabri, "it is very simple! I should buy certain stocks,
+which owing to certain conditions are very cheap, and I should sell them
+very dear. You have heard of America?"
+
+They smiled and nodded eagerly.
+
+"Of Wall Street?"
+
+They looked blank.
+
+"Doubtless," said the banker, "you have been taught by your priests to
+believe that the great church of St. Peter, in Rome, is the actual
+centre of the universe. Is it not so?"
+
+They assented, not without wonder, since the fact was well known.
+
+"Recent geographers," said Asabri, "unwilling to take any statement for
+granted, have, after prolonged and scientific investigation, discovered
+that this idea is hocus pocus. The centre of the universe is in the
+United States, in the city of New York, in Wall Street. The number in
+the street, to be precise, is fifty-nine. From fifty-nine Wall Street,
+the word goes out to the extremities of the world: 'Let prices be low.'
+Or: 'Let them be high.' And so they become, according to the word. But
+unless I can find five thousand lire with which to take advantage of
+this fact, why to-morrow----"
+
+"To-morrow?" asked the brigand who had been first to smile.
+
+"Two months ago," said Asabri, "I was perhaps the most envied man in
+Italy. To-morrow I shall be laughed at." He shrugged his powerful
+shoulders.
+
+"But if five thousand lire could be found?"
+
+It was the sullen brigand who spoke, and his companions eyed him with
+some misgiving.
+
+"In that case," said Asabri, "I should rehabilitate my fortune and that
+of the man, or men, who came to my assistance."
+
+"Suppose," said the sullen one, "that I were in a position to offer you
+the loan of five thousand lire, or four thousand eight hundred and
+ninety-two, to be exact, what surety should I receive that my fortunes
+and those of my associates would be mended thereby?"
+
+"My word," said Asabri simply, and he turned his face of a Roman emperor
+and looked the sullen brigand directly in the eye.
+
+"Words," said this one, although his eyes fell before the steadiness of
+the banker's, "are of all kinds and conditions, according to whoso gives
+them."
+
+Asabri smiled, and sure of his notoriety: "I am Asabri," said he.
+
+They examined him anew with a great awe. The youngest said:
+
+"And _you_ have fallen upon evil days! I should have been less
+astonished if some one were to tell me that the late pope had received
+employment in hell."
+
+"Beppo," said the sullen brigand, "whatever the state of his fortunes,
+the word of Asabri is sufficient. Go into the tomb of Attulius and fetch
+out the money."
+
+The money--silver, copper, and notes of small denominations--was in a
+dirty leather bag.
+
+"Will you count it, sir?"
+
+With the palms of his hands Asabri answered that he would not. Inwardly,
+it was as if he had been made of smiles; but he showed them a stern
+countenance when he said:
+
+"One thing! Before I touch this money, is there blood on it?"
+
+"High hands only," said the sullen brigand; but the youngest protested.
+
+"Indeed, yes," he said, "there is blood upon it. Look, see, and behold!"
+
+He bared a breast on which the skin was fine and satiny like a woman's,
+and they saw in the firelight the cicatrice of a newly healed wound.
+
+"A few drops of mine," he said proudly. "May they bring the money luck."
+
+"One thing more," said Asabri; "I have said that I will mend your
+fortunes. What sum apiece would make you comfortable for the rest of
+your days and teach you to see the evil in your present manner of life?"
+
+"If the money were to be doubled," said the sullen brigand, "then each
+of us could have what he most desires."
+
+"And what is that?" asked the banker.
+
+"For me," said the sullen brigand, "there is a certain piece of land
+upon which are grapes, figs, and olives."
+
+The second brigand said: "I am a waterman by birth and by longing. If I
+could purchase a certain barge upon which I have long had an eye, I
+should do well and honestly in the world, and happily."
+
+"And you? What do you want?" Asabri smiled paternally in the face of
+the youngest brigand.
+
+This one showed his beautiful teeth a moment, and drew the rags together
+over his scarred breast.
+
+"I am nineteen years of age," he said, and his eyes glistened. "There is
+a girl, sir, in my village. Her eyes are like velvet; her skin is smooth
+as custard. She is very beautiful. If I could go to her father with a
+certain sum of money, he would not ask where I had gotten it--that is
+why I have robbed on the highway. He would merely stretch forth his
+hands and roll his fat eyes heavenward, and say: 'Bless you, my
+children.'"
+
+"But the girl," said Asabri.
+
+"It is wonderful," said the youngest brigand, "how she loves me. And
+when I told her that I was going upon the road to earn the moneys
+necessary for our happiness, she said that she would climb down from her
+window at night and come with me. But," he concluded unctuously, "I
+pointed out to her that from sin springs nothing but unhappiness."
+
+"We formed a fellowship, we three," said the second brigand, "and swore
+an oath: to take from the world so much as would make us happy, and no
+more."
+
+"My friends," said Asabri, "there are worse brigands than yourselves
+living in palaces."
+
+The fog had lifted, and it was beginning to grow light. Asabri gathered
+up the heavy bag of money and prepared to depart.
+
+"How long," said the sullen brigand, "with all respect, before your own
+fortunes will be mended, sir, and ours?"
+
+"You are quite sure you know nothing of stocks?"
+
+"Nothing, excellency."
+
+"Then listen. They shall be mended to-day. To-morrow come to my
+bank----"
+
+"Oh, sir, we dare not show our faces in Rome."
+
+"Very well, then; to-morrow at ten sharp I shall leave Rome in a
+motor-car. Watch for me along the Appian Way."
+
+He shook them by their brown, grimy hands, mounted the impatient Biddy,
+and was gone--blissfully smiling.
+
+Upon reaching Rome he rode to his palace and assured Luigi the valet
+that all was well. Then he bathed, changed, breakfasted, napped, and
+drove to the hospital of Our Lady in Emergencies. He saw the superior
+and gave her the leather bag containing the brigands' savings.
+
+"For my sins," he said. "I have told lies half the night."
+
+Then he drove to his great banking house and sent for the cashier.
+
+"Make me up," said he, "three portable parcels of fifty thousand lire
+each."
+
+The next day at ten he left Rome in a black and beauteous motor-car,
+and drove slowly along the Appian Way. He had left his mechanic behind,
+and was prepared to renew his tires and his youth. Packed away, he had
+luncheon and champagne enough for four; and he had not forgotten to
+bring along the three parcels of money.
+
+The three brigands stepped into the Appian Way from behind a mass of
+fallen masonry. They had found the means to shave cleanly, and perhaps
+to wash. They were adorned with what were evidently their very best
+clothes. The youngest, whose ambition was the girl he loved, even wore a
+necktie.
+
+Asabri brought the motor to a swift, oily, and polished halt.
+
+"Well met," he said, "since all is well. If you," he smiled into the
+face of the sullen brigand, "will be so good as to sit beside me!... The
+others shall sit in behind.... We shall go first," he continued, when
+all were comfortably seated, "to have a look at that little piece of
+land on which grow figs, olives, and grapes. We shall buy it, and break
+our fast in the shade of the oldest fig tree. It is going to be a hot
+day."
+
+"It is below Rome, and far," said the sullen brigand; "but since the
+barge upon which my friend has set his heart belongs to a near neighbor,
+we shall be killing two birds with one stone. But with all deference,
+excellency, have you really retrieved your fortunes?"
+
+"And yours," said Asabri. "Indeed, I am to-day as rich as ever I was,
+with the exception"--his eyes twinkled behind his goggles--"of about a
+hundred and fifty thousand lire."
+
+The sullen brigand whistled; and although the roads were rough, they
+proceeded, thanks to the shock-absorbers on Asabri's car, in complete
+comfort, at a great pace.
+
+In the village nearest to the property upon which the sullen brigand had
+cast his eye, they picked up a notary through whom to effect the
+purchase.
+
+The little farm was rather stony, but sweet to the eye as a bouquet of
+flowers, with the deep greens of the figs and grapes and the silvery
+greens of the olives. Furthermore, there were roses in the door-yard,
+and the young and childless widow to whom the homestead belonged stood
+among the roses. She was brown and scarlet, and her eyes were black and
+merry.
+
+Yes, yes, she agreed, she would sell! There was a mortgage on the place.
+She intended to pay that off and have a little over. True, the place
+paid. But, Good Lord, she lived all alone, and she didn't enjoy that!
+
+They invited the pretty widow to luncheon, and she helped them spread
+the cloth under a fig tree that had thrown shade for five hundred
+years. Asabri passed the champagne, and they all became very merry
+together. Indeed, the sullen brigand became so merry and happy that he
+no longer addressed Asabri respectfully as "excellency," but gratefully
+and affectionately as "my father."
+
+This one became more and more delighted with the term, until finally he
+said:
+
+"It is true, that in a sense I am this young man's father, since I
+believe that if I were to advise him to do a certain thing he would do
+it."
+
+"That is God's truth," cried the sullen brigand; "if he advised me to
+advance single-handed against the hosts of hell, I should do so."
+
+"My son," said Asabri, "our fair guest affirms that upon this beautiful
+little farm she has had everything that she could wish except
+companionship. Are you not afraid that you, in your turn, will here
+suffer from loneliness?" He turned to the pretty widow. "I wish," said
+he, "to address myself to you in behalf of this young man."
+
+The others became very silent. The notary lifted his glass to his lips.
+The widow blushed. Said she:
+
+"I like his looks well enough; but I know nothing about him."
+
+"I can tell you this," said Asabri, "that he has been a man of exemplary
+honesty since--yesterday, and that under the seat of my automobile he
+has, in a leather bag, a fortune of fifty thousand lire."
+
+The three brigands gasped.
+
+"He is determined, in any case," the banker continued, "to purchase your
+little farm; but it seems to me that it would be a beautiful end to a
+story that has not been without a certain aroma of romance if you, my
+fair guest, were, so to speak, to throw yourself into the bargain. Think
+it over. The mortgage lifted, a handsome husband, and plenty of money in
+the bank.... Think it over. And in any case--the pleasure of a glass of
+wine with you!"
+
+They touched glasses. Across the golden bubbling, smiles leapt.
+
+"Let us," said the second brigand, "leave the pair in question to talk
+the matter over, while the rest of us go and attend to the purchase of
+my barge."
+
+"Well thought," said Asabri. "My children, we shall be gone about an
+hour. See if, in that time, you cannot grow fond of each other. Perhaps,
+if you took the bag of money into the house and pretended that it
+already belonged to both of you, and counted it over, something might be
+accomplished."
+
+The youngest brigand caught the sullen one by the sleeve and whispered
+in his ear.
+
+"If you want her, let her count the money. If you don't, count it
+yourself."
+
+The second brigand turned to Asabri. "Excellency," he whispered, "you
+are as much my father as his."
+
+"True," said Asabri, "what of it?"
+
+"Nothing! Only, the man who owns the barge which I desire to purchase
+has a very beautiful daughter."
+
+Asabri laughed so that for a moment he could not bend over to crank his
+car. And he cried aloud:
+
+"France, France, I thank thee for thy champagne! And I thank thee, O
+Italy, for thy merry hearts and thy suggestive climate!... My son, if
+the bargeman's daughter is to be had for the asking, she is yours. But
+we must tell the father that until recently you have been a very naughty
+fellow."
+
+They remained with the second brigand long enough to see him exchange a
+kiss of betrothal with the bargeman's daughter, while the bargeman
+busied himself counting the money; and then they returned to see how the
+sullen brigand and the pretty widow were getting on.
+
+The sullen brigand was cutting dead-wood out of a fig tree with a saw.
+His face was supremely happy. The widow stood beneath and directed him.
+
+"Closer to the tree, stupid," she said, "else the wound will not heal
+properly."
+
+The youngest brigand laid a hand that trembled upon Asabri's arm.
+
+"Oh, my father," he said, "these doves are already cooing! And it is
+very far to the place where I would be."
+
+But Asabri went first to the fig tree, and he said to the widow:
+
+"Is all well?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "we have agreed to differ for the rest of our lives. It
+seems that this stupid fellow needs somebody to look after him. And it
+seems to be God's will that that somebody should be I."
+
+"Bless you then, my children," said Asabri; "and farewell! I shall come
+to the wedding."
+
+They returned the notary to his little home in the village; and the fees
+which he was to receive for the documents which he was to draw up made
+him so happy that he flung his arms about his wife, who was rather a
+prim person, and fell to kissing her with the most boisterous good will.
+
+It was dusk when they reached the village in which the sweetheart of the
+youngest brigand lived. Asabri thought that he had never seen a girl
+more exquisite.
+
+"And we have loved each other," said the youngest brigand, his arm about
+her firm, round waist, "since we were children.... I think I am dying, I
+am so happy."
+
+"Shall you buy a farm, a barge, a business?" asked the banker.
+
+"Whatever is decided," said the girl, "it will be a paradise."
+
+Her old father came out of the house.
+
+"I have counted the money. It is correct."
+
+Then he rolled his fat eyes heavenward, just as the youngest brigand had
+prophesied, and said: "Bless you, my children!"
+
+"I must be going," said Asabri; "but there is one thing."
+
+Four dark luminous eyes looked into his.
+
+"You have not kissed," said Asabri; "let it be now, so that I may
+remember."
+
+Without embarrassment, the young brigand and his sweetheart folded their
+arms closely about each other, and kissed each other, once, slowly, with
+infinite tenderness.
+
+"I am nineteen," said the youngest brigand; then, and he looked
+heavenward: "God help us to forget the years that have been wasted!"
+
+Asabri drove toward Rome, his headlights piercing the darkness. The
+champagne was no longer in his blood. He was in a calm, judicial mood.
+
+"To think," he said to himself, "that for a mere matter of a hundred and
+fifty thousand lire, a rich old man can be young again for a day or
+two!"
+
+It was nearly one o'clock when he reached his palace in Rome. Luigi,
+the valet, was sitting up for him, as usual.
+
+"This is the second time in three days," said Luigi, "that you have been
+out all night.... A telegram," he threatened, "would bring the mistress
+back to Rome."
+
+"Forgive me, old friend," said Asabri, and he leaned on Luigi's
+shoulder; "but I have fallen in love...."
+
+"What!" screamed the valet. "At your age?"
+
+"It is quite true," said Asabri, a little sadly, "that at my age a man
+most easily falls in love--with life."
+
+"You shall go to bed at once," said Luigi sternly. "I shall prepare a
+hot lemonade, and you shall take five grains of quinine.... You are
+damp.... The mist from the Campagna...."
+
+Asabri yawned in the ancient servitor's face.
+
+"Luigi," he said, "I think I shall buy you a farm and a wife; or a barge
+and a wife...."
+
+"You do, do you?" said Luigi. "And I think you'll take your quinine like
+a Trojan, or I'll know the reason why."
+
+"Everybody regards me as rather an important person," complained Asabri,
+"except you."
+
+"You were seven years old," said Luigi, "when I came to serve you. I
+have aged. But you haven't. You didn't know enough then to come in when
+it rained, as the Americans say. You don't now. I would not speak of
+this to others. But to you--yes--for your own good."
+
+Asabri smiled blissfully.
+
+"In all the world," he said, "there is only one thing for a man to fear,
+that he will learn to take the world seriously; in other words, that he
+will grow up.... You may bring the hot lemonade and the quinine when
+they are ready."
+
+And then he blew his nose of a Roman emperor; for he had indeed
+contracted a slight cold.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's IT and Other Stories, by Gouverneur Morris
+
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of It, And Other Stories, by Gouverneur Morris.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
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+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
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+    hr.smler { width: 10%; }
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+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 5px; border: none; }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
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+    .block    {margin: auto; text-align: center; width: 28em;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
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+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem div        {display: block; margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem div.i1     {display: block; margin-left: 1em;}
+    .poem div.i3     {display: block; margin-left: 3em;}
+
+    /* index */
+
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+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of IT and Other Stories, by Gouverneur Morris
+
+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: IT and Other Stories
+
+Author: Gouverneur Morris
+
+Release Date: January 30, 2009 [EBook #27934]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IT AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/titlepage.jpg" width='404' height='700' alt="IT AND OTHER STORIES BY GOUVERNEUR MORRIS AUTHOR OF THE FOOTPRINT, AND OTHER STORIES,
+THE SPREAD EAGLE AND OTHER STORIES, ETC. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1912" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<h4><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1912, by</span><br />CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h4>
+
+<hr class="smler" />
+
+<h4>Published March, 1912</h4>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="center"><img src="images/logo.jpg" width='100' height='107' alt="logo" /></div>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>TO ELSIE</h3>
+
+<div class="block">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div class="center">I</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>Crown the heads of better men</div>
+<div class="i1">With lilies and with morning-glories!</div>
+<div>I'm unworthy of a pen&mdash;</div>
+<div class="i1">These are Bread-and-Butter stories.</div>
+<div class="i3">Shall I tell you how I know?</div>
+<div class="i3">Strangers wrote and told me so.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="center">II</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>He who only toils for fame</div>
+<div class="i1">I pronounce a silly Billy.</div>
+<div><i>I</i> can't dine upon a name,</div>
+<div class="i1">Or look dressy in a lily.</div>
+<div class="i3">And&mdash;oh shameful truth to utter!&mdash;</div>
+<div class="i3">I <i>won't</i> live on bread and butter.</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div class="center">III</div>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<div>Sometimes now (and sometimes then)</div>
+<div class="i1">Meat and wine my soul requires.</div>
+<div>Satan tempted me&mdash;my pen</div>
+<div class="i1">Fills the house with open fires.</div>
+<div class="i3">I <i>must</i> have a horse or two&mdash;</div>
+<div class="i3">Babies, oh my Love&mdash;and you!</div>
+</div></div>
+<p class="right">G. M.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">Aiken</span>, <i>February 10, 1912</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="index">
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#IT"><b><i>It</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#TWO_BUSINESS_WOMEN"><b><i>Two Business Women</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#THE_TRAP"><b><i>The Trap</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#SAPPHIRA"><b><i>Sapphira</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#THE_BRIDES_DEAD"><b><i>The Bride's Dead</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#HOLDING_HANDS"><b><i>Holding Hands</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#THE_CLAWS_OF_THE_TIGER"><b><i>The Claws of The Tiger</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#GROWING_UP"><b><i>Growing Up</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#THE_BATTLE_OF_AIKEN"><b><i>The Battle of Aiken</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#AN_IDYL_OF_PELHAM_BAY_PARK"><b><i>An Idyl of Pelham Bay Park</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#BACK_THERE_IN_THE_GRASS"><b><i>Back There in the Grass</i></b></a></li>
+<li><a href="#ASABRI"><b><i>Asabri</i></b></a></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="IT" id="IT"></a>IT</h2>
+
+<p>Prana Beach would be a part of the solid west coast if it wasn't for a
+half circle of the deadliest, double-damned, orchid-haunted black
+morass, with a solid wall of insects that bite, rising out of it. But
+the beach is good dry sand, and the wind keeps the bugs back in the
+swamp. Between the beach and the swamp is a strip of loam and jungle,
+where some niggers live and a god.</p>
+
+<p>I landed on Prana Beach because I'd heard&mdash;but it wasn't so and it
+doesn't matter. Anyhow, I landed&mdash;all alone; the canoemen wouldn't come
+near enough for me to land dry, at that. Said the canoe would shrivel
+up, like a piece of hide in a fire, if it touched that beach; said
+they'd turn white and be blown away like puffs of smoke. They nearly
+backed away with my stuff; would have if I hadn't pulled a gun on them.
+But they made me wade out and get it myself&mdash;thirty foot of rope with
+knots, dynamite, fuses, primers, compass, grub for a week, and&mdash;well, a
+bit of skin in a half-pint flask with a rubber and screw-down top. Not
+nice, it wasn't, wading out and back and out and back. There was one
+shark, I remember, came in so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> close that he grounded, snout out, and
+made a noise like a pig. Sun was going down, looking like a bloody
+murder victim, and there wasn't going to be any twilight. It's an
+uncertain light that makes wading nasty. It might be salt-water soaking
+into my jeans, but with that beastly red light over it, it looked like blood.</p>
+
+<p>The canoe backed out to the&mdash;you can't call 'em a nautical name. They've
+one big, square sail of crazy-quilt work&mdash;raw silk, pieces of rubber
+boots, rattan matting, and grass cloth, all colors, all shapes of
+patches. They point into the wind and then go sideways; and they <i>don't</i>
+steer with an oar that Charon discarded thousands of years ago, that's
+painted crimson and raw violet; and the only thing they'd be good for
+would be fancy wood-carpets. Mine, or better, ours, was made of
+satinwood, and was ballasted with scrap-iron, rotten ivory, and ebony.
+There, I've told you what she was like (except for the live
+entomological collection aboard), and you may call her what you please.
+The main point is that she took the canoe aboard, and then disobeyed
+orders. Orders were to lie at anchor (which was a dainty thing of stone,
+all carved) till further orders. But she'd gotten rid of me, and she
+proposed to lie farther off, and come back (maybe) when I'd finished my
+job. So she pointed straight in for where I was standing amid my duds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+and chattels, just as if she was going to thump herself ashore&mdash;and then
+she began to slip off sideways like a misbegotten crab, and backward,
+too&mdash;until what with the darkness tumbling down, and a point o' palms, I
+lost sight of her. Why didn't I shout, and threaten, and jump up and down?</p>
+
+<p>Because I was alone on Prana Beach, between the sea and the swamp. And
+because the god was beginning to get stirred up; and because now that
+I'd gone through six weeks' fever and boils to get where I was, I wished
+I hadn't gotten there. No, I wasn't scared. You wouldn't be if you were
+alone on a beach, after sundown, deserted you may say, your legs shaky
+with being wet, and your heart hot and mad as fire because you couldn't
+digest the things you had to put into your stomach, and if you'd heard
+that the beach was the most malodorous, ghoul-haunted beach of the seas,
+and if just as you were saying to yourself that <i>you</i> for one didn't
+believe a word of it&mdash;if, I say, just then <i>It</i> began to cut loose&mdash;back
+of you&mdash;way off to the left&mdash;way off to the right&mdash;why you'd have been scared.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn't the noise it made so much as the fact that it could make any
+noise at all.... Shut your mouth tight and hum on the letter
+m-mmmmmmm&mdash;that's it exactly. Only It's was ten times as loud, and
+vibrating. The vibrations shook me where I stood.</p>
+
+<p>With the wind right, that humming must have <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>carried a mile out to sea;
+and that's how it had gotten about that there was a god loose on Prana
+Beach. It was an It-god, the niggers all agreed. You'll have seen 'em
+carved on paddles&mdash;shanks of a man, bust of a woman, nose of a
+snapping-turtle, and mouth round like the letter O. But the Prana Beach
+one didn't show itself that first night. It hummed
+awhile&mdash;m-m-m-m-m&mdash;oh, for maybe a minute&mdash;stopped and began
+again&mdash;jumped a major fifth, held it till it must have been half burst
+for breath, and then went down the scale an octave, hitting every note
+in the middle, and giving the effect of one damned soul meeting another
+out in eternity and yelling for pure joy and malice. The finish was a
+whoop on the low note so loud that it lifted my hair. Then the howl was
+cut off as sharp and neat and sudden as I've seen a Chinaman's head
+struck from his body by the executioner at Canton&mdash;Big Wan&mdash;ever seen
+him work? Very pretty. Got to perfection what golfers call "the follow through."</p>
+
+<p>Yes. I sauntered into the nearest grove, whistling "Yankee Doodle,"
+lighted a fire, cooked supper, and turned in for the night. Not!... I
+took to the woods all right, but on my stomach. And I curled up so tight
+that my knees touched my chin. Ever try it? It's the nearest thing to
+having some one with you, when you're cold and alone. Adam must have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+had a hard-shell back and a soft-shell stomach, like an armadillo&mdash;how
+does it run?&mdash;"dillowing in his armor." Because in moments of real or
+imaginary danger it's the first instinct of Adam's sons to curl up, and
+of Eve's daughters. Ever touch a Straits Settlement Jewess on the back
+of the hand with a lighted cigarette?...</p>
+
+<p>As I'm telling you, I curled up good and tight, head and knees on the
+grub sack, Colt and dynamite handy, hair standing perfectly straight up,
+rope round me on the ground in a circle&mdash;I had a damn-fool notion that
+It mightn't be allowed to cross knotted ropes, and I shook with chills
+and nightmares and cramps. I could only lie on my left side, for the
+boils on my right. I couldn't keep my teeth quiet. I couldn't do
+anything that a Christian ought to do, with a heathen It-god strolling
+around. Yes, ... the thing came out on the beach, in full view of where
+I was, but I couldn't see it, because of the pitch dark. It came out,
+and made noises with its feet in the sand&mdash;up and down&mdash;up and
+down&mdash;scrunch&mdash;scrunch&mdash;something like a man walking, and not in a
+hurry. Something like it, but not exactly. The It's feet (they have
+seven toes according to the nigger paddles) didn't touch the ground as
+often as a man's would have done in walking the distance. There'd be one
+scrunch and then quite a long pause before the next. It sounded like a
+very,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> very big man, taking the very longest steps he could. But there
+wasn't any more mouth work. And for that I'm still offering up prayers
+of thanksgiving; for, if&mdash;say when it was just opposite where I lay, and
+not fifty yards off&mdash;it had let off anything sudden and loud, I'd have
+been killed as dead as by a stroke of lightning.</p>
+
+<p>Well, I was just going to break, when day did. Broke so sweet, and calm,
+and pretty; all pink landward over the black jungle, all smooth and
+baby-blue out to sea. Till the sun showed, there was a land breeze&mdash;not
+really a breeze, just a stir, a cool quiet moving of spicy smells from
+one place to another&mdash;nothing more than that. Then the sea breeze rose
+and swept the sky and ocean till they were one and the same blue, the
+blue that comes highest at Tiffany's; and little puffs of shore birds
+came in on the breeze and began to run up and down on the beach, jabbing
+their bills into the damp sand and flapping their little wings. It was
+like Eden&mdash;Eden-by-the-Sea&mdash;I wouldn't have been surprised if Eve had
+come out of the woods yawning and stretching herself. And I wouldn't
+have cared&mdash;if I'd been shaved.</p>
+
+<p>I took notice of all this peacefulness and quiet, twenty grains of
+quinine, some near food out of a can, and then had a good look around
+for a good place to stop, in case I got started running.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p><p>I fixed on a sandy knoll that had a hollow in the top of it, and one
+twisted beach ebony to shade the hollow. At the five points of a star
+with the knoll for centre, but at safe blasting distance, I planted
+dynamite, primed and short-fused. If anything chased me I hoped to have
+time to spring one of these mines in passing, tumble into my hollow and
+curl up, with my fingers in my ears.</p>
+
+<p>I didn't believe in heathen gods when the sea and sky were that
+exclusive blue; but I had learned before I was fifteen years old that
+day is invariably followed by night, and that between the two there is a
+time toward the latter end of which you can believe anything. It was
+with that dusky period in view that I mined the approaches to my little
+villa at Eden-by-the-Sea.</p>
+
+<p>Well, after that I took the flask that had the slip of skin in it,
+unscrewed the top, pulled the rubber cork, and fished the skin out, with
+a salvage hook that I made by unbending and rebending a hair-pin....
+Don't smile. I've always had a horror of <i>accidentally</i> finding a
+hair-pin in my pocket, and so I carry one on purpose.... See? Not an
+airy, fairy Lillian, but an honest, hard-working Jane ... good to clean
+a pipe with. So I fished out the slip of skin (with the one I had then)
+and spread it out on my knee, and translated what was written on it, for
+the thousandth time.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p><p>Can you read that? The old-fashioned S's mix you up. It's straight
+modern Italian. I don't know what the ink's made of, but the skin's the
+real article&mdash;it's taken from just above the knee where a man can get at
+himself best. It runs this way, just like a "personal" in the <i>Herald</i>,
+only more so:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Prisoner on Prana Beach will share treasure with rescuing party. Come at once.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Isn't that just like an oil-well-in-the-South-west-Company's prospectus?
+"Only a little stock left; price of shares will be raised shortly to thirteen cents."</p>
+
+<p>I bit. It was knowing what kind of skin the ad. was written on that got
+me. I'd seen cured human hide before. In Paris they've got a
+Constitution printed on some that was peeled off an aristocrat in the
+Revolution, and I've seen a seaman's upper arm and back, with the
+tattoos, in a bottle of alcohol in a museum on Fourteenth Street, New
+York&mdash;boys under fourteen not admitted. I wasn't a day over eight when I
+saw those tattoos. However....</p>
+
+<p>To get that prisoner loose was the duty that I owed to humanity; to
+share the treasure was the duty that I owed to myself. So I got together
+some niggers, and the fancy craft I've described (on shares with a
+Singapore Dutchman, who was too fat to come himself, and too much
+married), and made a start.... You're bothered by my calling them
+niggers. Is that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> it? Well, the Mason and Dixon line ran plump through
+my father's house; but mother's room being in the south gable, I was
+born, as you may say, in the land of cotton, and consequently in my
+bright Southern lexicon the word nigger is defined as meaning anything
+black or brown. I think I said that Prana is on the west coast, and that
+may have misled you. But Africa isn't the only God-forsaken place that
+has a west coast; how about Staten Island?</p>
+
+<p>Malaysian houses are built mostly of reed and thatch work standing in
+shallow water on bamboo stalks, highly inflammable and subject to
+alterations by a blunt pocket-knife. So a favorite device for holding a
+man prisoner is a hole in the ground too deep and sheer for him to climb
+out of. That's why I'd brought a length of knotted rope. The dynamite
+was instead of men, which we hadn't means to hire or transport, and who
+wouldn't have landed on that beach anyhow, unless drowned and washed up.
+Now dynamite wouldn't be a pleasant thing to have round your club or
+your favorite restaurant; but in some parts of the world it makes the
+best company. It will speak up for you on occasion louder than your best
+friend, and it gives you the feeling of being Jove with a handful of
+thunderbolts. My plan was to find in what settlement there was the most
+likely prisoner, drive the inhabitants off for two or three days&mdash;one
+blast would do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> that, I calculated (especially if preceded and followed
+by blowings on a pocket siren)&mdash;let my rope down into his well, lift the
+treasure with him, and get away with it.</p>
+
+<p>This was a straight ahead job&mdash;except for the god. And in daylight it
+didn't seem as if It could be such an awful devil of a god. But It did
+have the deuce of a funny spoor, as I made haste to find out. The thing
+had five toes, like a man, which was a relief. But unlike nigger feet,
+the thumb toe and the index weren't spread. The thumb bent sharply
+inward, and mixed its pad mark with that of the index. Furthermore,
+though the impress of the toes was very deep (down-slanting like a man
+walking on tiptoe), the heel marks were also very deep, and between toe
+and heel marks there were no other marks at all. In other words, the
+thing's feet must have been arched like a croquet wicket. And It's heels
+were not rounded; they were <i>perfectly</i> round&mdash;absolute circles they
+were, about the diameter of the smallest sized cans in which Capstan
+tobacco is sold. If ever a wooden idol had stopped squatting and gone
+out for a stroll on a beach, it would have left just such a track. Only
+it might not have felt that it had to take such peculiarly long steps.</p>
+
+<p>My knoll being near the south end of Prana Beach (pure patriotism I
+assure you), my village hunts must be to the northward. I had one good
+hunt, the first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> day, and I got near some sort of a village, a jungle
+one built over a pool, as I found afterward. The reason I gave up
+looking that day was because the god got between me and where I was
+trying to get; burst out humming, you might say, right in my face,
+though I couldn't see It, and directly I had turned and was tiptoeing
+quietly away (I remember how the tree trunks looked like teeth in a
+comb, or the nearest railroad ties from the window of an express train),
+It set up the most passionate, vindictive, triumphant vocal fireworks
+ever heard out of hell. It made black noises like Niagara Falls, and
+white noises higher than Pike's Peak. It made leaps, lighting on tones
+as a carpenter's hammer lights on nails. It ran up and down the major
+and minor diatonics, up and down the chromatic, with the speed and fury
+of a typhoon, and the attention to detail of Paderewski&mdash;at his best,
+when he makes the women faint&mdash;and with the power and volume of a church
+organ with all the stops pulled out. It shook and It trilled and It
+quavered, and It gargled as if It had a barrel of glycothermoline in
+It's mouth and had been exposed to diphtheria, and It finished&mdash;just as
+I tripped on a snake and fell&mdash;with a round bar of high C sound, that
+lasted a good minute (or until I was a quarter of a mile beyond where I
+had fallen), and was the color of butter, and could have been cut with a
+knife. And It stopped short&mdash;biff&mdash;just as if It had been chopped off.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p><p>That was the end of my village hunting. Let the prisoner of Prana Beach
+drown in his hole when the rains come, let his treasure remain unlifted
+till Gabriel blows his trumpet; but let yours truly bask in the shade of
+the beach ebony, hidden from view, and fortified by dynamite&mdash;until the
+satinwood shallop should see fit to return and take him off.</p>
+
+<p>Except for a queer dream (queer because of the time and place, and
+because there seemed absolutely nothing to suggest it to the mind
+asleep), I put in six hours' solid sleep. In my dream I was in Lombardy
+in a dark loft where there were pears laid out to ripen; and we were
+frightened and had to keep creepy-mouse still&mdash;because the father had
+come home sooner than was expected, and was milking his goats in the
+stable under the loft, and singing, which showed that he was in liquor,
+and not his usual affable, bland self. I could hear him plainly in my
+dream, tearing the heart out of that old folk-song called <i>La
+Smortina</i>&mdash;"The Pale Girl":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"T' ho la scia to e son contento</div>
+<div>Non m'in cresca niente, niente</div>
+<div>Altro giovine hogi&agrave; in mente</div>
+<div>Pin belino assai di te."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And I woke up tingling with the remembered fear (it was a mixed feeling,
+half fright, and half an insane desire to burst out laughing to see what
+the old man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> would do), and I looked over the rim of my hat, and there
+walking toward me, in the baby-blue and pink of the bright dawn (but a
+big way off), came a straggling line of naked niggers, headed by the It-god, Itself.</p>
+
+<p>One look told me that, one look at a great bulk of scarletness, that
+walked upright like a man. I didn't look twice, I scuttled out to my
+nearest mine, lighted the fuse, tumbled back into the hollow, fingers in
+ears, face screwed up as tight as a face can be screwed, and waited.</p>
+
+<p>When it was over, and things had stopped falling, I looked out again.
+The tropic dawn remained as before, but the immediate landscape was
+somewhat altered for the worse, and in the distance were neither niggers
+nor the god. It is possible that I stuck my thumbs into my armpits and
+waggled my fingers. I don't remember. But it's no mean sensation to have
+pitted yourself against a strange god, with perfectly round heels, and to have won out.</p>
+
+<p>About noon, though, the god came back, fortified perhaps by reflection,
+and more certainly by a nigger who walked behind him with a spear.
+You've seen the donkey boys in Cairo make the donkeys trot?... This time
+I put my trust in the Colt forty-five; and looked the god over, as he
+came reluctantly nearer and nearer, singing a magic.</p>
+
+<p>Do you know the tragedian walk as taken off on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> comic opera stage,
+the termination of each strutting, dragging step accentuated by cymbals
+smashed together F-F-F? That was how the god walked. He was all in
+scarlet, with a long feather sticking straight up from a scarlet cap.
+And the magic he sang (now that you knew the sounds he made were those
+of a tenor voice, you knew that it was a glorious tenor voice) was a
+magic out of "A&iuml;da." It was the magic that what's-his-name sings when he
+is appointed commander-in-chief of all the Egyptian forces. Now the
+niggers may have thought that their god's magics were stronger than my
+dynamite. But the god, though very, very simple, was not so simple as
+that. He was an Italian colored man, black bearded, and shaped like
+Caruso, only more so, if that is possible; and he sang, because he was a
+singing machine, but he couldn't have talked. I'll bet on that. He was too plumb afraid.</p>
+
+<p>When he reached the hole that the dynamite had made in the landscape&mdash;I
+showed myself; trying to look as much like a dove of peace as possible.</p>
+
+<p>"Come on alone," I called in Italian, "and have a bite of lunch."</p>
+
+<p>That stopped his singing, but I had to repeat. Well he had an argument
+with the nigger, that finished with all the gestures that two monkeys
+similarly situated would have made at each other, and after a time the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+nigger sat down, and the god came on alone, puffing and indignant.</p>
+
+<p>We talked in Dago, but I'll give the English of it, so's not to appear
+to be showing off.</p>
+
+<p>"Who and what in the seventh circle of hell <i>are</i> you?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed offended that I should not have known. But he gave his name,
+sure of his effect. "Signor &mdash;&mdash;" and the name sounded like that tower
+in Venice that fell down the other day.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't mean it!" I exclaimed joyfully. "Be seated," and, I added,
+being silly with joy and relief at having my awful devil turn into a
+silly child&mdash;"there may be some legacy&mdash;though trifling."</p>
+
+<p>Well, he sat down, and stuck his short, immense hirsute legs out, all
+comfy, and I, remembering the tracks on the beach, had a look at his
+feet. And I turned crimson with suppressed laughter. He had wooden
+cylinders three inches high strapped to his bare heels. They made him
+five feet five inches high instead of five feet two. They were just such
+heels (only clumsier and made of wood instead of cork and crimson
+morocco or silk) as <i>Siegfried</i> wears for mountain climbing, dragon
+fighting, or other deeds of derring-do. And with these heels to guide
+me, I sighed, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Signor Recent-Venetian-Tower, you have the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> beautiful pure golden
+tenor voice that I have ever heard in my life."</p>
+
+<p>Have you ever been suddenly embraced by a pile-driver, and kissed on
+both cheeks by a blacking-brush? I have. Then he held me by the
+shoulders at arm's length, and looked me in the eyes as if I had been a
+long-lost son returned at last. Then he gathered a kiss in his finger
+tips and flung it to the heavens. Then he asked if by any chance I had
+any spaghetti with me. He cried when I said that I had not; but quietly,
+not harassingly. And then we got down to real business, and found out
+about each other.</p>
+
+<p><i>He</i> was the prisoner of Prana Beach. The treasure that he had to share
+with his rescuer was his voice. Two nights a week during the season, at
+two thousand a night. But&mdash;There was a great big But.</p>
+
+<p>Signor What-I-said-before, his voice weakened by pneumonia, had taken a
+long travelling holiday to rest up. But his voice, instead of coming
+back, grew weaker and weaker, driving him finally into a suicidal
+artistic frenzy, during which he put on his full suit of evening
+clothes, a black pearl shirt stud, a tall silk hat, in the dead of
+night, and flung himself from the stern of a P. &amp; O. boat into the sea.
+He had no knowledge of swimming and expected to drown at once. But he
+was not built for drowning. The laws of buoyancy and displacement caused
+him to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> float upon his back, high out of the water, like an empty
+barrel. Nor was the water into which he had fallen as tepid as he had
+expected. From his description, with its accompaniment of shudderings
+and shiverings, the temperature must have been as low as 80&deg; Fahrenheit,
+which is pretty sharp for dagoes. Anyhow, the double shock of the cold
+and of not drowning instantly acted on his vocal chords. Without even
+trying, he said, he knew that his voice had come back. Picture the poor
+man's despair&mdash;overboard in the ocean, wanting to die because he had
+nothing to live for, and suddenly discovering that he had everything to
+live for. He asserts that he actually forgot the cold, and thought only
+of how to preserve that glorious instrument, his voice; not for himself
+but for mankind. But he could not think out a way, and he asserted that
+a passion of vain weeping and delirium, during which he kicked himself
+warm, was followed by a noble and godlike calm, during which, lying as
+easily upon the sea as on a couch, and inspired by the thought that some
+ear might catch the notes and die the happier for it, he lifted his
+divine voice and sang a swan song. After that he sang twenty-nine
+others. And then, in the very midst of <i>La Bella Napoli</i>, with which he
+intended to close (fearing to strain his voice if he sang any more), he
+thought of sharks.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p><p>Spurred by that thought, he claims to have kicked and beaten with his
+hands until he was insensible. Otherwise, he would, he said, have
+continued to float about placidly, singing swan songs at intervals
+until, at last, thinned by starvation to the sinking point, he would
+have floated no more.</p>
+
+<p>To shorten up. Signor You-know-what, either owing to his struggles, or
+to the sea breeze pressing against his stomach, came ashore on Prana
+Beach; was pounced upon by the niggers, stripped of his glad rags (the
+topper had been lost in the shuffle), and dropped into a hole eight feet
+deep, for safe-keeping. It was in this hole, buried in sand, that he
+found the flask I have told you about. Well, one day, for he had a bit
+of talent that way, he fell to sketching on his legs, knees, upper thigh
+and left forearm, using for ink something black that they had given him
+for breakfast. That night it rained; but next morning his drawings were
+as black and sharp as when he had made them; this, coupled with the
+flask, furnished him with an idea, a very forlorn and hopeless one, but
+an idea for all that. He had, however, nothing to write his C Q D on but
+himself, none of which (for he held himself in trust for his Maker as a
+complete whole, he explained) he intended to part with.</p>
+
+<p>It was in trying to climb out of the hole that he tore a flap of skin
+from his left thigh just above the knee,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> clean off, except for one
+thread by which it hung. In less than two days he had screwed up his
+courage to breaking that thread with a sudden jerk. He cured his bit of
+hide in a novel way. Every morning he cried on it, and when the tears
+had dried, leaving their minute residue of salt, he would work the raw
+skin with his thumb and a bit of stick he had found. Then a nigger boy,
+one beast of a hot day, lowered him a gourd of sea-water as a joke, and
+Signor What-we-agreed-on, made salt of that while the sun shone, and
+finished his job of tanning.</p>
+
+<p>The next time he was given a black breakfast, he wrote his hurry-call
+message and corked it into the flask. And there only remained the
+somewhat herculean task of getting that flask flung into the sea.</p>
+
+<p>You'll never believe how it got there finally. But I'll tell you for all
+that. A creek flowed near the dungeon in which the famous tenor was
+incarcerated. And one night of cloud-burst that creek burst its
+cerements, banks I mean, filled the singing man's prison in two jerks of
+a lamb's tail, and floated both him and his flask out of it. He grounded
+as usual, but the flask must have been rushed down to the sea. For in
+the sea it was found, calmly bobbing, and less than two years later. A
+nigger fisherman found it, and gave it to me, in exchange for a
+Waterbury watch. He tried to make me take his daughter instead, but I wouldn't.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p><p>Signor What-you-would-forget-if-I-told-you wasn't put back in his
+dungeon till the rainy season was at an end. Instead he was picketed. A
+rope ran from his wrists, which were tied behind his back, and was
+inserted through the handles (it had a pair of them like ears just above
+the trunnions) of a small bronze cannon, that had Magellan's name and
+the arms of Spain engraved around the touch-hole. And thus picketed, he
+was rained on, joked on, and abused until dry weather. Then, it was the
+first happiness that he had had among them, they served him one day with
+a new kind of fish that had begun to run in the creek. It tasted like
+Carlton sole, he said. And it made him feel so good that, being quite by
+himself and the morning blue and warm, he began, sitting on his little
+cannon, to hum an aria. Further inspirited by his own tunefulness, he
+rose (and of course struck an attitude) and opened his mouth and sang.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, how good it was to hear&mdash;as he put it himself&mdash;after all those
+months of silence!</p>
+
+<p>Well, the people he belonged to came running up with eyes like saucers
+and mouths open, and they squatted at his feet in a semicircle, and
+women came and children. They had wonder in their faces and fear. Last
+came the old chief, who was too old to walk, and was carried always in a
+chair which two of his good-natured sons-in-law made with their hands.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+And the old chief, when he had listened awhile with his little bald
+monkey head cocked on one side, signed to be put down. And he stood on
+his feet and walked.</p>
+
+<p>And he took out a little khris and walked over to the Divo, and cut the
+ropes that bound him, and knelt before him and kowtowed, and pressed the
+late prisoner's toes with his forehead. Then&mdash;and this was terribly
+touching, my informant said, and reminded him of St. Petersburg&mdash;one of
+the old chief's granddaughters, a little brown slip of a girl, slender
+and shapely as a cigar, flung her arms round his neck, and hung&mdash;just
+hung. When they tried to get her away she kicked at them, but she never
+so much as once changed the expression of her upturned face, which was
+one of adoration. Well, the people hollered and made drums of their
+cheeks and beat on them, and the first thing Signor Recent-Disaster knew
+he was being dressed in a scarlet coat that had belonged to a British
+colonel dead this hundred years. The girl by now had had to let go and
+had dropped at his feet like a ripe guava&mdash;and he was being ushered into
+the largest bamboo-legged house that the place boasted, and told as
+plainly as round eyes, gesticulations, and moans can, that the house was
+his to enjoy. Then they began to give him things. First his own dress
+suit, ruined by sea-water and shrinking, his formerly boiled shirt, his
+red silk underwear still wearable, his black pearl stud and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> every
+stiver of gold, silver, copper, and English banknotes that had been
+found in his pockets. They gave him knives, rough silver bangles, heaps
+of elaborate mats, a handful of rather disappointing pearls, a scarlet
+head-dress with a feather that had been a famous chief's, a gun without
+a lock, and, what pleased him most (must have), a bit of looking-glass
+big enough to see half of his face in at a time. They allowed him to
+choose his own house-keeper; and, although several beauties were knocked
+down in the ensuing riot, he managed to satisfy them that his
+unalterable choice rested upon the little lady who had been the most
+convincing in her recognition of his genius, and&mdash;what's the
+line?&mdash;"Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die."</p>
+
+<p>Well, he offered to put me up, and show me how the gods keep house. I
+counter-offered to keep him with me, by force of dynamite, carry him
+back to civilization, and go shares on his voice, as per circular. And
+this is where the big But comes in. My offer was pestilential; he shunned it.</p>
+
+<p>"You shall have my black pearl stud for your trouble," he said. "I
+bought her years ago in a pawnshop at Aix. But <i>me</i>&mdash;no. I have found my
+niche, and my temple. But you shall be the judge of that."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't <i>want</i> to escape?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span></p><p>His mouth curled in scorn at the very idea.</p>
+
+<p>"Try to think of how much spaghetti you could buy for a song."</p>
+
+<p>His eyes and mouth twitched. But he sighed, and shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know," said he, "when you demonstrated against us with your
+dynamite it was instantly concluded that you were some new kind of a god
+come to inhabit the beach. It was proposed that I go against you singing
+a charm that should drive you away. But, as you saw, I came only at the
+spear's point. Do you think I was afraid? I was; but not of your
+godship. I had seen your tracks, I had seen the beach rise to your
+explosive, and I knew that as one Christian gentleman I had nothing on
+the lines of violence to fear from another. Your explosion was like a
+note, asking me when I should next call to bring fewer attendants. I
+<i>was</i> afraid; I was afraid that you were not one, alone, but several,
+and that you would compel me to return with you to a world in which,
+take it for all and all, the good things, such as restaurants,
+artificial heat, Havana cigars, and Steinway pianos, are nullified by
+climatic conditions unsuited to vocal chords, fatal jealousies among
+members of the same artistic professions, and a public that listens but
+does not hear; or that hears and does not listen. But you shall stop
+with me a few days, in my house. You shall see for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> yourself that among
+all artists I alone enjoy an appreciation and solicitude that are better than gold."</p>
+
+<p>Signor Shall-we-let-it-go-at-that had not lied to me. And all he asked
+was, with many apologies, that I should treat him with a certain
+reverence, a little as if he were a conqueror. So all the way to the
+village I walked two paces right flank rear, and wore a solemn and
+subdued expression. My host approached the dwellings of his people with
+an exaggeration of tragi-comic stride, dragging his high-heeled feet as
+Henry Irving used, raising and advancing his chest to the bursting
+point, and holding his head so proudly that the perpendicular feather of
+his cap leaned backward at a sharp angle. With his scarlet soldier's
+coat, all burst along the seams, and not meeting by a yard over his red
+silk undershirt, with his bit of broken mirror dangling at his waist
+like a lady's jewelled "vanity set," with his china-ink black mustache
+and superb beard, he presented for all the purposes of the time and
+place an appearance in keeping with the magnificence of his voice and of his dreams.</p>
+
+<p>When we got among the houses, from which came a great peeping of shy
+eyes, the Signor suddenly raised his fingers to his throat and sounded a
+shocking b-r-rr-rrr of alarm and anxiety. Then there arose a murmur,
+almost pitiful it was so heartfelt, as of bees who fear an irreparable
+tragedy in the hive. The old<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> chief came out of the council-house upon
+the hands of his good-natured sons-in-law, and he was full of tenderness
+and concern. I saw my friend escorted into his own dwelling by ladies
+who sighed and commiserated. But already the call for help had reached
+the tenor's slip of a wife; and she, with hands that shook, was
+preparing a compress of leaves that smelt of cinnamon and cloves. I,
+too, showed solicitude, and timidly helped my conqueror to the heaped
+mats upon which he was wont to recline in the heat of the day. He had
+made himself a pair of very round terrified eyes, and he had not taken
+the compress from his throat. But he spoke quietly, and as one possessed
+of indomitable fortitude. In Malay he told his people that it was
+"nothing, just a little&mdash;brrr&mdash;soreness and thickening," and he let slip
+such a little moan as monkeys make. To me he spoke in Italian.</p>
+
+<p>"I shall have to submit to a bandage," said he. "But there is nothing
+the matter with my throat" (slight monkey moan here for benefit of
+adorers), "absolutely nothing. I have invented a slight soreness so&mdash;so
+that you could see for yourself ... so that you could see for
+yourself.... If you were to count those here assembled and those
+assembled without, you would number our entire population, including
+children and babes in arms" (a slight moan while <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>compress is being
+readjusted over Adam's apple by gentle, tremulous brown fingers), "and
+among these, my friend, are no dissenters. There is none here to stand
+forth and say that on Tuesday night Signor And-he-pronounced-it's
+singing was lacking in those golden tones for which we used to look to
+him. His voice, indeed, is but a skeleton of its former self, and shall
+we say that the public must soon tire of a singer with so pronounced a tendency to flat?</p>
+
+<p>"Here in this climate," he continued, "my voice by dint of constant and
+painstaking care and practice has actually improved. I should not have
+said that this was possible; but a man must believe experience.... And
+then these dear, amiable people are one in their acclaim of me; although
+I sometimes grieve, not for myself, but for them, to think that they can
+never <i>really</i> know what they've got...."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>I sometimes wonder how the god of Prana Beach will be treated when he
+begins to age and to lose his voice. It worries me&mdash;a little.</p>
+
+<p>The black pearl stud? Of course not, you wretched materialist. I sold it
+in the first good market I came to. No good ever came of material
+possessions, and always much payment of storage bills. But I have a
+collection of memories that I am fond of.</p>
+
+<p>Still, on second thought, and if I had the knack of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> setting them
+straight on paper, I'd part even with them for a consideration,
+especially if I felt that I could reach such an appreciative audience as
+that of Prana Beach, which sits upon its heels in worship and humility
+and listens to the divine fireworks of Signor I-have-forgotten-too.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="TWO_BUSINESS_WOMEN" id="TWO_BUSINESS_WOMEN"></a>TWO BUSINESS WOMEN</h2>
+
+<p>They engaged themselves to be married when they were so young they
+couldn't tell anybody about it for fear of being laughed at; and if I
+mentioned their years to you, you would laugh at me. They thought they
+were full-grown, but they weren't even that. When they were finally
+married they couldn't either of them have worn the clothes they got
+engaged in. The day they got engaged they wore suits made of white
+woollen blankets, white knitted toques, and white knitted sashes. It was
+because they were dressed exactly alike that they first got excited
+about each other. And Cynthia said: "You look just like a snowman." And
+G. G.&mdash;which was his strange name&mdash;said: "You look just like a
+snowbird."</p>
+
+<p>G. G. was in Saranac for his health. Cynthia had come up for the
+holidays to skate and to skee and to coast, and to get herself engaged
+before she was full-grown to a boy who was so delicate that climate was
+more important for him than education. They met first at the rink. And
+it developed that if you crossed hands with G. G. and skated with him
+you skated almost as well as he did. He could teach a girl to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> waltz in
+five minutes; and he had a radiant laugh that almost moved you to tears
+when you went to bed at night and got thinking about it. Cynthia had
+never seen a boy with such a beautiful round head and such beautiful
+white teeth and such bright red cheeks. She always said that she loved
+him long before he loved her. As a matter of fact, it happened to them
+both right away. As one baby, unabashed and determined, embraces a
+strange baby&mdash;and is embraced&mdash;so, from their first meeting in the great
+cold stillness of the North Woods, their young hearts snuggled together.</p>
+
+<p>G. G. was different from other boys. To begin with, he had been born at
+sea. Then he had lived abroad and learned the greatest quantity of
+foreign languages and songs. Then he had tried a New England
+boarding-school and had been hurt playing games he was too frail to
+play. And doctors had stethoscoped him and shaken their heads over him.
+And after that there was much naming of names which, instead of
+frightening him, were magic to his ear&mdash;Arizona, California,
+Saranac&mdash;but, because G. G.'s father was a professional man and
+perfectly square and honest, there wasn't enough money to send G. G. far
+from New York and keep him there and visit him every now and then. So
+Saranac was the place chosen for him to get well in; and it seemed a
+little hard, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>because there was almost as much love of sunshine and
+warmth and flowers and music in G. G. as there was patience and courage.</p>
+
+<p>The day they went skeeing together&mdash;which was the day after they had
+skated together&mdash;he told Cynthia all about himself, very simply and
+naturally, as a gentleman farmer should say: "This is the dairy; this is
+the blacksmith shop; this is the chicken run." And the next day, very
+early, when they stood knee-deep in snow, armed with shot-guns and
+waiting for some dogs that thought they were hounds to drive rabbits for
+them to shoot at, he told her that nothing mattered so long as you were
+happy and knew that you were happy, because when these two stars came
+into conjunction you were bound to get well.</p>
+
+<p>A rabbit passed. And G. G. laid his mitten upon his lips and shook his
+head; and he whispered:</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't shoot one for anything in the world."</p>
+
+<p>And she said: "Neither would I."</p>
+
+<p>Then she said: "If you don't shoot why did you come?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Miss Snowbird," he said, "don't I look why I came? Do I have to say it?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked and she looked. And their feet were getting colder every
+moment and their hearts warmer. Then G. G. laughed aloud&mdash;bright, sudden
+music in the forest. Snow, balanced to the fineness of a hair,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> fell
+from the bowed limbs of trees. Then there was such stillness as may be
+in Paradise when souls go up to the throne to be forgiven. Then, far
+off, one dog that thought he was a hound began to yap and thought he was
+belling; but still G. G. looked into the snowbird's eyes and she into
+his, deeper and deeper, until neither had any secret of soul from the
+other. So, upon an altar cloth, two wax candles burn side by side, with clear, pure light.</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia had been well brought up, but she came of rich, impatient stock,
+and never until the present moment had she thought very seriously about
+God. Now, however, when she saw the tenderness there was in G. G.'s eyes
+and the smile of serene joyousness that was upon his lips, she
+remembered the saying that God has made man&mdash;and boys&mdash;in His image&mdash;and
+understood what it meant.</p>
+
+<p>She said: "I know why you think you've come."</p>
+
+<p>"Think?" he said. "Think!"</p>
+
+<p>And then the middle ends of his eyebrows rose&mdash;all tender and quizzical;
+and with one mitten he clutched at his breast&mdash;just over his heart. And he said:</p>
+
+<p>"If only I could get it out I would give it to you!"</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia, too, began to look melting tender and wondrous quizzical; and
+she bent her right arm forward and plucked at its sleeve as if she were
+looking for something. Then, in a voice of dismay:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p><p>"Only three days ago it was still there," she said; "and now it's
+gone&mdash;I've lost it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said G. G. "You don't suspect me of having purloined&mdash;" His voice broke.</p>
+
+<p>"We're only kids," said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said he; "but you're the dearest kid!"</p>
+
+<p>"Since you've taken my heart," said she, "you'll not want to give it
+back, will you? I think that would break it."</p>
+
+<p>"I oughtn't to have taken it!" said G. G.</p>
+
+<p>And then on his face she saw the first shadow that ever he had let her
+see of doubt and of misgiving.</p>
+
+<p>"Listen!" he said. "My darling! I think that I shall get well.... I
+think that, once I am well, I shall be able to work very hard. I have
+nothing. I love you so that I think even angels don't want to do right
+more than I do. Is that anything to offer? Not very much."</p>
+
+<p>"Nobody in all the world," said she, "will ever have the chance to offer
+me anything else&mdash;just because I'm a kid doesn't mean that I don't know
+the look of forever when I see it."</p>
+
+<p>"Is it really forever?" he said. "For you too?"</p>
+
+<p>"For me&mdash;surely!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," said he, "what shall I think of to promise you?"</p>
+
+<p>His face was a flash of ecstasy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p><p>"You don't even have to promise that you will get well," she said. "I
+know you will try your hardest. No matter what happens&mdash;we're final&mdash;and
+I shall stick to you always, and nothing shall take you from me, and
+nobody.... When I am of age I shall tell my papa about us and then we
+shall be married to each other! And meanwhile you shall write to me
+every day and I shall write to you three times every day!" Her breath
+came like white smoke between her parted lips and she stood valiant and
+sturdy in the snow&mdash;a strong, resolute girl, built like a
+boy&mdash;clean-cut, crystal-pure, and steel-true. A shot sounded and there
+came to them presently the pungent, acid smell of burnt powder.</p>
+
+<p>"And we shall never hurt things or kill them," said G. G. "And every day
+when I've been good I shall kiss your feet and your hands."</p>
+
+<p>"And when I've been good," she said, "you'll smile at me the way you're
+smiling now&mdash;and it won't be necessary to die and go to Heaven to see
+what the gentlemen angels look like."</p>
+
+<p>"But," cried G. G., "whoever heard of going to Heaven? It comes to
+people. It's here."</p>
+
+<p>"And for us," she said, "it's come to stay."</p>
+
+<p>All the young people came to the station to see Cynthia off and G. G.
+had to content himself with looking things at her. And then he went back
+to his room<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> and undressed and went to bed. Because for a week he had
+done all sorts of things that he shouldn't have done, just to be with
+Cynthia&mdash;all the last day he had had fever and it had been very hard for
+him to look like a joyous boy angel&mdash;he knew by experience that he was
+in for a "time." It is better that we leave him behind closed doors with
+his doctors and his temperature. We may knock every morning and ask how
+he is, and we shall be told that he is no better. He was even delirious
+at times. And it is only worth while going into this setback of G. G's
+because there are miracles connected with it&mdash;his daily letter to Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p>Each day she had his letter&mdash;joyous, loving, clearly writ, and full of
+flights into silver-lined clouds and the plannings of Spanish castles.
+Each day G. G. wrote his letter and each day he descended a little
+farther into the Valley of the Shadow, until at last he came to Death
+Gate&mdash;and then rested, a voyager undecided whether to go on or to go
+back. Who may know what it cost him to write his letter, sitting there
+at the roadside!</p>
+
+<p>His mother was with him. It was she who took the letter from his hands
+when he sank back into his pillows; and they thought for a little that
+he had gone from that place&mdash;for good and all. It was she who put it
+into the envelope and who carried it with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> her own hands to the
+post-office. Because G. G. had said: "To get there, it must go by the
+night's mail, Mumsey."</p>
+
+<p>G. G.'s mother didn't read the letter; but you may be sure she noted
+down the name and address in her heart of hearts, and that for the girl
+who seemed to mean so much to G. G. she developed upon the spot a
+heavenly tenderness, mixed with a heavenly jealousy.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>One day there came to G. G., in convalescence&mdash;it was after his mother
+had gone back to New York&mdash;a great, thick package containing photographs
+and a letter. I think the letter contained rouge&mdash;because it made G.
+G.'s cheeks so red.</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia had collected all the pictures she could find of herself in her
+father's house and sent them to G. G. There were pictures of her in the
+longest baby clothes and in the shortest. There were pictures posed for
+occasions, pictures in fancy clothes, and a quart of kodaks. He had her
+there on his knees&mdash;riding, driving, diving, skating, walking, sitting
+on steps, playing with dogs, laughing, looking sad, talking, dimpling,
+smiling. There were pictures that looked right at G. G., no matter at
+what angle he held them.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> There were pictures so delicious of her that
+he laughed aloud for delight.</p>
+
+<p>All the stages of her life passed before his eyes&mdash;over and over&mdash;all
+day long; and, instead of growing more and more tired, he grew more and
+more refreshed. He made up his spotless mind to be worthy of her and to
+make, for her to bear, a name of which nobody should be able to say anything unkind.</p>
+
+<p>If G. G. had had very little education he had made great friends with
+some of the friendliest and most valuable books that had ever been
+written. And he made up his mind, lying at full length&mdash;the livelong
+day&mdash;in the bright, cold air&mdash;his mittened hands plunged into deep
+pockets full of photographs&mdash;that, for her sake and to hasten that time
+when they might always be together, he would learn to write books,
+taking infinite pains. And he determined that these books should be as
+sweet and clean and honorable as he could make them. You see, G. G. had
+been under the weather so much and had suffered so much all alone by
+himself, with nobody to talk to, that his head was already full of
+stories about make-believe places and people that were just dying to get
+themselves written. So many things that are dead to most people had
+always been alive to him&mdash;leaves, flowers, fairies. He had always been a
+busy maker of verses, which was because melody, rhythm, and harmony had
+always been delicious to his ear. And he had had,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> as a little boy, a
+soprano voice that was as true as truth and almost as agile as a canary bird's.</p>
+
+<p>He decided, then, very deliberately&mdash;lying upon his back and healing
+that traitor lung of his&mdash;to be a writer. He didn't so decide entirely
+because that was what he had always wanted to be, but for many reasons.
+First place, he could say things to her through prose and verse that
+could not be expressed in sculpture, music, painting, groceries, or
+dry-goods. Second place, where she was, there his heart was sure to be;
+and where the heart is, there the best work is done. And, third place,
+he knew that the chances were against his ever living in dusty cities or
+in the places of business thereof.</p>
+
+<p>"I am so young," he wrote to her, "that I can begin at the beginning and
+learn to be anything&mdash;in time to be it! And so every morning now you
+shall think of G. G. out with his butterfly net, running after winged
+words. That's nonsense. I've a little pad and a big pencil, and a hot
+potato in my pocket for to warm the numb fingers at. And father's got an
+old typewriter in his office that's to be put in order for me; and
+nights I shall drum upon it and print off what was written down in the
+morning, and study to see why it's all wrong. I think I'll never write
+anything but tales about people who love each other. 'Cause a fellow
+wants to stick to what he knows about...."</p>
+
+<p>Though G. G. was not to see Cynthia again for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> whole year he didn't
+find any trouble in loving her a little more every day. To his mind's
+eye she was almost as vivid as if she had been standing right there in
+front of him. And as for her voice, that dwelt ever in his ear, like
+those lovely airs which, once heard, are only put aside with death. You
+may have heard your grandmother lilting to herself, over her mending,
+some song of men and maidens and violets that she had listened to in her
+girlhood and could never forget.</p>
+
+<p>And then, of course, everything that G. G. did was a reminder of
+Cynthia. With the help of one of Doctor Trudeau's assistants, who came
+every day to see how he was getting on, he succeeded in understanding
+very well what was the matter with him and under just what conditions a
+consumptive lung heals and becomes whole. To live according to the
+letter and spirit of the doctor's advice became almost a religion with him.</p>
+
+<p>For six hours of every day he sat on the porch of the house where he had
+rooms, writing on his little pad and making friends with the keen,
+clean, healing air. Every night the windows of his bedroom stood wide
+open, so that in the morning the water in his pitcher was a solid block.
+And he ate just the things he was told to&mdash;and willed himself to like
+milk and sugar, and snow and cold, and short days!</p>
+
+<p>In his writing he began to see progress. He was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> like a musical person
+beginning to learn an instrument; for, just as surely as there are
+scales to be run upon the piano before your virtuoso can weave music,
+binding the gallery gods with delicious meshes of sound, so in
+prose-writing there must be scales run, fingerings worked out, and
+harmonies mastered. For in a page of <i>lo bello stile</i> you will find
+trills and arpeggios, turns, grace notes, a main theme, a sub theme,
+thorough-bass, counterpoint, and form.</p>
+
+<p>Music is an easier art than prose, however. It comes to men as a more
+direct and concrete gift of those gods who delight in sound and the
+co-ordination of parts. The harmonies are more quickly grasped by the
+well-tuned ear. We can imagine the boy Mozart discoursing lovely music
+at the age of five; but we cannot imagine any one of such tender years
+compiling even a fifth-rate paragraph of prose.</p>
+
+<p>Those men who have mastered <i>lo bello stile</i> in music can tell us pretty
+clearly how the thing is done. There be rules. But your prose masters
+either cannot formulate what they have learned&mdash;or will not.</p>
+
+<p>G. G. was very patient; and there were times when the putting together
+of words was fascinating, like the putting together of those picture
+puzzles which were such a fad the other day. And such reading as he did
+was all in one book&mdash;the dictionary. For hours, guided by his nice ear
+for sound, he applied himself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> to learning the derivatives and exact
+meanings of new words&mdash;or he looked up old words and found that they were new.</p>
+
+<p>As for his actual compositions, he had only the ambition to make them as
+workmanlike as he could. He made little landscapes; he drew little
+interiors. He tried to get people up and down stairs in the fewest words
+that would make the picture. And when he thought that he had scored a
+little success he would count the number of words he had used and
+determine to achieve the same effect with the use of only half that number.</p>
+
+<p>Well, G. G.'s lung healed again; and this time he was very careful not
+to overdo. He had gained nine pounds, he wrote to Cynthia&mdash;"saved them"
+was the way he put it; and he was determined that this new tissue, worth
+more than its weight in gold, should go to bank and earn interest for
+him&mdash;and compound interest.</p>
+
+<p>"Shall I get well?" he asked that great dreamer who dreamed that there
+was hope for people who had never hoped before&mdash;and who has lived to see
+his dream come true; and the great dreamer smiled and said:</p>
+
+<p>"G. G., if growing boys are good boys and do what they are told, and
+have any luck at all&mdash;they always get well!"</p>
+
+<p>Then G. G. blushed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p><p>"And when I am well can I live where I please&mdash;and&mdash;and get
+married&mdash;and all that sort of thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"You can live where you please, marry and have children; and if you
+aren't a good husband and a good father I dare say you'll live to be
+hanged at ninety. But if I were you, G. G., I'd stick by the Adirondacks
+until you're old enough to&mdash;know better."</p>
+
+<p>And G. G. went back to his rooms in great glee and typewrote a story
+that he had finished as well as he could, and sent it to a magazine. And
+six days later it came back to him, with a little note from the editor, who said:</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing wrong with your story except youth. If you say so we'll
+print it. We like it. But, personally, and believing that I have your
+best interests at heart, I advise you to wait, to throw this story into
+your scrap basket, and to study and to labor until your mind and your
+talent are mature. For the rest, I think you are going to do some fine
+things. This present story isn't that&mdash;it's not fine. At the same time,
+it is so very good in some ways that we are willing to leave its
+publication or its destruction to your discretion."</p>
+
+<p>G. G. threw his story into the scrap basket and went to bed with a
+brand-new notion of editors.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said he to the cold darkness&mdash;and his voice was full of awe and
+astonishment&mdash;"they're&mdash;alive!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Cynthia couldn't get at G. G. and she made up her mind that she must get
+at something that belonged to him&mdash;or die. She had his letter, of
+course, and his kodaks; and these spoke the most eloquent language to
+her&mdash;no matter what they said or how they looked&mdash;but she wanted somehow
+or other to worm herself deeper into G. G.'s life. To find somebody, for
+instance, who knew all about him and would enjoy talking about him by
+the hour. Now there are never but two people who enjoy sitting by the
+hour and saying nice things about any man&mdash;and these, of course, are the
+woman who bore him and the woman who loves him. Fathers like their sons
+well enough&mdash;sometimes&mdash;and will sometimes talk about them and praise
+them; but not always. So it seemed to Cynthia that the one and only
+thing worth doing, under the circumstances, was to make friends with G.
+G.'s mother. To that end, Cynthia donned a warm coat of pony-skin and
+drove in a taxicab to G. G.'s mother's address, which she had long since
+looked up in the telephone book.</p>
+
+<p>"If she isn't alone," said Cynthia, "I shan't know what to say or what to do."</p>
+
+<p>And she hesitated, with her thumb hovering about<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> the front-door
+bell&mdash;as a humming-bird hovers at a flower.</p>
+
+<p>Then she said: "What does it matter? Nobody's going to eat me." And she
+rang the bell.</p>
+
+<p>G. G.'s mother was at home. She was alone. She was sitting in G. G.'s
+father's library, where she always did sit when she was alone. It was
+where she kept most of her pictures of G. G.'s father and of G. G.,
+though she had others in her bedroom; and in her dressing-room she had a
+dapple-gray horse of wood that G. G. had galloped about on when he was
+little. She had a sweet face, full of courage and affection. And
+everything in her house was fresh and pretty, though there wasn't
+anything that could have cost very much. G. G.'s father was a lawyer. He
+was more interested in leaving a stainless name behind him than a pot of
+money. And, somehow, fruit doesn't tumble off your neighbor's tree and
+fall into your own lap&mdash;unless you climb the tree when nobody is looking
+and give the tree a sound shaking. I might have said of G. G., in the
+very beginning, that he was born of poor <i>and</i> honest parents. It would
+have saved all this explanation.</p>
+
+<p>G. G.'s mother didn't make things hard for Cynthia. One glance was
+enough to tell her that dropping into the little library out of the blue
+sky was not a pretty girl but a blessed angel&mdash;not a rich man's
+daughter<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> but a treasure. It wasn't enough to give one hand to such a
+maiden. G. G.'s mother gave her two. But she didn't kiss her. She felt
+things too deeply to kiss easily.</p>
+
+<p>"I've come to talk about G. G.," said Cynthia. "I couldn't help it. I
+think he's the <i>dearest</i> boy!"</p>
+
+<p>She finished quite breathless&mdash;and if there had been any Jacqueminot
+roses present they might have hung their lovely heads in shame and left the room.</p>
+
+<p>"G. G. has shown me pictures of you," said his mother. "And once, when
+we thought we were going to lose him, he used his last strength to write
+to you. I mailed the letter. That is a long time ago. Nearly two years.</p>
+
+<p>"And I didn't know that he'd been ill in all that time," said Cynthia;
+"he never told me."</p>
+
+<p>"He would have cut off his hand sooner than make you anxious. That was
+why he <i>would</i> write his daily letter to you. That one must have been
+almost as hard to write as cutting off a hand."</p>
+
+<p>"He writes to me every day," said Cynthia, "and I write to him; but I
+haven't seen him for a year and I don't feel as if I could stand it much
+longer. When he gets well we're going to be married. And if he doesn't
+get well pretty soon we're going to be married anyway."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother. "You know that wouldn't be right!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p><p>"I don't know," said Cynthia; "and if anybody thinks I'm going to be
+tricked out of the man I love by a lot of silly little germs they are
+very much mistaken!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, my dear," said G. G.'s mother, "G. G. can't support a wife&mdash;not
+for a long time anyway. We have nothing to give him. And, of course, he
+can't work now&mdash;and perhaps can't for years."</p>
+
+<p>"I, too," said Cynthia&mdash;with proper pride&mdash;"have parents. Mine are
+rolling in money. Whenever I ask them for anything they always give it
+to me without question."</p>
+
+<p>"You have never asked them," said G. G.'s mother, "for a sick, penniless boy."</p>
+
+<p>"But I shall," said Cynthia, "the moment G. G.'s well&mdash;and maybe sooner."</p>
+
+<p>There was a little silence.</p>
+
+<p>Then G. G.'s mother leaned forward and took both of Cynthia's hands in hers.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't wonder at him," she said&mdash;"I don't. I was ever so jealous of
+you, but I'm not any more. I think you're the <i>dearest</i> girl!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" cried Cynthia. "I am so glad! But will G. G.'s father like me too?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has never yet failed," said G. G.'s mother, "to like with his whole
+heart anything that was stainless and beautiful."</p>
+
+<p>"Is he like G. G.?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p><p>"He has the same beautiful round head, but he has a rugged look that G.
+G. will never have. He has a lion look. He might have been a terrible
+tyrant if he hadn't happened, instead, to be a saint."</p>
+
+<p>And she showed Cynthia, side by side, pictures of the father and the
+boy.</p>
+
+<p>"They have such valiant eyes!" said Cynthia.</p>
+
+<p>"There is nothing base in my young men," said G. G.'s mother.</p>
+
+<p>Then the two women got right down to business and began an interminable
+conversation of praise. And sometimes G. G.'s mother's eyes cried a
+little while the rest of her face smiled and she prattled like a brook.
+And the meeting ended with a great hug, in which G. G.'s mother's tiny
+feet almost parted company with the floor.</p>
+
+<p>And it was arranged that they two should fly up to Saranac and be with
+G. G. for a day.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>It wasn't from shame that G. G. signed another name than his own to the
+stories that he was making at the rate of one every two months. He
+judged calmly and dispassionately that they were "going to be pretty
+good some day," and that it would never be necessary for him to live in
+a city. He signed his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> stories with an assumed name because he was full
+of dramatic instinct. He wanted to be able&mdash;just the minute he was
+well&mdash;to say to Cynthia:</p>
+
+<p>"Let us be married!" Then she was to say: "Of course, G. G.; but what
+are we going to live on?" And G. G. was going to say: "Ever hear of so-and-so?"</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Cynthia</span>: Goodness gracious! Sakes alive! Yes; I should think I had! And,
+except for you, darlingest G. G., I think he's the very greatest man in all the world!</p>
+
+<p>G. G.: Goosey-Gander, know that he and I are one and the same
+person&mdash;and that we've saved seventeen hundred dollars to get married on!</p>
+
+<p>(Tableau not to be seen by the audience.)</p>
+
+<p>So far as keeping Cynthia and his father and mother in ignorance of the
+fledgling wings he was beginning to flap, G. G. succeeded admirably; but
+it might have been better to have told them all in the beginning.</p>
+
+<p>Now G. G.'s seventeen hundred dollars was a huge myth. He was writing
+short stories at the rate of six a year and he had picked out to do
+business with one of the most dignified magazines in the world.
+Dignified people do not squander money. The magazine in question paid G.
+G. from sixty to seventy dollars apiece for his stories and was much too
+dignified<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> to inform him that plenty of other magazines&mdash;very frivolous
+and not in the least dignified&mdash;would have been ashamed to pay so little
+for anything but the poems, which all magazines use to fill up blank
+spaces. So, even in his own ambitious and courageous mind, a "married
+living" seemed a very long way off.</p>
+
+<p>He refused to be discouraged, however. His health was too good for that.
+The doctor pointed to him with pride as a patient who followed
+instructions to the letter and was not going to die of the disease which
+had brought him to Saranac. And they wrote to G. G's father&mdash;who was
+finding life very expensive&mdash;that, if he could keep G. G. at Saranac, or
+almost anywhere out of New York, for another year or two, they
+guaranteed&mdash;as much as human doctors can&mdash;that G. G. would then be as
+sound as a bell and fit to live anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>This pronouncement was altogether too much of a good thing for Fate. As
+G. G's father walked up-town from his office, Fate raised a dust in his
+face which, in addition to the usual ingredients of city dust, contained
+at least one thoroughly compatible pair of pneumonia germs. These went
+for their honey-moon on a pleasant, warm journey up G. G's father's left
+nostril and to house-keeping in his lungs. In a few hours they raised a
+family of several hundred thousand bouncing baby germs; and these grew
+up in a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> few minutes and began to set up establishments of their own
+right and left.</p>
+
+<p>G. G.'s father admitted that he had a "heavy cold on the chest." It was
+such a heavy cold that he became delirious, and doctors came and sent
+for nurses; and there was laid in the home of G. G.'s father the
+corner-stone of a large edifice of financial disaster.</p>
+
+<p>He had never had a partner. His practice came to a dead halt. The
+doctors whom G. G.'s mother called in were, of course, the best she had
+ever heard of. They would have been leaders of society if their persons
+had been as fashionable as their prices. The corner drug store made its
+modest little profit of three or four hundred per cent on the drugs
+which were telephoned for daily. The day nurse rolled up twenty-five
+dollars a week and the night nurse thirty-five. The servant's wages
+continued as usual. The price of beef, eggs, vegetables, etc., rose. The
+interest on the mortgage fell due. And it is a wonder, considering how
+much he worried, that G. G.'s father ever lived to face his obligations.</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia, meanwhile, having heard that G. G. was surely going to get
+well, was so happy that she couldn't contain the news. And she proceeded
+to divulge it to her father.</p>
+
+<p>"Papa," she said, "I think I ought to tell you that years ago, at
+Saranac&mdash;that Christmas when I went<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> up with the Andersons&mdash;I met the
+man that I am going to marry. He was a boy then; but now we're both
+grown up and we feel just the same about each other."</p>
+
+<p>And she told her father G. G.'s name and that he had been very delicate,
+but that he was surely going to get well. Cynthia's father, who had
+always given her everything she asked for until now, was not at all enthusiastic.</p>
+
+<p>"I can't prevent your marrying any one you determine to marry, Cynthia,"
+he said. "Can this young man support a wife?"</p>
+
+<p>"How could he!" she exclaimed&mdash;"living at Saranac and not being able to
+work, and not having any money to begin with! But surely, if the way
+<i>we</i> live is any criterion, you could spare us some money&mdash;couldn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You wish me to say that I will support a delicate son-in-law whom I
+have never seen? Consult your intelligence, Cynthia."</p>
+
+<p>"I have my allowance," she said, her lips curling.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said her father, "while you live at home and do as you're told."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, papa, don't tell me that you're going to behave like a lugubrious
+parent in a novel! Don't tell me that you are going to cut me off with a shilling!"</p>
+
+<p>"I shan't do that," he said gravely; "it will be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> without a shilling."
+But he tempered this savage statement with a faint smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Papa, dear, is this quite definite? Are you talking in your right mind
+and do you really mean what you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose you talk the matter over with your mother&mdash;she's always
+indulged you in every way. See what she says."</p>
+
+<p>It developed that neither of Cynthia's parents was enthusiastic at the
+prospect of her marrying a nameless young man&mdash;she had told them his
+name, but that was all she got for her pains&mdash;who hadn't a penny and who
+had had consumption, and might or might not be sound again. Personally
+they did not believe that consumption can be cured. It can be arrested
+for a time, they admitted, but it always comes back. Cynthia's mother
+even made a physiological attack on Cynthia's understanding, with the
+result that Cynthia turned indignantly pink and left the room, saying:</p>
+
+<p>"If the doctor thinks it's perfectly right and proper for us to marry I
+don't see the least point in listening to the opinions of excited and
+prejudiced amateurs."</p>
+
+<p>The ultimatum that she had from her parents was distinct, final, and painful.</p>
+
+<p>"Marry him if you like. We will neither forgive you nor support you."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p><p>They were perfectly calm with her&mdash;cool, affectionate, sensible, and
+worldly, as it is right and proper for parents to be. She told them they
+were wrong-headed, old-fashioned, and unintelligent; but as long as they
+hadn't made scenes and talked loud she found that she couldn't help
+loving them almost as much as she always had; but she loved G. G. very
+much more. And having definitely decided to defy her family, to marry G.
+G. and live happily ever afterward, she consulted her check-book and
+discovered that her available munition of war was something less than
+five hundred dollars&mdash;most of it owed to her dress-maker.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well!" she said; "she's always had plenty of money from me; she
+can afford to wait."</p>
+
+<p>And Cynthia wrote to her dress-maker, who was also her friend!</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><span class="smcap">My dear Celeste</span>: I have decided that you will have to afford to
+wait for your money. I have an enterprise in view which calls for
+all the available capital I have. Please write me a nice note and
+say that you don't mind a bit. Otherwise we shall stop being
+friends and I shall always get my clothes from somebody else. Let
+me know when the new models come....</p></blockquote>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>On her way down-town Cynthia stopped to see G. G.'s mother and found the
+whole household in the throes occasioned by its head's pneumonia.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p><p>"Why haven't you let me know?" exclaimed Cynthia. "There must be so
+many little things that I could have done to help you."</p>
+
+<p>Though the sick man couldn't have heard them if they had shouted, the
+two women talked in whispers, with their heads very close together.</p>
+
+<p>"He's better," said G. G.'s mother, "but yesterday they wanted me to
+send for G. G. 'No,' I said. 'You may have given him up, but I haven't.
+If I send for my boy it would look as if I had surrendered,' And almost
+at once, if you'll believe it, he seemed to shake off something that was
+trying to strangle him and took a turn for the better; and now they say
+that, barring some long names, he will get well.... It does look, my
+dear, as if death had seen that there was no use facing a thoroughly
+determined woman."</p>
+
+<p>At this point, because she was very much overwrought, G. G.'s mother had
+a mild little attack of hysteria; and Cynthia beat her on the back and
+shook her and kissed her until she was over it. Then G. G.'s mother told
+Cynthia about her financial troubles.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't us that matters," she said, "but that G. G. ought to have one
+more year in a first-rate climate; and it isn't going to be possible to
+give it to him. They say that he's well, my dear, absolutely well; but
+that now he should have a chance to build up and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> become strong and
+heavy, so that he can do a man's work in the world. As it is, we shall
+have to take him home to live; and you know what New York dust and
+climate can do to people who have been very, very ill and are still
+delicate and high-strung."</p>
+
+<p>"There's only one thing to do for the present," said Cynthia&mdash;"anybody
+with the least notion of business knows that&mdash;we must keep him at
+Saranac just as long as our credit holds out, mustn't we?&mdash;until the
+woman where he boards begins to act ugly and threatens to turn him out
+in the snow."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, but that would be dreadful!" said G. G.'s mother. Cynthia smiled in
+a superior way.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe," she said, "that you understand the first thing about
+business. Even my father, who is a prude about bills, says that all the
+business of the country is done on credit.... Now you're not going to be
+silly, are you?&mdash;and make G. G. come to New York before he has to?"</p>
+
+<p>"It will have to be pretty soon, I'm afraid," said G. G.'s mother.</p>
+
+<p>"Sooner than run such risks with any boy of mine," said Cynthia, with a
+high color, "I'd beg, I'd borrow, I'd forge, I'd lie&mdash;I'd steal!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't I know you would!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother. "My darling girl,
+you've got the noblest character&mdash;it's just shining in your eyes!"</p>
+
+<p>"There's another thing," said Cynthia: "I have to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> go down-town now on
+business, but you must telephone me around five o'clock and tell me how
+G. G.'s father is. And you must spend all your time between now and then
+trying to think up something really useful that I can do to help you.
+And"&mdash;here Cynthia became very mysterious&mdash;"I forbid you to worry about
+money until I tell you to!"</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia had a cousin in Wall Street; his name was Jarrocks Bell. He was
+twenty years older than Cynthia and he had been fond of her ever since
+she was born. He was a great, big, good-looking man, gruff without and
+tender within. Clever people, who hadn't made successful brokers,
+wondered how in the face of what they called his "obvious stupidity"
+Jarrocks Bell had managed to grow rich in Wall Street. The answer was
+obvious enough to any one who knew him intimately. To begin with, his
+stupidity was superficial. In the second place, he had studied bonds and
+stocks until he knew a great deal about them. Then, though a drinking
+man, he had a head like iron and was never moved by exhilaration to
+mention his own or anybody else's affairs. Furthermore, he was
+unscrupulously honest. He was so honest and blunt that people thought
+him brutal at times. Last and not least among the elements of his
+success was the fact that he himself never speculated.</p>
+
+<p>When the big men found out that there was in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> Wall Street a broker who
+didn't speculate himself, who didn't drink to excess, who was absolutely
+honest, and who never opened his mouth when it was better shut, they
+began to patronize that man's firm. In short, the moment Jarrocks Bell's
+qualities were discovered, Jarrocks Bell was made. So that now, in
+speculative years, his profits were enormous.</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia had always been fond of her big, blunt cousin, as he of her; and
+in her present trouble her thoughts flew to him as straight as a homing
+aeroplane to the landing-stage.</p>
+
+<p>Even a respectable broker's office is a noisome, embarrassing place, and
+among the clients are men whose eyes have become popped from staring at
+paper-tapes and pretty girls; but Cynthia had no more fear of men than a
+farmer's daughter has of cows, and she flashed through Jarrocks's outer
+office&mdash;preceded by a very small boy&mdash;with her color unchanged and only
+her head a little higher than usual.</p>
+
+<p>Jarrocks must have wondered to the point of vulgar curiosity what the
+deuce had brought Cynthia to see him in the busiest hour of a very busy
+day; but he said "Hello, Cynthia!" as naturally as if they two had been
+visiting in the same house and he had come face to face with her for the
+third or fourth time that morning.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose," said Cynthia, "that you are <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>dreadfully busy; but, Jarrocks
+dear, my affairs are so much more important to me than yours can
+possibly be to you&mdash;do you mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"May I smoke?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I don't mind. What's your affair, Cynthia&mdash;money or the heart?"</p>
+
+<p>"Both, Jarrocks." And she told him pretty much what the reader has
+already learned. As for Jarrocks's listening, he was a perfect study of
+himself. He laughed gruffly when he ought to have cried; and when
+Cynthia tried to be a little humorous he looked very solemn and not
+unlike the big bronze Buddha of the Japanese. Inside, however, his big
+heart was full of compassion and tenderness for his favorite girl in all
+the world. Nobody will ever know just how fond Jarrocks was of Cynthia.
+It was one of those matters on which&mdash;owing, perhaps, to his being her
+senior by twenty years&mdash;he had always thought it best to keep his mouth shut.</p>
+
+<p>"What's your plan?" he asked. "Where do I come in? I'll give you
+anything I've got." Cynthia waived the offer; it was a little unwelcome.</p>
+
+<p>"I've got about five hundred dollars," she said, "and I want to
+speculate with it and make a lot of money, so that I can be independent of papa and mamma."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p><p>"Lots of people," said Jarrocks, "come to Wall Street with five hundred
+dollars, more or less, and they wish to be independent of papa and
+mamma. They end up by going to live in the Mills Hotel."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," said Cynthia; "but this is really important. If G. G. could
+work it would be different."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me one thing," said Jarrocks: "If you weren't in love with G. G.
+what would you think of him as a candidate for your very best friend's hand?"</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia counted ten before answering.</p>
+
+<p>"Jarrocks, dear," she said&mdash;and he turned away from the meltingness of
+her lovely face&mdash;"he's so pure, he's so straight, he's so gentle and so
+brave, that I don't really think I can tell you what I think of him."</p>
+
+<p>There was silence for a moment, then Jarrocks said gruffly:</p>
+
+<p>"That's a clean-enough bill of health. Guess you can bring him into the
+family, Cynthia."</p>
+
+<p>Then he drummed with his thick, stubby fingers on the arm of his chair.</p>
+
+<p>"The idea," he said at last, "is to turn five hundred dollars into a
+fortune. You know I don't speculate."</p>
+
+<p>"But you make it easy for other people?"</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"If you'd come a year ago," he said, "I'd have sent you away. Just at
+the present moment your proposition isn't the darn-fool thing it sounds."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p><p>"I knew you'd agree with me," said Cynthia complacently. "I knew you'd
+put me into something that was going 'way up."</p>
+
+<p>Jarrocks snorted.</p>
+
+<p>"Prices are at about the highest level they've ever struck and money was
+never more expensive. I think we're going to see such a tumble in values
+as was never seen before. It almost tempts me to come out of my shell
+and take a flyer&mdash;if I lose your five hundred for you, you won't squeal, Cynthia?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course not."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I'll tell you what I think. There's nothing certain in this
+business, but if ever there was a chance to turn five hundred dollars
+into big money it's now. You've entered Wall Street, Cynthia, at what
+looks to me like the psychological moment."</p>
+
+<p>"That's a good omen," said Cynthia. "I believe we shall succeed. And I
+leave everything to you."</p>
+
+<p>Then she wrote him a check for all the money she had in the world. He
+held it between his thumb and forefinger while the ink dried.</p>
+
+<p>"By the way, Cynthia," he said, "do you want the account to stand in
+your own name?"</p>
+
+<p>She thought a moment, then laughed and told him to put it in the name of
+G. G.'s mother. "But you must report to me how things go," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Jarrocks called a clerk and gave him an order to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> sell something or
+other. In three minutes the clerk reported that "it"&mdash;just some letter
+of the alphabet&mdash;had been sold at such and such a price.</p>
+
+<p>For another five minutes Jarrocks denied himself to all visitors. Then
+he called for another report on the stock which he had just caused to be
+sold. It was selling "off a half."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Cynthia," said Jarrocks, "you're fifty dollars richer than when
+you came. Now I've got to tell you to go. I'll look out for your
+interests as if they were my own."</p>
+
+<p>And Jarrocks, looking rather stupid and bored, conducted Cynthia through
+his outer offices and put her into an elevator "going down." Her face
+vanished and his heart continued to mumble and grumble, just the way a
+tooth does when it is getting ready to ache.</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia had entered Wall Street at an auspicious moment. Stocks were at
+that high level from which they presently tumbled to the panic
+quotations of nineteen-seven. And Jarrocks, whom the unsuccessful
+thought so very stupid, had made a very shrewd guess as to what was going to happen.</p>
+
+<p>Two weeks later he wrote Cynthia that if she could use two or three
+thousand dollars she could have them, without troubling her balance very perceptibly.</p>
+
+<p>"I thought you had a chance," he wrote. "I'm <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>beginning to think it's a
+sure thing! Keep a stiff upper lip and first thing you know you'll have
+the laugh on mamma and papa. Give 'em my best regards."</p>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>If it is wicked to gamble Cynthia was wicked. If it is wicked to lie
+Cynthia was wicked. If the money that comes out of Wall Street belonged
+originally to widows and orphans, why, that is the kind of money which
+she amassed for her own selfish purposes. Worst of all, on learning from
+Jarrocks that the Rainbow's Foot&mdash;where the pot of gold is&mdash;was almost
+in sight, this bad, wicked girl's sensations were those of unmixed
+triumph and delight!</p>
+
+<p>The panic of nineteen-seven is history now. Plenty of people who lost
+their money during those exciting months can explain to you how any
+fool, with the least luck, could have made buckets of it instead.</p>
+
+<p>As a snowball rolling down a hill of damp snow swells to gigantic
+proportions, so Cynthia's five hundred dollars descended the long slopes
+of nineteen-seven, doubling itself at almost every turn. And when, at
+last, values had so shrunk that it looked to Jarrocks as if they could
+not shrink any more, he told her that her account&mdash;which stood in the
+name of G. G.'s mother&mdash;was worth nearly four hundred <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>thousand dollars.
+"And I think," he said, "that, if you now buy stocks outright and hold
+them as investments, your money will double again."</p>
+
+<p>So they put their heads together and Cynthia bought some Union Pacific
+at par and some Steel Common in the careless twenties, and other
+standard securities that were begging, almost with tears in their eyes,
+to be bought and cared for by somebody. She had the certificates of what
+she bought made out in the name of G. G.'s mother. And she went up-town
+and found G. G.'s mother alone, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my dear! If anybody ever finds out <i>you</i> will catch it!"</p>
+
+<p>G. G.'s mother knew there was a joke of some kind preparing at her
+expense, but she couldn't help looking a little puzzled and anxious.</p>
+
+<p>"It's bad enough to do what you have done," continued Cynthia; "but on
+top of it to be going to lie up and down&mdash;that does seem a little too awful!"</p>
+
+<p>"What are you going to tell me?" cried G. G.'s mother. "I know you've
+got some good news up your sleeve!"</p>
+
+<p>"Gambler!" cried Cynthia&mdash;"cold-blooded, reckless Wall Street
+speculator!" And the laughter that was pent up in her face burst its
+bonds, accompanied by hugs and kisses.</p>
+
+<p>"Now listen!" said Cynthia, as soon as she could.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> "On such and such a
+day, you took five hundred dollars to a Wall Street broker named
+Jarrocks Bell&mdash;you thought that conditions were right for turning into a
+Bear. You went short of the market. You kept it up for weeks and months.
+Do you know what you did? You pyramided on the way down!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mercy!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother, her eyes shining with wonder and
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>"First thing you knew," continued Cynthia, "you were worth four hundred
+thousand dollars!"</p>
+
+<p>G. G.'s mother gave a little scream, as if she had seen a mouse.</p>
+
+<p>"And you invested it," went on Cynthia, relenting, "so that now you
+stand to double your capital; and your annual income is between thirty
+and forty thousand dollars!"</p>
+
+<p>After this Cynthia really did some explaining, until G. G.'s mother
+really understood what had really happened. It must be recorded that, at
+first, she was completely flabbergasted.</p>
+
+<p>"And you've gone and put it in my name!" she said. "But why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you see," said Cynthia, "that if I came offering money to G. G.
+and G. G.'s father they wouldn't even sniff at it? But if you've got
+it&mdash;why, they've just got to share with you. Isn't that so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Y-e-e-s," admitted G. G.'s mother; "but, my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> dear, I can't take it.
+Even if I could, they would want to know where I'd gotten it and I'd
+have nothing to say."</p>
+
+<p>"Not if you're the one woman in a million that I think you are," said
+Cynthia. "Tell me, isn't your husband at his wit's end to think how to
+meet the bills for his illness and all and all? And wouldn't you raise
+your finger to bring all his miserable worries to an end? Just look at
+the matter from a business point of view! You must tell your husband and
+G. G. that what has really happened to me happened to you; that you were
+desperate; that you took the five hundred dollars to speculate with, and
+that this is the result."</p>
+
+<p>"But that wouldn't be true," said G. G.'s mother.</p>
+
+<p>"For mercy's sake," said Cynthia, "what has the truth got to do with it!
+This isn't a matter of religion or martyrdom; it's a matter of business!
+How to put an end to my husband's troubles and to enable my son to marry
+the girl he loves?&mdash;that's your problem; and the solution is&mdash;lie! Whom
+can the money come from if not from you? Not from me certainly. You must
+lie! You'd better begin in the dark, where your husband can't see your
+face&mdash;because I'm afraid you don't know how very well. But after a time
+it will get easy; and when you've told him the story two or three
+times&mdash;with details&mdash;you'll end by believing it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> yourself.... And, of
+course," she added, "you must make over half of the securities to G. G.,
+so that he will have enough money to support a wife."</p>
+
+<p>For two hours Cynthia wrestled with G. G.'s mother's conscience; but,
+when at last the struggling creature was thrown, the two women literally
+took it by the hair and dragged it around the room and beat it until it
+was deaf, dumb, and blind.</p>
+
+<p>And when G. G.'s father came home G. G.'s mother met him in the hall
+that was darkish, and hid her face against his&mdash;and lied to him! And as
+she lied the years began to fall from the shoulders of G. G.'s
+father&mdash;to the number of ten.</p>
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<p>Cynthia was also met in a front hall&mdash;but by her father.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been looking for you, Cynthia," he said gravely. "I want to talk
+to you and get your advice&mdash;no; the library is full of smoke&mdash;come in
+here."</p>
+
+<p>He led her into the drawing-room, which neither of them could remember
+ever having sat in before.</p>
+
+<p>"I've been talking with a young gentleman," said her father without
+further preliminaries, "who made himself immensely interesting to me. To
+begin with, I never saw a handsomer, more engaging specimen of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> young
+manhood; and, in the second place, he is the author of some stories that
+I have enjoyed in the past year more than any one's except O. Henry's.
+He doesn't write over his own name&mdash;but that's neither here nor there.</p>
+
+<p>"He came to me for advice. Why he selected me, a total stranger, will
+appear presently. His family isn't well off; and, though he expects to
+succeed in literature&mdash;and there's no doubt of it in my mind&mdash;he feels
+that he ought to give it up and go into something in which the financial
+prospects are brighter. I suggested a rich wife, but that seemed to hurt
+his feelings. He said it would be bad enough to marry a girl that had
+more than he had; but to marry a rich girl, when he had only the few
+hundreds a year that he can make writing stories, was an intolerable
+thought. And that's all the more creditable to him because, from what I
+can gather, he is desperately in love&mdash;and the girl is potentially rich."</p>
+
+<p>"But," said Cynthia, "what have I to do with all this?"</p>
+
+<p>Her father laughed. "This young fellow didn't come to me of his own
+accord. I sent for him. And I must tell you that, contrary to my
+expectations, I was charmed with him. If I had had a son I should wish
+him to be just like this youngster."</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia was very much puzzled.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p><p>"He writes stories?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Bully stories! But he takes so much pains that his output is small."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said she, "what did you tell him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I told him to wait."</p>
+
+<p>"That's conservative advice."</p>
+
+<p>"As a small boy," said her father, "he was very delicate; but now he's
+as sound as a bell and he looks as strong as an elk."</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia rose to her feet, trembling slightly.</p>
+
+<p>"What was the matter with him&mdash;when he was delicate?"</p>
+
+<p>"Consumption."</p>
+
+<p>She became as it were taller&mdash;and vivid with beauty.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is he?"</p>
+
+<p>"In the library."</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia put her hands on her father's shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right," she said; "his family has come into quite a lot of
+money. He doesn't know it yet. They're going to give him enough to marry
+on. You still think he ought to marry&mdash;don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>They kissed.</p>
+
+<p>Cynthia flew out of the room, across the hall, and into the library.</p>
+
+<p><i>They</i> kissed!</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_TRAP" id="THE_TRAP"></a>THE TRAP</h2>
+
+<div class="block">
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>The animals went in two by two.</div>
+<div class="i3">Hurrah! Hurrah!</div>
+</div></div></div>
+
+<p>Given Bower for a last name, the boys are bound to call you "Right" or
+"Left." They called me "Right" because I usually held it, one way or
+another. I was shot with luck. No matter what happened, it always worked
+out to my advantage. All inside of six months, for instance, the mate
+fell overboard and I got his job; the skipper got drunk after weathering
+a cyclone and ran the old <i>Boldero</i> aground in "lily-pad" weather&mdash;and I
+got his. Then the owner called me in and said: "Captain Bower, what do
+you know about Noah's Ark?" And I said: "Only that 'the animals went in
+two by two. Hurrah! Hurrah!'" And the owner said: "But how did he feed
+'em&mdash;specially the meat-eaters?" And I said: "He got hold of a Hindu who
+had his arm torn off by a black panther and who now looks after the same
+at the Calcutta Zoo&mdash;and he put it up to him."</p>
+
+<p>"The Bible doesn't say so," said the owner.</p>
+
+<p>"Everything the Bible says is true," said I. "But there're heaps of true
+sayings, you know, that aren't in it at all."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p><p>"Well," says the owner, "you slip out to yon Zoo and you put it up to
+yon one-armed Hindu that a white Noah named Bower has been ordered to
+carry pairs of all the Indian fauna from Singapore to Sydney; and you
+tell him to shake his black panther and 'come along with.'"</p>
+
+<p>"What will you pay?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>The owner winked his eye. "What will I promise?" said he. "I leave that to you."</p>
+
+<p>But I wasn't bluffed. The owner always talked pagan and practised
+Christian; loved his little joke. They called him "Bond" Hadley on the
+water-front to remind themselves that his word was just as good.</p>
+
+<p>I settled with Yir Massir in a long confab back of the snake-house, and
+that night Hadley blew me to Ivy Green's benefit at the opera-house.</p>
+
+<p>Poor little girl! There weren't fifty in the audience. She couldn't act.
+I mean she couldn't draw. The whole company was on the bum and
+stone-broke. They'd scraped out of Australia and the Sandwich Islands,
+but it looked as if they'd stay in Calcutta, doing good works, such as
+mending roads for the public, to the end of time.</p>
+
+<p>"Ivy Green is a pretty name for a girl," said the owner.</p>
+
+<p>"And Ivy Green is a pretty girl," I said; "and I'll bet my horned soul
+she's a good girl."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p><p>To tell the truth, I was taken with her something terrible at first
+sight. I'd often seen women that I wanted, but she was the first
+girl&mdash;and the last. It's a different sort of wanting, that. It's the
+good in you that wants&mdash;instead of the bad.</p>
+
+<p>Her little face was like the pansies that used to grow in mother's
+dooryard; and a dooryard is the place for pansies, not a stage. When her
+act was over the fifty present did their best; but I knew, when she'd
+finished bobbing little curtsies and smiling her pretty smile, she'd
+slip off to her dressing-room and cry like a baby. I couldn't stand it.
+There were other acts to come, but I couldn't wait.</p>
+
+<p>"If Ivy Green is a pretty name for a girl, Ivy Bower is a prettier name
+for a woman," I said. "I'm going behind."</p>
+
+<p>He looked up, angry. Then he saw that I didn't mean any harm and he
+looked down. He said nothing. I got behind by having the pull on certain
+ropes in that opera-house, and I asked a comedian with a face like a
+walrus which was Miss Green's dressing-room.</p>
+
+<p>"Friend of hers?" he says.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," says I, "a friend."</p>
+
+<p>He showed me which door and I knocked. Her voice was full of worry and tears.</p>
+
+<p>"Who's there?" she said.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p><p>"A friend," said I.</p>
+
+<p>"Pass, friend," said she.</p>
+
+<p>And I took it to mean "Come in," but it didn't. Still, she wasn't so
+dishabilled as to matter. She was crying and rubbing off the last of her paint.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Green," I said, "you've made me feel so mean and miserable that I
+had to come and tell you. My name is Bower. The boys call me 'Right'
+Bower, meaning that I'm lucky and straight. It was lucky for me that I
+came to your benefit, and I hope to God that it will be lucky for you."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?" she says&mdash;none too warm.</p>
+
+<p>"As for you, Miss Green," I said, "you're up against it, aren't you? The
+manager's broke. You don't know when you've touched any salary. There's
+been no balm in your benefit. What are you going to do?"</p>
+
+<p>This time she looked me over before she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't have to ask," said I, blushing red, "if you're a good girl.
+It's just naturally obvious. I guess that's what put me up to butting
+in. I want to help. Will you answer three questions?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Where," said I, "will you get breakfast to-morrow?&mdash;lunch
+to-morrow?&mdash;and dinner to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>"We disband to-night," she said, "and I don't know."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p><p>"I suppose you know," said I, "what happens to most white girls who get
+stranded in Indian cities?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she said, "that people get up against it so hard that they
+oughtn't to be blamed for anything they do."</p>
+
+<p>"They aren't," I said, "by&mdash;Christians; but it's ugly just the same.
+Now&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And you," she said, flaring up, "think that, as long as it's got to be,
+it might as well be you! Is that your song and dance, Mr. Smarty?"</p>
+
+<p>I shook my head and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be a little goat!" I said; and that seemed to make her take to me
+and trust me.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want me to do?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll tell you," I said; and I found that it wasn't easy. "First place,"
+I said, "I've got some money saved up. That will keep you on Easy Street
+till I get back from Sydney. If by that time nothing's turned up that
+you want of your own free heart and will, I'll ask you to pay me back
+by&mdash;by changing your name."</p>
+
+<p>She didn't quite follow.</p>
+
+<p>"That," said I, "gives you a chance to look around&mdash;gives you one small
+chance in a million to light on some man you can care for and who'll
+care for you and take care of you. Failing that, it would be fair enough
+for you to take me, failing a better. See?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p><p>"You mean," she said, "that if things don't straighten out, it would be
+better for me to become Mrs. Bower than walk the streets? Is that it?"</p>
+
+<p>I nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't see your point of view," she cried. "Just because you're
+sorry for a girl don't mean you want to make her your wife."</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't sorrowing," I said. "It's wanting. It's the right kind of
+wanting. It's the wanting that would rather wait than hurt you; that
+would rather do without you than hurt you."</p>
+
+<p>"And you'll trust me with all your savings and go away to Australia&mdash;and
+if I find some other man that I like better you'll let me off from
+marrying you? Is that it?"</p>
+
+<p>"That's about it," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"And suppose," says she, "that you don't come back, and nobody shows up,
+and the money goes?"</p>
+
+<p>That was a new point of view.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said I, "we've got to take some chances in this world."</p>
+
+<p>"We have," said she. "And now look here&mdash;I don't know how much of it's
+wanting and how much of it's fear&mdash;but if you'll take chances I will."</p>
+
+<p>She turned as red as a beet and looked away.</p>
+
+<p>"In words of two syllables," said I, "what do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p><p>"I mean," she said&mdash;and she was still as red as a beet, but this time
+she looked me in my eyes without a flinch in hers&mdash;"that if you're dead
+sure you want me&mdash;are you?&mdash;if you're dead sure, why, I'll take chances
+on my wanting you. I believe every word you've said to me. Is that right?"</p>
+
+<p>"Every word," I said. "That is right."</p>
+
+<p>Then we looked at each other for a long time.</p>
+
+<p>"What a lot we'll have to tell each other," she said, "before we're
+really acquainted. But you're sure? You're quite sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure that I want you? Yes," I said; "not sure that you ought not to
+wait and think me over."</p>
+
+<p>"You've begun," she said, "with everything that's noble and generous. I
+could never look myself in the face again if I felt called upon to begin
+by being mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Hadn't you better think it over?" I said. "Hadn't you?"</p>
+
+<p>But she put her hands on my shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"If an angel with wings had come with gifts," she said, "would I have
+thought them over? And just because your wings don't show&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't fair," I mumbled. "I give you a choice between the streets and
+me and you feel forced to choose me."</p>
+
+<p>But she pulled my head down and gave me a quick, fierce kiss.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p><p>"There," said she&mdash;"was that forced? Did you force me to do that? No,"
+she said; "you needn't think you're the only person in the world that
+wants another person.... If you go to Australia I don't wait here. I go
+too. If you sink by the way, I sink. And don't you go to thinking you've
+made me a one-sided bargain.... I can cook for you and mend for you and
+save for you. And if you're sick I can nurse you. And I can black your boots."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought," said I, "that you were just a little girl that I wanted,
+but you turn out to be the whole world that I've got to have. Slip the
+rest of your canvas on and I'll hook it up for you. Then we'll find some
+one to marry us&mdash;'nless you'd rather wait."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait?" said she, turning her back and standing still, which most women
+haven't sense enough to do when a man's ten thumbs are trying to hook
+them up. "I've been waiting all my life for this&mdash;and you!"</p>
+
+<p>"And I," said I, splitting a thumb-nail, "would go through an eternity
+of hell if I knew that this was at the end of it&mdash;and you!"</p>
+
+<p>"What is your church?" she asked of a sudden.</p>
+
+<p>"Same as yours," I said, "which is&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Does it matter," said she, "if God is in it? Do you pray?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said I; "do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Always," she said, "before I go to bed."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p><p>"Then I will," said I; "always&mdash;before we do."</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes," she said, "I've been shaken about God. Was to-night&mdash;before
+you came. But He's made good&mdash;hasn't He?"</p>
+
+<p>"He has," I said. "And now you're hooked up. And I wish it was to do all
+over again. I loved doing it."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you?" said she.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were bright and brave like two stars. She slipped her hand
+through my arm and we marched out of the opera-house. Half a dozen young
+globe-trotters were at the stage-door waiting to take a chance on Miss
+Green as she came out, but none of them spoke. We headed for the nearest
+city directory and looked up a minister.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>I had married April; she cried when she thought she wasn't good enough
+for me; she smiled like the sun when I swore she was.</p>
+
+<p>I had married June; she was like an armful of roses.</p>
+
+<p>We weren't two; we were one. What alloy does gold make mixed with brass?
+We were that alloy. I was the brass.</p>
+
+<p>We travelled down to Singapore first-class, with one-armed Yir Massir to
+look after us&mdash;down the old Hoogli<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> with the stubs of half-burned Hindus
+bobbing alongside, crows sitting on 'em and tearing off strips. We ran
+aground on all the regular old sand-bars that are never twice in the
+same place; and one dusk we saw tigers come out of the jungle to drink.
+We'd both travelled quite some, but you wouldn't have thought it. Ivy
+Bower and Right Bower had just run away from school for to see the world
+"so new and all."</p>
+
+<p>Some honey-moons a man keeps finding out things about his wife that he
+don't like&mdash;little tricks of temper and temperature; but I kept finding
+out things about mine that I'd never even dared to hope for. I went
+pretty near crazy with love of her. At first she was a child that had
+had a wicked, cruel nightmare&mdash;and I'd happened to be about to comfort
+her when she waked and to soothe her. Then she got over her scare and
+began to play at matrimony, putting on little airs and dignities&mdash;just
+like a child playing grown-up. Then all of a sudden it came to her, that
+tremendous love that some women have for some of us dogs of men. It was
+big as a storm, but it wasn't too big for her. Nothing that's noble and
+generous was too big for her; nor was any way of showing her love too
+little. Any little mole-hill of thoughtfulness from me was
+changed&mdash;presto!&mdash;into a chain o' mountains; but she thought in
+mountains and made mole-hills of 'em.</p>
+
+<p>We steamed into Singapore and I showed her the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> old <i>Boldero</i>, that was
+to be our home, laid against the Copra Wharf, waiting to be turned into
+an ark. The animals weren't all collected and we had a day or two to
+chase about and enjoy ourselves; but she wasn't for expensive pleasures.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," she said, "till you're a little tired of me; but now, when we're
+happy just to be together walking in the dust, what's the use of disbursing?"</p>
+
+<p>"If we save till I'm tired of you," says I, "we'll be rich."</p>
+
+<p>"Rich it is, then," said she, "for those who will need it more."</p>
+
+<p>"But," says I, "the dictionary says that a skunk is a man that
+economizes on his honey-moon."</p>
+
+<p>"If you're bound to blow yourself," says she, "let's trot down to the
+Hongkong-Shanghai Bank and buy some shares in something."</p>
+
+<p>"But," says I, "you have no engagement ring."</p>
+
+<p>"And I'm not engaged," says she. "I'm a married woman."</p>
+
+<p>"You're a married child."</p>
+
+<p>"My husband's arm around my waist is my ring," says she; "his heart is my jewel."</p>
+
+<p>Even if it had been broad daylight and people looking, I'd have put her
+ring on her at that. But it was dark, in a park of trees and
+benches&mdash;just like Central Park.</p>
+
+<p>"With this ring," says I, "I thee guard from all evil."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p><p>"But there is no evil," said she. "The world's all new; it's been given
+a fresh start. There's no evil. The apple's back on the tree of
+knowledge. Eden's come back&mdash;and it's spring in Eden."</p>
+
+<p>"And among other items," says I, "that we've invoiced for Sydney is a
+python thirty feet long."</p>
+
+<p>"Look!" says she.</p>
+
+<p>A girl sat against one of the stems of a banyan, and a Tommy lay on his
+back with his head in her lap. She was playing with his hair. You could
+just see them for the dark.</p>
+
+<p>"'And they lived on the square like a true married pair,'" says I.</p>
+
+<p>"Can't people be naughty and good?" says she.</p>
+
+<p>"No," says I; "good and naughty only."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose," says she, "you and I felt about each other the way we do, but
+you were married to a rich widow in Lisbon and I was married to a wicked
+old Jew in Malta&mdash;would that make you Satan and me Jezebel?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," says I; "only me. Nothing could change you." She thought a little.</p>
+
+<p>"No," says she; "I don't think anything could. But there isn't any
+wicked old Jew. You know that."</p>
+
+<p>"And you know about the rich widow?"</p>
+
+<p>"What about her?" This said sharp, with a tug at my arm to unwrap it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p><p>"She was born in Singapore," said I, "of a silly goose by an idle
+thought. And two minutes later she died."</p>
+
+<p>"There's nothing that can ever hurt us&mdash;is there?&mdash;nothing that's
+happened and gone before?"</p>
+
+<p>Man that is born of woman ought not to have that question put up to him;
+but she didn't let me answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Because, if there is," she said, "it's lucky I'm here to look after us."</p>
+
+<p>"Could I do anything that you wouldn't forgive?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you turned away from me," she said, "I'd die&mdash;but I'd forgive."</p>
+
+<p>Next daylight she was leaning on the rail of the <i>Boldero</i> watching the
+animals come over the side and laughing to see them turn their heads to
+listen to what old Yir Massir said to them in Hindustani. He spoke words
+of comfort, telling them not to be afraid; and they listened. Even
+Bahut, the big elephant, as the slings tightened and he swung dizzily
+heavenward, cocked his moth-eaten ears to listen and refrained from
+whimpering, though the pit of his stomach was cold with fear; and he
+worked his toes when there was nothing under them but water.</p>
+
+<p>"The elephant is the strongest of all things," I said, "and the most gentle."</p>
+
+<p>Her little fingers pressed my arm, which was like marble in those days.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said she&mdash;"the man!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>That voyage was good, so far as it went, but there's no use talking
+about it, because what came afterward was better. We'd no sooner backed
+off the Copra Wharf and headed down the straits, leaving a trail of
+smoke and tiger smell, than Ivy went to house-keeping on the <i>Boldero</i>.
+There are great house-keepers, just as there are great poets and actors.
+It takes genius; that's all. And Ivy had that kind of genius. Yir Massir
+had a Hindu saying that fitted her like a glove. He looked in upon her
+work of preparing and systematizing for the cramped weeks at sea and
+said: "The little mem-sahib is a born woman."</p>
+
+<p>That's just what she is. There are born idiots and born leaders. Some
+are born male and some female; but a born woman is the rarest thing in
+the world, the most useful and the most precious. She had never kept
+house, but there was nothing for her to learn. She worked things so that
+whenever I could come off duty she was at leisure to give all her care
+and thought to me.</p>
+
+<p>There was never a millionaire who had more speckless white suits than I
+had, though it's a matter almost of routine for officers to go dirty on
+anything but the swell liners. Holes in socks grew together under her
+fingers, so that you had to look close to see where<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> they'd been. She
+even kept a kind of dwarf hibiscus, with bright red flowers, alive and
+flourishing in the thick salt air; and she was always slipping into the
+galley to give a new, tasty turn to the old sea-standbys.</p>
+
+<p>The crew, engineer, and stokers were all Chinks. Hadley always put his
+trust in them and they come cheap. We had forty coolies who berthed
+forward, going out on contract to work on a new government dry-dock at
+Paiulu. I don't mind a Chink myself, so long as he keeps his habits to
+himself and doesn't over-smoke; but they're not sociable. Except for Yir
+Massir and myself, there was no one aboard for Ivy to talk to. Yir
+Massir's duty kept him busy with the health of the collection for the
+Sydney Zoo, and Ivy found time to help, to advise, and to learn. They
+made as much fuss between them over the beasts as if they had been
+babies; and the donkey-engine was busy most of the day hoisting cages to
+the main-deck and lowering them again, so that the beasts could have a
+better look at the sea and a bit of sun and fresh air. As it was, a good
+many of the beasts and all the birds roomed on the main-deck all the
+time. Sometimes Yir Massir would take out a chetah&mdash;a nasty, snarling,
+pin-headed piece of long-legged malice&mdash;and walk him up and down on a
+dog-chain, same as a woman walks her King Charlie. He gave the monkeys
+all the liberty they could use and abuse; it was good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> sport to see them
+chase themselves and each other over the masts and upper-works.</p>
+
+<p>The most you can say of going out with a big tonnage of beasts is that,
+if you're healthy and have no nerves, you can just stand it. Sometimes
+they'll all howl together for five or six hours at a time; sometimes
+they'll all be logy and still as death, except one tiger, who can't make
+his wants understood and who'll whine and rumble about them all round
+the clock. I don't know which is worse, the chorus or the solo. And
+then, of course, the smell side to the situation isn't a matter for
+print. If I say that we had twenty hogsheads of disinfectants and
+deodorizers along it's all you need know. Anyhow, according to Yir
+Massir, it was the smell that killed big Bahut's mate. And she'd been
+brought up in an Indian village and ought to have been used to all the
+smells, from A to Z.</p>
+
+<p>One elephant more or less doesn't matter to me, especially when it's
+insured, but Yir Massir's grief and self-reproach were appalling; and
+Ivy felt badly too. It was as much for her sake as Yir Massir's that I
+read a part of the burial service out of the prayer-book and committed
+the body of "this our sister" to the deep. It may have been
+sacrilegious, but I don't care. It comforted Ivy some and Yir Massir a
+heap. And it did this to me, that I can't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> look at a beast now without
+thinking that&mdash;well, that there's not such an awful lot of difference
+between two legs and four, and that maybe God put Himself out just as
+much to make one as the other.</p>
+
+<p>We swung her overside by heavy tackle. What with the roll of the ship
+and the fact that she swung feet down, she looked alive; and the funeral
+looked more like a drowning than a burial.</p>
+
+<p>We had no weights to sink her; and when I gave the word to cut loose she
+made a splash like a small tidal wave and then floated.</p>
+
+<p>We could see her for an hour, like a bit of a slate-colored island with
+white gulls sitting on it.</p>
+
+<p>And that night Yir Massir waited on us looking like some old crazy loon
+out of the Bible. He'd made himself a prickly shirt of sackcloth and had
+smeared his black head and brown face with gray ashes. Big Bahut
+whimpered all night and trumpeted as if his heart were broken.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>I've often noticed that when things happen it's in bunches. The tenth
+day south of the line we had a look at almost all the sea-events that
+are made into woodcuts for the high-school geographies. For days we'd
+seen nothing except sapphire-blue sea, big swells<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> rolling under a satin
+finish without breaking through, and a baby-blue sky. On the morning of
+the tenth the sea was streaked with broad, oily bands, like State roads,
+and near and far were whales travelling south at about ten knots an
+hour, as if they had a long way to go.</p>
+
+<p>We saw heaps of porpoises and heaps of flying-fish; some birds; unhewn
+timber&mdash;a nasty lot of it&mdash;and big floats of sea-weed. We saw a whale
+being pounded to death by a killer; and in the afternoon as perfect an
+example of a brand-new coral island as was ever seen. It looked like a
+ring of white snow floating on the water, and inside the ring was a
+careened two-master&mdash;just the ribs and stumps left. There was a
+water-spout miles off to port, and there was a kind of electric jump and
+thrill to the baked air that made these things seem important, like
+omens in ancient times. Besides, the beasts, from Bahut the elephant to
+little Assam the mongoose, put in the whole day at practising the noises
+of complaint and uneasiness. Then, directly it was dark, we slipped into
+a "white sea." That's a rare sight and it has never been very well
+explained. The water looks as though it had been mixed with a quantity
+of milk, but when you dip it up it's just water.</p>
+
+<p>About midnight we ran out of this and Ivy and I turned in. The sky was
+clear as a bell and even the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> beasts were quiet. I hadn't been asleep
+ten minutes and Ivy not at all, when all at once hell broke loose. There
+was a bump that nearly drove my head through a bulkhead; though only
+half awake I could feel to the cold marrow of my bones that the old
+<i>Boldero</i> was down by the head. The beasts knew it and the Chinks. Never
+since Babel was there such pandemonium on earth or sea. By a struck
+match I saw Ivy running out of the cabin and slipping on her
+bath-wrapper as she went. I called to her, but she didn't answer. I
+didn't want to think of anything but Ivy, but I had to let her go and
+think of the ship.</p>
+
+<p>There wasn't much use in thinking. The old <i>Boldero</i> was settling by the
+head and the pumps couldn't hold up the inflood. In fifteen minutes I
+knew that it was all up with us&mdash;or all down, rather&mdash;and I ordered the
+boats over and began to run about like a maniac, looking for Ivy and
+calling to her. And why do you suppose I couldn't find her? She was
+hiding&mdash;hiding from me!</p>
+
+<p>She'd heard of captains of sinking ships sending off their wives and
+children and sweethearts and staying behind to drown out of a mistaken
+notion of duty. She'd got it into her head that I was that kind of
+captain and she'd hid so that she couldn't be sent away; but it was all
+my fault really. If I'd hurried her on deck the minute I did find her
+we'd have been in time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> to leave with the boats. But I stopped for
+explanations and to give her a bit of a lecture; so when we got on deck
+there were the boats swarming with Chinks slipping off to windward&mdash;and
+there at our feet was Yir Massir, lying in his own blood and brains, a
+wicked, long knife in his hand and the thread outpiece of a Chink's
+pigtail between his teeth.</p>
+
+<p>I like to think that he'd tried to make them wait for us, but I don't
+know. Anyhow, there we were, alone on a sinking deck and all through
+with earthly affairs as I reckoned it. But Ivy reckoned differently.</p>
+
+<p>"Why are they rowing in that direction?" she says. "They won't get
+anywhere."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" says I.</p>
+
+<p>She jerked her thumb to leeward.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you feel that it's over there?&mdash;the land?" she says. "Just over there."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no, bless you!" says I. "I don't have any feeling about it.... Now
+then, we've got to hustle around and find something that will float us.
+We want to get out of this before the old <i>Boldero</i> goes and sucks us down after."</p>
+
+<p>"There's the life-raft," says she; "they left that."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," says I; "if we can get it overboard. It weighs a ton. You make up
+a bundle of food on the jump, Ivy, and I'll try to rig a tackle."</p>
+
+<p>When the raft was floating quietly alongside I felt<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> better. It looked
+then as if we were to have a little more run for our money.</p>
+
+<p>We worked like a couple of furies loading on food and water, Ivy
+lowering and I lashing fast.</p>
+
+<p>"There," says I at last; "she won't take any more. Come along. I can
+help you down better from here."</p>
+
+<p>"We've got to let the beasts loose," says she.</p>
+
+<p>"Why?" says I.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, just to give 'em a chance," she says.</p>
+
+<p>So I climbs back to where she was standing.</p>
+
+<p>"It's rot!" I says. "But if you say so&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There's loads of time," says she&mdash;"we're not settling so fast. Besides,
+even if I'm wrong about the land, they'll know. They'll show us which
+way to go. Big Bahut, he knows."</p>
+
+<p>"It don't matter," I says. "We can't work the raft any way but to
+leeward&mdash;not one man can't."</p>
+
+<p>"If the beasts go the other way," says she, "one man must try and one woman."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, we'll try," says I, "right enough. We'll try."</p>
+
+<p>The first beast we loosed was the python. Ivy did the loosing and I
+stood by with a big rifle to guard against trouble; but, bless you,
+there was no need. One and all, the beasts knew the old <i>Boldero</i> was
+doomed, and one and all they cried and begged and made eyes and signs to
+be turned loose. As for knowing where the nearest land was&mdash;well, if
+you'd<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> seen the python, when he came to the surface, make a couple of
+loopy turns to get his bearings and his wriggles in order, and then hike
+off to leeward in a bee-line&mdash;you'd have believed that he&mdash;well, that he
+knew what he was talking about.</p>
+
+<p>And the beasts, one and all, big and little, the minute they were
+loosed, wanted to get overboard&mdash;even the cats; and off they went to
+leeward in the first flush of dawn, horned heads, cat heads, pig
+heads&mdash;the darnedest game of follow-my-leader that ever the skies looked
+down on. And the birds, white and colored, streaked out over the beasts.
+There was a kind of wonder to it all that eased the pinch of fear. Ivy
+clapped her hands and jumped up and down like a child when it sees the
+grand entry in Buffalo Bill's show for the first time&mdash;or the last, for that matter.</p>
+
+<p>There was some talk of taking a tow-line from around Bahut's neck to the
+raft; but the morning breeze was freshening and with a sail rigged the
+raft would swim pretty fast herself. Anyway, we couldn't fix it to get
+big Bahut overboard. The best we could do was to turn him loose, open
+all the hatches, and trust to his finding a way out when the <i>Boldero</i> settled.</p>
+
+<p>He did, bless him! We weren't two hundred yards clear when the <i>Boldero</i>
+gave a kind of shudder and went down by the bows, Bahut yelling bloody
+murder. Then, just when we'd given him up for lost, he shot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> up from the
+depths, half-way out of water. After blowing his nose and getting his
+bearings he came after the raft like a good old tugboat.</p>
+
+<p>We stood up, Ivy and I did, and cheered him as he caught up with us and foamed by.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The worst kind of remembering is remembering what you've forgotten. I
+got redder and redder. It didn't seem as if I could tell Ivy; but I did.
+First I says, hopeful:</p>
+
+<p>"Have you forgotten anything?"</p>
+
+<p>She shakes her head.</p>
+
+<p>"I have," says I. "I've left my rifle, but I've got plenty of
+cartridges. I've got a box of candles, but I've forgotten to bring
+matches. A nice, thoughtful husband you've got!"</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>The beasts knew.</p>
+
+<p>There was land just around the first turn of the world&mdash;land that had
+what might be hills when you got to 'em and that was pale gray against
+the sun, with all the upper-works gilded; but it wasn't big land. You
+could see the north and south limits; and the trees on the hills could
+probably see the ocean to the east.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p><p>They were funny trees, those; and others just like them had come down
+to the cove to meet us when we landed. They were a kind of pine and the
+branches grew in layers, with long spaces between. Since then I've seen
+trees just like them, but very little, in florists' windows; only the
+florists' trees have broad scarlet sashes round their waists, by way of
+decoration, maybe, or out of deference to Anthony Comstock.</p>
+
+<p>The cove had been worked out by a brook that came loafing down a turfy
+valley, with trees single and in spinneys, for all the world like an
+English park; and at the upper end of the valley, cutting the island in
+half lengthwise, as we learned later, the little wooded hills rolled
+north and south, and low spurs ran out from them, so as to make the
+valley a valley instead of a plain.</p>
+
+<p>There were flocks of goats in the valley, which was what made the grass
+so turfy, I suppose; and our own deer and antelopes were browsing near
+them, friendly as you please. Near at hand big Bahut, who had been the
+last but us to land, was quietly munching the top of a broad-leafed tree
+that he'd pulled down; but the cats and riffraff had melted into the
+landscape. So had the birds, except a pair of jungle-fowl, who'd found
+seed near the cove and were picking it up as fast as they could and
+putting it away.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," says I, "it's an island, sure, Ivy. The first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> thing to do is to
+find out who lives on it, owns it, and dispenses its hospitality, and
+make up to them."</p>
+
+<p>But she shook her head and said seriously:</p>
+
+<p>"I've a feeling, Right," she says&mdash;"a kind of hunch&mdash;that there's nobody
+on it but us."</p>
+
+<p>I laughed at her then, but half a day's tramping proved that she was
+right. I tell you women have ways of knowing things that we men haven't.
+The fact is, civilization slides off 'em like water off a duck; and at
+heart and by instinct they are people of the cave-dwelling period&mdash;on
+cut-and-dried terms with ghosts and spirits, all the unseen sources of
+knowledge that man has grown away from.</p>
+
+<p>I had sure proofs of this in the way Ivy took to the cave we found in a
+bunch of volcano rock that lifted sheer out of the cove and had bright
+flowers smiling out of all its pockets. No society lady ever entered her
+brand-new marble house at Newport with half the happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Ivy was crazy about the cave and never tired of pointing out its
+advantages. She went to house-keeping without any of the utensils, as
+keen and eager as she'd gone to it on the poor old <i>Boldero</i>, where at
+least there were pots and pans and pepper.</p>
+
+<p>We had grub to last a few weeks, a pair of blankets, the clothes we
+stood in, and an axe. I had, besides, a heavy clasp-knife, a watch, and
+seven sovereigns.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> The first thing Ivy insisted on was a change of
+clothes.</p>
+
+<p>"These we stand in," says she, "are the only presentable things we've
+got, and Heaven only knows how long they've got to last us for best."</p>
+
+<p>"We could throw modesty to the winds," I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you can do as you please," she said. "I don't care one way or
+the other about the modesty; but I've got a skin that looks on the sun
+with distinct aversion, and I don't propose to go through a course of
+yellow blisters&mdash;and then turn black."</p>
+
+<p>"I've seen islanders weave cloth out of palm fibre&mdash;most any kind," I
+said. "It's clumsy and airy; but if you think it would do&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It sounds scratchy."</p>
+
+<p>"It is, but it's good for the circulation."</p>
+
+<p>Well, we made a kind of cloth and cut it into shapes, and knotted the
+shapes together with more fibre; then we folded up our best and only
+Sunday-go-to-meeting suits and put the fibre things on; and then we went
+down to the cove to look at ourselves in the water. And Ivy laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"We're not clothed," she said; "we're thatched; and yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;it's
+accident, of course, but this skirt has got a certain hang that&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever that skirt's got," I said, "these pants haven't; but if you're
+happy I am."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p><p>Well, there's worse situations than desert-islanding it with the one
+woman in the world. I even know one man who claims he was cast away with
+a perfect stranger that he hated the sight of at first&mdash;a terribly
+small-minded, conventional woman&mdash;and still he had the time of his life.
+They got to like each other over a mutual taste for cribbage, which they
+played for sea-shells, yellow with a pink edge, until the woman went
+broke and got heavily in debt to the man. He was nice about it and let
+her off. He says the affair must have ended in matrimony, only she took
+a month to think it over; during that month they were picked up and
+carried to Honolulu; then they quarrelled and never saw each other again.</p>
+
+<p>"Ivy," said I one day, "we'll be picked up by a passing steamer some
+day, of course, but meanwhile I'd rather be here with you than any place I can name."</p>
+
+<p>"It's Eden," she said, "and I'd like to live like this always. But&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"But what?"</p>
+
+<p>"But people grow old," she said, "and one dies before another. That's
+what's wrong with Eden."</p>
+
+<p>I laughed at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Old! You and I? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, Ivy Bower."</p>
+
+<p>"Right Bower," says she, "you don't understand&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p><p>"How not understand?"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't understand that Right Bower and Ivy Bower aren't the only
+people on this island."</p>
+
+<p>She didn't turn a fiery red and bolt&mdash;the way young wives do in stories.
+She looked at me with steady, brave, considering eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't worry, dear," she says after a time; "everything will be all
+right. I know it will."</p>
+
+<p>"I know it too." I lied.</p>
+
+<p>Know it? I was cold with fright.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be afraid," said she. "And&mdash;and meanwhile there's dinner to be
+got ready&mdash;and you can have a go at your firesticks."</p>
+
+<p>It was my ambition to get fire by friction. Now and then I got the
+sticks to smoke and I hoped that practice would give me the little extra
+speed and cunning that makes for flame. I'd always been pretty good at
+games, if a little slow to learn.</p>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>You'd think anxiety about Ivy'd have been the hardest thing to bear in
+the life we were living; and so it would have been if she'd showed any
+anxiety about herself. Not she. You might have thought she was looking
+forward to a Christmas-box from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> home. If she was ever scared it was
+when I wasn't looking. No&mdash;it was the beasts that made us anxious.</p>
+
+<p>At first we'd go for long walks and make explorations up and down the
+island. The beasts hid from us according to the wild nature that's in
+them. You could only tell from fresh tracks in damp places that they
+hadn't utterly disappeared. Now and then we saw deer and antelopes far
+off; and at night, of course, there was always something doing in the
+way of a chorus. Beasts that gave our end of the island the go-by
+daytimes paid us visits nights and sat under the windows, you may say,
+and sang their songs.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed natural after a time to be cooped up in a big green prison
+with a lot of loose wild things that could bite and tear you to pieces
+if they thought of it. We were hard to scare. What scared me first was
+this: When we got to the island it was alive with goats. Well, these
+just casually disappeared. Then, one morning, bright and early, I came
+on the big python in the act of swallowing a baby antelope. It gave me a
+horrid start and set me thinking. How long could the island support a
+menagerie? What would the meat-eaters do when they'd killed off all the
+easy meat&mdash;finished up the deer and antelopes and all? Would they fight
+it out among themselves&mdash;big tiger eat little tiger&mdash;until only the
+fittest one survived? And what would that fittest one do if he got good
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> hungry and began to think that I'd make a square meal for him&mdash;or
+Ivy?</p>
+
+<p>I reached two conclusions&mdash;and the cave about the same time. First, I
+wouldn't tell Ivy I was scared. Second, I'd make fire by friction or
+otherwise&mdash;or bust. Once I got fire, I'd never let it go out. I set to
+work with the firesticks right off, and Ivy came and stood by and looked on.</p>
+
+<p>"Never saw you put so much elbow-grease into anything," she said.
+"What's the matter with you, anyway?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a game," I grunted, "and these two fellows will have me beat if I
+don't look lively."</p>
+
+<p>"Right Bower," she says then, slow and deliberate, "I can see you're
+upside down about something. Tell Ivy."</p>
+
+<p>"Look," says I&mdash;"smoke! I never got it so quick before." I spun the
+pointed stick between the palms of my hands harder than ever and gloated
+over the wisp of smoke that came from where it was boring into the flat stick.</p>
+
+<p>"Make a bow," says Ivy. "Loop the bowstring round the hand-piece and
+you'll get more friction with less work."</p>
+
+<p>"By gorry!" says I; "you're right. I remember a picture in a
+geography&mdash;'Native Drilling a Conch Shell.' Fool that I am to forget!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p><p>"Guess you and I learned out of the same geography," said Ivy.</p>
+
+<p>"Only I didn't learn," said I. "I'm off to cut something tough to make
+the bow."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't go far," she says.</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" said I&mdash;the sporty way a man does when he pretends that he's
+going to take a night off with the boys and play poker.</p>
+
+<p>"Because," she says smiling, "I'm afraid the beasts will get me while you're gone."</p>
+
+<p>"Rats!" says I.</p>
+
+<p>"Tigers!" says she. "Oh, Right, you unplumbable old idiot! Do you think
+you can come into this cave and hide anything from me under that
+transparent face of yours? The minute you came in and hemmed and hawed,
+and said as you had nothing to do you guessed you'd have a go with the
+firesticks&mdash;I knew. What scared you?"</p>
+
+<p>I surrendered and told her.</p>
+
+<p>"... And then," she said, "you think maybe they'll hurt&mdash;us?"</p>
+
+<p>I nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it's war," she said. "I've read enough about war to know that
+there are two safe rules to follow. First, declare war yourself while
+the other fellow's thinking about it; and then strike him before he's
+even heard that you have declared it. That<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> sounds mixed, but it's easy
+enough. We'll declare war on the dangerous beasts while I'm still in the
+months of hop, skip, and jump."</p>
+
+<p>"A certain woman," said I, "wouldn't let the beasts go down in the old
+<i>Boldero</i>, as would have been beneficial for all parties."</p>
+
+<p>"This is different," she said. "This island's got to be a safe place for
+a little child to play in or Ivy Bower's got to be told the reason why."</p>
+
+<p>"You're dead right, Ivy dear," I says, "and always was. But how? I'm
+cursed if I know how to kill a tiger without a rifle.... Let's get fire
+first and put the citadel in a state of siege. Then we'll try our hand
+at traps, snares, and pitfalls. I'm strong, but I'm cursed if I want to
+fall on a tiger with nothing in my hands but a knife or an axe."</p>
+
+<p>"All I care about," said Ivy, "is to get everything settled, so that
+when the time comes we can be comfortable and plenty domestic."</p>
+
+<p>She sat in the mouth of the cave and looked over the smooth cove to the
+rolling ocean beyond; and she had the expression of a little girl
+playing at being married with a little boy friend in the playhouse that
+her father had just given her for her birthday.</p>
+
+<p>I got a piece of springy wood to make a bow with, and sat by her shaping
+it with my knife. That night we got fire. Ivy caught some fish in the
+cove and we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> cooked them; and&mdash;thanks, O Lord!&mdash;how good they were! We
+sat up very late comparing impressions, each saying how each felt when
+the smoke began to show sparks and when the tinder pieces finally
+caught, and how each had felt when the broiled smell of the fish had
+begun to go abroad in the land. We told each other of all the good
+things we had eaten in our day, but how this surpassed them all. And
+later we told each other all our favorite names&mdash;boy names in case it
+should be a boy and girl names in case it shouldn't.</p>
+
+<p>Then, suddenly, something being hunted by something tore by in the
+dark&mdash;not very far off. The sweat came off me in buckets, and I heaped
+wood on the fire and flung burning brands into the night, this way and
+that, as far as I could fling them. Ivy said I was like Jupiter trying
+to hurl thunder-bolts, after the invention of Christianity, and not
+rightly understanding why they wouldn't explode any more.</p>
+
+<h3>VII</h3>
+
+<p>The pines of the island were full of pitch and a branch would burn
+torch-like for a long time. I kept a bundle of such handy, the short
+ends sharpened so's you could stick 'em round wherever the ground was
+soft enough and have an effect of altar candles in a draughty church. If
+there was occasion to leave the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> cave at night I'd carry one of the
+torches and feel as safe as if it had been an elephant rifle.</p>
+
+<p>We made a kind of a dooryard in front of the cave's mouth, with a
+stockade that we borrowed from Robinson Crusoe, driving pointed stakes
+close-serried and hoping they'd take root and sprout; but they didn't.
+Between times I made finger-drawings in the sand of plans for tiger
+traps and pitfalls. I couldn't dig pits, but I knew of two that might
+have been made to my order, a volcano having taken the contract. They
+were deep as wells, sheer-sided; anything that fell in would stay in. I
+made a wattle-work of branches and palm fibre to serve as lids for these
+nature-made tiger jars. The idea was to toss dead fish out to the middle
+of the lids for bait; then for one of the big cats to smell the fish,
+step out to get it, and fall through. Once in, it would be child's work
+to stone him to death.</p>
+
+<p>Another trap I made was more complicated and was a scheme to drop trees
+heavy enough to break a camel's back or whatever touched the trigger
+that kept them from falling. It was the devil's own job to make that
+trap. First place, I couldn't cut a tree big enough and lift it to a
+strategic position; so I had to fell trees in such a way that they'd be
+caught half-way to the ground by other trees. Then I'd have to clear
+away branches and roots so that when the trees<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> did fall the rest of the
+way it would be clean, plumb, and sudden. It was a wonderful trap when
+it was finished and it was the most dangerous work of art I ever saw. If
+you touched any of a dozen triggers you stood to have a whole grove of
+trees come banging down on top of you&mdash;same as if you went for a walk in
+the woods and a tornado came along and blew the woods down. If the big
+cats had known how frightfully dangerous that trap was they'd have
+jumped overboard and left the island by swimming. I made two other traps
+something like it&mdash;the best contractor in New York wouldn't have
+undertaken to build one just like it at any price&mdash;and then it came
+around to be the seventh day, so to speak; and, like the six-day bicycle
+rider, I rested.</p>
+
+<p>"Days," is only a fashion of speaking. I was months getting my five
+death-traps into working order. I couldn't work steadily because there
+was heaps of cavework to do besides, fish to be caught, wood to be cut
+for the fire, and all; and then, dozens of times, I'd suddenly get
+scared about Ivy and go running back to the cave to see if she was all
+right. I might have known better; she was always all right and much
+better plucked than I was.</p>
+
+<p>Well, sir, my traps wouldn't work. The fish rotted on the wattle-lids of
+the pitfalls, but the beasts wouldn't try for 'em. They were getting
+ravenous, too&mdash;ready<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> to attack big Bahut even; but they wouldn't step
+out on those wattles and they wouldn't step under my balanced trees.
+They'd beat about the neighborhood of the danger and I've found many a
+padmark within six inches of the edge of things. I even baited with a
+live kid. It belonged to the Thibet goats and I had a hard time catching
+it; and after it had bleated all night and done its baby best to be
+tiger food I turned it loose and it ran off with its mammy. She, poor
+soul, had gone right into the trap to be with her baby and, owing to the
+direct intervention of Providence, hadn't sprung the thing.</p>
+
+<p>The next fancy bait I tried was a chetah&mdash;dead. I found him just after
+his accident, not far from the cave. He was still warm; and he was
+flat&mdash;very flat, like a rug made of chetah skin. He had some shreds of
+elephant-hide tangled in his claws. It looked to me as if he'd gotten
+desperate with hunger and had pounced on big Bahut&mdash;pshaw! the story was
+in plain print: "Ouch!" says big Bahut. "A flea has bitten me. Here's
+where I play dead," and&mdash;rolls over. Result: one neat and very flat rug
+made out of chetah.</p>
+
+<p>I showed the rug to Ivy and then carried it off to the woods and spread
+it in my first and fanciest trap. Then I allowed I'd have a look at the
+pitfalls, which I hadn't visited for a couple of days&mdash;and I was a fool<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+to do it. I'd told Ivy where I was going to spread the chetah and that
+after that I'd come straight home. Well, the day seemed young and I
+thought if I hurried I could go home the roundabout way by the pitfalls
+in such good time that Ivy wouldn't know the difference. Well, sir, I
+came to the first pitfall&mdash;and, lo and behold! something had been and
+taken the bait and got away with it without so much as putting a foot
+through the wattling. I'd woven it too strong. So I thought I'd just
+weaken it up a little&mdash;it wouldn't take five minutes. I tried it with my
+foot&mdash;very gingerly. Yes, it was too strong&mdash;much too strong. I put more
+weight into that foot&mdash;and bang, smash, crash&mdash;bump! There I was at the
+bottom of the pit, with half the wattling on top of me.</p>
+
+<p>The depth of that hole was full twenty-five feet; the sides were as
+smooth as bottle-glass; dusk was turning into dark. But these things
+weren't the worst of it. I'd told Ivy that I'd do one thing&mdash;and I'd
+gone and done another. I'd lied to her and I'd put her in for a time of
+anxiety, and then fright, that might kill her.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>VIII</h3>
+
+<p>I wasted what little daylight was left trying to climb out, using
+nothing but hands and feet. And then I sat down and cursed myself for a
+triple-plated, copper-riveted, patent-applied-for fool. Nothing would
+have been easier, given light, than to take the wattling that had fallen
+into the pit with me to pieces, build a pole&mdash;sort of a split-bamboo
+fishing-rod on a big scale&mdash;shin up and go home. But to turn that trick
+in the dark wasn't any fun. I did it though&mdash;twice. I made the first
+pole too light and it smashed when I was half-way up. A splinter jabbed
+into my thigh and drew blood. That complicated matters. The smell of the
+blood went out of the pit and travelled around the island like a
+sandwich man saying: "Fine supply of fresh meat about to come out of
+Right Bower's pet pitfall; second on the left."</p>
+
+<p>When I'd shinned to the top of the second pole I built and crawled over
+the rim of the pit&mdash;there was a tiger sitting, waiting, very patient. I
+could just make him out in the starlight. He was mighty lean and looked
+like a hungry gutter-cat on a big scale. Some people are afraid to be
+alone in the dark. I'm not. Well, I just knelt there&mdash;I'd risen to my
+knees&mdash;and stared at him. And then I began to take in a long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> breath&mdash;I
+swelled and swelled with it. It's a wonder I didn't use up all the air
+on the island and create a vacuum&mdash;in which case the tiger would have
+blown up. I remember wondering what that big breath was going to do when
+it came out. I didn't know. I had no plan. I looked at the tiger and he
+looked at me and whined&mdash;like a spoiled spaniel asking for sugar. That
+was too much. I thought of Ivy, maybe needing me as she'd never needed
+any one before&mdash;and I looked at that stinking cat that meant to keep me
+from her. I made one jump at him&mdash;'stead of him at me&mdash;and at the same
+time I let out the big breath I'd drawn in a screech that very likely
+was heard in Jericho.</p>
+
+<p>The tiger just vanished like a Cheshire cat in a book I read once, and I
+was running through the night for home and Ivy. But the fire at the cave
+was dying, and Ivy was gone.</p>
+
+<p>Well, of course she'd have gone to look for me.... It was then that I
+began to whimper and cry. I lit a pine-torch, flung some wood on the
+embers, and went out to look for her&mdash;whimpering all the time. I'd told
+her that I was going out to bait a certain trap and would then come
+straight home. So of course she'd have gone straight to that trap&mdash;and
+it was there I found her.</p>
+
+<p>The torch showed her where she sat, right near the dead chetah, in the
+very centre of the trap<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>&mdash;triggers all about her&mdash;to touch one of which
+spelt death; and all around the trap, in a ring&mdash;like an audience at a
+one-ring circus&mdash;were the meat-eaters&mdash;the tigers&mdash;the lions&mdash;the
+leopards&mdash;and, worst of all, the pigs. There she sat and there they
+sat&mdash;and no one moved&mdash;except me with the torch.</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her great eyes to me and she smiled. All the beasts looked at
+me and turned away their eyes from the light and blinked and shifted;
+and the old he-lion coughed. They wouldn't come near me because of the
+torch&mdash;and they wouldn't go near Ivy because of the trap. They knew it
+was a trap. They always had known it and so had Ivy. That was why she
+had gone into it when so many deaths looked at her in so many
+ways&mdash;because she knew that in there she'd be safe. All along she'd
+known that my old traps and pitfalls wouldn't catch anything; but she'd
+never said so&mdash;and she'd never laughed at them or at me. I could find it
+in my heart to call her a perfect wife&mdash;just by that one fact of tact
+alone; but there are other facts&mdash;other reasons&mdash;millions of them.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly from somewhere near Ivy there came a thin, piping sound.</p>
+
+<p>"It's your little son talking to you," says Ivy, as calm as if she was
+sitting up in a four-poster.</p>
+
+<p>"My little son!" I says. That was all for a minute. Then I says:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p><p>"Are you all right?"</p>
+
+<p>And she says:</p>
+
+<p>"Sure I am&mdash;now that I know you are."</p>
+
+<p>I turned my torch fire-end down and it began to blaze and sputter and
+presently roar. Then I steps over to the lion and he doesn't move; and I
+points the torch at his dirty face&mdash;and lunges.</p>
+
+<p>Ever see a kitten enjoying a fit? That was what happened to him. Then I
+ran about, beating and poking and shouting and burning. It was like
+Ulysses cleaning the house of suitors and handmaids. All the beasts ran;
+and some of 'em ran a long way, I guess, and climbed trees.</p>
+
+<p>I stuck the torch point-end in the ground, stepped into the trap, and
+lifted my family out. All the time I prayed aloud, saying: "Lord on
+high, keep Right Bower from touching his blamed foot against any of
+these triggers and dropping the forest on top of all he holds in his
+arms!" Ivy, she rubbed her cheek against mine to show confidence&mdash;and
+then we were safe out and I picked up the torch and carried the whole
+kit and boodle, family, torch, happiness&mdash;much too big to tote&mdash;and
+belief in God's goodness, watchfulness, and mercy, home to our cave.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Right Bower added some uneventful details of the few days following&mdash;the
+ship's boat that put into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> island for water and took them off, and
+so on. Then he asked me if I'd like to meet Mrs. Bower, and I went
+forward with him and was presented.</p>
+
+<p>She was deep in a steamer-chair, half covered with a somewhat gay
+assortment of steamer-rugs. I had noticed her before, in passing, and
+had mistaken her for a child.</p>
+
+<p>Bower beamed over us for a while and then left us and we talked for
+hours&mdash;about Bower, the children, and the home in East Orange to which
+they were returning after a holiday at Aix; but she wouldn't talk much
+about the island. "Right," she said, "was all the time so venturesome
+that from morning till night I died of worry and anxiety. Right says the
+Lord does just the right thing for the right people at the right
+time&mdash;always. That's his creed.... Sometimes," she said, "I wonder
+what's become of big Bahut. He was such a&mdash;white elephant!"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Gordon-Colfax took me to task for spending so much of the afternoon
+with Mrs. Bower.</p>
+
+<p>"Who," said she, "was that common little person you were flirting
+with?&mdash;and why?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's a Mrs. Bower," I said. "She has a mission."</p>
+
+<p>"I could tell that," said Mrs. Gordon-Colfax, "from the way she turned
+up her eyes at you."</p>
+
+<p>"As long as she doesn't turn up her nose at me&mdash;" I began; but Mrs.
+Gordon-Colfax put in:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p><p>"The Lord did that for her."</p>
+
+<p>"And," I said, "so she was saying. She said the Lord does just the right
+thing for the right person at the right time.... Now, your nose is
+beautifully Greek; but, to be honest, it turns up ever so much more than hers does."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well," said Mrs. Gordon-Colfax, "I hate common people&mdash;and I can't
+help it. Let's have a bite in the grill."</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry," I said; "I'm dining with the Bowers."</p>
+
+<p>"You have a strong stomach," said she.</p>
+
+<p>"I have," I said, "but a weak heart&mdash;and they are going to strengthen it for me."</p>
+
+<p>And there arose thenceforth a coolness between Mrs. Gordon-Colfax and
+me, which proves once more that the Lord does just the right thing for
+the right people at the right time.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="SAPPHIRA" id="SAPPHIRA"></a>SAPPHIRA</h2>
+
+<p>Mr. Hemingway had transacted a great deal of business with Miss
+Tennant's father; otherwise he must have shunned the proposition upon
+which she came to him. Indeed, wrinkling his bushy brows, he as much as
+told her that he was a banker and not a pawnbroker.</p>
+
+<p>Outside, the main street of Aiken, broad enough to have made five New
+England streets, lay red and glaring in the sun. The least restless
+shifting of feet by horses and mules tied to hitching-posts raised
+clouds of dust, immense reddish ghosts that could not be laid. In the
+bank itself, ordinarily a cool retreat, smelling faintly of tobacco
+juice deposited by some of its clients, the mercury was swelling toward
+ninety. It was April Fools' day, and unless Miss Tennant was cool,
+nobody was. She looked cool. If the temperature had been 40&deg; below zero
+she would have looked warm; but she would have been dressed differently.</p>
+
+<p>It was her great gift always to look the weather and the occasion; no
+matter how or what she really felt. On the present occasion she wore a
+very simple, inexpensive muslin, flowered with faint mauve lilacs, and a
+wide, floppy straw-hat trimmed with the same. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> had driven into town,
+half a mile or more, without getting a speck of dust upon herself. Even
+the corners of her eyes were like those of a newly laundered baby. She
+smelled of tooth-powder (precipitated chalk and orris root), as was her
+custom, and she wore no ring or ornament of any value. Indeed, such
+jewels as she possessed, a graceful diamond necklace, a pearl collar, a
+pearl pendant, and two cabochon sapphire rings, lay on the table between
+her and Mr. Hemingway.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm not asking the bank to do this for me," she said, and she looked
+extra lovely (on purpose, of course). "I'm asking you&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hemingway poked the cluster of jewels very gingerly with his
+forefinger as if they were a lizard.</p>
+
+<p>"And, of course," she said, "they are worth twice the money; maybe three
+or four times."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps," said Mr. Hemingway, "you will take offence if I suggest that
+your father&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The muslin over her shoulders tightened the least in the world. She had shrugged them.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she said, "papa would do it; but he would insist on
+reasons. My reasons involve another, Mr. Hemingway, and so it would not
+be honorable for me to give them."</p>
+
+<p>"And yet," said the banker, twinkling, "your reasons would tempt me to
+accommodate you with the loan you ask for far more than your collateral."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p><p>"Oh," she said, "you are a business man. I could give you reasons, and
+be sure they would go no further&mdash;even if you thought them funny. But if
+papa heard them, and thought them funny, as he would, he would play the
+sieve. I don't want this money for myself, Mr. Hemingway."</p>
+
+<p>"They never do," said he.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish to lend it in turn," she said, "to a person who has been
+reckless, and who is in trouble, but in whom I believe.... But perhaps,"
+she went on, "the person, who is very proud, will take offence at my
+offer of help.... In which case, Mr. Hemingway, I should return you the
+money to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"This person&mdash;" he began, twinkling.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "I couldn't bear to be teased. The person is a young
+gentleman. Any interest that I take in him is a business interest, pure
+and simple. I believe that, tided over his present difficulties, he will
+steady down and become a credit to his sex. Can I say more than that?"
+She smiled drolly.</p>
+
+<p>"Men who are a credit to their sex," said Mr. Hemingway, "are not rare,
+but young gentlemen&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"This one," said she, "has in him the makings of a man. Just now he is
+discouraged."</p>
+
+<p>"Is he taking anything for it?" asked Mr. Hemingway with some sarcasm.</p>
+
+<p>"Buckets," said Miss Tennant simply.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p><p>"Was it cards?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Cards, and betting&mdash;and the hopeless optimism of youth," said she.</p>
+
+<p>"And you wish to lend him five thousand dollars, and your interest in
+him is platonic?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing so ardent," said she demurely. "I wish him to pay his debts, to
+give me his word that he will neither drink nor gamble until he has paid
+back the debt to me, and I shall suggest that he go out to one of those
+big Western States and become a man."</p>
+
+<p>"If anybody," said Mr. Hemingway with gallantry, "could lead a young
+gentleman to so sweeping a reform, it would be yourself."</p>
+
+<p>"There is no sequence of generations," said Miss Tennant, "long enough
+to eradicate a drop of Irish blood."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hemingway swept the jewels together and wrapped them in the
+tissue-paper in which she had brought them.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to put them in your safe&mdash;or return them to me?" she asked plaintively.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hemingway affected gruffness.</p>
+
+<p>"I am thanking God fervently, ma'am," said he, "that you didn't ask me
+for more. You'll have to give me your note. By the way, are you of age?"</p>
+
+<p>Her charming eyes narrowed, and she laughed at him.</p>
+
+<p>"People," she said, "are already beginning to say,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> 'she will hardly
+marry now.' But it's how old we feel, Mr. Hemingway, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I feel about seven," said he, "and foolish at that."</p>
+
+<p>"And I," said she, "will be twenty-five for the second time on my next birthday."</p>
+
+<p>"And, by the way," she said, when the details of the loan had been
+arranged and she had stuffed the five thousand dollars into the palm of
+a wash glove, "nobody must know about this, because I shall have to say
+that&mdash;my gewgaws have been stolen."</p>
+
+<p>"But that will give Aiken a black eye," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm afraid it can't be helped, Mr. Hemingway. Papa will ask point-blank
+why I never wear the pearls he gave me, and I shall have to anticipate."</p>
+
+<p>"How?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said demurely, "to-night or to-morrow night I shall rouse the
+household with screams, and claim that I woke and saw a man bending over
+my dressing-table&mdash;a man with a beautiful white mustache and imperial."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Hemingway's right hand flew to his mouth as if to hide these
+well-ordered appendages, and he laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"Is the truth nothing to you?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"In a business matter pure and simple," she said, after a moment's
+reflection, "it is nothing&mdash;absolutely nothing."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span></p><p>"Not being found out by one's parents is hardly a business matter,"
+said Mr. Hemingway.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said she with a shiver, "as a little girl I went into the hands of
+a receiver at least once a month&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"A hand of iron in a velvet glove," murmured Mr. Hemingway.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," she said, "a leather slipper in a nervous hand.... But how can I thank you?"</p>
+
+<p>She rose, still demure and cool, but with a strong sparkling in her eyes
+as from a difficult matter successfully adjusted.</p>
+
+<p>"You could make the burglar a clean-shaven man," Mr. Hemingway suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"I will," she said. "I will make him look like anybody you say."</p>
+
+<p>"God forbid," said he. "I have no enemies. But, seriously, Miss Tennant,
+if you possibly can, will you do without a burglary, for the good name of Aiken?"</p>
+
+<p>"I will do what I can," she said, "but I can't make promises."</p>
+
+<p>When she had gone, one of the directors pushed open the door of Mr.
+Hemingway's office and tiptoed in.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said he, "for an old graybeard! You've been flirting fifty
+minutes, you sinner."</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't," said Mr. Hemingway, twisting his mustache and looking
+roguish. "I've been discussing a little matter of business with Miss Tennant."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p><p>"<i>What</i> business?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, it wasn't any of yours, Frank, at the time, and I'm dinned if I
+think it is now. But if you must know, she came in to complain of the
+milk that your dairy has been supplying lately. She said it was the kind
+of thing you'd expect in the North, but for a Southern gentleman to put
+water in anything&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You go to Augusta," said the director (it is several degrees hotter
+than Aiken). "Everybody knows that spoons stand up in the milk from my
+dairy, and as for the cream&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In the fall from grace of David Larkin there was involved no great show
+of natural depravity. The difference between a young man who goes right
+and a young man who goes wrong may be no more than the half of one per
+cent. And I do not know why we show the vicious such contempt and the
+virtuous such admiration. Larkin's was the case of a young man who tried
+to do what he was not old enough, strong enough, or wise enough to "get
+away with," as the saying is. Aiken did not corrupt him; he was corrupt
+when he came, with a bank account of thirty-five hundred dollars
+snatched from the lap of Dame Fortune, at a moment when she was minding
+some other small boy. Horses running up to their form, spectacular
+bridge hands (not well played), and bets upon every subject that can be
+thought of had all contributed. Then <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>Larkin caught a cold in his nose,
+so that it ran all day and all night; and because the Browns had invited
+him to Aiken for a fortnight whenever he cared to come, he seized upon
+the excuse of his cold and boarded the first train. He was no sooner in
+Aiken than Dame Fortune ceased minding the other small boy, and turned
+her petulant eyes upon Larkin. Forthwith he began to lose.</p>
+
+<p>Let no man who does not personally know what a run of bad luck is judge
+another. What color is a lemon? Why, it is lemon-colored, to be sure.
+And behold, fortune produces you a lemon black as the ace of spades.
+When fortune goes against you, you cannot be right. The favorite falls
+down; the great jockey uses bad judgment for the first time in his life;
+the foot-ball team that ought to win is overtrained; the yacht carries
+away her bowsprit; your four kings are brought face to face, after much
+"hiking," with four aces; the cigarette that you try to flick into the
+fireplace hits the slender andiron and bounces out upon the rug; the
+liquor that you carried so amiably and sensibly in New York mixes with
+the exciting air of the place where the young lady you are attentive to
+lives, and you make four asses of yourself and seven fools, and wake up
+with your first torturing headache and your first humiliating apology.
+Americans (with the unfortunate exception of us who make a business<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> of
+it) are the greatest phrase-makers the world has ever known. Larkin's
+judgment was good; he was a modest young fellow of very decent
+instincts, he was neither a born gambler nor a born drinker; but, in the
+American phrase, "he was <i>in</i> wrong."</p>
+
+<p>Bad luck is not a good excuse for a failure in character; but God knows
+how wickedly provocative thereof it can be. The elders of the Aiken Club
+did not notice that Larkin was slipping from grace, because his slipping
+was gradual; but they noticed all of a sudden, with pity, chagrin (for
+they liked him), and kindly contempt, that he had fallen. Forthwith a
+wave of reform swept over the Aiken Club, or it amounted to that. Rich
+men who did not care a hang about what they won or lost refused to play
+for high stakes; Larkin's invitations to cocktails were very largely
+refused; no bets were made in his presence (and I must say that this was
+a great cause of languishment in certain men's conversation), and the
+young man was mildly and properly snubbed. This locking of the stable
+door, however, had the misfortune to happen just after the horse had
+bolted. Larkin had run through the most of his money; he did not know
+how he was to pay his bed and board at Willcox's, where he was now
+stopping; his family were in no position to help him; he knew that he
+was beginning to be looked on with contempt; he thought that he was
+seriously in love with Miss<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> Tennant. He could not see any way out of
+anything; knew that a disgraceful crash was imminent, and for all these
+troubles he took the wrong medicine. Not the least foolish part of this
+was that it was medicine for which he would be unable to pay when the
+club bill fell due. From after breakfast until late at night he kept
+himself, not drunk, but stimulated.... And then one day the president of
+the club spoke to him very kindly&mdash;and the next day wouldn't speak to him at all.</p>
+
+<p>The proper course would have been for Larkin to open his heart to any of
+a dozen men. Any one of them would have straightened him out mentally
+and financially in one moment, and forgotten about it the next. But
+Larkin was too young, too foolish, and too full of false pride to make
+confessions to any one who could help him; and he was quite ignorant of
+the genuine kindness and wisdom that lurks in the average rich man, if
+once you can get his ear.</p>
+
+<p>But one night, being sure they could not be construed into an appeal for
+help, or anything but a sympathetic scolding, which he thought would be
+enjoyable (and because of a full moon, perhaps, and a whole chorus of
+mocking-birds pouring out their souls in song, and because of an arbor
+covered with the yellow jasmine that smells to heaven, and a little
+sweeter), he made his sorry confessions into the lovely pink hollow of
+Miss Tennant's ear.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p><p>Instead of a scolding he received sympathy and understanding; and he
+misconstrued the fact that she caught his hand in hers and squeezed it
+very hard; and did not know that he had misconstrued that fact until he
+found that it was her cheek that he had kissed instead of her hastily averted lips.</p>
+
+<p>This rebuff did not prevent him from crowning the story of his young
+life with further confessions. And it is on record that when Larkin came
+into the brightly lighted club there was dust upon the knees of his trousers.</p>
+
+<p>"I <i>am</i> fond of you, David," she had said, "and in spite of all the mess
+you have made of things, I believe in you; but even if I were fonder
+than fondest of you, I should despise myself if I listened to you&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>But she did not sleep all night for thinking how she could be of real,
+material help to the young man, and cause him to turn into the straight,
+narrow path that always leads to success and sometimes to achievement.</p>
+
+<p>Every spring the Mannings, who have nothing against them except that
+they live on the wrong side of town, give a wistaria party. The Mannings
+live for the blossoming of the wistaria which covers their charming
+porticoed house from top to toe and fills their grounds. Ever since they
+can remember they have specialized in wistaria; and they are not young,
+and wistaria grows fast. The fine old trees that stand in the Mannings'<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+grounds are merely lofty trellises for the vines, white and mauve, to
+sport upon. The Mannings' garden cost less money, perhaps, than any
+notable garden in Aiken; and when in full bloom it is, perhaps, the most
+beautiful garden in the world. To appreciate wistaria, one vine with a
+spread of fifty feet bearing ten thousand racemes of blossoms a foot
+long is not enough; you must enter and disappear into a region of such
+vines, and then loaf and stroll with an untroubled nose and your heart's desire.</p>
+
+<p>Even Larkin, when he paused under the towering entrance vines, a mauve
+and a white, forgot his troubles. He filled his lungs with the delicious
+fragrance, and years after the consciousness of it would come upon him
+suddenly. And then coming upon tea-tables standing in the open and
+covered with good things, and finding, among the white flannel and
+muslin guests, Miss Tennant, very obviously on the lookout for him, his
+cup was full. When they had drunk very deep of orangeade, and eaten jam
+sandwiches followed by chicken sandwiches and walnut cake, they went
+strolling (Miss Tennant still looking completely ethereal&mdash;a creature
+that lived on the odor of flowers and kind thoughts rather than the more
+material edibles mentioned above), and then Larkin felt that his cup was overflowing.</p>
+
+<p>Either because the day was hot or because of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> sandwiches, they found
+exclusive shade and sat in it, upon a white seat that looked like
+marble&mdash;at a distance. Larkin once more filled his lungs with the breath
+of wistaria and was for letting it out in further confessions of what he
+felt to be his heart's ultimate depths. But Miss Tennant was too quick
+for him. She drew five one-thousand-dollar bills from the palm of her
+glove and put them in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"There," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Larkin looked at the money and fell into a dark mood.</p>
+
+<p>"What is this for?" he said presently.</p>
+
+<p>"This is a loan," said she, "from me to you; to be a tiding over of
+present difficulties, a reminder of much that has been pleasant in the
+past, and an earnest of future well-doing. Good luck to you, David."</p>
+
+<p>"I wish I could take it," said the young man with a swift, slanting
+smile. "And at least I can crawl upon my stomach at your feet, and pull
+my forelock and heap dust upon my head.... God bless you!" And he
+returned the bills to her.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled cheerfully but a little disdainfully.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then," said she. "I tear them up."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" cried Larkin. "Don't make a mess of a beautiful incident."</p>
+
+<p>"Then take them."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span></p><p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you know as well as I do that a man can't borrow from a girl."</p>
+
+<p>"A man?" asked Miss Tennant simply, as if she doubted having heard
+correctly. Then, as he nodded, she turned a pair of eyes upon him that
+were at once kind, pained, and deeply thoughtful. And she began to speak
+in a quiet, repressed way upon the theme that he had suggested.</p>
+
+<p>"A man," she said; "what is a man? I can answer better by telling you
+what a man is not. A man is not a creature who loafs when he ought to be
+at work, who loses money that he hasn't got, who drinks liquor that he
+cannot carry, and who upon such a noble groundwork feels justified in
+making love to a decent, self-respecting girl. That is not a <i>man</i>,
+David. A man would have no need of any help from me.... But you&mdash;you are
+a child that has escaped from its nurse, a bird that has fallen out of
+its nest before it has learned to fly, and you have done nothing but
+foolish things.... But somehow I have learned to suspect you of a better
+self, where, half-strangled with foolishnesses and extravagance, there
+lurks a certain contrition and a certain sweetness.... God knows I
+should like to see you a man...."</p>
+
+<p>Larkin jumped to his feet, and all of him that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> showed was crimson, and
+he could have cried. But he felt no anger, and he kept his eyes upon
+hers.</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he said; "may I have them?"</p>
+
+<p>He stuffed the bills into his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no security," he said. "But I will give you my word of honor
+neither to drink, neither to gamble, neither to loaf, nor to make love
+until I have paid you back interest and principal."</p>
+
+<p>"Where will you go? What will you do, David?"</p>
+
+<p>"West&mdash;God knows. I <i>will</i> do something.... You see that I can't say any
+thanks, don't you? That I am almost choking, and that at any moment I
+might burst into sobs?"</p>
+
+<p>They were silent, and she looked into his face unconsciously while he
+mastered his agitation. He sat down beside her presently, his elbows on
+his knees, his chin deep in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Is God blessing you by any chance?" he said. "Do you feel anything of
+the kind? Because I am asking Him to&mdash;so very hard. I shall ask Him to a
+million times every day until I die.... Would it be possible for one who
+has deserved nothing, but who would like it for the strengthingest,
+beautifulest memory...."</p>
+
+<p>"Quick, then," said she, "some one's coming."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p><p>That very night screams pierced to every corner of the Tennants' great
+house on the Whiskey Road. Those whom screams affect in one way sprang
+from bed; those whom they affect in another hid under the bedclothes.
+Mr. Tennant himself, a man of sharp temper and implacable courage,
+dashed from his room in a suit of blue-and-white pajamas, and overturned
+a Chippendale cabinet worth a thousand dollars; young Mr. Tennant barked
+both shins on a wood-box and dropped a loaded Colt revolver into the
+well of the stair; Mrs. Tennant was longer in appearing, having tarried
+to try the effect upon her nerves and color sense of three divers
+wrappers. The butler, an Admirable Crichton of a man, came, bearing a
+bucket of water in case the house was on fire. Mrs. Tennant's French
+maid carried a case of her mistress's jewels, and seemed determined to leave.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Tennant stood in the door-way of her room. She was pale and greatly
+agitated, but her eyes shone with courage and resolve. Her arched,
+blue-veined feet were thrust into a pair of red Turkish slippers turning
+up at the toes. A mandarin robe of dragoned blue brocade was flung over
+her night-gown. In one hand she had a golf club&mdash;a niblick.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" she cried, when her father was sufficiently recovered from
+overturning the cabinet to listen, "there was a man in my room."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+
+<table summary="A man?">
+  <tr>
+    <td>Mr. Tennant</td>
+    <td>}</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>{ furiously.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Young Mr. Tennant&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>}</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>{ sleepily.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The butler</td>
+    <td>}</td>
+    <td>"A man?"</td>
+    <td>{ as if he thought she meant to say a fire.</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The French maid</td>
+    <td>}</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>{ blushing crimson.</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Then, and again all together:</p>
+
+<table summary=" ">
+  <tr>
+    <td>Mr. Tennant&mdash;</td>
+    <td>"Which way did he go?"</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Young Mr. Tennant&mdash;</td>
+    <td>"Which man?"</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The butler&mdash;</td>
+    <td>"A white man?"</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The French maid (with a kind of ecstasy)&mdash;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>"A man!"</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>"Out the window!" cried Miss Tennant.</p>
+
+<p>Her father and brother dashed downstairs and out into the grounds. The
+butler hurried to the telephone (still carrying his bucket of water) and
+rang Central and asked for the chief of police. Central answered, after
+a long interval, that the chief of police was out of order, and rang off.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Mrs. Tennant arrived, and, having coldly recovered her
+jewel-case from the custody of the French maid, prepared to be told the
+details of what hadn't happened.</p>
+
+<p>"He was bending over my dressing-table, mamma,"<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> said Miss Tennant. "I
+could see him plainly in the moonlight; he had a mask, and was smooth
+shaven, and he wore gloves."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder why he wore gloves," mused Mrs. Tennant.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose," said Miss Tennant, "that he had heard of the Bertillon
+system, and was afraid of being tracked by his finger-marks."</p>
+
+<p>"Did he say anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not to me, I think," said Miss Tennant, "but he kept mumbling to
+himself so I could hear: 'Slit her damn throat if she makes a move; slit
+it right into the backbone.' So, of course, I didn't make a move&mdash;I
+thought he was talking to a confederate whom I couldn't see."</p>
+
+<p>"Why a <i>confederate</i>?" asked Mrs. Tennant. "Oh, I see&mdash;you mean a sort of partner."</p>
+
+<p>"But there was only the one," said Miss Tennant. "And when he had filled
+his pockets and was gone by the window&mdash;I thought it was safe to scream, and I screamed."</p>
+
+<p>"Have you looked to see what he took?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. But my jewels were all knocking about on the dressing-table. I
+suppose he got them."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Mrs. Tennant, "let's be thankful that he didn't get mine."</p>
+
+<p>"And only to think," said Miss Tennant, "that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> only last night papa
+asked me why I had given up wearing my pearls, and was put out about it,
+and I promised to wear them oftener!"</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, my dear," said her mother confidentially; "if you are sorry
+enough long enough your father will buy you others. He can be
+wonderfully generous if you keep at him."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Miss Tennant, "I feel sure that they will be recovered some
+day&mdash;it may not be to-morrow, or next day&mdash;but somehow&mdash;some time I feel
+sure that they will come back. Of course papa must offer a reward."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder how much he will offer!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, a good round sum. I shall suggest five thousand dollars, if he asks me."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>The next day Miss Tennant despatched the following note to Mr. Hemingway:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p><span class="smcap">Dear, kind Mr. Hemingway:</span></p>
+
+<p>You have heard of the great robbery and of my dreadful fright. But
+there is no use crying about it. It is one of those dreadful
+things, I suppose, that simply <i>have</i> to happen. The burglar was
+smooth-shaven. How awful that this should have to happen in Aiken
+of all cities. In Aiken where we never have felt hitherto that it
+was ever necessary to lock the door. I suppose Mr. Powell's nice
+hardware store will do an enormous business now in patent bolts.
+Papa is going to offer five thousand dollars' reward for the return
+of my jewels, and no questions asked. Do you know,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> I have a
+feeling that you are going to be instrumental in finding the stolen
+goods. I have a feeling that the thief (if he has any sense at all)
+will negotiate through you for their return. And I am sure the
+thief would never have taken them if he had known how badly it
+would make me feel, and what a blow he was striking at the good
+name of Aiken.</p>
+
+<p>I am, dear Mr. Hemingway, contritely and sincerely yours,</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">Sapphira Tennant</span>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br />
+(formerly Dolly Tennant).</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>But Mr. Hemingway refused to touch the reward, and Miss Tennant remained
+in his debt for the full amount of her loan. She began at once to save
+what she could from her allowance. And she called this fund her
+"conscience money."</p>
+
+<p>Miss Tennant and David Larkin did not meet again until the moment of the
+latter's departure from Aiken. And she was only one of a number who
+drove to the station to see him off. Possibly to guard against his
+impulsive nature, she remained in her runabout during the brief
+farewell. And what they said to each other might have been (and probably
+was) heard by others.</p>
+
+<p>Aiken felt that it had misjudged Larkin, and he departed in high favor.
+He had paid what he owed, so Aiken confessed to having misjudged his
+resources. He had suddenly stopped short in all evil ways, so Aiken
+confessed to having misjudged his strength of character. He had
+announced that he was going<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> out West to seek the bubble wealth in the
+mouth of an Idaho apple valley, so Aiken cheered him on and wished him
+well. And when Aiken beheld the calmness of his farewells to Miss
+Tennant, Aiken said: "And he seems to have gotten over that."</p>
+
+<p>But Larkin had done nothing of the kind, and he said to himself, as he
+lay feverish and restless in a stuffy upper berth: "It isn't because
+she's so beautiful or so kind; it's because she always speaks the truth.
+Most girls lie about everything, not in so many words, perhaps, but in
+fact. She doesn't. She lets you know what she thinks, and where you
+stand ... and I didn't stand very high."</p>
+
+<p>Despair seized him. How is it possible to go into a strange world, with
+only nine hundred dollars in your pocket, and carve a fortune? "When can
+I pay her back? What must I do if I fail?..." Then came thoughts that
+were as grains of comfort. Was her lending him money philanthropy pure
+and simple, an act emanating from her love of mankind? Was it not rather
+an act emanating from affection for a particular man? If so, that
+man&mdash;misguided boy, bird tumbled out of the nest, child that had escaped
+from its nurse&mdash;was not hard to find. "I could lay my finger on him,"
+thought Larkin, and he did so&mdash;five fingers, somewhat grandiosely upon
+the chest. A gas lamp peered at him over the curtain pole; snores<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> shook
+the imprisoned atmosphere of the car. And Larkin's thoughts flitted from
+the past and future to the present.</p>
+
+<p>A question that he now asked himself was: "Do women snore?" And: "If
+people cannot travel in drawing-rooms, why do they travel at all?" The
+safety of his nine hundred dollars worried him; he knelt up to look in
+the inside pocket of his jacket, and bumped his head, a dull, solid
+bump. Pale golden stars, shaped like the enlarged pictures of
+snow-flakes, streamed across his consciousness. But the money was safe.</p>
+
+<p>Already his nostrils were irritable with cinders; he attempted to blow
+them clear, and failed. He was terribly thirsty. He wished very much to
+smoke. Whichever way he turned, the frogs on the uppers of his pajamas
+made painful holes in him. He woke at last with two coarse blankets
+wrapped firmly about his head and shoulders and the rest of him
+half-naked, gritty with cinders, and as cold as a well curb. Through the
+ventilators (tightly closed) daylight was struggling with gas-light. The
+car smelled of stale steam and man. The car wheels played a headachy
+tune to the metre of the Ph&oelig;be-Snow-upon-the-road-of-anthracite
+verses. David cursed Ph&oelig;be Snow, and determined that if ever God
+vouchsafed him a honey-moon it should be upon the clean, fresh ocean.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p><p>There had been wistaria in Aiken. There was snow in New York. There was
+a hurricane in Chicago. But in the smoker bound West there was a fine
+old gentleman in a blue-serge suit and white spats who took a fancy to
+David, just when David had about come to the conclusion that nothing in
+the world looked friendly except suicide.</p>
+
+<p>If David had learned nothing else from Miss Tennant, he had learned to
+speak the truth. "Any employer that I am ever to have," he resolved,
+"shall know all that there is to be known about me. I shall not try to
+create the usual impression of a young man seeking his fortune in the
+West purely for amusement." And so, when the preliminaries of
+smoking-room acquaintance had been made&mdash;the cigar offered and refused,
+and one's reasons for or against smoking plainly stated&mdash;David was
+offered (and accepted) the opportunity to tell the story of his life.</p>
+
+<p>David shook his head at a brilliantly labelled cigar eight inches long.</p>
+
+<p>"I love to smoke," he said, "but I've promised not to."</p>
+
+<p>"Better habit than liquor," suggested the old gentleman in the white
+spats.</p>
+
+<p>"I've promised not to drink."</p>
+
+<p>"Men who don't smoke and who don't drink," said the old gentleman,
+"usually spend their time running after the girls. My name is Uriah Grey."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p><p>"Mine is David Larkin," said David, and he smiled cheerfully, "and I've
+promised not to make love."</p>
+
+<p>"What&mdash;never?" exclaimed Mr. Grey.</p>
+
+<p>"Not until I have a right to," said David.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Grey drew three brightly bound volumes from between his leg and the
+arm of his chair, and intimated that he was about to make them a subject of remark.</p>
+
+<p>"I love stories," he said, "and in the hope of a story I paid a dollar
+and a half for each of three novels. This one tells you how to prepare
+rotten meat for the market. This one tells you when and where to find
+your neighbor's wife without being caught. And in this one a noble young
+Chicagoan describes the life of society persons in the effete East."</p>
+
+<p>"Whom he does not know from Adam," said David.</p>
+
+<p>"Whom he does not distinguish from Adam," corrected Mr. Grey. "But I was
+thinking that I am disappointed in my appetite for stories, and that
+just now you made a most enticing beginning as&mdash;'I, Roger Slyweather of
+Slyweather Hall, Blankshire, England, having at the age of twenty-two or
+thereabouts made solemn promise neither to smoke nor to drink, nor to
+make love, did set forth upon a blustering day in April....'"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said David, "if it's my story you want, I don't mind a bit. It
+will chasten me to tell it, and you can stop me the minute you are bored."</p>
+
+<p>And then, slip by slip and bet by bet, he told his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> story, withholding
+only the sex of that dear friend who had loaned him the five thousand
+dollars, and to whom he had bound himself by promises.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Mr. Grey, when David had finished, "I don't know your
+holding-out powers, Larkin, but you do certainly speak the truth without mincing."</p>
+
+<p>"That," said David, "is a promise I have made to myself in admiration of
+and emulation of my friend. But I have had my little lesson, and I shall
+keep the other promises until I have made good."</p>
+
+<p>"And then?" Mr. Grey beamed.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said David, "I shall smoke and I shall make love."</p>
+
+<p>"But no liquor."</p>
+
+<p>David laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I have a secret clause in my pledge," said he; "it is not to touch
+liquor except on the personal invitation of my future father-in-law,
+whoever he may be." But he had Dolly Tennant's father in his mind, and
+the joke seemed good to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Mr. Grey, "I don't know as I'd go into apple-growing. You
+haven't got enough capital."</p>
+
+<p>"But," said David, "I intend to begin at the bottom and work up."</p>
+
+<p>"When I was a youngster," said Mr. Grey, "I began at the bottom of an
+apple tree and worked my way to the top. There I found a wasp's nest.
+Then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> I fell and broke both arms. That was a lesson to me. Don't go up
+for your pile, my boy. Go down. Go down into the beautiful earth, and
+take out the precious metals."</p>
+
+<p>"Good Heavens!" exclaimed David; "you're <i>the</i> Mr. Grey of Denver."</p>
+
+<p>"I have a car hitched on to this train," said the magnate; "I'd be very
+glad of your company at dinner&mdash;seven-thirty. It's not every young man
+that I'd invite. But seeing that you're under bond not to make love
+until you've made good, I can see no objection to introducing you to my granddaughter."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"Grandpa," said Miss Violet Grey, who was sixteen, spoiled, and
+exquisite, "make that poor boy stop off at Denver, and do something for
+him."</p>
+
+<p>"Since when," said her grandfather, "have you been so down on apples,
+miss?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said she with an approving shudder, "all good women fear
+them&mdash;like so much poison."</p>
+
+<p>"But," said Mr. Grey (Mr. "Iron Grey," some called him), "if I take this
+young fellow up, it won't be to put him down in a drawing-room, but in a
+hole a thousand feet deep, or thereabouts."</p>
+
+<p>"And when he comes out," said she, "I shall have returned from being
+finished in Europe."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't know what there is so attractive about these<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> young Eastern
+ne'er-do-weels," said the old gentleman, "but this one has got a certain something...."</p>
+
+<p>"It's his inimitable truthfulness," said she.</p>
+
+<p>"Not to me," said her grandfather, "so much as the way he says <i>w</i>
+instead of <i>r</i> and at the same time gives the impression of having the
+makings of a man in him...."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "make him, grandpa, do!"</p>
+
+<p>"And if I make him?" The old gentleman smiled provokingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said she, "then I'll break him."</p>
+
+<p>"Or," said her grandfather, who was used to her sudden fancies and
+subsequent disenchantments, "or else you'll shake him."</p>
+
+<p>Then he pulled her ears for her and sent her to bed.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>In one matter David was, from the beginning of his new career, firmly
+resolved. He would in no case write Miss Tennant of his hopes and fears.
+If he was to be promoted she was not to hear of it until after the fact;
+and she should not be troubled with the sordid details of his
+savings-bank account. As to fears, very great at first, these dwindled,
+became atrophied, and were consumed in the fire of work from the moment
+when that work changed from a daily nuisance to a daily miracle, at once
+the exercise and the reward of intelligence. His work, really light at
+first, seemed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> stupendous to him because he did not understand it. As
+his understanding grew, he was given heavier work, and behold! it seemed
+more light. He discovered that great books had been written upon every
+phase of bringing forth metal from the great mother earth; and he
+snatched from long days of toil time for more toil, and burned his lamp
+into the night, so that he might add theory to practice.</p>
+
+<p>I should like to say that David's swift upward career owed thanks
+entirely to his own good habits, newly discovered gifts for mining
+engineering, and industry; but a strict regard for the truth prevents.
+Upon his own resources and talents he must have succeeded in the end;
+but his success was the swifter for the interest, and presently
+affection, that Uriah Grey himself contributed toward it. In short,
+David's chances came to him as soon as he was strong enough to handle
+them, and were even created on purpose for him; whereas, if he had had
+no one behind him, he must have had to wait interminably for them. But
+the main point, of course, is that, as soon as he began to understand
+what was required of him, he began to make good.</p>
+
+<p>His field work ended about the time that Miss Violet Grey returned from
+Europe "completely finished and done up," as she put it herself, and he
+became a fixture of growing importance in Mr. Grey's main offices in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+Denver and a thrill in Denver society. His baby <i>w</i>'s instead of rolling
+<i>r</i>'s thrilled the ladies; his good habits coupled with his manliness
+and success thrilled the men.</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't drink," said one.</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't smoke," said another.</p>
+
+<p>"He doesn't bet," said a third.</p>
+
+<p>"He can look the saints in the face," said a fourth; and a fifth,
+looking up, thumped upon a bell that would summon a waiter, and with emphasis said:</p>
+
+<p>"And we <i>like</i> to have him around!"</p>
+
+<p>Among the youngest and most enthusiastic men it even became the habit to
+copy David in certain things. He was responsible for a small wave of
+reform in Denver, as he had once been in Aiken; but for the opposite
+cause. Little dialogues like the following might frequently be heard in
+the clubs:</p>
+
+<p>"Have a drink, Billy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks; I don't drink."</p>
+
+<p>"Cigar, Sam?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks (with a moan); don't smoke."</p>
+
+<p>"Betcherfivedollars, Ned."</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry, old man; I don't bet."</p>
+
+<p>Or, in a lowered voice:</p>
+
+<p>"Say, let's drop round to&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I've (chillingly) cut out all that sort of thing."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span></p><p>Platonic friendships became the rage. David himself, as leader,
+maintained a dozen such, chiefest of which was with the newly finished
+Miss Grey. At first her very soul revolted against a friendship of this
+sort. She was lovely, and she knew it; with lovely clothes she made
+herself even lovelier, and she knew this, too. She was young, and she
+rejoiced in it. And she had always been a spoiled darling, and she
+wished to be made much of, to cause a dozen hearts to beat in the breast
+where but one beat before, to be followed, waited on, adored, bowed down
+to, and worshipped. She wished yellow-flowering jealousy to sprout in
+David's heart instead of the calm and loyal friendliness to which alone
+the soil seemed adapted. She knew that he often wrote letters to a Miss
+Tennant; and she would have liked very much to have this Miss Tennant in
+her power, and to have scalped her there and then.</p>
+
+<p>This was only at first, when she merely fancied David rather more than
+other young men. But a time came when her fancy was stronger for him
+than that; and then it seemed to her that even his platonic friendship
+was worth more than all the great passions of history rolled into one.
+Then from the character of that spoiled young lady were wiped clean
+away, as the sponge wipes marks from a slate, vanity, whims, temper,
+tantrums, thoughtlessness, and arrogance, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> in their places appeared
+the opposites. She sought out hard spots in people's lives and made them
+soft; sympathy and gentleness radiated from her; thoughtfulness and steadfastness.</p>
+
+<p>Her grandfather, who had been reading Ibsen, remarked to himself: "It
+may be artistically and dramatically inexcusable for the ing&eacute;nue
+suddenly to become the heroine&mdash;but <i>I</i> like it. As to the cause&mdash;&mdash;"
+and the old gentleman rested in his deep chair till far into the night,
+twiddling his thumbs and thinking long thoughts. Finally, frowning and
+troubled, he rose and went off to his bed.</p>
+
+<p>"Is it," thought he, "because he gave his word not to make love until he
+had made good&mdash;or is it because he really doesn't give a damn about poor
+little Vi? If it's the first reason, why he's absolved from that
+promise, because he has made good, and every day he's making better. But
+if it's the second reason, why then this world is a wicked, dreary
+place. Poor little Vi&mdash;poor little Vi ... only two things in the whole
+universe that she can't get&mdash;the moon, and David&mdash;the moon, and David&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>About noon the next day, David requested speech with his chief.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said Uriah. The old man looked worn and feeble. He had had a
+sorrowful night.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span></p><p>"I haven't had a vacation in a year," said David. "Will you give me
+three weeks, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"Want to go back East and pay off your obligations?"</p>
+
+<p>David nodded.</p>
+
+<p>"I have the money and interest in hand," said he.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Grey smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose you'll come back smoking like a chimney, drinking like a
+fish, betting like a book-maker, and keeping a whole chorus in picture-hats."</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'll not even smoke," said David. "About a month ago the last
+traces of hankering left me, and I feel like a free man at last."</p>
+
+<p>"But you'll be making love right and left," said Mr. Grey cheerfully,
+but with a shrewd eye upon the young man's expression of face.</p>
+
+<p>David looked grave and troubled. He appeared to be turning over
+difficult matters in his mind. Then he smiled gayly.</p>
+
+<p>"At least I shall be free to make love if I want to."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense," said Mr. Grey. "People don't make love because they want to.
+They do it because they have to."</p>
+
+<p>Again David looked troubled, and a little sad, perhaps.</p>
+
+<p>"True," said he. And he walked meditatively back to his own desk, took
+up a pen, meditated for a long time, and then wrote:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p><blockquote><p>Best friend that any man ever had in the world! I shall be in
+Aiken on the twenty-fifth, bringing with me that which I owe, and
+can pay, and deeply conscious of that deeper debt that I owe, but
+never can hope to pay. But I will do what I can. I will not now
+take back the promises I gave, unless you wish; I will not do
+anything that you do not wish. And if all the service and devotion
+that is in me for the rest of time seem worth having to you, they
+are yours. But you know that.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">David.</span></p></blockquote>
+
+<p>This, looking white, tired, and austere, he reread, folded, enveloped,
+stamped, sealed, and addressed to Miss Tennant.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Neither the hand which Miss Tennant laid on his, nor the cigarette which
+she lighted for him, completely mollified Mr. Billy McAllen. He was no
+longer young enough to dance with pleasure to a maiden's whims. The
+experience of dancing from New York to Newport and back, and over the
+deep ocean and back, and up and down Europe and back with the late Mrs.
+McAllen&mdash;now Mrs. Jimmie Greenleaf&mdash;had sufficed. He would walk to the
+altar any day with Miss Tennant, but he would not dance.</p>
+
+<p>"You have so many secrets with yourself," he complained, "and I'm so very reasonable."</p>
+
+<p>"True, Billy," said Miss Tennant. "But if I put up with your secrets,
+you should put up with mine."</p>
+
+<p>"I have none," said he, "unless you are rudely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> referring to the fact
+that I gave my wife such grounds for divorce as every gentleman must be
+prepared to give to a lady who has tired of him. I might have contracted
+a pleasant liaison; but I didn't. I merely drove up and down Piccadilly
+with a notorious woman until the courts were sufficiently scandalized. You know that."</p>
+
+<p>"But is it nothing," she said, "to have me feel this way toward you?"
+And she leaned and rested her lovely cheek against his.</p>
+
+<p>"At least, Dolly," said he, more gently, "announce our engagement, and
+marry me inside of six months. I've been patient for eighteen. It would
+have been easy if you had given a good reason...."</p>
+
+<p>"My reason," said she, "will be in Aiken to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"You speak with such assurance," said he, smiling, "that I feel sure
+your reason is not travelling by the Southern. And you'll tell me the reason to-morrow?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Not to-morrow, Billy&mdash;now."</p>
+
+<p>He made no comment, fearing that she might seize upon any as a pretext
+for putting him off. But he slipped an arm around her waist.</p>
+
+<p>"Tighter if you like," she said. "I don't mind. My reason, Billy, is a
+young man. Don't let your arm slacken that way. I don't see any one or
+anything<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> beyond you in any direction in this world. You know that.
+There is nothing in the expression 'a young man' to turn you suddenly
+cold toward me. Don't be a goose.... Not so tight." They laughed
+happily. "I will even tell you his name," she resumed&mdash;"David Larkin;
+and I was a little gone on him, and he was over ears with me. You
+weren't in Aiken the year he was. Well, he misbehaved something
+dreadful, Billy; betted himself into a deep, deep hole, and tried to
+float himself out. I took him in hand, loaned him money, and took his
+solemn word that he would not even make love until he had paid me back.
+There was no real understanding between us, only&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Only?" McAllen was troubled.</p>
+
+<p>"Only I think he couldn't have changed suddenly from a little fool into
+a man if <i>he</i> hadn't felt that there was an understanding. And his
+letters, one every week, confirm that; though he's very careful, because
+of his promise, not to make love in them.... You see, he's been working
+his head off&mdash;there's no way out of it, Billy&mdash;for me.... If you hadn't
+crossed my humble path I think I should have possessed enough sentiment
+for David to have been&mdash;the reward."</p>
+
+<p>"But there <i>was</i> no understanding."</p>
+
+<p>"No. Not in so many words. But at the last talk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> we had together he was
+humble and pathetic and rather manly, and I did a very foolish thing."</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said with a blush, "I sat still."</p>
+
+<p>"Let me blot it out," said McAllen, drawing her very close.</p>
+
+<p>"But I can only remember up to seven," said she, "and I am afraid that
+nothing can blot them out as far as David is concerned. He will come
+to-morrow as sure that I have been faithful to him as that he has been
+faithful to me.... It's all very dreadful.... He will pay me back the
+money, and the interest; and then I shall give him back the promises
+that he gave, and then he will make love to me...."</p>
+
+<p>She sighed, and said that the thought of the pickle she had got herself
+into made her temples ache. McAllen kissed them for her.</p>
+
+<p>"But why," he said, "when you got to care for me, didn't you let this
+young man learn gradually in your letters to him that&mdash;that it was all
+off?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was afraid, don't you see," said she, "that if the incentive was
+suddenly taken away from him&mdash;he might go to pieces. And I was fond of
+him, and I am proud to think that he has made good for my sake, and the
+letters.... Oh, Billy, it's a dreadful mess. My letters to him have been
+rather warm, I am afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Damn!" said McAllen.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>"Damn!" said Miss Tennant.</p>
+
+<p>"If he would have gone to pieces before this," said McAllen, "why not
+now?&mdash;after you tell him, I mean."</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" said she dismally. "But if he does, Billy, I can only be
+dreadfully sorry. I'm certainly not going to wreck our happiness just to
+keep him on the war-path."</p>
+
+<p>"But you'll not be weak, Dolly?"</p>
+
+<p>"How!&mdash;weak?"</p>
+
+<p>"He'll be very sad and miserable&mdash;you won't be carried away? You won't,
+upon the impulse of the moment, feel that it is your duty to go on
+saving him?... If that should happen, Dolly, <i>I</i> should go to pieces."</p>
+
+<p>"Must I tell him," she said, "that I never really cared? He will think
+me such a&mdash;a liar. And I'm not a liar, Billy, am I? I'm just unlucky."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't believe," said he tenderly, "that you ever told a story in your
+whole sweet life."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she cried, "I <i>do</i> love you when you say things like that to
+me.... Let's not talk about horrid things any more, and mistakes, and
+bugbears.... If we're going to show up at the golf club tea.... It's
+Mrs. Carrol's to-day and we promised her to come."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said McAllen, "we need not start for ten minutes.... When will you marry me?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p><p>"In May," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Good</i> girl," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Billy," she said presently, "it was <i>all</i> the first Mrs. Billy's fault&mdash;wasn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, dear," said he, "it wasn't. It's never all of anybody's fault. Do you care?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you afraid?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you love me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"How much?"</p>
+
+<p>"So much," and she made the gesture that a baby makes when you ask, "How big's the baby?"</p>
+
+<p>"What's your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dolly."</p>
+
+<p>"Whose girl are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm Billy McAllen's girl."</p>
+
+<p>"All of you?"</p>
+
+<p>She grew very serious in a moment.</p>
+
+<p>"All of me, Billy&mdash;all that is straight in me, all that is crooked, all
+that is white, all that is black...."</p>
+
+<p>But he would not be serious.</p>
+
+<p>"How about this hand? Is that mine?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yours."</p>
+
+<p>He kissed it.</p>
+
+<p>"This cheek?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p><p>"Yours."</p>
+
+<p>"And this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yours."</p>
+
+<p>"These eyes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Both yours."</p>
+
+<p>He closed them, first one, then the other.</p>
+
+<p>Then a kind of trembling seized him, so that it was evident in his speech.</p>
+
+<p>"This mouth, Dolly?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mumm."</p>
+
+<p>And so, as the romantic school has it, "the long day dragged slowly on."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>David may have thought it pure chance that he should find Dolly Tennant
+alone. But it was not. She had given the matter not a little strategy
+and arrangement. Why, however, in view of her relations with McAllen,
+she should have made herself as attractive as possible to the eye is for
+other women to say.</p>
+
+<p>It was to be April in a few days, and March was going out like a fiery
+dragon. The long, broad shadow of the terrace awning helped to darken
+the Tennants' drawing-room, and Venetian blinds, half-drawn, made a kind
+of cool dusk, in which it came natural to speak in a lowered voice, and
+to move quietly, as if some one were sick in the house. Miss Tennant sat
+very low, with her hands clasped over her knees; a brocade<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> and Irish
+lace work-bag spilled its contents at her feet. She wore a twig of tea
+olive in her dress so that the whole room smelled of ripe peaches. She
+had never looked lovelier or more desirable.</p>
+
+<p>"David!" she exclaimed. Her tone at once expressed delight at seeing
+him, and was an apology for remaining languidly seated. And she looked
+him over in a critical, maternal way.</p>
+
+<p>"If you hadn't sent in your name," she said, "I should never have known
+you. You stand taller and broader, David. You filled the door-way. But
+you're not really much bigger, now that I look at you. It's your
+character that has grown.... I'm <i>so</i> proud of you."</p>
+
+<p>David was very pale. It may have been from his long journey. But he at
+least did not know, because he said that he didn't when she asked him.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," she said, "you must tell me all that you haven't written."</p>
+
+<p>"Not quite yet," said David. "There is first a little matter of business...."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;" she protested.</p>
+
+<p>But David counted out his debt to her methodically, with the accrued interest.</p>
+
+<p>"Put it in my work-bag," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you ever expect to see it again?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, David."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span></p><p>"Thank you," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"But I," she said, "I, too, have things of yours to return."</p>
+
+<p>"Of mine?" He lifted his eyebrows expectantly.</p>
+
+<p>She waved a hand, white and clean as a cherry blossom, toward a
+claw-footed table on which stood decanters, ice, soda, cigarettes,
+cigars, and matches.</p>
+
+<p>"Your collateral," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said David. "But I have decided not to be a backslider."</p>
+
+<p>"I know," she said. "But in business&mdash;as a matter of form."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said David, "if it's a matter of form, it must be complied with."</p>
+
+<p>He stepped to the table, smiling charmingly, and poured from the nearest
+decanter into a glass, added ice and soda, and lifting the mixture
+touched it to his lips, and murmured, "To you."</p>
+
+<p>Then he put a cigarette in his mouth, and, after drawing the one breath
+that served to light it, flicked it, with perfect accuracy, half across
+the room and into the fireplace.</p>
+
+<p>Still smiling, he walked slowly toward Miss Tennant, who was really
+excited to know what he would do next.</p>
+
+<p>"Betcher two cents it snows to-morrow," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Done with you, David," she took him up merrily.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> And after that a
+painful silence came over them. David set his jaws.</p>
+
+<p>"I gave you one more promise," he said. "Is that, too, returned?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," she said, "all the promises you gave are herewith returned."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I may make love?" he asked very gently.</p>
+
+<p>She did not answer for some moments, and then, steeling herself, for she
+thought that she must hurt him:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, David," she said slowly, "you may&mdash;as a matter of form."</p>
+
+<p>"Only in that way?"</p>
+
+<p>"In that way only, David&mdash;to me."</p>
+
+<p>"I thought&mdash;I thought," said the young man in confusion.</p>
+
+<p>"I made you think so," she said generously. "Let all of the punishment,
+that can, be heaped on me ... David...." There was a deep appeal in her
+voice as for mercy and forgiveness.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said he, "you never did care&mdash;at all."</p>
+
+<p>But even at this juncture Miss Tennant could not speak the truth.</p>
+
+<p>"Never, David&mdash;never at all&mdash;at least not in <i>that</i> way," she said. "If
+I let you think so it was because I thought it would help you to be
+strong and to succeed.... God knows I think I was wrong to let you think so...."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p><p>But she broke off suddenly a stream of extenuation that was welling in
+her mind; for David did not look like a man about to be cut off in the
+heyday of his youth by despair.</p>
+
+<p>She had the tenderest heart; and in a moment the truth blossomed
+therein&mdash;a truth that brought her pleasure, bewilderment, and was not
+unmixed with mortification.</p>
+
+<p>"The man," she said gently, "has found him another girl!"</p>
+
+<p>The man bowed his head and blushed.</p>
+
+<p>"But I have kept my promise, Dolly."</p>
+
+<p>"Of course you have, you poor, dear, long-suffering soul. Oh, David,
+when I think what I have been taking for granted I am humiliated, and
+ashamed&mdash;but I am glad, too. I cannot tell you how glad."</p>
+
+<p>A pair of white gloves, still showing the shape of her hands, lay in the
+chair where Miss Tennant had tossed them. David brought her one of these gloves.</p>
+
+<p>"Put it on," he said.</p>
+
+<p>When she had done so, he took her gloved hand in his and kissed it.</p>
+
+<p>"As a matter of form," he said.</p>
+
+<p>She laughed easily, though the blush of humiliation had not yet left her cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me," she said, "what you would have done, David, if&mdash;if I <i>did</i>
+care."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span></p><p>"God punish me," he said gravely, "oh, best friend that ever a man had
+in the world, if I should not then have made you a good husband."</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Not long after McAllen was with her.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said she, "there was a train that he could catch. And I suppose he caught it."</p>
+
+<p>"How did he&mdash;er, behave?"</p>
+
+<p>"Considering the circumstances," said she, "he behaved very well."</p>
+
+<p>"Is he hard hit?"</p>
+
+<p>She considered a while; but the strict truth was not in that young lady.</p>
+
+<p>"I think," she said, "that you may say that he is hard hit&mdash;very hard hit."</p>
+
+<p>"Poor soul," said Billy tenderly.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Billy!" she exclaimed, "I feel so false and so old."</p>
+
+<p>"Old!" he cried. "You! You at twenty-five say that to me at&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't as if I was <i>just</i> twenty-five, Billy," and she burst out
+laughing. "The terrible part of it is that I'm still twenty-five."</p>
+
+<p>But he only smiled and smiled. She seemed like a little child to him,
+all innocence, and inexperience, and candor.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p><p>Then as her laughter merged into tears he knelt and caught her in his
+arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Dolly&mdash;Dolly!" he said in a choking voice. "What is your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Dolly." The tears came slowly.</p>
+
+<p>"Whose girl are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm Billy McAllen's girl." The tears ceased.</p>
+
+<p>"All of you?"</p>
+
+<p>"All of me.... Oh, Billy&mdash;love me always&mdash;only love me...."</p>
+
+<p>And for these two the afternoon dragged slowly on, and very much as usual.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"You are two days ahead of schedule, David. I'm glad to see you."</p>
+
+<p>Though Uriah Grey's smile was bland and simple, beneath it lay a
+complicated maze of speculation; and the old man endeavored to read in
+the young man's face the answers to those questions which so greatly
+concerned him. Uriah Grey's eyesight was famous for two things: for its
+miraculous, almost chemical ability to detect the metals in ore and the
+gold in men. He sighed; but not so that David could hear. The magnate
+detected happiness where less than two weeks before he had read doubt,
+hesitation, and a kind of dumb misery.</p>
+
+<p>"You have had a pleasant holiday?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p><p>"A happy one, Mr. Grey." David's eyes twinkled and sparkled.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell me about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, I paid my debts and got back my collateral."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"I tasted whiskey," said David. "I lighted a cigarette, I registered a
+bet of two cents upon the weather, and I made love."</p>
+
+<p>Uriah Grey with difficulty suppressed a moan.</p>
+
+<p>"Did you!" he said dully.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said David. "I kissed the glove upon a lady's hand." He laughed.
+"It smelled of gasoline," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Grey grunted.</p>
+
+<p>"And what are your plans?"</p>
+
+<p>"What!" cried David offendedly. "Are you through with me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, my boy&mdash;no."</p>
+
+<p>David hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Grey," he began, and paused.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is now lawful for me to make love," said David; "but I should do so
+with a better grace if I had your permission and approval."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Grey was puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>"What have I to do with it?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p><p>"You have a granddaughter...."</p>
+
+<p>"What!" thundered the old man. "You want to make love to my granddaughter!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said David boldly, "and I wonder what you are going to say."</p>
+
+<p>"I have only one word to say&mdash;Hurry!"</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"David!"</p>
+
+<p>Spools of silk rattled from her lap to the floor. She was frankly and
+childishly delighted to see him again, and she hurried to him and gave
+him both her hands. But he looked so happy that her heart misgave her
+for a moment, and then she read his eyes aright, just as long since he
+must have read the confession in hers. At this juncture in their lives
+there could not have been detected in either of them the least show of
+hesitation or embarrassment. It was as if two travellers in the desert,
+dying of thirst, should meet, and each conceive in hallucination that
+the other was a spring of sweet water.</p>
+
+<p>Presently David was looking into the lovely face that he held between
+his hands. He had by this time squeezed her shoulders, patted her back,
+kissed her feet, her dress, her hands, her eyes, and pawed her hair.
+They were both very short of breath.</p>
+
+<p>"Violet," he gasped, "what is your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Violet."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span></p><p>"Whose girl are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm David Larkin's girl."</p>
+
+<p>"All of you?"</p>
+
+<p>"All&mdash;all&mdash;all&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>It was the beginning of another of those long, tedious afternoons. But
+to the young people concerned it seemed that never until then had such
+words as they spoke to each other been spoken, or such feelings of
+almost insupportable tenderness and adoration been experienced.</p>
+
+<p>Yet back there in Aiken, Sapphira was experiencing the same feelings,
+and thinking the same thoughts about them; and so was Billy McAllen. And
+when you think that he had already been divorced once, and that
+Sapphira, as she herself (for once truthfully) confessed, was still
+twenty-five, it gives you as high an opinion of the little bare god&mdash;as he deserves.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_BRIDES_DEAD" id="THE_BRIDES_DEAD"></a>THE BRIDE'S DEAD</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>Only Farallone's face was untroubled. His big, bold eyes held a kind of
+grim humor, and he rolled them unblinkingly from the groom to the bride,
+and back again. His duck trousers, drenched and stained with sea-water,
+clung to the great muscles of his legs, particles of damp sand glistened
+upon his naked feet, and the hairless bronze of his chest and columnar
+throat glowed through the openings of his torn and buttonless shirt.
+Except for the life and vitality that literally sparkled from him, he
+was more like a statue of a shipwrecked sailor than the real article
+itself. Yet he had not the proper attributes of a shipwrecked sailor.
+There was neither despair upon his countenance nor hunger; instead a
+kind of enjoyment, and the expression of one who has been set free.
+Indeed, he must have secured a kind of liberty, for after the years of
+serving one master and another, he had, in our recent struggle with the
+sea, but served himself. His was the mind and his the hand that had
+brought us at length to that desert coast. He it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> was that had extended
+to us the ghost of a chance. He who so recently had been but one of
+forty in the groom's luxurious employ; a polisher of brass, a
+holy-stoner of decks, a wage-earning paragon who was not permitted to
+think, was now a thinker and a strategist, a wage-taker from no man, and
+the obvious master of us three.</p>
+
+<p>The bride slept on the sand where Farallone had laid her. Her stained
+and draggled clothes were beginning to dry and her hair to blaze in the
+pulsing rays of the sun. Her breath came and went with the long-drawn
+placidity of deep sleep. One shoe had been torn from her by the surf,
+and through a tear in her left stocking blinked a pink and tiny toe. Her
+face lay upon her arm and was hidden by it, and by her blazing hair. In
+the loose-jointed abandon of exhaustion and sleep she had the effect of
+a flower that has wilted; the color and the fabric were still lovely,
+but the robust erectness and crispness were gone. The groom, almost
+unmanned and wholly forlorn, sat beside her in a kind of huddled
+attitude, as if he was very cold. He had drawn his knees close to his
+chest, and held them in that position with thin, clasped fingers. His
+hair, which he wore rather long, was in a wild tangle, and his neat
+eye-glasses with their black cord looked absurdly out of keeping with
+his general dishevelment. The groom, never strong or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> robust, looked as
+if he had shrunk. The bride, too, looked as if she had shrunk, and I
+certainly felt as if I had. But, however strong the contrast between us
+three small humans and the vast stretches of empty ocean and desert
+coast, there was no diminution about Farallone, but the contrary. I have
+never seen the presence of a man loom so strongly and so large. He sat
+upon his rock with a kind of vastness, so bold and strong he seemed, so utterly unperturbed.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the groom, a kind of querulous shiver in his voice, spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"The brandy, Farallone, the brandy."</p>
+
+<p>The big sailor rolled his bold eyes from the groom to the bride, but
+returned no answer.</p>
+
+<p>The groom's voice rose to a note of vexation.</p>
+
+<p>"I said I wanted the brandy," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Farallone's voice was large and free like a fresh breeze.</p>
+
+<p>"I heard you," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," snapped the groom, "get it."</p>
+
+<p>"Get it yourself," said Farallone quickly, and he fell to whistling in a major key.</p>
+
+<p>The groom, born and accustomed to command, was on his feet shaking with fury.</p>
+
+<p>"You damned insolent loafer&mdash;" he shouted.</p>
+
+<p>"Cut it out&mdash;cut it out," said the big sailor, "you'll wake her."</p>
+
+<p>The groom's voice sank to an angry whisper.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span></p><p>"Are you going to do what I tell you or not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not," said Farallone.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll"&mdash;the groom's voice loudened&mdash;his eye sought an ally in mine. But
+I turned my face away and pretended that I had not seen or heard. There
+had been born in my breast suddenly a cold unreasoning fear of Farallone
+and of what he might do to us weaklings. I heard no more words and,
+venturing a look, saw that the groom was seating himself once more by the bride.</p>
+
+<p>"If you sit on the other side of her," said Farallone, "you'll keep the sun off her head."</p>
+
+<p>He turned his bold eyes on me and winked one of them. And I was so taken
+by surprise that I winked back and could have kicked myself for doing so.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Farallone helped the bride to her feet. "That's right," he said with a
+kind of nursely playfulness, and he turned to the groom.</p>
+
+<p>"Because I told you to help yourself," he said, "doesn't mean that I'm
+not going to do the lion's share of everything. I am. I'm fit. You and
+the writer man aren't. But you must do just a little more than you're
+able, and that's all we'll ask of you. Everybody works this voyage
+except the woman."</p>
+
+<p>"I can work," said the bride.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p><p>"Rot!" said Farallone. "We'll ask you to walk ahead, like a kind of
+north star. Only we'll tell you which way to turn. Do you see that
+sugar-loaf? You head for that. Vamoose! We'll overhaul you."</p>
+
+<p>The bride moved upon the desert alone, her face toward an easterly hill
+that had given Farallone his figure of the sugar-loaf. She had no longer
+the effect of a wilted flower, but walked with quick, considered steps.
+What the groom carried and what I carried is of little moment. Our packs
+united would not have made the half of the lumbersome weight that
+Farallone swung upon his giant shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Follow the woman," said he, and we began to march upon the
+shoe-and-stocking track of the bride. Farallone, rolling like a ship (I
+had many a look at him over my shoulder) brought up the rear. From time
+to time he flung forward a phrase to us in explanation of his rebellious attitude.</p>
+
+<p>"I take command because I'm fit; you're not. I give the orders because I
+can get 'em obeyed; you can't." And, again: "You don't know east from west; I do."</p>
+
+<p>All the morning he kept firing disagreeable and very personal remarks at
+us. His proposition that we were not in any way fit for anything he
+enlarged upon and illustrated. He flung the groom's unemployed ancestry
+at him; he likened the groom to Rome at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> the time of the fall, which he
+attributed to luxury; he informed me that only men who were unable to
+work, or in any way help themselves, wrote books. "The woman's worth the
+two of you," he said. "Her people were workers. See it in her stride.
+She could milk a cow if she had one. If anything happens to me she'll
+give the orders. Mark my words. She's got a head on her shoulders, she has."</p>
+
+<p>The bride halted suddenly in her tracks and, turning, faced the groom.</p>
+
+<p>"Are you going to allow this man's insolence to run on forever?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>The groom frowned at her and shook his head covertly.</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh," said the bride, and I think I heard her call him "<i>my
+champion</i>," in a bitter whisper. She walked straight back to Farallone
+and looked him fearlessly in the face.</p>
+
+<p>"The bigger a man is, Mr. Farallone," she said, "and the stronger, the
+more he ought to mind his manners. We are grateful to you for all you
+have done, but if you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head, then the
+sooner we part company the better."</p>
+
+<p>For a full minute the fearless eyes snapped at Farallone, then, suddenly
+abashed, softened, and turned away.</p>
+
+<p>"There mustn't be any more mutiny," said <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>Farallone. "But you've got
+sand, you have. I could love a woman like you. How did you come to hitch
+your wagon to little Nicodemus there? He's no star. You deserved a man.
+You've got sand, and when your poor feet go back on you, as they will in
+this swill (here he kicked the burning sand), I'll carry you. But if you
+hadn't spoken up so pert, I wouldn't. Now you walk ahead and pretend
+you're Christopher Columbus De Soto Peary leading a flock of sheep to
+the Fountain of Eternal Youth.... Bear to the left of the sage-brush,
+there's a tarantula under it...."</p>
+
+<p>We went forward a few steps, when suddenly I heard Farallone's voice in
+my ear. "Isn't she splendid?" he said, and at the same time he thumped
+me so violently between the shoulders that I stumbled and fell. For a
+moment all fear of the man left me on the wings of rage, and I was for
+attacking him with my fists. But something in his steady eye brought me to my senses.</p>
+
+<p>"Why did you do that?" I meant to speak sharply, but I think I whined.</p>
+
+<p>"Because," said Farallone, "when the woman spoke up to me you began to
+brindle and act lion-like and bold. For a minute you looked
+dangerous&mdash;for a little feller. So I patted your back, in a friendly
+way&mdash;as a kind of reminder&mdash;a feeble reminder."</p>
+
+<p>We had dropped behind the others. The groom<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> had caught up with the
+bride, and from his nervous, irritable gestures I gathered that the poor
+soul was trying to explain and to ingratiate himself. But she walked on,
+steadily averted, you might say, her head very high, her shoulders drawn
+back. The groom, his eyes intent upon her averted face, kept stumbling with his feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Just look," said Farallone in a friendly voice. "Those whom God hath
+joined together. What did the press say of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't remember," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"You lie," said Farallone. "The press called it an ideal match. My God!"
+he cried&mdash;and so loudly that the bride and the groom must have
+heard&mdash;"think of being a woman like that and getting hitched to a little
+bit of a fuss with a few fine feathers"; and with a kind of sing-song he
+began to misquote and extemporize:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>"Just for a handful of silver she left me,</div>
+<div class="i1">Just for a yacht and a mansion of stone,</div>
+<div>Just for a little fool nest of fine feathers</div>
+<div class="i1">She wed Nicodemus and left me alone."</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"But she'd never seen me," he went on, and mused for a moment. "Having
+seen me&mdash;do you guess what she's saying to herself? She's saying: 'Thank
+God I'm not too old to begin life over again,' or thinking it. Look at
+him! Even you wouldn't have been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> such a joke. I've a mind to kick the
+life out of him. One little kick with bare toes. Life? There's no life
+in him&mdash;nothing but a jenny-wren."</p>
+
+<p>The groom, who must have heard at least the half of Farallone's speech,
+stopped suddenly and waited for us to come up. His face was red and
+white&mdash;blotchy with rage and vindictiveness. When we were within ten
+feet of him he suddenly drew a revolver and fired it point-blank at
+Farallone. He had no time for a second shot. Farallone caught his wrist
+and shook it till the revolver spun through the air and fell at a
+distance. Then Farallone seated himself and, drawing the groom across
+his knee, spanked him. Since the beginning of the world children have
+been punished by spankings, and the event is memorable, if at all, as a
+something rather comical and domestic. But to see a grown man spanked
+for the crime of attempted murder is horrible. Farallone's fury got the
+better of him, and the blows resounded in the desert. I grappled his
+arm, and the recoil of it flung me head over heels. When Farallone had
+finished, the groom could not stand. He rolled in the sands, moaning and hiding his face.</p>
+
+<p>The bride was white as paper; but she had no eye for the groom.</p>
+
+<p>"Did he miss you?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Farallone, "he hit me&mdash;Nicodemus hit me."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p><p>"Where?" said the bride.</p>
+
+<p>"In the arm."</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, the left sleeve of Farallone's shirt was glittering with blood.</p>
+
+<p>"I will bandage it for you," she said, "if you will tell me how."</p>
+
+<p>Farallone ripped open the sleeve of his shirt.</p>
+
+<p>"What shall I bandage it with?" asked the bride.</p>
+
+<p>"Anything," said Farallone.</p>
+
+<p>The bride turned her back on us, stooped, and we heard a sound of
+tearing. When she had bandaged Farallone's wound (it was in the flesh
+and the bullet had been extracted by its own impetus) she looked him
+gravely in the face.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the use of goading him?" she said gently.</p>
+
+<p>"Look," said Farallone.</p>
+
+<p>The groom was reaching for the fallen revolver.</p>
+
+<p>"Drop it," bellowed Farallone.</p>
+
+<p>The groom's hand, which had been on the point of grasping the revolver's
+stock, jerked away. The bride walked to the revolver and picked it up.
+She handed it to Farallone.</p>
+
+<p>"Now," she said, "that all the power is with you, you will not go on abusing it."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> carry it," said Farallone, "and any time <i>you</i> think I ought to
+be shot, why, you just shoot me. I won't say a word."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you mean it?" said the bride.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p><p>"I cross my heart," said Farallone.</p>
+
+<p>"I sha'n't forget," said the bride. She took the revolver and dropped it
+into the pocket of her jacket.</p>
+
+<p>"Vamoose!" said Farallone. And we resumed our march.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>The line between the desert and the blossoming hills was as distinctly
+drawn as that between a lake and its shore. The sage-brush, closer
+massed than any through which we had yet passed, seemed to have gathered
+itself for a serried assault upon the lovely verdure beyond. Outposts of
+the sage-brush, its unsung heroes, perhaps, showed here and there among
+ferns and wild roses&mdash;leafless, gaunt, and dead; one knotted specimen
+even had planted its banner of desolation in the shade of a wild lilac
+and there died. A twittering of birds gladdened our dusty ears, and from
+afar there came a splashing of water. Our feet, burned by the desert
+sands, torn by yucca and cactus, trod now upon a cool and delicious
+moss, above which nodded the delicate blossoms of the shooting-star,
+swung at the ends of strong and delicate stems. In the shadows the
+chocolate lilies and trilliums dully glinted, and flag flowers trooped
+in the sunlight. The resinous paradisiacal smell of tarweed and
+bay-tree<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> refreshed us, and the wonder of life was a something strong
+and tangible like bread and wine.</p>
+
+<p>The wine of it rushed in particular to Farallone's head; his brain
+became flooded with it; his feet cavorted upon the moss; his bellowed
+singing awoke the echoes, and the whole heavenly choir of the birds answered him.</p>
+
+<p>"You, Nicodemus," he cried gayly, "thought that man was given a nose to
+be a tripod for his eye-glasses&mdash;but now&mdash;oh, smell&mdash;smell!"</p>
+
+<p>His great bulk under its mighty pack tripped lightly, dancingly at the
+bride's elbow. Now his agile fingers nipped some tiny, scarce
+perceivable flower to delight her eye, and now his great hand scooped up
+whole sheaves of strong-growing columbine, and flung them where her feet
+must tread. He made her see great beauties and minute, and whatever had
+a look of smelling sweet he crushed in his hands for her to smell.</p>
+
+<p>He was no longer that limb of Satan, that sardonic bully of the desert
+days, but a gay wood-god intent upon the gentle ways of wooing. At first
+the bride turned away her senses from his offerings to eye and nostril;
+for a time she made shift to turn aside from the flowers that he cast
+for her feet to tread. But after a time, like one in a trance, she began
+to yield up her indifference and aloofness. The magic of the riotous
+spring began to intoxicate her. I saw her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> turn to the sailor and smile
+a gracious smile. And after awhile she began to talk with him.</p>
+
+<p>We came at length to a bright stream, from whose guileless
+superabundance Farallone, with a bent pin and a speck of red cloth,
+jerked a string of gaudy rainbow-trout. He made a fire and began to
+broil them; the bride searched the vicinal woods for dried branches to
+feed the fire. The groom knelt by the brook and washed the dust from his
+face and ears, snuffing the cool water into his dusty nose and blowing it out.</p>
+
+<p>And I lay in the shade and wondered by what courses the brook found its
+way to what sea or lake; whether it touched in its wanderings only the
+virginal wilderness, or flowed at length among the habitations of men.</p>
+
+<p>Farallone, of a sudden, jerked up his head from the broiling and
+answered my unspoken questions.</p>
+
+<p>"A man," he said, "who followed this brook could come in a few days to
+the river Maria Cleofas, and following that, to the town of that name,
+in a matter of ten days more. I tell you," he went on, "because some day
+some of you may be going that voyage; no ill-found voyage
+either&mdash;spring-water and trout all the way to the river; and all the
+rest of the way river-water and trout; and at this season birds' eggs in
+the reeds and a turtlelike terrapin, and Brodeia roots and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> wild onion,
+and young sassafras&mdash;a child could do it. Eat that...." he tossed me
+with his fingers a split, sputtering, piping hot trout....</p>
+
+<p>We spent the rest of that day and the night following by the stream.
+Farallone was in a riotous good-humor, and the fear of him grew less in
+us until we felt at ease and could take an unmixed pleasure in the loafing.</p>
+
+<p>Early the next morning he was astir, and began to prepare himself for
+further marching, but for the rest of us he said there would be one day more of rest.</p>
+
+<p>"Who knows," he said, "but this is Sunday?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where are you going?" asked the bride politely.</p>
+
+<p>"Me?" said Farallone, and he laughed. "I'm going house-hunting&mdash;not for
+a house, of course, but for a site. It's not so easy to pick out just
+the place where you want to spend the balance of your days. The
+neighborhood's easy, but the exact spot's hard." He spoke now directly
+to the bride, and as if her opinion was law to him. "There must be sun
+and shade, mustn't there? Spring-water?&mdash;running water? A hill handy to
+take the view from? An easterly slope to be out of the trades? A big
+tree or two.... I'll find 'em all before dark. I'll be back by dark or
+at late moonrise, and you rest yourselves, because to-morrow or the next
+day we go at house-raising."</p>
+
+<p>Had he left us then and there, I think that we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> would have waited for
+him. He had us, so to speak, abjectly under his thumbs. His word had
+come to be our law, since it was but child's play for him to enforce it.
+But it so happened that he now took a step which was to call into life
+and action that last vestige of manhood and independence that flickered
+in the groom and me. For suddenly, and not till after a moment of
+consideration, he took a step toward the bride, caught her around the
+waist, crushed her to his breast, and kissed her on the mouth.</p>
+
+<p>But she must have bitten him, for the tender passion changed in him to
+an unmanly fury.</p>
+
+<p>"You damned cat!" he cried; and he struck her heavily upon the face with
+his open palm. Not once only, but twice, three, four times, till she
+fell at his feet.</p>
+
+<p>By that the groom and I, poor, helpless atoms, had made shift to grapple
+with him. I heard his giant laugh. I had one glimpse of the groom's face
+rushing at mine&mdash;and then it was as if showers of stars fell about me.
+What little strength I had was loosened from my joints, and more than
+half-senseless I fell full length upon my back. Farallone had foiled our
+attack by the simple method of catching us by the hair and knocking our heads together.</p>
+
+<p>I could hear his great mocking laugh resounding through the forest.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p><p>"Let him go," I heard the groom moan.</p>
+
+<p>The bride laughed. It was a very curious laugh. I could not make it out.
+There seemed to be no anger in it, and yet how, I wondered, could there be anything else?</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>When distance had blotted from our ears the sound of Farallone's
+laughter, and when we had humbled ourselves to the bride for allowing
+her to be maltreated, I told the groom what Farallone had said about a
+man who should follow the stream by which we were encamped.</p>
+
+<p>"See," I said, "we have a whole day's start of him. Even he can't make
+that up. We must go at once, and there mustn't be any letting up till we get somewhere."</p>
+
+<p>The groom was all for running away, and the bride, silent and white,
+acquiesced with a nod. We made three light packs, and started&mdash;<i>bolted</i>
+is the better word.</p>
+
+<p>For a mile or more, so thick was the underwood, we walked in the bed of
+the stream; now freely, where it was smooth-spread sand, and now where
+it narrowed and deepened among rocks, scramblingly and with many a
+splashing stumble. The bride met<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> her various mishaps with a kind of
+silent disdain; she made no complaints, not even comments. She made me
+think of a sleep-walker. There was a set, far-off, cold expression upon
+her usually gentle and vivacious face, and once or twice it occurred to
+me that she went with us unwillingly. But when I remembered the
+humiliation that Farallone had put upon her and the blows that he had
+struck her, I could not well credit the recurrent doubt of her
+willingness. The groom, on the other hand, recovered his long-lost
+spirits with immeasurable rapidity. He talked gayly and bravely, and you
+would have said that he was a man who had never had occasion to be
+ashamed of himself. He went ahead, the bride following next, and he kept
+giving a constant string of advices and imperatives. "That stone's
+loose"; "keep to the left, there's a hole." "Splash&mdash;dash&mdash;damn, look
+out for that one." Branches that hung low across our course he bent and
+held back until the bride had passed. Now he turned and smiled in her
+face, and now he offered her the helping hand. But she met his
+courtesies, and the whole punctilious fabric of his behavior, with the
+utmost absence and nonchalance. He had, it seemed, been too long in
+contempt to recover soon his former position of husband and beloved. For
+long days she had contemplated his naked soul, limited, weak, incapable.
+He had shown a certain capacity<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> for sudden, explosive temper, but not
+for courage of any kind, or force. Nor had he played the gentleman in
+his helplessness. Nor had I. We had not in us the stuff of heroes; at
+first sight of instruments of torture we were of those who would confess
+to anything, abjure, swear falsely, beg for mercy, change our so-called
+religions&mdash;anything. The bride had learned to despise us from the bottom
+of her heart. She despised us still. And I would have staked my last
+dollar, or, better, my hopes of escaping from Farallone, that as man and
+wife she and the groom would never live together again. I felt terribly
+sorry for the groom. He had, as had I, been utterly inefficient,
+helpless, babyish, and cowardly&mdash;yet the odds against us had seemed
+overwhelming. But now as we journeyed down the river, and the distance
+between us and Farallone grew more, I kept thinking of men whom I had
+known; men physically weaker than the groom and I, who, had Farallone
+offered to bully them, would have fought him and endured his torture
+till they died. In my immediate past, then, there was nothing of which I
+was not burningly ashamed, and in the not-too-distant future I hoped to
+separate from the bride and the groom, and never see them or hear of
+them in this world again. At that, I had a real affection for the bride,
+a real admiration. On the yacht, before trouble showed me up, we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> had
+bid fair to become fast and enduring friends. But that was all over&mdash;a
+bud, nipped by the frost of conduct and circumstance, or ever the fruit
+could so much as set. For many days now I had avoided her eye; I had
+avoided addressing her; I had exerted my ingenuity to keep out of her
+sight. It is a terrible thing for a man to be thrown daily into the
+society of a woman who has found him out, and who despises him, mind,
+soul, marrow, and bone.</p>
+
+<p>The stream broke at length from the forest and, swelled by a sizable
+tributary, flowed broad and deep into a rolling, park-like landscape.
+Grass spread over the country's undulations and looked in the distance
+like well-kept lawns; and at wide intervals splendidly grown live-oaks
+lent an effect of calculated planting. Here our flight, for our muscles
+were hardened to walking, became easy and swift. I think there were
+hours when we must have covered our four miles, and even on long, upward
+slopes we must have made better than three. There is in swift walking,
+when the muscles are hard, the wind long, and the atmosphere
+exhilarating, a buoyant rhythm that more, perhaps, than merited success,
+or valorous conduct, smoothes out the creases in a man's soul. And so
+quick is a man to recover from his own baseness, and to ape outwardly
+his transient inner feelings, that I found myself presently, walking
+with a high head and a mind full of martial thoughts.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span></p><p>All that day, except for a short halt at noon, we followed the river
+across the great natural park; now paralleling its convolutions, and now
+cutting diagonals. Late in the afternoon we came to the end of the park
+land. A more or less precipitous formation of glistening quartz marked
+its boundary, and into a fissure of this the stream, now a small river,
+plunged with accelerated speed. The going became difficult. The walls of
+the fissure through which the river rushed were smooth and water-worn,
+impossible to ascend; and between the brink of the river and the base of
+the walls were congestions of boulders, jammed drift-wood, and tangled
+alder bushes. There were times when we had to crawl upon our hands and
+knees, under one log and over the next. To add to our difficulties
+darkness was swiftly falling, and we were glad, indeed, when the wall of
+the fissure leaned at length so far from the perpendicular that we were
+able to scramble up it. We found ourselves upon a levelish little meadow
+of grass. In the centre of it there grew a monstrous and gigantic
+live-oak, between two of whose roots there glittered a spring. On all
+sides of the meadow, except on that toward the river, were
+superimpending cliffs of quartz. Along the base of these was a dense growth of bushes.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll rest here," said the groom. "What a place. It's a natural
+fortress. Only one way into it." He stood looking down at the noisy
+river and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>considering the steep slope we had just climbed. "See this
+boulder?" he said. "It's wobbly. If that damned longshoreman tries to
+get us here, all we've got to do is to choose the psychological moment
+and push it over on him."</p>
+
+<p>The groom looked quite bellicose and daring. Suddenly he flung his
+fragment of a cap high into the air and at the very top of his lungs cried: "Liberty!"</p>
+
+<p>The echoes answered him, and the glorious, abused word was tossed from
+cliff to cliff, across the river and back, and presently died away.</p>
+
+<p>At that, from the very branches of the great oak that stood in the
+centre of the meadow there burst a titanic clap of laughter, and
+Farallone, literally bursting with merriment, dropped lightly into our midst.</p>
+
+<p>I can only speak for myself. I was frightened&mdash;I say it deliberately and
+truthfully&mdash;<i>almost</i> into a fit. And for fully five minutes I could not
+command either of my legs. The groom, I believe, screamed. The bride
+became whiter than paper&mdash;then suddenly the color rushed into her
+cheeks, and she laughed. She laughed until she had to sit down, until
+the tears literally gushed from her eyes. It was not hysterics
+either&mdash;could it have been amusement? After a while, and many prolonged
+gasps and relapses, she stopped.</p>
+
+<p>"This," said Farallone, "is my building site. Do you like it?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p><p>"Oh, oh," said the bride, "I think it's the m&mdash;most am&mdash;ma&mdash;musing site
+I ever saw," and she went into another uncontrollable burst of laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;oh," she said at length, and her shining eyes were turned from the
+groom to me, and back and forth between us, "if you <i>could</i> have seen your faces!"</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>It seemed strange to us, an alteration in the logical and natural, but
+neither the groom nor I received corporal punishment for our attempt at
+escape. Farallone had read our minds like an open book; he had, as it
+were, put us up to the escapade in order to have the pure joy of
+thwarting us. That we should have been drawn to his exact waiting-place
+like needles to the magnet had a smack of the supernatural, but was in
+reality a simple and explicable happening. For if we had not ascended to
+the little meadow, Farallone, alertly watching, would have descended
+from it, and surprised us at some further point. That we should have
+caught no glimpse of his great bulk anywhere ahead of us in the day-long
+stretch of open, park-like country was also easily explained. For
+Farallone had made the most of the journey in the stream itself,
+drifting with a log.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p><p>And although, as I have said, we were not to receive corporal
+punishment, Farallone visited his power upon us in other ways. He would
+not at first admit that we had intended to escape, but kept praising us
+for having followed him so loyally and devotedly, for saving him the
+trouble of a return journey, and for thinking to bring along the bulk of
+our worldly possessions. Tiring at length of this, he switched to the
+opposite point of view. He goaded us nearly to madness with his
+criticisms of our inefficiency, and he mocked repeatedly the groom's
+ill-timed cry of Liberty.</p>
+
+<p>"Liberty!" he said, "you never knew, you never will know, what that
+is&mdash;you miserable little pin-head. Liberty is for great natures.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<div>'Stone walls do not a prison make,</div>
+<div class="i1">Nor iron bars a cage.'</div>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the woman shall know what liberty is. If she had wanted to leave me
+there was nothing to stop her. Do you think she'd have followed the
+river, leaving a broad trail? Do you think she'd have walked right into
+this meadow&mdash;unless she hadn't cared? Not she. Did you ask her advice,
+you self-sufficiencies? Not you. You were the men-folk, you thought, and
+you were to have the ordering of everything. You make me sick, the pair of you...."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p><p>He kept us awake until far into the night with his jibes and his
+laughter.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he said lastly, "good-night, girls. I'm about sick of you, and
+in the morning we part company...."</p>
+
+<p>At the break of dawn he waked us from heavy sleep&mdash;me with a cuff, the
+groom with a kick, the bride with a feline touch upon the hair.</p>
+
+<p>"And now," said he, "be off."</p>
+
+<p>He caught the bride by the shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>you</i>," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"I am to stay?" she asked, as if to settle some trivial and unimportant point.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you ask?" said he; "Was man meant to live alone? This will be enough
+home for us." And he turned to the groom. "Get," he said savagely.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Farallone," said the bride&mdash;she was very white, but calm,
+apparently, and collected&mdash;"you have had your joke. Let us go now, or
+better, come with us. We will forget our former differences, and you
+will never regret your future kindnesses."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you <i>want</i> to stay?" exclaimed Farallone in a tone of astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>"If I did," said the bride gently, "I could not, and I would not."</p>
+
+<p>"What's to stop you?" asked Farallone.</p>
+
+<p>"My place is with my husband," said the bride,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> "whom I have sworn to
+love, and to honor, and to obey."</p>
+
+<p>"Woman," said Farallone, "do you love him, do you honor him?"</p>
+
+<p>She pondered a moment, then held her head high.</p>
+
+<p>"I do," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"God bless you," cried the groom.</p>
+
+<p>"Rats," said Farallone, and he laughed bitterly. "But you'll get over
+it," he went on. "Let's have no more words." He turned to the groom and to me.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you climb down the cliff or shall I throw you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Let us all go," said the bride, and she caught at his trembling arm,
+"and I will bless you, and wish you all good things&mdash;and kiss you good-by."</p>
+
+<p>"If you go," said Farallone, and his great voice trembled, "I die. You
+are everything. You know that. Would I have hit you if I hadn't loved
+you so&mdash;poor little cheek!" His voice became a kind of mumble.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go," said the bride, "if you love me."</p>
+
+<p>"Not <i>you</i>," said Farallone, "while I live. I would not be such a fool.
+Don't you know that in a little while you'll be glad?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is that your final word?" said the bride.</p>
+
+<p>"It must be," said Farallone. "Are you not a gift to me from God?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think you must be mad," said the bride.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p><p>"I am unalterable," said Farallone, "as God made me&mdash;I <i>am</i>. And you
+are mine to take."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you remember," said the bride, "what you said when you gave me the
+revolver? You said that if ever I thought it best to shoot you&mdash;you
+would let me do it."</p>
+
+<p>"I remember," said Farallone, and he smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"That was just talk, of course?" said the bride.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not," said Farallone; "shoot me."</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go," said the bride. Her voice faltered.</p>
+
+<p>"Not you," said Farallone, "while I live."</p>
+
+<p>His voice, low and gentle, had in it a kind of far-off sadness. He
+turned his eyes from the bride and looked the rising sun in the face. He
+turned back to her and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't the heart to shoot me," he said. "My darling."</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Let&mdash;you&mdash;go!</i>" He laughed. "<i>Send&mdash;away&mdash;my&mdash;mate!</i>"</p>
+
+<p>His eyes clouded and became vacant. He blinked them rapidly and raised
+his hand to his brow. It seemed to me that in that instant, suddenly
+come and suddenly gone, I perceived a look of insanity in his face. The
+bride, too, perhaps, saw something of the kind, for like a flash she had
+the revolver out and cocked it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p><p>"Splendid," cried Farallone, and his eyes blazed with a tremendous love
+and admiration. "This is something like," he cried. "Two forces face to
+face&mdash;a man and a bullet&mdash;love behind them both. Ah, you do love
+me&mdash;don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go," said the bride. Her voice shook violently.</p>
+
+<p>"Not you," said Farallone, "while I live."</p>
+
+<p>He took a step toward her, his eyes dancing and smiling. "Do you know,"
+he said, "I don't know if you'll do it or not. By my soul, I don't know.
+This is living, this is. This is gambling. I'll do nothing violent," he
+said, "until my hands are touching you. I'll move toward you slowly one
+slow step at a time&mdash;with my arms open&mdash;like this&mdash;you'll have plenty of
+chance to shoot me&mdash;we'll see if you'll do it."</p>
+
+<p>"We shall see," said the bride.</p>
+
+<p>They faced each other motionless. Then Farallone, his eyes glorious with
+excitement and passion, his arms open, moved toward her one slow, deliberate step.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," he cried suddenly. "This is too good for <i>them</i>." He jerked his
+thumb toward the groom and me. "This is a sight for gods&mdash;not jackasses.
+Go down to the river," he said to us. "If you hear a shot come back. If
+you hear a scream&mdash;then as you value your miserable hides&mdash;get!"</p>
+
+<p>We did not move.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p><p>The bride, her voice tense and high-pitched, turned to us.</p>
+
+<p>"Do as you're told," she cried, "or I shall ask this man to throw you
+over the cliff." She stamped her foot.</p>
+
+<p>"And this man," said Farallone, "will do as he's told."</p>
+
+<p>There was nothing for it. We left them alone in the meadow and descended
+the cliff to the river. And there we stood for what seemed the ages of
+ages, listening and trembling.</p>
+
+<p>A faint, far-off detonation, followed swiftly by louder and fainter
+echoes, broke suddenly upon the rushing noises of the river. We
+commenced feverishly to scramble back up the cliff. Half-way to the top
+we heard another shot, a second later a third, and after a longer
+interval, as if to put a quietus upon some final show of life&mdash;a fourth.</p>
+
+<p>A nebulous drift of smoke hung above the meadow.</p>
+
+<p>Farallone lay upon his face at the bride's feet. The groom sprang to her
+side and threw a trembling arm about her.</p>
+
+<p>"Come away," he cried, "come away."</p>
+
+<p>But the bride freed herself gently from his encircling arm, and her eyes
+still bent upon Farallone&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Not till I have buried my dead," she said.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="HOLDING_HANDS" id="HOLDING_HANDS"></a>HOLDING HANDS</h2>
+
+<p>At first nobody knew him; then the Hotchkisses knew him, and then it
+seemed as if everybody had always known him. He had run the gauntlet of
+gossip and come through without a scratch. He was first noticed sitting
+in the warm corner made by Willcox's annex and the covered passage that
+leads to the main building. Pairs or trios of people, bareheaded, their
+tennis clothes (it was a tennis year) mostly covered from view by clumsy
+coonskin coats, passing Willcox's in dilapidated runabouts drawn by
+uncurried horses, a nigger boy sitting in the back of each, his thin
+legs dangling, had glimpses of him through the driveway gap in the tall
+Amor privet hedge that is between Willcox's and the road. These pairs or
+trios having seen would break in upon whatever else they may have been
+saying to make such remarks as: "He can't be, or he wouldn't be at
+Willcox's"; or, contradictorily: "He must be, or he'd do something
+besides sit in the sun"; or, "Don't they always have to drink lots of
+milk?" or, "Anyway, they're quite positive that it's not catching"; or,
+"Poor boy, what nice hair he's got."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p><p>With the old-timers the new-comer, whose case was otherwise so
+doubtful, had one thing in common: a coonskin coat. It was handsome of
+its kind, unusually long, voluminous, and black. The upturned collar
+came above his ears, and in the opening his face showed thin and white,
+and his eyes, always intent upon the book in his lap, had a look of
+being closed. Two things distinguished him from other men: his great
+length of limb and the color and close-cropped, almost moulded, effect
+of his hair. It was the color of old Domingo mahogany, and showed off
+the contour of his fine round head with excellent effect.</p>
+
+<p>The suspicion that this interesting young man was a consumptive was set
+aside by Willcox himself. He told Mrs. Bainbridge, who asked (on account
+of her little children who, et cetera, et cetera), that Mr. Masters was
+recuperating from a very stubborn attack of typhoid. But was Mr. Willcox
+quite sure? Yes, Mr. Willcox had to be sure of just such things. So Mrs.
+Bainbridge drove out to Miss Langrais' tea at the golf club, and passed
+on the glad tidings with an addition of circumstantial detail. Mister
+Masters (people found that it was quite good fun to say this, with
+assorted intonations) had been sick for many months at&mdash;she thought&mdash;the
+New York Hospital. Sometimes his temperature had touched a hundred and
+fifteen degrees and sometimes he had not had any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> temperature at all.
+There was quite a romance involved, "his trained nurse, my dear, not one
+of the ordinary creatures, but a born lady in impoverished
+circumstances," et cetera, et cetera. And later, when even Mister
+Masters himself had contradicted these brightly colored statements, Mrs.
+Bainbridge continued to believe them. Even among wealthy and idle women
+she was remarkable for the number of impossible things she could believe
+before breakfast, and after. But she never made these things seem even
+half plausible to others, and so she wasn't dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>Mister Masters never remembered to have passed so lonely and dreary a
+February. The sunny South was a medicine that had been prescribed and
+that had to be swallowed. Aiken on the label had looked inviting enough,
+but he found the contents of the bottle distasteful in the extreme. "The
+South is sunny," he wrote to his mother, "but oh, my great jumping
+grandmother, how seldom! And it's cold, mummy, like being beaten with
+whips. And it rains&mdash;well, if it rained cats and dogs a fellow wouldn't
+mind. Maybe they'd speak to him, but it rains solid cold water, and it
+hits the windows the way waves hit the port-holes at sea; and the only
+thing that stops the rain is a wind that comes all the way from Alaska
+for the purpose. In protected corners the sun has a certain warmth. But
+the other morning the waiter put my milk on the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> wrong side of my chair,
+in the shade, namely, and when I went to drink it it was frozen solid.
+You were right about the people here all being kind; they are all the
+same kind. I know them all now&mdash;by sight; but not by name, except, of
+course, some who are stopping at Willcox's. We have had three ice
+storms&mdash;<i>'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bl&uuml;hen?</i>' I am getting to
+<i>kennst</i> it very well. But Willcox, who keeps a record of such things,
+says that this is the coldest winter Aiken has known since last winter!</p>
+
+<p>"But in spite of all this there is a truth that must be spoken. I feel a
+thousand times better and stronger than when I came. And yesterday,
+exercising in the privacy of my room, I discovered that there are once
+more calves upon my legs. This is truth, too. I have no one to talk to
+but your letters. So don't stint me. Stint me with money if you can
+(here I defy you), but for the love of Heaven keep me posted. If you
+will promise to write every day I will tell you the name of the
+prettiest girl in Aiken. She goes by eight times every day, and she
+looks my way out of the corner of her eye. And I pretend to be reading
+and try very hard to look handsome and interesting.... Mother! ... just
+now I rested my hand on the arm of my chair and the wood felt hot to the
+touch! It's high noon and the sun's been on it since eight o'clock, but
+still it seems very wonderful. Willcox says that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> the winter is
+practically over; but I begged him not to hurry...."</p>
+
+<p>Such was the usual trend of his letters. But that one dated March 7
+began with the following astonishing statement:</p>
+
+<p>"I love Aiken ..." and went on to explain why.</p>
+
+<p>But Mister Masters was not allowed to love Aiken until he had come
+through the whole gauntlet of gossip. It had first been suggested that
+he was a consumptive and a menace ("though of course one feels terribly
+sorry for them, my dear"). This had been disproved. Then it was spread
+about that he belonged to a wealthy family of Masters from the upper
+West Side ("very well in their way, no doubt, and the backbone of the
+country, my dear, but one doesn't seem to get on with them, and I
+shouldn't think they'd come to Aiken of all places"). But a gentleman
+who knew the West Side Masters, root and branch, shook his head to this,
+and went so far as to say, "Not much, he isn't"; and went further and
+shuddered. Then it got about that Mister Masters was poor (and that made
+people suspicious of him). Then it got about that he was rich (and that
+made them even more so). Then that he wrote for a living (and that was
+nearly as bad as to say that he cheated at cards&mdash;or at least it was the
+kind of thing that <i>they</i> didn't do). And then, finally, the real truth
+about him, or something like it, got out;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> and the hatchet of suspicion
+was buried, and there was peace in Aiken. In that Aiken of whose peace
+the judge, referring to a pock-marked mulatto girl, had thundered that
+it should not be disturbed for any woman&mdash;"no&mdash;not even were she Helen of Troy."</p>
+
+<p>This was the truth that got out about Mister Masters. He was a nephew of
+the late Bishop Masters. His mother, on whom he was dependent, was very
+rich; she had once been prominent in society. He was thirty, and was
+good at games. He did not work at anything.</p>
+
+<p>So he was something that Aiken could understand and appreciate: a young
+man who was well-born, who didn't have to work&mdash;and who didn't <i>want</i> to.</p>
+
+<p>But old Mrs. Hotchkiss did not know of these things when, one bright day
+in passing Willcox's (she was on one good foot, one rheumatic foot, and
+a long black cane with a gold handle), she noticed the young man pale
+and rather sad-looking in his fur coat and steamer-rug, his eyes on his
+book, and stopped abruptly and spoke to him through the gap in the hedge.</p>
+
+<p>"I hope you'll forgive an old woman for scraping an acquaintance," she
+piped in her brisk, cheerful voice, "but I want to know if you're
+getting better, and I thought the best way to find out was to stop and ask."</p>
+
+<p>Mister Masters's steamer-rug fell from about his long legs and his face
+became rosy, for he was very shy.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span></p><p>"Indeed I am," he said, "ever so much. And thank you for asking."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm tired," said the old lady, "of seeing you always sitting by
+yourself, dead tired of it. I shall come for you this afternoon at four
+in my carriage, and take you for a drive...."</p>
+
+<p>"It was abrupt," Mister Masters wrote to his mother, "but it was kind.
+When I had done blushing and scraping with my feet and pulling my
+forelock, we had the nicest little talk. And she remembered you in the
+old days at Lenox, and said why hadn't I told her before. And then she
+asked if I liked Aiken, and, seeing how the land lay, I lied and said I
+loved it. And she said that that was her nice, sensible young fellow, or
+words to that effect. And then she asked me why, and I said because it
+has such a fine climate; and then she laughed in my face, and said that
+I was without reverence for her age&mdash;not a man&mdash;a scalawag.</p>
+
+<p>"And do you know, Mrs. Hotchkiss is like one of those magic keys in
+fairy stories? All doors open to her. Between you and me I have been
+thinking Aiken's floating population snobbish, purse-proud, and
+generally absurd. And instead, the place seems to exist so that kindness
+and hospitality may not fail on earth. Of course I'm not up to genuine
+sprees, such as dining out and sitting up till half-past ten or eleven.
+But I can go to luncheons, and watch other people play tennis,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> and poke
+about gardens with old ladies, and guess when particular flowers will be
+out, and learn the names of birds and of hostile bushes that prick and
+of friendly bushes that don't.</p>
+
+<p>"All the cold weather has gone to glory; and it's really spring because
+the roosters crow all night. Mrs. Hotchkiss says it's because they are
+roosters and immoral. But I think they're crowing because they've
+survived the winter. I am...."</p>
+
+<p>Aiken took a great fancy to Mister Masters. First because Aiken was
+giving him a good time; and second because he was really good company
+when you got him well cornered and his habitual fright had worn off. He
+was the shyest, most frightened six-footer in the memory of Aiken. If
+you spoke to him suddenly he blushed, and if you prepared him by first
+clearing your throat he blushed just the same. And he had a crooked,
+embarrassed smile that was a delight to see.</p>
+
+<p>But gradually he became almost at ease with nearly everybody; and in the
+shyest, gentlest way enjoyed himself hugely. But the prettiest girl in
+Aiken had very hard work with him.</p>
+
+<p>As a stag fights when brought to bay, so Mister Masters when driven into
+a corner could talk as well and as freely as the next man; but on his
+own initiative there was, as we Americans say, "nothing doing." Whether
+or not the prettiest girl in Aiken ever rolled<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> off a log is unknown;
+but such an act would have been no more difficult for her than to corner
+Mister Masters. The man courted cornering, especially by her. But given
+the desired situation, neither could make anything of it. Mister
+Masters's tongue became forthwith as helpless as a man tied hand and
+foot and gagged. He had nothing with which to pay for the delight of
+being cornered but his rosiest, steadiest blush and his crookedest and
+most embarrassed smile. But he retained a certain activity of mind and
+within himself was positively voluble with what he would say if he only could.</p>
+
+<p>I don't mean that the pair sat or stood or walked in absolute silence.
+Indeed, little Miss Blythe could never be silent for a long period nor
+permit it in others, but I mean that with the lines and the machinery of
+a North Atlantic liner, their craft of propinquity made about as much
+progress as a scow. Nevertheless, though neither was really aware of
+this, each kept saying things, that cannot be put into words, to the
+other; otherwise the very first cornering of Mister Masters by little
+Miss Blythe must have been the last. But even as it was way back at the
+beginning of things, and always will be, Beauty spoke to Handsome and
+Handsome up and spoke back.</p>
+
+<p>"No," said little Miss Blythe, upon being sharply cross-questioned by
+Mrs. Hotchkiss, "he practically never does say anything."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p><p>Mrs. Hotchkiss dug a little round hole in the sand with her long black
+cane, and made an insulting face at little Miss Blythe.</p>
+
+<p>"Some men," said she, "can't say 'Boo' to a goose."</p>
+
+<p>If other countries produce girls like little Miss Blythe, I have never
+met a specimen; and I feel very sure that foreign young ladies do not
+become personages at the age of seventeen. When she met Mister Masters
+she had been a personage for six years, and it was time for her to yield
+her high place to another; to marry, to bear children, and to prove that
+all the little matters for which she was celebrated were merely passing
+phases and glitterings of a character which fundamentally was composed
+of simple and noble traits.</p>
+
+<p>Little Miss Blythe had many brothers and sisters; no money, as we reckon
+money; and only such prospects as she herself might choose from
+innumerable offers. She was little; her figure looked best in athletic
+clothes (low neck didn't do well with her, because her face was tanned
+so brown) and she was strong and quick as a pony. All the year round she
+kept herself in the pink of condition ("overkept herself" some said)
+dancing, walking, running, swimming, playing all games and eating to
+match. She had a beautiful, clean-cut face, not delicate and to be
+hidden and coaxed by veils and soft things, but a face that looked
+beautiful above<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> a severe Eton collar, and at any distance. She had the
+bright, wide eyes of a collected athlete, unbelievably blue, and the
+whites of them were only matched for whiteness by her teeth (the deep
+tan of her skin heightened this effect, perhaps); and it was said by one
+admirer that if she were to be in a dark room and were to press the
+button of a kodak and to smile at one and the same instant, there would
+be a picture taken.</p>
+
+<p>She had friends in almost every country-clubbed city in America.
+Whenever, and almost wherever, a horse show was held she was there to
+show the horses of some magnate or other to the best advantage. Between
+times she won tennis tournaments and swimming matches, or tried her hand
+at hunting or polo (these things in secret because her father had
+forbidden them), and the people who continually pressed hospitality upon
+her said that they were repaid a thousand-fold. In the first place, it
+was a distinction to have her. "Who are the Ebers?" "Why, don't you
+know? They are the people Miss Blythe is stopping with."</p>
+
+<p>She was always good-natured; she never kept anybody waiting; and she
+must have known five thousand people well enough to call them by their
+first names. But what really distinguished her most from other young
+women was that her success in inspiring others with admiration and
+affection was not confined to men;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> she had the same effect upon all
+women, old and young, and all children.</p>
+
+<p>Foolish people said that she had no heart, merely because no one had as
+yet touched it. Wise people said that when she did fall in love sparks
+would fly. Hitherto her friendships with men, whatever the men in
+question may have wished, had existed upon a basis of good-natured
+banter and prowess in games. Men were absolutely necessary to Miss
+Blythe to play games with, because women who could "give her a game"
+were rare as ivory-billed woodpeckers. It was even thought by some, as
+an instance, that little Miss Blythe could beat the famous Miss May
+Sutton once out of three times at lawn-tennis. But Miss Sutton, with the
+good-natured and indomitable aggression of her genius, set this
+supposition at rest. Little Miss Blythe could not beat Miss Sutton once
+out of three or three hundred times. But for all that, little Miss
+Blythe was a splendid player and a master of strokes and strategy.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing would have astonished her world more than to learn that little
+Miss Blythe had a secret, darkly hidden quality of which she was
+dreadfully ashamed. At heart she was nothing if not sentimental and
+romantic. And often when she was thought to be sleeping the dreamless
+sleep of the trained athlete who stores up energy for the morrow's
+contest, she was sitting at the windows in her night-gown, looking at
+the moon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> (in hers) and weaving all sorts of absurd adventures about
+herself and her particular fancy of the moment.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a surprise and pleasure to some men, a tragedy perhaps to
+others, if they should learn that little Miss Blythe had fancied them
+all at different times, almost to the boiling point, and that in her own
+deeply concealed imagination Jim had rescued her from pirates and Jack
+from a burning hotel, or that just as her family were selling her to a
+rich widower, John had appeared on his favorite hunter and carried her
+off. The truth is that little Miss Blythe had engaged in a hundred love
+affairs concerning which no one but herself was the wiser.</p>
+
+<p>And at twenty-three it was high time for her to marry and settle down.
+First because she couldn't go on playing games and showing horses
+forever, and second because she wanted to. But with whom she wanted to
+marry and settle down she could not for the life of her have said.
+Sometimes she thought that it would be with Mr. Blagdon. He <i>was</i> rich
+and he <i>was</i> a widower; but wherever she went he managed to go, and he
+had some of the finest horses in the world, and he wouldn't take no for
+an answer. Sometimes she said to the moon:</p>
+
+<p>"I'll give myself a year, and if at the end of that time I don't like
+anybody better than Bob, why...." Or, in a different mood, "I'm tired of
+everything I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span> do; if he happens to ask me to-morrow I'll say yes." Or,
+"I've ridden his horses, and broken his golf clubs, and borrowed his
+guns (and he won't lend them to anybody else), and I suppose I've got to
+pay him back." Or, "I really <i>do</i> like him a lot," or "I really don't
+like him at all."</p>
+
+<p>Then there came into this young woman's life Mister Masters. And he
+blushed his blush and smiled his crooked smile and looked at her when
+she wasn't looking at him (and she knew that he was looking) and was
+unable to say as much as "Boo" to her; and in the hidden springs of her
+nature that which she had always longed for happened, and became, and
+was. And one night she said to the moon: "I know it isn't proper for me
+to be so attentive to him, and I know everybody is talking about it,
+but&mdash;" and she rested her beautiful brown chin on her shapely, strong,
+brown hands, and a tear like a diamond stood in each of her unbelievably
+blue eyes, and she looked at the moon, and said: "But it's Harry Masters
+or&mdash;<i>bust</i>!"</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bob Blagdon, the rich widower, had been content to play a waiting
+game; for he knew very well that beneath her good-nature little Miss
+Blythe had a proud temper and was to be won rather by the man who should
+make himself indispensable to her than by him who should be forever
+pestering her with speaking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> and pleading his cause. She is an honest
+girl, he told himself, and without thinking of consequences she is
+always putting herself under obligations to me. Let her ride down
+lover's lane with young Blank or young Dash, she will not be able to
+forget that she is on my favorite mare. In his soul he felt a certain
+proprietorship in little Miss Blythe; but to this his ruddy,
+dark-mustached face and slow-moving eyes were a screen.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Blagdon had always gone after what he wanted in a kind of slow,
+indifferent way that begot confidence in himself and in the beholder;
+and (in the case of Miss Blythe) a kind of panic in the object sought.
+She liked him because she was used to him, and because he could and
+would talk sense upon subjects which interested her. But she was afraid
+of him because she knew that he expected her to marry him some day, and
+because she knew that other people, including her own family, expected
+this of her. Sometimes she felt ready to take unto herself all the
+horses and country places and automobiles and yachts, and in a life
+lived regardless of expense to bury and forget her better self. But more
+often, like a fly caught in a spider's web, she wished by one desperate
+effort (even should it cost her a wing, to carry out the figure) to free
+herself once and forever from the entanglement.</p>
+
+<p>It was pleasant enough in the web. The strands<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> were soft and silky;
+they held rather by persuasion than by force. And had it not been for
+the spider she could have lived out her life in the web without any very
+desperate regrets. But it was never quite possible to forget the spider;
+and that in his own time he would approach slowly and deliberately, sure
+of himself and of little Miss Fly....</p>
+
+<p>But, after all, the spider in the case was not such a terrible fellow.
+Just because a man wants a girl that doesn't want him, and means to have
+her, he hasn't necessarily earned a hard name. Such a man as often as
+not becomes one-half of a very happy marriage. And Mr. Bob Blagdon was
+considered an exceptionally good fellow. In his heart, though I have
+never heard him say so openly, I think he actually looked down on people
+who gambled and drank to excess, and who were uneducated and had
+acquired (whatever they may have been born with) perfectly empty heads.
+I think that he had a sound and sensible virtue; one ear for one side of
+an argument, and one for the other.</p>
+
+<p>There is no reason to doubt that he was a good husband to his first
+wife, and wished to replace her with little Miss Blythe, not to supplant
+her. To his three young children he was more of a grandfather than a
+father; though strong-willed and even stubborn, he was unable half the
+time to say no to them. And I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> have seen him going on all-fours with the
+youngest child perched on his back kicking him in the ribs and urging
+him to canter. So if he intended by the strength of his will and of his
+riches to compel little Miss Blythe to marry (and to be happy with him;
+he thought he could manage that, too), it is only one blot on a decent
+and upright character. And it is unjust to have called him spider.</p>
+
+<p>But when Mister Masters entered (so timidly to the eye, but really so
+masterfully) into little Miss Blythe's life, she could no longer
+tolerate the idea of marrying Mr. Blagdon. All in a twinkle she knew
+that horses and yachts and great riches could never make up to her for
+the loss of a long, bashful youth with a crooked smile. You can't be
+really happy if you are shivering with cold; you can't be really happy
+if you are dripping with heat. And she knew that without Mister Masters
+she must always be one thing or the other&mdash;too cold or too hot, never
+quite comfortable.</p>
+
+<p>Her own mind was made up from the first; even to going through any
+number of awful scenes with Blagdon. But as time passed and her
+attentions (I shall have to call it that) to Mister Masters made no
+visible progress, there were times when she was obliged to think that
+she would never marry anybody at all. But in her heart she knew that
+Masters was attracted by her, and to this strand of knowledge she clung
+so as not to be drowned in a sea of despair.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p><p>Her position was one of extreme difficulty and delicacy. Sometimes
+Mister Masters came near her of his own accord, and remained in bashful
+silence; but more often she was obliged to have recourse to "accidents"
+in order to bring about propinquity. And even when propinquity had been
+established there was never any progress made that could be favorably
+noted. Behind her back, for instance, when she was playing tennis and he
+was looking on, he was quite bold in his admiration of her. And whereas
+most people's eyes when they are watching tennis follow the flight of
+the ball, Mister Masters's faithful eyes never left the person of his favorite player.</p>
+
+<p>One reason for his awful bashfulness and silence was that certain
+people, who seemed to know, had told him in the very beginning that it
+was only a question of time before little Miss Blythe would become Mrs.
+Bob Blagdon. "She's always been fond of him," they said, "and of course
+he can give her everything worth having." So when he was with her he
+felt as if he was with an engaged girl, and his real feelings not being
+proper to express in any way under such circumstances, and his nature
+being single and without deceit, he was put in a quandary that defied solution.</p>
+
+<p>But what was hidden from Mister Masters was presently obvious to Mr.
+Blagdon and to others. So the spider, sleepily watching the automatic
+enmeshment of the fly, may spring into alert and formidable<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> action at
+seeing a powerful beetle blunder into the web and threaten by his
+stupid, aimless struggles to set the fly at liberty and to destroy the
+whole fabric spun with care and toil.</p>
+
+<p>To a man in love there is no redder danger signal than a sight of the
+object of his affections standing or sitting contentedly with another
+man and neither of them saying as much as "Boo" to the other. He may,
+with more equanimity, regard and countenance a genuine flirtation, full
+of laughter and eye-making. The first time Mr. Blagdon saw them together
+he thought; the second time he felt; the third time he came forward
+graciously smiling. The web might be in danger from the beetle; the fly
+at the point of kicking up her heels and flying gayly away; but it may
+be in the power of the spider to spin enough fresh threads on the spur
+of the moment to rebind the fly, and even to make prisoner the doughty beetle.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you ride, Mister Masters?" said Mr. Blagdon.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course," said the shy one, blushing. "But I'm not to do anything
+violent before June."</p>
+
+<p>"Sorry," said Mr. Blagdon, "because I've a string of ponies that are
+eating their heads off. I'd be delighted to mount you."</p>
+
+<p>But Mister Masters smiled with unusual crookedness and stammered his
+thanks and his regrets. And so that thread came to nothing.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p><p>The spider attempted three more threads; but little Miss Blythe looked
+serenely up.</p>
+
+<p>"I never saw such a fellow as you, Bob," said she, "for putting other
+people under obligations. When I think of the weight of my personal ones
+I shudder." She smiled innocently and looked up into his face. "When
+people can't pay their debts they have to go through bankruptcy, don't
+they? And then their debts all have to be forgiven."</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Blagdon felt as if an icy cold hand had been suddenly laid upon the
+most sensitive part of his back; but his expression underwent no change.
+His slow eyes continued to look into the beautiful, brightly colored
+face that was turned up to him.</p>
+
+<p>"Very honorable bankrupts," said he carelessly, "always pay what they
+can on the dollar."</p>
+
+<p>Presently he strolled away, easy and nonchalant; but inwardly he carried
+a load of dread and he saw clearly that he must learn where he stood
+with little Miss Blythe, or not know the feeling of easiness from one
+day to the next. Better, he thought, to be the recipient of a painful
+and undeserved ultimatum, than to breakfast, lunch, and dine with uncertainty.</p>
+
+<p>The next day, there being some dozens of people almost in earshot, Mr.
+Blagdon had an opportunity to speak to little Miss Blythe. Under the
+circumstances, the last thing she expected was a declaration; they were
+in full view of everybody; anybody might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> stroll up and interrupt. So
+what Mr. Blagdon had to say came to her with something the effect of
+sudden thunder from a clear sky.</p>
+
+<p>"Phyllis," said he, "you have been looking about you since you were
+seventeen. Will I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Bob!" she protested.</p>
+
+<p>"I have tried to do," said he, not without a fine ring of manliness.
+"Have I made good?"</p>
+
+<p>She smiled bravely and looked as nonchalant as possible; but her heart
+was beating heavily.</p>
+
+<p>"I've liked being good friends&mdash;<i>so</i> much," she said. "Don't spoil it."</p>
+
+<p>"I tell her," said he, "that in all the world there is only the one
+girl&mdash;only the one. And she says&mdash;Don't spoil it.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Bob&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I will <i>make</i> you happy," he said.... "Has it never entered your dear
+head that some time you must give me an answer?"</p>
+
+<p>She nodded her dear head, for she was very honest.</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said he.</p>
+
+<p>"In my mind," she said, "I have never been able to give you the same
+answer twice...."</p>
+
+<p>"A decision is expected from us," said he. "People are growing tired of
+our long backing and filling."</p>
+
+<p>"People! Do they matter?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span></p><p>"They matter a great deal. And you know it."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I suppose they do. Let me off for now, Bob. People are looking at us...."</p>
+
+<p>"I want an answer."</p>
+
+<p>But she would not be coerced.</p>
+
+<p>"You shall have one, but not now. I'm not sure what it will be."</p>
+
+<p>"If you can't be sure now, can you ever be sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Give me two weeks. I shall think about nothing else."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you," he said. "Two weeks.... That will be full moon.... I shall
+ask all Aiken to a picnic in the woods, weather permitting ... and&mdash;and
+if your answer is to be my happiness, why, you shall come up to me, and
+say, 'Bob&mdash;drive me home, will you?'"</p>
+
+<p>"And if it's the other answer, Bob?"</p>
+
+<p>He smiled in his usual bantering way.</p>
+
+<p>"If it's the other, Phyllis&mdash;why&mdash;you&mdash;you can walk home."</p>
+
+<p>She laughed joyously, and he laughed, just as if nothing but what was
+light and amusing was in question between them.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Along the Whiskey Road nearly the whole floating population of Aiken
+moved on horseback or on wheels. Every fourth or fifth runabout carried
+a lantern; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> the presence in the long, wide-gapped procession of
+other vehicles or equestrians was denoted only by the sounds of voices.
+Half a dozen family squabbles, half a dozen flirtations (which would
+result in family squabbles), and half a dozen genuine romances were
+moving through the sweet-smelling dark to Mr. Bob Blagdon's picnic in
+Red Oak Hollow. Only three of the guests knew where Red Oak Hollow was,
+and two of these were sure that they could only find it by daylight; but
+the third, a noted hunter and pigeon shot, rode at the head of the
+procession, and pretended (he was forty-five with the heart of a child)
+that he was Buffalo Bill leading a lost wagon-train to water. And though
+nobody could see him for the darkness, he played his part with minute
+attention to detail, listening, pulling up short, scowling to right and
+left, wetting a finger and holding it up to see from which direction the
+air was moving. He was so intent upon bringing his convoy safely through
+a hostile country that the sounds of laughter or of people in one
+runabout calling gayly to people in another were a genuine annoyance to him.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Bob Blagdon had preceded his guests by half an hour, and was already
+at the scene of the picnic. Fate, or perhaps the weather bureau at
+Washington, had favored him with just the conditions he would have
+wished for. The night was hot without <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>heaviness; in the forenoon of
+that day there had been a shower, just wet enough to keep the surfaces
+of roads from rising in dust. It was now clear and bestarred, and
+perhaps a shade less dark than when he had started. Furthermore, it was
+so still that candles burned without flickering. He surveyed his
+preparations with satisfaction. And because he was fastidious in
+entertainment this meant a great deal.</p>
+
+<p>A table thirty feet long, and low to the ground so that people sitting
+on rugs or cushions could eat from it with comfort, stood beneath the
+giant red oak that gave a name to the hollow. The white damask with
+which it was laid and the silver and cut glass gleamed in the light of
+dozens of candles. The flowers were Mar&eacute;chal Niel roses in a long bank
+of molten gold.</p>
+
+<p>Except for the lanterns at the serving tables, dimly to be seen through
+a dense hedgelike growth of Kalmia latifolia, there were no other lights
+in the hollow; so that the dinner-table had the effect of standing in a
+cave; for where the gleam of the candles ended, the surrounding darkness
+appeared solid like a wall.</p>
+
+<p>It might have been a secret meeting of smugglers or pirates, the
+Georgian silver on the table representing years of daring theft; it
+seemed as if blood must have been spilled for the wonderful glass and
+linen and porcelain. Even those guests most hardened in luxury and
+extravagance looked twice at Mr. Bob<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> Blagdon's picnic preparations
+before they could find words with which to compliment him upon them; and
+the less experienced were beside themselves with enthusiasm and delight.
+But Mr. Bob Blagdon was wondering what little Miss Blythe would think
+and say, and he thought it unkind of her, under the circumstances, to be
+the last to arrive. Unkind, because her doing so was either a good omen
+or an evil one, and he could not make up his mind which.</p>
+
+<p>The guests were not homogeneously dressed. Some of the men were in
+dinner clothes; some were in full evening dress; some wore dinner coats
+above riding breeches and boots; some had come bareheaded, some with
+hats which they did not propose to remove. Half the women were in low
+neck and short sleeves; one with short curly hair was breeched and
+booted like a man; others wore what I suppose may be called theatre
+gowns; and a few who were pretty enough to stand it wore clothes suited
+to the hazards of a picnic in the woods.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Blagdon's servants wore his racing colors, blue and silver,
+knee-breeches, black silk stockings, pumps with silver buckles, and
+powdered hair. They were men picked for their height, wooden faces, and
+well-turned calves. They moved and behaved as if utterly untouched and
+uninterested in their unusual and romantic surroundings; they were like
+jinns summoned for the occasion by the rubbing of a magic lamp.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span></p><p>At the last moment, when to have been any later would have been either
+rude or accidental, little Miss Blythe's voice was heard calling from
+the darkness and asking which of two roads she should take. Half a dozen
+men rushed off to guide her, and presently she came blinking into the
+circle of light, followed by Mister Masters, who smiled his crookedest
+smile and stumbled on a root so that he was cruelly embarrassed.</p>
+
+<p>Little Miss Blythe blinked at the lights and looked very beautiful. She
+was all in white and wore no hat. She had a red rose at her throat. She
+was grave for her&mdash;and silent.</p>
+
+<p>The truth was that she had during the last ten minutes made up her mind
+to ask Mr. Bob Blagdon to drive her home when the picnic should be over.
+She had asked Mister Masters to drive out with her; and how much that
+had delighted him nobody knew (alas!) except Mister Masters himself. She
+had during the last few weeks given him every opportunity which her
+somewhat unconventional soul could sanction. In a hundred ways she had
+showed him that she liked him immensely; and well&mdash;if he liked her in
+the same way, he would have managed to show it, in spite of his shyness.
+The drive out had been a failure. They had gotten no further in
+conversation than the beauty and the sweet smells of the night. And
+finally, but God alone knows with what reluctance, she had given him up as a bad job.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p><p>The long table with its dozens of candles looked like a huge altar, and
+she was Iphigenia come to the sacrifice. She had never heard of
+Iphigenia, but that doesn't matter. At Mister Masters, now seated near
+the other end of the table, she lifted shy eyes; but he was looking at
+his plate and crumbling a piece of bread. It was like saying good-by.
+She was silent for a moment; then, smiling with a kind of reckless
+gayety, she lifted her glass of champagne and turned to the host.</p>
+
+<p>"To you!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>Delight swelled in the breast of Mr. Bob Blagdon. He raised his hand,
+and from a neighboring thicket there rose abruptly the music of banjos
+and guitars and the loud, sweet singing of negroes.</p>
+
+<p>Aiken will always remember that dinner in the woods for its beauty and
+for its gayety. Two or three men, funny by gift and habit, were at their
+very best; and fortune adapted the wits of others to the occasion. So
+that the most unexpected persons became humorous for once in their
+lives, and said things worth remembering. People gather together for one
+of three reasons: to make laws, to break them, or to laugh. The first
+sort of gathering is nearly always funny, and if the last isn't, why
+then, to be sure, it is a failure. Mr. Bob Blagdon's picnic was an
+uproarious success. Now and then somebody's whole soul seemed to go<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+into a laugh, in which others could not help joining, until
+uncontrollable snorts resounded in the hollow and eyes became blinded with tears.</p>
+
+<p>And then suddenly, toward dessert, laughter died away and nothing was to
+be heard but such exclamations as: "For Heaven's sake, look at the
+moon!" "Did you ever see anything like it?"</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Blagdon had paid money to the owner of Red Oak Hollow for permission
+to remove certain trees and thickets that would otherwise have
+obstructed his guests' view of the moonrise. At the end of the vista
+thus obtained the upper rim of the moon now appeared, as in a frame.
+And, watching in silence, Mr. Blagdon's guests saw the amazing luminary
+emerge, as it were, from the earth like a bright and blameless soul from
+the grave, and sail clear, presently, and upward into untroubled space;
+a glory, serene, smiling, and unanswerable.</p>
+
+<p>No one remembered to have seen the moon so large or so bright. Atomized
+silver poured like tides of light into the surrounding woods; and at the
+same time heavenly odors of flowers began to move hither and thither, to
+change places, to return, and pass, like disembodied spirits engaged in
+some tranquil and celestial dance.</p>
+
+<p>And it became cooler, so that women called for light wraps and men tied
+sweaters round their necks<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> by the arms. Then at a long distance from
+the dinner-table a bonfire began to flicker, and then grow bright and
+red. And it was discovered that rugs and cushions had been placed (not
+too near the fire) for people to sit on while they drank their coffee
+and liquors, and that there were logs to lean against, and boxes of
+cigars and cigarettes where they could most easily be reached.</p>
+
+<p>It was only a question now of how long the guests would care to stay. As
+a gathering the picnic was over. Some did not use the rugs and cushions
+that had been provided for them, but strolled away into the woods. A
+number of slightly intoxicated gentlemen felt it their duty to gather
+about their host and entertain him. Two married couples brought candles
+from the dinner-table and began a best two out of three at bridge.
+Sometimes two men and one woman would sit together with their backs
+against a log; but always after a few minutes one of the men would go
+away "to get something" and would not return.</p>
+
+<p>It was not wholly by accident that Mister Masters found himself alone
+with little Miss Blythe. Emboldened by the gayety of the dinner, and
+then by the wonder of the moon, he had had the courage to hurry to her
+side; and though there his courage had failed utterly, his action had
+been such as to deter others from joining her. So, for there was nothing
+else to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> do, they found a thick rug and sat upon it, and leaned their
+backs against a log.</p>
+
+<p>Little Miss Blythe had not yet asked Mr. Blagdon to drive her home.
+Though she had made up her mind to do so, it would only be at the last
+possible moment of the twelfth hour. It was now that eleventh hour in
+which heroines are rescued by bold lovers. But Mister Masters was no
+bolder than a mouse. And the moon sailed higher and higher in the heavens.</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't it wonderful?" said little Miss Blythe.</p>
+
+<p>"Wonderful!"</p>
+
+<p>"Just smell it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Umm."</p>
+
+<p>Her sad, rather frightened eyes wandered over to the noisy group of
+which Mr. Bob Blagdon was the grave and silent centre. He knew that
+little Miss Blythe would keep her promise. He believed in his heart that
+her decision would be favorable to him; but he was watching her where
+she sat with Masters and knew that his belief in what she would decide
+was not strong enough to make him altogether happy.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>And</i> he was old enough to be her father!" repeated the gentleman in
+the Scotch deer-stalker who had been gossiping. Mr. Blagdon smiled, but
+the words hurt&mdash;"old enough to be her father." "My God," he thought,
+"<i>I</i> am old enough&mdash;just!" But then he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> comforted himself with "Why not?
+It's how old a man feels, not how old he is."</p>
+
+<p>Then his eyes caught little Miss Blythe's, but she turned hers instantly away.</p>
+
+<p>"This will be the end of the season," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mister Masters assented. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you see old Mr. Black over there?" she said. "He's pretending not to
+watch us, but he's watching us like a lynx.... Did you ever start a piece of news?"</p>
+
+<p>"Never," said Mister Masters.</p>
+
+<p>"It would be rather fun," said little Miss Blythe. "For instance, if we
+held hands for a moment Mr. Black would see it, and five minutes later
+everybody would know about it."</p>
+
+<p>Mister Masters screwed his courage up to the sticking point, and took
+her hand in his. Both looked toward Mr. Black as if inviting him to
+notice them. Mr. Black was seen almost instantly to whisper to the nearest gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>"There," said little Miss Blythe, and was for withdrawing her hand. But
+Masters's fingers tightened upon it, and she could feel the pulses
+beating in their tips. She knew that people were looking, but she felt
+brazen, unabashed, and happy. Mister Masters's grip tightened; it said:
+"My master has a dozen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> hearts, and they are all beating&mdash;for <i>you</i>." To
+return that pressure was not an act of little Miss Blythe's will. She
+could not help herself. Her hand said to Masters: "With the heart&mdash;with
+the soul." Then she was frightened and ashamed, and had a rush of color to the face.</p>
+
+<p>"Let go," she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>But Masters leaned toward her, and though he was trembling with fear and
+awe and wonder, he found a certain courage and his voice was wonderfully
+gentle and tender, and he smiled and he whispered: "Boo!"</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Only then did he set her hand free. For one reason there was no need now
+of so slight a bondage; for another, Mr. Bob Blagdon was approaching
+them, a little pale but smiling. He held out his hand to little Miss
+Blythe, and she took it.</p>
+
+<p>"Phyllis," said he, "I know your face so well that there is no need for
+me to ask, and for you&mdash;to deny." He smiled upon her gently, though it
+cost him an effort. "I wanted her for myself," he turned to Masters with
+charming frankness, "but even an old man's selfish desires are not proof
+against the eloquence of youth, and I find a certain happiness in saying
+from the bottom of my heart&mdash;bless you, my children...."</p>
+
+<p>The two young people stood before him with bowed heads.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span></p><p>"I am going to send you the silver and glass from the table," said he,
+"for a wedding present to remind you of my picnic...." He looked upward
+at the moon. "If I could," said he, "I would give you that."</p>
+
+<p>Then the three stood in silence and looked upward at the moon.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_CLAWS_OF_THE_TIGER" id="THE_CLAWS_OF_THE_TIGER"></a>THE CLAWS OF THE TIGER</h2>
+
+<p>What her given name was in the old country has never reached me; but
+when her family had learned a little English, and had begun to affect
+the manners and characteristics of their more Americanized
+acquaintances, they called her Daisy. She was the only daughter; her age
+was less than that of two brothers, and she was older than three. The
+family consisted of these six, Mr. and Mrs. Obloski, the parents,
+Grandfather Pinnievitch, and Great-grandmother Brenda&mdash;a woman so old,
+so shrunken, so bearded, and so eager to live that her like was not to
+be found in the city.</p>
+
+<p>Upon settling in America two chief problems seemed to confront the
+family: to make a living and to educate the five boys. The first problem
+was solved for a time by The Organization. Obloski was told by an
+interpreter that he would be taken care of if he and his father-in-law
+voted as directed and as often as is decent under a wise and paternal
+system of government. To Obloski, who had about as much idea what the
+franchise stands for as The Organization had, this seemed an agreeable
+arrangement. Work was found<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> for him, at a wage. He worked with immense
+vigor, for the wage seemed good. Soon, however, he perceived that older
+Americans (of his own nationality) were laughing at him. Then he did not
+work so hard; but the wage, froth of the city treasury, came to him just
+the same. He ceased working, and pottered. Still he received pay. He
+ceased pottering. He joined a saloon. And he became the right-hand man
+of a right-hand man of a right-hand man who was a right-hand man of a
+very important man who was&mdash;left-handed.</p>
+
+<p>The two older boys were at school in a school; the three others were at
+school in the street. Mrs. Obloski was occupied with a seventh child,
+whose sex was not yet determined. Grandfather Pinnievitch was learning
+to smoke three cigars for five cents; and Great-grandmother Brenda sat
+in the sun, stroking her beard and clinging to life. Nose and chin
+almost obstructed the direct passage to Mrs. Brenda's mouth. She looked
+as if she had gone far in an attempt to smell her own chin, and would soon succeed.</p>
+
+<p>But for Daisy there was neither school, nor play in the street, nor
+sitting in the sun. She cooked, and she washed the dishes, and she did
+the mending, and she made the beds, and she slept in one of the beds
+with her three younger brothers. In spite of the great wage so easily
+won the Obloskis were very poor, for New<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> York. All would be well when
+the two older boys had finished school and begun to vote. They were
+thirteen and fourteen, but the school records had them as fifteen and
+sixteen, for the interpreter had explained to their father that a man
+cannot vote until he is twenty-one.</p>
+
+<p>Daisy was twelve, but she had room in her heart for all her family, and
+for a doll besides. This was of rags; and on the way from Castle Garden
+to the tenement she had found it, neglected, forsaken&mdash;starving,
+perhaps&mdash;in a gutter. In its single garment, in its woollen hair, and
+upon its maculate body the doll carried, perhaps, the germs of typhoid,
+of pneumonia, of tetanus, and of consumption; but all night it lay in
+the arms of its little mother, and was not permitted to harm her or hers.</p>
+
+<p>The Obloskis, with the exception of Mrs. Brenda, were a handsome
+family&mdash;the grandfather, indeed, was an old beauty in his way, with
+streaming white hair and beard, and eyes that reminded you of locomotive
+headlights seen far off down a dark tunnel; but their good features were
+marred by an expression of hardness, of greed, of unsatisfied desire.
+And Mr. Obloski's face was beginning to bloat with drink. It was only
+natural that Daisy, upon whom all the work was put, should have been too
+busy to look hard or greedy. She had no time to brood upon life or to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+think upon unattainable things. She had only time to cook, time to wash
+the dishes, to mend the clothes, to make the beds, and to play the
+mother to her little brothers and to her doll. And so, and naturally, as
+the skin upon her little hands thickened and grew rough and red, the
+expression in her great eyes became more and more luminous, translucent, and joyous.</p>
+
+<p>Even to a class of people whose standards of beauty differ, perhaps,
+from ours, she promised to be very beautiful. She was a
+brown-and-crimson beauty, with ocean-blue eyes and teeth dazzling white,
+like the snow on mountains when the sun shines. And though she was only
+twelve, her name, underlined, was in the note-book of many an ambitious
+young man. I knew a young man who was a missionary in that quarter of
+the city (indeed, it was through him that this story reached me), an
+earnest, Christian, upstanding, and, I am afraid, futile young man, who,
+for a while, thought he had fallen in love with her, and talked of
+having his aunt adopt her, sending her to school, ladyizing her. He had
+a very pretty little romance mapped out. She would develop into an
+ornament to any society, he said. Her beauty&mdash;he snapped his
+fingers&mdash;had nothing to do with his infatuation. She had a soul, a great
+soul. This it was that had so moved him. "You should see her," he said,
+"with her kid brother, and the whole family shooting-match.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> I know;
+lots of little girls have the instinct of mothering things&mdash;but it's
+more in her case, it amounts to genius&mdash;and she's so clever, and so
+quick, and in spite of all the wicked hard work they put upon her she
+sings a little, and laughs a little, and mothers them all the time&mdash;the selfish beasts!"</p>
+
+<p>My friend's pipe-dreams came to nothing. He drifted out of missionizing,
+through a sudden hobby for chemistry, into orchids; sickened of having
+them turn black just when they ought to have bloomed; ran for Congress
+and was defeated; decided that the country was going to the dogs, went
+to live in England, and is now spending his time in a vigorous and, I am
+afraid, vain attempt to get himself elected to a first-class London
+club. He is quite a charming man&mdash;and quite unnecessary. I mention all
+this, being myself enough of a pipe-dreamer to think that, if he had not
+been frightened out of his ideas about Daisy, life might have dealt more
+handsomely with them both.</p>
+
+<p>As Obloski became more useful to the great organization that owned him
+he received proportionately larger pay; but as he drank proportionately
+more, his family remained in much its usual straits. Presently Obloski
+fell off in utility, allowing choice newly landed men of his nationality
+to miss the polls. Then strange things happened. The great man (who was
+left-handed) spoke an order mingled with the awful names<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> of gods. Then
+certain shares, underwritten by his right-hand man, clamored for
+promised cash. A blue pallor appeared in the cheeks of the right-hand
+man, and he spoke an order, so that a contract for leaving the pavement
+of a certain city street exactly as it was went elsewhere. The defrauded
+contractor swore very bitterly, and reduced the salary of his right-hand
+man. This one caused a raid of police to ascend into the disorderly
+house of his. This one in turn punished his right-hand man; until
+finally the lowest of all in the scale, save only Mr. Obloski, remarked
+to the latter, pressing for his wage, that money was "heap scarce." And
+Mr. Obloski, upon opening his envelope, discovered that it contained but
+the half of that to which he had accustomed his appetite. Than Obloski
+there was none lower. Therefore, to pass on the shiver of pain that had
+descended to him from the throne, he worked upon his feelings with raw
+whiskey, then went home to his family and broke its workings to bits.
+Daisy should go sit in an employment agency until she was employed and
+earning money. The youngest boy and the next youngest should sell
+newspapers upon the street. Mrs. Obloski should stop mourning for the
+baby which she had rolled into a better world three years before, and do
+the housework. The better to fit her for this, for she was lazy and not
+strong, he kicked her in the ribs until she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> fainted, and removed
+thereby any possibility of her making good the loss for which her
+proneness to luxurious rolling had been directly responsible.</p>
+
+<p>So Daisy, who was now nearly sixteen, went to sit with other young women
+in a row: some were older than she, one or two younger; but no one of
+the others was lovely to look at or had a joyous face.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>After about an hour's waiting in an atmosphere of sour garments
+disguised by cheap perfumery, employment came to Daisy in the stout form
+of a middle aged, showily dressed woman, decisive in speech, and rich,
+apparently, who desired a waitress.</p>
+
+<p>"I want something cheap and green," she explained to the manager. "I
+form 'em then to suit myself." Her eyes, small, quick, and decided,
+flashed along the row of candidates, and selected Daisy without so much
+as one glance at the next girl beyond. "There's my article, Mrs.
+Goldsmith," she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Goldsmith shook her head and whispered something.</p>
+
+<p>The wealthy lady frowned. "Seventy-five?" she said. "That's ridiculous."</p>
+
+<p>"My Gott!" exclaimed Mrs. Goldsmith. "Ain't she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> fresh? Loog at her.
+Ain't she a fresh, sweet liddle-thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she looks fresh enough," said the lady, "but I don't go on looks.
+But I'll soon find out if what you say is true. And then I'll pay you
+seventy-five. Meanwhile"&mdash;as Mrs. Goldsmith began to protest&mdash;"there's
+nothing in it&mdash;nothing in it."</p>
+
+<p>"But I haf your bromice&mdash;to pay up."</p>
+
+<p>The lady bowed grandly.</p>
+
+<p>"You are sugh an old customer&mdash;" Thus Mrs. Goldsmith explained her
+weakness in yielding.</p>
+
+<p>Daisy, carrying her few possessions in a newspaper bundle, walked
+lightly at the side of her new employer.</p>
+
+<p>"My name is Mrs. Holt, Daisy," said the lady. "And I think we'll hit
+things off, if you always try to do just what I tell you."</p>
+
+<p>Daisy was in high spirits. It was wonderful to have found work so easily
+and so soon. She was to receive three dollars a week. She could not
+understand her good fortune. Again and again Mrs. Holt's hard eyes
+flicked over the joyous, brightly colored young face. Less often an
+expression not altogether hard accompanied such surveys. For although
+Mrs. Holt knew that she had found a pearl among swine, her feelings of
+elation were not altogether free from a curious and most unaccustomed tinge of regret.</p>
+
+<p>"But I must get you a better dress than that," she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> said. "I want my
+help to look cared for and smart. I don't mean you're not neat and clean
+looking; but maybe you've something newer and nicer in your bundle?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes," said Daisy. "I have my Sunday dress. That is almost new."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Mrs. Holt, "I'll have a look at it. This is where I live."</p>
+
+<p>She opened the front door with a latch-key; and to Daisy it seemed as if
+paradise had been opened&mdash;from the carved walnut rack, upon which
+entering angels might hang their hats and coats, to the carpet upon the
+stair and the curtains of purple plush that, slightly parted, disclosed
+glimpses of an inner and more sumptuous paradise upon the right&mdash;a grand
+crayon of Mrs. Holt herself, life-size, upon an easel of bamboo; chairs
+and sofas with tremendously stuffed seats and backs and arms, a
+tapestry-work fire-screen&mdash;a purple puppy against a pink-and-yellow ground.</p>
+
+<p>"I'll take you up to your room right off," said Mrs. Holt, "and you can
+show me your other dress, and I'll tell you if it's nice enough."</p>
+
+<p>So up they went three flights. But it was in no garret that Daisy was to
+sleep. Mrs. Holt conducted her into a large, high-ceilinged,
+old-fashioned room. To be sure, it was ill lighted and ill
+ventilated&mdash;giving on a court; but its furniture, from the
+marble-topped<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> wash-stand to the great double bed, was very grand and
+overpowering. Daisy could only gape with wonder and delight. To call
+such a room her own, to earn three dollars a week&mdash;with a golden promise
+of more later on if she proved a good girl&mdash;it was all very much too
+wonderful to be true.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Daisy, let me see your Sunday dress&mdash;open the bundle on the bed there."</p>
+
+<p>Daisy, obedient and swift (but blushing, for she knew that her dress
+would look very humble in such surroundings), untied the string and
+opened the parcel. But it was not the Sunday dress that caught Mrs.
+Holt's eye. She spoke in the voice of one the most of whose breath has
+suddenly been snatched away.</p>
+
+<p>"And what," she exclaimed, "for mercy sake, is <i>that</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>"That," said Daisy, already in an anguish lest it be taken from her, "is my doll."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Holt took the doll in her hands and turned it over and back. She
+looked at it, her head bent, for quite a long time. Then, all of a
+sudden, she made a curious sound in the back of her throat that sounded
+like a cross between a choke and a sob. Then she spoke swiftly&mdash;and like one ashamed:</p>
+
+<p>"You won't suit me, girlie&mdash;I can see that. Wrap up those things again,
+and&mdash;No, you mustn't go back to Goldsmith's&mdash;she's a bad woman&mdash;you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+wouldn't understand. Can't you go back home? No?... They need what you
+can earn.... Here, you go to Hauptman's employment agency and tell him I
+sent you. No.... You're too blazing innocent. I'll go with you. I've got
+some influence. I'll see to it that he gets a job for you from some one
+who&mdash;who'll let you alone."</p>
+
+<p>"But," said Daisy, gone quite white with disappointment, "I would have
+tried so hard to please you, Mrs. Holt. I&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't know what you're saying, child," exclaimed Mrs. Holt. "I&mdash;I
+don't need you. I've got trouble here." She touched what appeared to be
+an ample bosom. "One-half's the real thing and one-half's just padding.
+I'm not long for this world, and you've cost me a pretty penny, my dear;
+but it's all right. I don't need <i>you</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>So Mrs. Holt took Daisy to Hauptman's agency. And he, standing in fear
+of Mrs. Holt, found employment for her as waitress in a Polish
+restaurant. Here the work was cruel and hard, and the management
+thunderous and savage; but the dangers of the place were not machine
+made, and Daisy could sleep at home.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Daisy had not been at work in the restaurant many weeks before the
+proprietor perceived that business was increasing. The four tables to
+which Daisy attended were nearly always full, and the other waitresses
+were beginning to show symptoms of jealousy and nerves. More dishes were
+smashed; more orders went wrong; and Daisy, a smooth, quick, eager
+worker, was frequently delayed and thrown out of her stride, so to
+speak, by malicious stratagems and tricks. But Linnevitch, the
+proprietor, had a clear mind and an excellent knowledge of human nature.
+He got rid of his cash-girl, and put Daisy in her place; and this in
+face of the fact that Daisy had had the scantiest practice with figures
+and was at first dismally slow in the making of change. But Linnevitch
+bore with her, and encouraged her. If now and then she made too much
+change, he forgave her. He had only to look at the full tables to
+forget. For every nickel that she lost for him, she brought a new
+customer. And soon, too, she became at ease with money, and sure of her
+subtraction. Linnevitch advanced her sufficient funds to buy a neat
+black dress; he insisted that she wear a white turnover collar and white
+cuffs. The plain severity of this costume set off the bright <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>coloring
+of her face and hair to wonderful advantage. In the dingy, ill-lighted
+restaurant she was like that serene, golden, glowing light that
+Rembrandt alone has known how to place among shadows. And her temper was
+so sweet, and her disposition so childlike and gentle, that one by one
+the waitresses who hated her for her popularity and her quick success
+forgave her and began to like her. They discussed her a great deal among
+themselves, and wondered what would become of her. Something good, they
+prophesied; for under all the guilelessness and simplicity she was able.
+And you had to look but once into those eyes to know that she was
+string-straight. Among the waitresses was no very potent or instructed
+imagination. They could not formulate the steps upon which Daisy should
+rise, nor name the happy height to which she should ascend. They knew
+that she was exceptional; no common pottery like themselves, but of that
+fine clay of which even porcelain is made. It was common talk among them
+that Linnevitch was in love with her; and, recalling what had been the
+event in the case of the Barnhelm girl, and of Lotta Gorski, they knew
+that Linnevitch sometimes put pleasure ahead of business. Yet it was
+their common belief that the more he pined after Daisy the less she had
+to fear from him.</p>
+
+<p>A new look had come into the man's protruding eyes. Either prosperity or
+Daisy, or both, had changed him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> for the better. The place no longer
+echoed with thunderous assaults upon slight faults. The words, "If you
+will, please, Helena"; "Well, well, pick it up," fell now from his lips,
+or the even more reassuring and courteous, "Never mind; I say, never mind."</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, if her position and work in the restaurant were pleasant
+enough, Daisy's evenings and nights at home were hard to bear. Her
+mother, sick, bitter, and made to work against her will, had no tolerant
+words for her. Grandfather Pinnievitch, deprived of even pipe tobacco by
+his bibulous son-in-law, whined and complained by the hour. Old Mrs.
+Brenda declared that she was being starved to death, and she reviled
+whomever came near her. The oldest boy had left school in disgrace,
+together with a classmate of the opposite sex, whom he abandoned shortly
+at a profit. The family had turned him off at first; had then seen that
+he had in spite of this an air of prosperity; invited him to live at
+home once more, and were told that he was done with them. His first
+venture in the business of pandering had been a success; a company,
+always on the lookout for bright young men, offered him good pay, work
+intricate but interesting, and that protection without which crime would
+not be profitable.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, in the secure shadow of The Organization's secret dark wings, there
+was room even for this obscure young Pole, fatherless, now, and
+motherless.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> For The Organization stands at the gates of the young
+Republic to welcome in the unfortunate of all nations, to find work for
+them, and security. Let your bent be what it will, if only you will
+serve the master, young immigrant, you may safely follow that bent to
+the uttermost dregs in which it ends. Whatever you wish to be, that you
+may become, provided only that your ambition is sordid, criminal, and unchaste.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Obloski was now an incorrigible drunkard. He could no longer be
+relied on to cast even his own vote once, should the occasion for voting
+arise. So The Great Organization spat Obloski aside. He threatened
+certain reprisals and tale-bearings. He was promptly arrested for a
+theft which not only he had not committed, but which had never been
+committed at all. The Organization spared itself the expense of actually
+putting him in jail; but he had felt the power of the claws. He would
+threaten no more.</p>
+
+<p>To support the family on Daisy's earnings and the younger boys'
+newspaper sellings, and at the same time to keep drunk from morning to
+night, taxed his talents to the utmost. There were times when he had to
+give blows instead of bread. But he did his best, and was as patient and
+long-suffering as possible with those who sapped his income and kept him down.</p>
+
+<p>One night, in a peculiarly speculative mood, he addressed his business
+instincts to Daisy. "Fourteen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> dollars a month!" he said. "And there are
+girls without half your looks&mdash;right here in this city&mdash;that earn as
+much in a night. What good are you?"</p>
+
+<p>I cannot say that Daisy was so innocent as not to gather his meaning.
+She sat and looked at him, a terrible pathos in her great eyes, and said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said her father, "what good are you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No good," said Daisy gently.</p>
+
+<p>That night she hugged her old doll to her breast and wept bitterly, but
+very quietly, so as not to waken her brothers. The next morning, very
+early, she made a parcel of her belongings, and carried it with her to
+the restaurant. The glass door with its dingy gilt lettering was being
+unlocked for the day by Mr. Linnevitch. He was surprised to see her a
+full half-hour before opening time.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Linnevitch," said Daisy, "things are so that I can't stay at home
+any more. I will send them the money, but I have to find another place to live."</p>
+
+<p>"We got a little room," he said; "you can have if Mrs. Linnevitch says
+so. I was going to give you more pay. We give you that room instead&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Linnevitch gave her consent. She was a dreary, weary woman of
+American birth. When she was alone with her husband she never upbraided
+him for his infidelities, or referred to them. But later, on this
+particular day, having a chance to speak, she said:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span></p><p>"I hope you ain't going to bother this one, Linne?"</p>
+
+<p>He patted his wife's bony back and shook his head. "The better as I know
+that girl, Minnie," he said, "the sorrier I am for what I used to be
+doing sometimes. You and her is going to have a square deal."</p>
+
+<p>"I bin up to put her room straight," said Mrs. Linnevitch. "She's got a doll."</p>
+
+<p>She delivered this for what it was worth, in an uninterested, emotionless voice.</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you what she ought to have got," said her husband. "She ought to
+have got now a good husband, and some live dolls&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>New customers were not uncommon in the restaurant, but the young man who
+dropped in for noon dinner upon the following Friday was of a plumage
+gayer than any to which the waitresses and habitu&eacute;s of the place were
+accustomed. To Daisy, sitting at her high cashier's desk, like a young
+queen enthroned, he seemed to have something of the nature of a prince
+from a far country. She watched him eat. She saw in his cuffs the glint
+of gold; she noted with what elegance he held his little fingers aloof
+from his hands. She noted the polish and cleanliness of his nails, the
+shortness of his recent hair-cut, the great breadth of his shoulders<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+(they were his coat's shoulders, but she did not know this), the
+narrowness of his waist, the interesting pallor of his face.</p>
+
+<p>Not until the restaurant was well filled did any one have the audacity
+to sit at the stranger's table. His elegance and refinement were as a
+barrier between him and all that was rude and coarse. If he glanced
+about the place, taking notes in his turn of this and that, it was
+covertly and quietly and without offence. His eyes passed across Daisy's
+without resting or any show of interest. Once or twice he spoke quietly
+to the girl who waited on him, his eyebrows slightly raised, as if he
+were finding fault but without anger. For the first time in her life
+Daisy had a sensation of jealousy; but in the pale nostalgic form,
+rather than the yellow corrosive.</p>
+
+<p>Though the interesting stranger had been one of the earliest arrivals,
+he ate slowly, busied himself with important-looking papers out of his
+coat-pockets, and was the last to go. He paid his bill, and if he looked
+at Daisy while she made change it was in an absent-minded, uninterested way.</p>
+
+<p>She had an access of boldness. "I hope you liked your dinner," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"I?" The young man came out of the clouds. "Oh, yes. Very nice." He
+thanked her as courteously for his change as if his receiving any at all
+was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> purely a matter for her discretion to decide, wished her good
+afternoon, and went out.</p>
+
+<p>The waitresses were gathered about the one who had served the stranger.
+It seemed that he had made her a present of a dime. It was vaguely known
+that up-town, in more favored restaurants, a system of tipping
+prevailed; but in Linnevitch's this was the first instance in a long
+history. The stranger's stock, as they say, went up by leaps and bounds.
+Then, on removing the cloth from the table at which he had dined, there
+was discovered a heart-shaped locket that resembled gold. The girls were
+for opening it, and at least one ill-kept thumb-nail was painfully
+broken over backward in the attempt. Daisy joined the group. She was
+authoritative for the first time in her life.</p>
+
+<p>"He wouldn't like us to open it," she said.</p>
+
+<p>A dispute arose, presently a clamor; Linnevitch came in. There was a silence.</p>
+
+<p>Linnevitch examined the locket. "Trible-plate," he said judicially.
+"Maybe there's a name and address inside." As the locket opened for his
+strong thumb-nail, Daisy gave out a little sound as of pain. Linnevitch
+stood looking into the locket, smiling.</p>
+
+<p>"Only hair," he said presently, and closed the thing with a snap, "Put
+that in the cash-drawer," he said, "until it is called for."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p><p>Daisy turned the key on the locket and wondered what color the hair
+was. The stranger, of course, had a sweetheart, and of course the hair
+was hers. Was it brown, chestnut, red, blond, black? Beneath each of
+these colors in turn she imagined a face.</p>
+
+<p>Long before the first habitu&eacute;s had arrived for supper Daisy was at her
+place. All the afternoon her imagination had been so fed, and her
+curiosity thereby so aroused, that she was prepared, in the face of what
+she knew at heart was proper, to open the locket and see, at least, the
+color of the magic hair. But she still hesitated, and for a long time.
+Finally, however, overmastered, she drew out the cash-drawer a little
+way and managed, without taking it out, to open the locket. The lock of
+hair which it contained was white as snow.</p>
+
+<p>Daisy rested, chin on hands, looking into space. She had almost always
+been happy in a negative way, or, better, contented. Now she was
+positively happy. But she could not have explained why. She had closed
+the locket gently and tenderly, revering the white hairs and the filial
+piety that had enshrined them in gold ("triple-plated gold, at that!").
+And when presently the stranger entered to recover his property, Daisy
+felt as if she had always known him, and that there was nothing to know
+of him but good.</p>
+
+<p>He was greatly and gravely concerned for his loss, but when Daisy,
+without speaking, opened the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>cash-drawer and handed him his property,
+he gave her a brilliant smile of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>"One of the girls found it under your table," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Is she here now?" he asked. "But never mind; you'll thank her for me,
+won't you? And&mdash;" A hand that seemed wonderfully ready for financial
+emergencies slipped into a trousers pocket and pulled from a great roll
+of various denominations a dollar bill. "Thank her and give her that,"
+he said. Then, and thus belittling the transaction, "I have to be in
+this part of the city quite often on business," he said, "and I don't
+mind saying that I like to take my meals among honest people. You can
+tell the boss that I intend to patronize this place."</p>
+
+<p>He turned to go, but the fact that she had been included as being one of
+honest people troubled Daisy.</p>
+
+<p>"Excuse me," she said. He turned back. "It was wrong for me to do it,"
+she said, blushing deeply, and looking him full in the face with her
+great, honest eyes. "I opened your locket. And looked in."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you?" said the young man. He did not seem to mind in the least. "I
+do, often. That lock of hair," he said, rather solemn now, and a little
+sad, perhaps, "was my mother's."</p>
+
+<p>He now allowed his eyes to rest on Daisy's beautiful face for, perhaps, the first time.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p><p>"In a city like this," he said, "there's always temptations to do
+wrong, but I think having this" (he touched his breast pocket where the
+locket was) "helps me to do what mother would have liked me to."</p>
+
+<p>He brushed the corner of one eye with the back of his hand. Perhaps
+there was a tear in it. Perhaps a cinder.</p>
+
+<h3>V</h3>
+
+<p>It came to be known in the restaurant that the stranger's name was
+Barstow, and very soon he had ceased to be a stranger. His business in
+that quarter of the city, whatever it may have been, was at first
+intermittent; he would take, perhaps, three meals in a week at
+Linnevitch's; latterly he often came twice in one day. Always orderly
+and quiet, Barstow gradually, however, established pleasant and even
+joking terms with the waitresses. But with Daisy he never joked. He
+called the other girls by their first names, as became a social
+superior, but Daisy was always Miss Obloski to him. With Linnevitch
+alone he made no headway. Linnevitch maintained a pointedly surly and
+repellent attitude, as if he really wished to turn away a profitable
+patronage. And Barstow learned to leave the proprietor severely alone.</p>
+
+<p>One night, after Barstow had received his change,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> he remained for a few
+minutes talking with Daisy. "What do you find to do with yourself
+evenings, Miss Obloski?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"I generally sit with Mr. and Mrs. Linnevitch and sew," she answered.</p>
+
+<p>"That's not a very exciting life for a young lady. Don't you ever take
+in a show, or go to a dance?"</p>
+
+<p>She shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you like to dance?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know I'd like it," she said with enthusiasm; "but I never had a
+chance to try."</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't!" exclaimed Barstow. "What a shame! Some night, if you
+like, I'll take you to an academy&mdash;a nice quiet one, mostly for
+beginners&mdash;where they give lessons. If you'd like, I'll teach you myself."</p>
+
+<p>Delight showed in Daisy's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Good!" said Barstow. "It's a go. How about to-n&mdash;" He broke off short.
+Linnevitch, very surly and very big, was within hearing, although his
+attention appeared elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>"Some time soon, then," said Barstow in a lower voice, and aloud, "Well,
+good-night, Miss Obloski."</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were upon the glass door and the darkness beyond into which
+Barstow had disappeared. She was returned to earth by Linnevitch's voice
+close to her ear. It was gentle and understanding.</p>
+
+<p>"You like dot feller&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span></p><p>Daisy blushed very crimson, but her great eyes were steadfast and
+without guile. "I like him very much, Mr. Linnevitch."</p>
+
+<p>"Not too much&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Daisy did not answer. She did not know the answer.</p>
+
+<p>"Liddle girl," said Linnevitch kindly, "you don't know noddings. What
+was he saying to you, just now?"</p>
+
+<p>"He said some evening he'd take me to an academy and learn me dancing," said Daisy.</p>
+
+<p>"He said dot, did he?" said Linnevitch. "I say don't have nodding to do
+with them academies. You ask Mrs. Linnevitch to tell you some stories&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>"But he didn't mean a regular dance-hall," said Daisy. "He said a place for beginners."</p>
+
+<p>"For beginners!" said Linnevitch with infinite sarcasm. And then with a
+really tender paternalism, "If I am your father, I beat you sometimes
+for a liddle fool&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Linnevitch was more explicit. "I've knowed hundreds of girls that
+was taught to dance," she said. "First they go to the hall, and then they go to hell."</p>
+
+<p>Daisy defended her favorite character. "Any man," she said, "that
+carries a lock of his mother's white hair with him to help keep him
+straight is good enough for me, I guess."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know it is not hair of some old man's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> beard to fool you? Or
+some goat&mdash;eh? How do you know it make him keep straight&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>Linnevitch began to mimic the quiet voice and elegant manner of Barstow:
+"Good-morning, Miss Obloski, I have just given one dollar to a poor
+cribble.... Oh, how do you do to-day, Miss Obloski? My mouth is full of
+butter, but it don't seem to melt.... Oh, Miss Obloski, I am ready to
+faint with disgust. I have just seen a man drink one stein of beer. I am
+a temptation this evening&mdash;let me just look in dot locket and save myself."</p>
+
+<p>Daisy was not amused. She was even angry with Linnevitch, but too gentle
+to show it. Presently she said good-night and went to bed.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Now</i>," said Mrs. Linnevitch, "she'll go with that young feller sure.
+The way you mocked him made her mad. I've got eyes in my head. Whatever
+she used to think, now she thinks he's a live saint."</p>
+
+<p>"I wonder, now?" said Linnevitch. A few minutes' wondering must have
+brought him into agreement with his wife, for presently he toiled up
+three flights of stairs and knocked at Daisy's door.</p>
+
+<p>"Daisy," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it, Mr. Linnevitch?" If her voice had not been tearful it would
+have been cold.</p>
+
+<p>The man winced. "Mebbe that young feller is O. K.," he said. "I have
+come just to say that.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> Mebbe he is. But you just let me look him up a
+liddle bit&mdash;eh?"</p>
+
+<p>He did not catch her answer.</p>
+
+<p>"You promise me that&mdash;eh? Mrs. Linnevitch and me, we want to do what is
+right and best. We don't want our liddle Daisy to make no mistakes."</p>
+
+<p>He had no answer but the sounds that go with tears. He knew by this that
+his mockings and insinuations had been forgiven.</p>
+
+<p>"Good-night, liddle girl," he said. "Sleep tight." His own voice broke.
+"I be your popper&mdash;eh?" he said.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>To Barstow's surprise and disappointment, when he named a time for her
+first lesson in dancing Daisy refused to go.</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Linnevitch thinks I better not be going out nights, Mr. Barstow,"
+she said. "But thank you ever so much, all the same."</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Barstow, "I'm disappointed. But that's nothing, if you're not."</p>
+
+<p>Daisy blushed. "But I am," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Then," said he, "never mind what <i>they</i> say. Come on!"</p>
+
+<p>Daisy shook her head. "I promised."</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, Miss Obloski, what's wrong? Let's be honest, whatever else
+we are. Is it because they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> <i>know</i> something against me, because they
+<i>think</i> they do, or because they <i>know</i> that they don't?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's that," said Daisy. "Mr. Linnevitch don't want me to be going out
+with any one he don't know about."</p>
+
+<p>Barstow was obviously relieved. "Thank you," he said. "That's all square
+now. It isn't Mrs. Linnevitch; it's the boss. It isn't going out in
+general; it's going out with me!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he surprised her. "The boss is absolutely right," he said. "I'm for
+him, and, Miss Obloski, I won't ask you to trust me until I've proved to
+Linnevitch that I'm a proper guardian&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It's only Mr. Linnevitch," said Daisy, smiling very sweetly. "It's not
+me. <i>I</i> trust you." Her eyes were like two serene stars.</p>
+
+<p>Barstow leaned closer and spoke lower. "Miss Obloski," he said,
+"Daisy"&mdash;and he lingered on the name&mdash;"there's only one thing you could
+say that I'd rather hear."</p>
+
+<p>Daisy wanted to ask what that was. But there was no natural coquetry in
+the girl. She did not dare.</p>
+
+<p>She did not see him again for three whole days; but she fed upon his
+last words to her until she was ready, and even eager, to say that other
+thing which alone he would rather hear than that she trusted him.</p>
+
+<p>Between breakfast and dinner on the fourth day a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> tremendous great man,
+thick in the chest and stomach, wearing a frock coat and a glossy silk
+hat, entered the restaurant. The man's face, a miracle of close shaving,
+had the same descending look of heaviness as his body. But it was a
+strong, commanding face in spite of the pouched eyes and the drooping
+flesh about the jaws and chin. Daisy, busy with her book-keeping, looked
+up and smiled, with her strong instinct for friendliness.</p>
+
+<p>The gentleman removed his hat. Most of his head was bald. "You'll be
+Miss Obloski," he said. "The top o' the mornin' to you, miss. My boy has
+often spoken of you. I call him my boy bekase he's been like a son to
+me&mdash;like a son. Is Linnevitch in? Never mind, I know the way."</p>
+
+<p>He opened, without knocking upon it, the door which led from the
+restaurant into the Linnevitches' parlor. Evidently a great man. And how
+beautifully and touchingly he had spoken of Barstow! Daisy returned to
+her addition. Two and three are six and seven are twelve and four are
+nineteen. Then she frowned and tried again.</p>
+
+<p>The great man was a long time closeted with Linnevitch. She could hear
+their voices, now loud and angry, now subdued. But she could not gather
+what they were talking about.</p>
+
+<p>At length the two emerged from the parlor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>&mdash;Linnevitch flushed, red,
+sullen, and browbeaten; the stranger grandly at ease, an unlighted cigar
+in his mouth. He took off his hat to Daisy, bent his brows upon her with
+an admiring glance, and passed out into the sunlight.</p>
+
+<p>"Who was it?" said Daisy.</p>
+
+<p>"That," said Linnevitch, "is Cullinan, the boss&mdash;Bull Cullinan. Once he
+was a policeman, and now he is a millionaire."</p>
+
+<p>There was a curious mixture of contempt, of fear, and of adulation in
+Linnevitch's voice.</p>
+
+<p>"He is come here," he said, "to tell me about that young feller."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" exclaimed Daisy. "Mr. Barstow?"</p>
+
+<p>Linnevitch did not meet her eye. "I am wrong," he said, "and that young
+feller is O. K."</p>
+
+<p>When Daisy came back from her first dancing lesson, Mr. and Mrs.
+Linnevitch were sitting up for her. Her gayety and high spirits seemed
+to move the couple, especially Linnevitch, deeply. He insisted that she
+eat some crackers and drink a glass of milk. He was wonderfully gentle,
+almost tender, in his manner; but whenever she looked at him he looked away.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>VI</h3>
+
+<p>It was as if heaven had opened before Daisy. The blood in her veins
+moved to the rhythm of dance music; her vision was being fed upon color
+and light. And, for she was still a child, she was taken great wonders
+to behold: dogs that rode upon bicycles, men who played upon fifty
+instruments, clowns that caused whole theatres to roar with laughter,
+ladies that dove from dizzy heights, bears that drank beer, Apollos that
+seemed to have been born turning wonderful somersaults. And always at
+her side was her man, her well-beloved, to explain and to protect. He
+was careful of her, careful as a man is careful who carries a glass of
+water filled to overflowing without losing a drop. And if little by
+little he explained what he called "life" to her, it was with delicacy,
+with gravity&mdash;even, as it seemed, with sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>His kisses filled her at first with a wonderful tenderness; at last with
+desire, so that her eyes narrowed and she breathed quickly. At this
+point in their relations Barstow put off his pleading, cajoling manner,
+and began, little by little, to play the master. In the matter of dress
+and deportment he issued orders now instead of suggestions; and she only
+worshipped him the more.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span></p><p>When he knew in his heart that she could refuse him nothing he proposed
+marriage. Or rather, he issued a mandate. He had led her to a seat after
+a romping dance. She was highly flushed with the exercise and the
+contact, a little in disarray, breathing fast, a wonderful look of
+exaltation and promise in her face. He was white, as always, methodic,
+and cool&mdash;the man who arranges, who makes light of difficulties, who
+gives orders; the man who has money in his pocket.</p>
+
+<p>"Kid," he whispered, "when the restaurant closes to-morrow night I am
+going to take you to see a friend of mine&mdash;an alderman."</p>
+
+<p>She smiled brightly, lips parted in expectation. She knew by experience
+that he would presently tell her why.</p>
+
+<p>"You're to quit Linnevitch for good," he said. "So have your things ready."</p>
+
+<p>Although the place was so crowded that whirling couples occasionally
+bumped into their knees or stumbled over their feet, Barstow took her
+hand with the na&iuml;ve and easy manner of those East Siders whom he
+affected to despise.</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't guess we were going to be married so soon, did you?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>She pressed his hand. Her eyes were round with wonder.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p><p>"At first," he went on, "we'll look about before we go to
+house-keeping. I've taken nice rooms for us&mdash;a parlor and bedroom suite.
+Then we can take our time looking until we find just the right
+house-keeping flat."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she said, "are you sure you want me?"</p>
+
+<p>He teased her. He said, "Oh, I don't know" and "I wouldn't wonder," and
+pursed up his lips in scorn; but at the same time he regarded her out of
+the corners of roguish eyes. "Say, kid," he said presently&mdash;and his
+gravity betokened the importance of the matter&mdash;"Cullinan's dead for it.
+He's going to be a witness, and afterward he's going to blow us to
+supper&mdash;just us two. How's that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she exclaimed, "that's fine!"</p>
+
+<p>The next morning Daisy told Mr. and Mrs. Linnevitch that she was to be
+married as soon as the restaurant closed. But they had schooled
+themselves by now to expect this event, and said very little.
+Linnevitch, however, was very quiet all day. Every now and then an
+expression little short of murderous came into his face, to be followed
+by a vacant, dazed look, and this in turn by sudden uncontrollable
+starts of horror. At these times he might have stood for "Judas
+beginning to realize what he has done."</p>
+
+<p>Barstow, carrying Daisy's parcel, went out first. He was always tactful.
+Daisy flung herself into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> Mrs. Linnevitch's arms. The undemonstrative
+woman shed tears and kissed her. Linnevitch could not speak. And when
+Daisy had gone at last, the couple stood and looked at the floor between
+them. So I have seen a father and mother stand and look into the coffin
+of their only child.</p>
+
+<p>If the reader's suspicions have been aroused, let me set them at rest.
+The marriage was genuine. It was performed in good faith by a genuine
+alderman. The groom and the great Mr. Cullinan even went so far as to
+disport genuine and generous white boutonni&egrave;res. Daisy cried a little;
+the words that she had to say seemed so wonderful to her, a new
+revelation, as it were, of the kingdom and glory of love. But when she
+was promising to cleave to Barstow in sickness and peril till death
+parted them, her heart beat with a great, valiant fierceness. So the
+heart of the female tiger beats in tenderness for her young.</p>
+
+<p>Barstow was excited and nervous, as became a groom. Even the great Mr.
+Cullinan shook a little under the paternal jocoseness with which he came
+forward to kiss the bride.</p>
+
+<p>There was a supper waiting in the parlor of the rooms which Barstow had
+hired: cold meats, salad, fruit, and a bottle of champagne. While the
+gentlemen divested themselves of their hats and overcoats, Daisy carried
+her parcel into the bedroom and opened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> it on the bureau. Then she took
+off her hat and tidied her hair. She hardly recognized the face that
+looked out of the mirror. She had never, before that moment, realized
+that she was beautiful, that she had something to give to the man she
+loved that was worth giving. Her eyes fell upon her old doll, the
+companion of so many years. She laughed a happy little laugh. She had
+grown up. The doll was only a doll now. But she kissed it, because she
+loved it still. And she put it carefully away in a drawer, lest the
+sight of a childishness offend the lord and master.</p>
+
+<p>As she passed the great double bed, with its two snow-white pillows, her
+knees weakened. It was like a hint to perform a neglected duty. She
+knelt, and prayed God to let her make Barstow happy forever and ever.
+Then, beautiful and abashed, she joined the gentlemen.</p>
+
+<p>As she seated herself with dignity, as became a good housewife presiding
+at her own table, the two gentlemen lifted their glasses of champagne.
+There was a full glass beside Daisy's plate. Her fingers closed lightly
+about the stem; but she looked to Barstow for orders. "Ought I?" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"Sure," said he, "a little champagne&mdash;won't hurt you."</p>
+
+<p>No, Daisy; only what was in the champagne. She had her little moment of
+exhilaration, of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>self-delighting ease and vivacity&mdash;then dizziness,
+then awful nausea, and awful fear, and oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>The great Mr. Cullinan&mdash;Bull Cullinan&mdash;caught her as she was falling. He
+regarded the bridegroom with eyes in which there was no expression whatever.</p>
+
+<p>"Get out!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>And then he was alone with her, and safe, in the dark shadow of the wings.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="GROWING_UP" id="GROWING_UP"></a>GROWING UP</h2>
+
+<p>The children were all down in the salt-marsh playing at
+marriage-by-capture. It was a very good play. You ran just as fast after
+the ugly girls as the pretty ones, and you didn't have to abide by the
+result. One little girl got so excited that she fell into the river, and
+it was Andramark who pulled her out, and beat her on the back till she
+stopped choking. It may be well to remember that she was named Tassel
+Top, a figure taken from the Indian-corn ear when it is in silk.</p>
+
+<p>Andramark was the name of the boy. He was the seventh son of Squirrel
+Eyes, and all his six brothers were dead, because they had been born in
+hard times, or had fallen out of trees, or had been drowned. To grow up
+in an Indian village, especially when it is travelling, is very
+difficult. Sometimes a boy's mother has to work so hard that she runs
+plumb out of milk; and sometimes he gets playing too roughly with the
+other boys, and gets wounded, and blood-poisoning sets in; or he finds a
+dead fish and cooks it and eats it, and ptomaine poisoning sets in; or
+he catches too much cold on a full stomach, or too much malaria on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> an
+empty one. Or he tries to win glory by stealing a bear cub when its
+mother isn't looking, or a neighboring tribe drops in between days for
+an unfriendly visit, and some big painted devil knocks him over the head
+and takes his scalp home to his own little boy to play with.</p>
+
+<p>Contrariwise, if he does manage to grow up and reach man's estate he's
+got something to brag of. Only he doesn't do it; because the first thing
+that people learn who have to live very intimately together is that bore
+and boaster are synonymous terms. So he never brags of what he has
+accomplished in the way of deeds and experiences until he is married.
+And then only in the privacy of his own lodge, when that big hickory
+stick which he keeps for the purpose assures him of the beloved one's
+best ears and most flattering attention.</p>
+
+<p>Andramark's father was worse than dead. He had been tried in the
+council-lodge by the elders, and had been found guilty of something
+which need not be gone into here, and driven forth into the wilderness
+which surrounded the summer village to shift for himself. By the same
+judgment the culprit's wife, Squirrel Eyes, was pronounced a widow. Most
+women in her position would have been ambitious to marry again, but
+Squirrel Eyes's only ambition was to raise her seventh son to be the
+pride and support of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> her old age. She had had quite enough of marriage,
+she would have thanked you.</p>
+
+<p>So, when Andramark was thirteen years old, and very swift and husky for
+his age, Squirrel Eyes went to the Wisest Medicine-man, and begged him
+to take her boy in hand and make a man of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Woman," the Wisest Medicine-man had said, "fifteen is the very greenest
+age at which boys are made men, but seeing that you are a widow, and
+without support, it may be that something can be done. We will look into the matter."</p>
+
+<p>That was why Owl Eyes, the Wisest Medicine-man, invited two of his
+cronies to sit with him on the bluff overlooking the salt-marsh and
+watch the children playing at marriage-by-capture.</p>
+
+<p>Those old men were among the best judges of sports and form living. They
+could remember three generations of hunters and fighters. They had all
+the records for jumping, swimming under water, spear-throwing,
+axe-throwing, and bow-shooting at their tongues' ends. And they knew the
+pedigree for many, many generations of every child at that moment
+playing in the meadow, and into just what sort of man or woman that
+child should grow, with good luck and proper training.</p>
+
+<p>Owl Eyes did not call his two cronies' attention to Andramark. If there
+was any precocity in the lad it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> would show of itself, and nothing would
+escape their black, jewel-like, inscrutable eyes. When Tassel Top fell
+into the river the aged pair laughed heartily, and when Andramark,
+without changing his stride, followed her in and fished her out, one of
+them said, "That's a quick boy," and the other said, "Why hasn't that
+girl been taught to swim?" Owl Eyes said, "That's a big boy for only
+thirteen&mdash;that Andramark."</p>
+
+<p>In the next event Andramark from scratch ran through a field&mdash;some of
+the boys were older and taller than himself&mdash;and captured yet another
+wife, who, because she expected and longed to be caught by some other
+boy, promptly boxed&mdash;the air where his ears had been. Andramark,
+smiling, caught both her hands in one of his, tripped her over a neatly
+placed foot, threw her, face down, and seated himself quietly on the
+small of her back and rubbed her nose in the mud.</p>
+
+<p>The other children, laughing and shouting, rushed to the rescue.
+Simultaneously Andramark, also laughing, was on his feet, running and
+dodging. Twice he passed through the whole mob of his pursuers without,
+so it seemed to the aged watchers on the bluff, being touched. Then,
+having won some ten yards clear of them, he wheeled about and stood with
+folded arms. A great lad foremost in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>pursuit reached for him, was
+caught instead by the outstretched hand and jerked forward on his face.
+Some of the children laughed so hard that they had to stop running.
+Others redoubled their efforts to close with the once more darting,
+dodging, and squirming Andramark, who, however, threading through them
+for the third and last time in the most mocking and insulting manner,
+headed straight for the bluff a little to the right of where his elders
+and betters were seated with their legs hanging over, leaped at a
+dangling wild grape-vine, squirmed to the top, turned, and prepared to
+defend his position against any one insolent enough to assail it.</p>
+
+<p>The children, crowded at the base of the little bluff, looked up.
+Andramark looked down. With one hand and the tip of his nose he made the
+insulting gesture which is older than antiquity.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Owl Eyes had left his front-row seat, and not even a waving
+of the grasses showed that he was crawling upon Andramark from behind.</p>
+
+<p>Owl Eyes's idea was to push the boy over the bluff as a lesson to him
+never to concentrate himself too much on one thing at a time. But just
+at the crucial moment Andramark leaped to one side, and it was a
+completely flabbergasted old gentleman who descended through the air in
+his stead upon a scattering flock of children. Owl Eyes, still agile at
+eighty,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> gathered himself into a ball, jerked violently with his head
+and arms, and managed to land on his feet. But he was very much shaken,
+and nobody laughed. He turned and looked up at Andramark, and Andramark looked down.</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't help it," said Andramark. "I knew you were there all the time."</p>
+
+<p>Owl Eyes's two cronies grinned behind their hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Come down," said Owl Eyes sternly.</p>
+
+<p>Andramark leaped and landed lightly, and stood with folded arms and
+looked straight into the eyes of the Wisest Medicine-man. Everybody made
+sure that there was going to be one heap big beating, and there were not
+wanting those who would have volunteered to fetch a stick, even from a
+great distance. But Owl Eyes was not called the Wisest Medicine-man for
+nothing. His first thought had been, "I will beat the life out of this
+boy." But then (it was a strict rule that he always followed) he recited
+to himself the first three stanzas of the Rain-Maker's song, and had a
+new and wiser thought. This he spoke aloud.</p>
+
+<p>"Boy," he said, "beginning to-morrow I myself shall take you in hand and
+make a man of you. You will be at the medicine-lodge at noon. Meanwhile
+go to your mother's lodge and tell her from me to give you a sound beating."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p><p>The children marvelled, the boys envied, and Andramark, his head very
+high, his heart thumping, passed among them and went home to his mother
+and repeated what the Wisest Medicine-man had said.</p>
+
+<p>"And you are to give me a sound beating, mother," said Andramark,
+"because after to-day they will begin making a man of me, and when I am
+a man it will be the other way around, and I shall have to beat you."</p>
+
+<p>His back was bare, and he bent forward so that his mother could beat
+him. And she took down from the lodge-pole a heavy whip of raw buckskin.
+It was not so heavy as her heart.</p>
+
+<p>Then she raised the whip and said:</p>
+
+<p>"A blow for the carrying," and she struck; "a blow for the bearing," and
+she struck; "a blow for the milking," and she struck; "a blow for lies
+spoken," and she did <i>not</i> strike; "a blow for food stolen," and she did
+<i>not</i> strike.</p>
+
+<p>And she went through the whole litany of the beating ceremonial and
+struck such blows as the law demanded, and spared those she honestly
+could spare, and when in doubt she quibbled&mdash;struck, but struck lightly.</p>
+
+<p>When the beating was over they sat down facing each other and talked.
+And Squirrel Eyes said: "What must be, must. The next few days will soon be over."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p><p>And Andramark shuddered (he was alone with his mother) and said, "If I
+show that they hurt me they will never let me be a man."</p>
+
+<p>And Squirrel Eyes did her best to comfort him and put courage in his
+heart, just as modern mothers do for sons who are about to have a tooth
+pulled or a tonsil taken out.</p>
+
+<p>The next day at noon sharp Andramark stood before the entrance of the
+medicine-lodge with his arms folded; and all his boy and girl friends
+watched him from a distance. And all the boys envied him, and all the
+girls wished that they were boys. Andramark stood very still, almost
+without swaying, for the better part of an hour. His body was nicely
+greased, and he resembled a wet terra-cotta statue. A few mosquitoes
+were fattening themselves on him, and a bite in the small of his back
+itched so that he wanted very much to squirm and wriggle. But that would
+have been almost as bad an offence against ceremonial as complaining of
+hunger during the fast or shedding tears under the torture.</p>
+
+<p>Andramark had never seen the inside of the medicine-lodge; but it was
+well known to be very dark, and to contain skulls and thigh-bones of
+famous enemies, and devil-masks, and horns and rattles and other
+disturbing and ghostly properties. Of what would happen to him when he
+had passed between the flaps of the lodge and was alone with the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>medicine-men he did not know. But he reasoned that if they really
+wanted to make a man of him they would not really try to kill him or
+maim him. And he was strong in the determination, no matter what should
+happen, to show neither surprise, fear, nor pain.</p>
+
+<p>A quiet voice spoke suddenly, just within the flaps of the lodge:</p>
+
+<p>"Who is standing without?"</p>
+
+<p>"The boy Andramark."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you wish of us?"</p>
+
+<p>"To be made a man."</p>
+
+<p>"Then say farewell to your companions of childhood."</p>
+
+<p>Andramark turned toward the boys and girls who were watching him. Their
+faces swam a little before his eyes, and he felt a big lump coming
+slowly up in his throat. He raised his right arm to its full length,
+palm forward, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Farewell, O children; I shall never play with you any more."</p>
+
+<p>Then the children set up a great howl of lamentation, which was all part
+of the ceremonial, and Andramark turned and found that the flaps of the
+lodge had been drawn aside, and that within there was thick darkness and
+the sound of men breathing.</p>
+
+<p>"Come in, Andramark."</p>
+
+<p>The flaps of the lodge fell together behind him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> Fingers touched his
+shoulder and guided him in the dark, and then a voice told him to sit
+down. His quick eyes, already accustomed to the darkness, recognized one
+after another the eleven medicine-men of his tribe. They were seated
+cross-legged in a semicircle, and one of them was thumbing tobacco into
+the bowl of a poppy-red pipe. Some of the medicine-men had rattles handy
+in their laps, others devil-horns. They were all smiling and looking
+kindly at the little boy who sat all alone by himself facing them. Then
+old Owl Eyes, who was the central medicine-man of the eleven, spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"In this lodge," he said, "no harm will befall you. But lest the women
+and children grow to think lightly of manhood there will be from time to
+time much din and devil-noises."</p>
+
+<p>At that the eleven medicine-men began to rock their bodies and groan
+like lost souls (they groaned louder and louder, with a kind of awful
+rhythm), and to shake the devil-rattles, which were dried gourds,
+brightly painted, and containing teeth of famous enemies, and one of the
+medicine-men tossed a devil-horn to Andramark, and the boy put it to his
+lips and blew for all he was worth. It was quite obvious that the
+medicine-men were just having fun, not with him, but with all the women
+and children of the village who were outside listening&mdash;at a safe
+distance, of course&mdash;and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>imagining that the medicine-lodge was at that
+moment a scene of the most awful visitations and terrors. And all that
+afternoon, at intervals, the ghastly uproar was repeated, until
+Andramark's lips were chapped with blowing the devil-horn and his
+insides felt very shaky. But between times the business of the
+medicine-men with Andramark was very serious, and they talked to him
+like so many fathers, and he listened with both ears and pulled at the
+poppy-red medicine-pipe whenever it was passed to him.</p>
+
+<p>They lectured him upon anatomy and hygiene; upon tribal laws and
+intertribal laws; and always they explained "why" as well as they could,
+and if they didn't know "why" they said it must be right because it's
+always been done that way. Sometimes they said things that made him feel
+very self-conscious and uncomfortable. And sometimes they became so
+interesting that it was the other way round.</p>
+
+<p>"The gulf," said Owl Eyes, "between the race of men and the races of
+women and children is knowledge. For, whereas many squaws and little
+children possess courage, knowledge is kept from them, even as the
+first-run shad of the spring. The duty of the child is to acquire
+strength and skill, of the woman to bear children, to labor in the
+corn-field, and to keep the lodge. But the duty of man is to hunt, and
+to fight, and to make medicine, to know, and to keep <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>knowledge to
+himself. Hence the saying that whatever man betrays the secrets of the
+council-lodge to a squaw is a squaw himself. Hitherto, Andramark, you
+have been a talkative child, but henceforth you will watch your tongue
+as a warrior watches the prisoner that he is bringing to his village for
+torture. When a man ceases to be a mystery to the women and children he
+ceases to be a man. Do not tell them what has passed in the
+medicine-lodge, but let it appear that you could discourse of ghostly
+mysteries and devilish visitations and other dread wonders&mdash;if you
+would; so that even to the mother that bore you you will be henceforward
+and forever a thing apart, a thing above, a thing beyond."</p>
+
+<p>And the old medicine-man who sat on Owl Eyes's left cleared his throat and said:</p>
+
+<p>"When a man's wife is in torment, it is as well for him to nod his head
+and let her believe that she does not know what suffering is."</p>
+
+<p>Another said:</p>
+
+<p>"Should a man's child ask what the moon is made of, let that man answer
+that it is made of foolish questions, but at the same time let him
+smile, as much as to say that he could give the truthful answer&mdash;if he would."</p>
+
+<p>Another said:</p>
+
+<p>"When you lie to women and children, lie foolishly,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> so that they may
+know that you are making sport of them and may be ashamed. In this way a
+man may keep the whole of his knowledge to himself, like a basket of
+corn hidden in a place of his own secret choosing."</p>
+
+<p>Still another pulled one flap of the lodge a little so that a ray of
+light entered. He held his hand in the ray and said:</p>
+
+<p>"The palm of my hand is in darkness, the back is in light. It is the
+same with all acts and happenings&mdash;there is a bright side and a dark
+side. Never be so foolish as to look on the dark side of things; there
+may be somewhat there worth discovering, but it is in vain to look
+because it cannot be seen."</p>
+
+<p>And Owl Eyes said:</p>
+
+<p>"It will be well now to rest ourselves from seriousness with more din
+and devil-noises. And after that we shall lead the man-boy Andramark to
+the Lodge of Nettles, there to sit alone for a space and to turn over in
+his mind all that we have said to him."</p>
+
+<p>"One thing more." This from a very little medicine-man who had done very
+little talking. "When you run the gauntlet of the women and children
+from the Hot Lodge to the river, watch neither their eyes nor their
+whips; watch only their feet, lest you be tripped and thrown at the very threshold of manhood."</p>
+
+<p>Nettles, thistles, and last year's burdocks and <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>sandspurs strewed the
+floor of the lodge to which Andramark was now taken. And he was told
+that he must not thrust these to one side and make himself comfortable
+upon the bare ground. He might sit, or stand, or lie down; he might walk
+about; but he mustn't think of going to sleep, or, indeed, of anything
+but the knowledge and mysteries which had been revealed to him in the medicine-lodge.</p>
+
+<p>All that night, all the next day, and all the next night he meditated.
+For the first six hours he meditated on knowledge, mystery, and the
+whole duty of man, just as he had been told to do. And he only stopped
+once to listen to a flute-player who had stolen into the forest back of
+the lodge and was trying to tell some young squaw how much he loved her
+and how lonely he was without her. The flute had only four notes and one
+of them was out of order; but Andramark had been brought up on that sort
+of music and it sounded very beautiful to him. Still, he only listened
+with one ear, Indian fashion. The other was busy taking in all the other
+noises of the night and the village. Somebody passed by the Lodge of
+Nettles, walking very slowly and softly. "A man," thought Andramark,
+"would not make any noise at all. A child would be in bed."</p>
+
+<p>The slow, soft steps were nearing the forest back of the lodge,
+quickening a little. Contrariwise, the flute was being played more and
+more slowly. Each of its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> three good notes was a stab at the feelings,
+and so, for that matter, was the note that had gone wrong. An owl
+hooted. Andramark smiled. If he had been born enough hundreds of years
+later he might have said, "You can't fool me!"</p>
+
+<p>The flute-playing stopped abruptly. Andramark forgot all about the
+nettles and sat down. Then he stood up.</p>
+
+<p>He meditated on war and women, just as he had been told to do. Then,
+because he was thirsty, he meditated upon suffering. And he finished the
+night meditating&mdash;upon an empty stomach.</p>
+
+<p>Light filtered under the skirts of the lodge. He heard the early women
+going to their work in the fields. The young leaves were on the oaks,
+and it was corn-planting time. Even very old corn, however, tastes very
+good prepared in any number of different ways. Andramark agreed with
+himself that when he gave himself in marriage it would be to a woman who
+was a thoroughly good cook. But quite raw food is acceptable at times.
+It is pleasant to crack quail eggs between the teeth, or to rip the roe
+out of a fresh-caught shad with your forefinger and just let it melt in your mouth.</p>
+
+<p>The light brightened. It was a fine day. It grew warm in the lodge, hot,
+intolerably hot. The skins of which it was made exhaled a smoky, meaty
+smell. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>Andramark was tempted to see if he couldn't suck a little
+nourishment out of them. A shadow lapped the skirts of the lodge and
+crawled upward. It became cool, cold. The boy, almost naked, began to
+shiver and shake. He swung his arms as cab-drivers do, and tried very
+hard to meditate upon the art of being a man.</p>
+
+<p>During the second night one of his former companions crept up to the
+lodge and spoke to him under its skirts. "Sst! Heh! What does it feel
+like to be a man?"&mdash;chuckled and withdrew.</p>
+
+<p>Andramark said to himself the Indian for "I'll lay for that boy." He was
+very angry. He had been gratuitously insulted in the midst of his new dignities.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the flaps of the lodge were opened and some one leaned in and
+set something upon the floor. Andramark did not move. His nostrils
+dilated, and he said to himself, "Venison&mdash;broiled to the second."</p>
+
+<p>In the morning he saw that there was not only venison, but a bowl of
+water, and a soft bearskin upon which he might stretch himself and
+sleep. His lips curled with a great scorn. And he remained standing and
+aloof from the temptations. And meditated upon the privileges of being a man.</p>
+
+<p>About noon he began to have visitors. At first they were vague, dark
+spots that hopped and ziddied in the overheated air. But these became,
+with careful looking, all sorts of devils and evil spirits, and beasts
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> like of which were not in the experience of any living man. There
+were creatures made like men, only that they were covered with long,
+silky hair and had cry-baby faces and long tails. And there was a vague,
+yellowish beast, very terrible, something like a huge cat, only that it
+had curling tusks like a very big wild pig. And there were other things
+that looked like men, only that they were quite white, as if they had
+been most awfully frightened. And suddenly Andramark imagined that he
+was hanging to a tree, but not by his hands or his feet, and the limb to
+which he was hanging broke, and, after falling for two or three days, he
+landed on his feet among burs and nettles that were spread over the floor of a lodge.</p>
+
+<p>The child had slept standing up, and had evolved from his
+subconsciousness, as children will, beasts and conditions that had
+existed when the whole human race was a frightened cry-baby in its
+cradle. He had never heard of a monkey or a sabre-tooth tiger; but he
+had managed to see a sort of vision of them both, and had dreamed that
+he was a monkey hanging by his tail.</p>
+
+<p>He was very faint and sick when the medicine-men came for him. But it
+did not show in his face, and he walked firmly among them to the great
+Torture Lodge, his head very high and the ghost of a smile hovering about his mouth.</p>
+
+<p>It was a grim business that waited him in the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>Torture Lodge. He was
+strung up by his thumbs to a peg high up the great lodge pole, and drawn
+taut by thongs from his big toes to another peg in the base of the pole,
+and then, without any unnecessary delays, for every step in the
+proceeding was according to a ceremonial that was almost as old as
+suffering, they gave him, what with blunt flint-knives and lighted
+slivers of pitch-pine, a very good working idea of hell. They told him,
+without words, which are the very tenderest and most nervous places in
+all the human anatomy, and showed him how simple it is to give a little
+boy all the sensations of major operations without actually removing his
+arms and legs. And they talked to him. They told him that because he
+came of a somewhat timorous family they were letting him off very
+easily; that they weren't really hurting him, because it was evident
+from the look of him that at the first hint of real pain he would scream
+and cry. And then suddenly, just when the child was passing through the
+ultimate border-land of endurance, they cut him down, and praised him,
+and said that he had behaved splendidly, and had taken to torture as a
+young duck takes to water. And poor little Andramark found that under
+the circumstances kindness was the very hardest thing of all to bear.
+One after another great lumps rushed up his throat, and he began to
+tremble and totter and struggle with the corners of his mouth.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p><p>Old Owl Eyes, who had tortured plenty of brave boys in his day, was
+ready for this phase. He caught up a great bowl of ice-cold spring-water
+and emptied it with all his strength against Andramark's bloody back.
+The shock of that sudden icy blow brought the boy's runaway nerves back
+into hand. He shook himself, drew a long breath, and, without a quiver anywhere, smiled.</p>
+
+<p>And the old men were as glad as he was that the very necessary trial by
+torture was at an end. And, blowing triumphantly upon devil-horns and
+shaking devil-rattles, they carried him the whole length of the village
+to the base of the hill where the Hot Lodge was.</p>
+
+<p>This was a little cave, in the mouth of which was a spring, said to be
+very full of Big Medicine. The entrance to the cave was closed by a
+heavy arras of bearskins, three or four thick, and the ground in front
+was thickly strewn with round and flat stones cracked and blackened by
+fire. From the cave to the fifteen-foot bluff overhanging a deep pool of
+the river the ground was level, and worn in a smooth band eight or ten
+feet wide as by the trampling of many feet.</p>
+
+<p>Andramark, stark naked and still bleeding in many places, sat
+cross-legged in the cave, at the very rim of the medicine-spring. His
+head hung forward on his chest. All his muscles were soft and relaxed.
+After a while the hangings of the cave entrance were drawn a little to
+one side and a stone plumped into the spring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> with a savage hiss;
+another followed&mdash;another&mdash;and another and another. Steam began to rise
+from the surface of the spring, little bubbles darted up from the bottom
+and burst. More hot stones were thrown into the water. Steam, soft and
+caressing, filled the cave. The temperature rose by leaps and bounds.
+The roots of Andramark's hair began to tickle&mdash;the tickling became
+unendurable, and ceased suddenly as the sweat burst from every pore of
+his body. His eyes closed; in his heart it was as if love-music were
+being played upon a flute. He was no longer conscious of hunger or
+thirst. He yielded, body and soul, to the sensuous miracle of the steam, and slept.</p>
+
+<p>He was awakened by many shrill voices that laughed and dared him to come out.</p>
+
+<p>"It's only one big beating," he said, rose, stepped over the spring,
+pushed through the bearskins, and stood gleaming and steaming in the fading light.</p>
+
+<p>The gantlet that he was to run extended from the cave to the bluff
+overhanging the river. He looked the length of the double row of
+grinning women and children&mdash;the active agents in what was to come. Back
+of the women and children were warriors and old men, their faces relaxed
+into holiday expressions. Toward the river end of the gauntlet were
+stationed the youngest, the most vigorous, the most fun-loving of the
+women, and the larger boys, with only a negligible sprinkling of really
+little children. Every woman and child in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> the two rows was armed with a
+savage-looking whip of willow, hickory, or even green brier, and the
+still more savage intention of using these whips to the utmost extent of
+their speed and accuracy in striking.</p>
+
+<p>Upon a signal Andramark darted forward and was lost in a whistling
+smother. It was as if an untrimmed hedge had suddenly gone mad.
+Andramark made the best of a bad business, guarded his face and the top
+of his head with his arms, ran swiftly, but not too swiftly, and kept
+his eyes out for feet that were thrust forward to trip him.</p>
+
+<p>A dozen feet ahead he saw a pair of little moccasins that were familiar
+to him. As he passed them he looked into their owner's face, and
+wondered why, of all the little girls in the village, Tassel Top alone
+did not use her whip on him.</p>
+
+<p>At last, half blinded, lurching as he ran, he came to the edge of the
+bluff, and dived, almost without a splash, into the deep, fresh water.
+The cold of it stung his overheated, bleeding body like a swarm of wild
+bees, and it is possible that when he reached the Canoe Beach the water
+in his eyes was not all fresh. Here, however, smiling chiefs and
+warriors surrounded the stoic, and welcomed him to their number with
+kind words and grunts of approval. And then, because he that had been
+but a moment before a naked child was now a naked man, and no fit
+spectacle for women and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> children, they formed a bright-colored moving
+screen about him and conducted him to the great council-lodge. There
+they eased his wounds with pleasant greases, and dressed him in softest
+buckskin, and gave him just as much food as it was safe for him to
+eat&mdash;a couple of quail eggs and a little dish of corn and freshwater mussels baked.</p>
+
+<p>And after that they sent him home armed with a big stick. And there was
+his mother, squatting on the floor of their lodge, with her back bared
+in readiness for a good beating. But Andramark closed the lodge-flaps,
+and dropped his big stick, and began to blubber and sob. And his mother
+leaped up and caught him in her arms; and then&mdash;once a mother, always
+tactful&mdash;she began to howl and yell, just as if she were actually
+receiving the ceremonial beating which was her due. And the neighbors
+pricked up their ears and chuckled, and said the Indian for "Squirrel
+Eyes is getting what was coming to her."</p>
+
+<p>Maybe Andramark didn't sleep that night, and maybe he did. And all the
+dreams that he dreamed were pleasant, and he got the best of everybody
+in them, and he woke next morning to a pleasant smell of broiling shad,
+and lay on his back blinking and yawning, and wondering why of all the
+little girls in the village Tassel Top alone had not used her whip on him.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="THE_BATTLE_OF_AIKEN" id="THE_BATTLE_OF_AIKEN"></a>THE BATTLE OF AIKEN</h2>
+
+<p>At the Palmetto Golf Club one bright, warm day in January they held a
+tournament which came to be known as the Battle of Aiken. Colonel Bogey,
+however, was not in command.</p>
+
+<p>Each contestant's caddie was provided with a stick cleft at one end and
+pointed at the other. In the cleft was stuck a square of white
+card-board on which was printed the contestant's name, Colonel Bogey's
+record for the course, the contestant's handicap, and the sum of these
+two. Thus:</p>
+
+<p class="center">A. B. Smith<br />78 + 9 = 87</p>
+
+<p>And the winner was to be he who travelled farthest around the links in
+the number of strokes allotted to him.</p>
+
+<p>Old Major Jennings did not understand, and Jimmy Traquair, the
+professional, explained.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know what the bogey for the course is?" said he. "It's
+seventy-eight. Do you know what your handicap is? It's twenty."</p>
+
+<p>Old Major Jennings winced slightly. His handicap had never seemed quite
+adequate to him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p><p>"Well?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Jimmie, who ever tempered his speech to his hearer's
+understanding, "what's twenty added to seventy-eight?"</p>
+
+<p>"Eighty-eight&mdash;ninety-eight," said old Major Jennings (but not conceitedly).</p>
+
+<p>"Right," said Jimmie. "Well, you start at the first tee and play
+ninety-eight strokes. Where the ball lies after the ninety-eighth, you
+plant the card with your name on it. And that's all."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose after my ninety-eighth stroke that my ball lies in the pond?"
+said old Major Jennings with a certain timid conviction. The pond hole
+is only the twelfth, and Jimmie wanted to laugh, but did not.</p>
+
+<p>"If that happens," he said, "you'll have to report it, I'm afraid, to
+the Green Committee. Who are you going around with?"</p>
+
+<p>"I haven't got anybody to go around with," said the major. "I didn't
+know there was going to be a tournament till it was too late to ask any
+one to play with me."</p>
+
+<p>This conversation took place in the new shop, a place all windows,
+sunshine, labels, varnishes, vises, files, grips, and clubs of exquisite
+workmanship. At one of the benches a grave-eyed young negro, aproned and
+concentrated, was enamelling the head of a driver with shellac. Sudden
+cannon fire would not have shaken his hand. In one corner a rosy lad
+with curly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> yellow hair dangled his legs from the height of a
+packing-case and chewed gum. He had been born with a golden spoon in his
+mouth, and was learning golf from the inside. Sometimes he winked with
+one eye. But these silent comments were hidden from the major.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care about the tournament," said the latter, his loose lip
+trembling slightly. "I'll just practice a little."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't be in a hurry, sir," said Jimmie sympathetically; "General
+Bullwigg hasn't any one to go around with either. And if you don't mind&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Bullwigg," said the major vaguely; "I used to know a Bullwigg."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a very fine gentleman indeed, sir," said Jimmie. "Same handicap as
+yourself, sir, and if you don't mind&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Where is he from?" asked the major.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, sir. Mr. Bowers extended the privileges of the club to
+him. He's stopping at the Park in the Pines."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said the major, and then with a certain dignity and resolution:
+"If Mr. Bowers knows him, and if <i>he</i> doesn't mind, I'm sure I don't. Is he here?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's waiting at the first tee," said Jimmie, and he averted his face.</p>
+
+<p>At the first tee old Major Jennings found a portly, red-faced gentleman,
+with fierce, bushy eyebrows, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> seemed prepared to play golf under any
+condition of circumstance and weather. He had two caddies. One carried a
+monstrous bag, which, in addition to twice the usual number of clubs,
+contained a crook-handled walking-stick and a crook-handled umbrella;
+the other carried over his right arm a greatcoat, in case the June-like
+weather should turn cold, and over his left a mackintosh, in case rain
+should fall from the cloudless, azure heavens. The gentleman himself was
+swinging a wooden club, with pudgy vehemence, at an imaginary ball. Upon
+his countenance was that expression of fortitude which wins battles and
+championships. Old Major Jennings approached timidly. He was very shy.
+In the distance he saw two of his intimate friends finishing out the
+first hole. Except for himself and the well-prepared stranger they had
+been the last pair to start, and the old major's pale blue eyes clung to
+them as those of a shipwrecked mariner may cling to ships upon the
+horizon. Then he pulled himself together and said:</p>
+
+<p>"General Bullwigg, I presume."</p>
+
+<p>"The very man," said the general, and the two gentlemen lifted their
+plaid golfing caps and bowed to each other. Owing to extreme diffidence,
+Major Jennings did not volunteer his own name; owing to the fact that he
+seldom thought of anything but himself, General Bullwigg did not ask it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span></p><p>Major Jennings was impatient to be off, but it was General Bullwigg's
+honor, and he could not compel that gentleman to drive until he was
+quite ready. General Bullwigg apostrophized the weather and the links.
+He spoke at some length of "<i>My</i> game," "<i>My</i> swing," "<i>My</i> wrist
+motion," "<i>My</i> notion of getting out of a bunker." He told an anecdote
+which reminded him of another. He touched briefly upon the manufacture
+of balls, the principle of imparting pure back-spin; the best seed for
+Northern greens, the best sand for Southern. And then, by way of adding
+insult to injury, he stepped up to his ball and, with due consideration
+for his age and stomach, drove it far and straight.</p>
+
+<p>"Fine shot, sir," was Major Jennings's comment.</p>
+
+<p>"I've seen better, sir," said General Bullwigg. "But I won't take it over."</p>
+
+<p>Major Jennings teed up his ball, and addressed it, and waggled, and
+shifted his feet, and had just received that sudden inner knowledge that
+the time was come to strike, when General Bullwigg interrupted him.</p>
+
+<p>"My first visit to Aiken," said he, "was in the 60's. But that was no
+visit of pleasure. No, sir. Along the brow of this hill upon which we
+are standing was an earthwork. In the pines yonder, back of the first
+green, was a battery. In those days we did not fight<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> it out with the
+pacific putter, but with bullets and bayonets."</p>
+
+<p>"Were you in the battle of Aiken?" asked the major, so quietly as to
+make the question sound purely perfunctory.</p>
+
+<p>General Bullwigg laughed, as strong men laugh, from the stomach, and
+with a sweeping gesture of his left hand appeared to dismiss a hundred flatterers.</p>
+
+<p>"I have heard men say," said he, "that I <i>was</i> the battle of Aiken."</p>
+
+<p>With an involuntary shudder Major Jennings hastily addressed his ball,
+swung jerkily, and topped it feebly down the hill. Then, smiling a
+sickly smile, he said:</p>
+
+<p>"We're off."</p>
+
+<p>"Get a good one?" asked General Bullwigg. "I wasn't looking."</p>
+
+<p>"Not a very good one," said Major Jennings, inwardly writhing, "but
+straight&mdash;perfectly straight. A little on top."</p>
+
+<p>They sagged down the hill, the major in a pained silence, the general
+describing, with sweeping gestures, the positions of the various troops
+among the surrounding hills at the beginning of the battle of Aiken.</p>
+
+<p>"In those days," he went on, "I was second lieutenant in the gallant
+Twenty-ninth; but it often happens<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> that a young man has an old head on
+his shoulders, and as one after the other of my superior
+officers&mdash;superior in rank&mdash;bit the dust&mdash;&mdash; That ball is badly cupped.
+You will hardly get it away with a brassy; if I were you I should play
+my niblick. Well out, sir! A fine recovery! On this very spot I saw a
+bomb burst. The air was filled with arms and legs. It seemed as if they
+would never come down. I shall play my brassy spoon, Purnell, the one
+with the yellow head. I see you don't carry a spoon. Most invaluable
+club. There are days when I can do anything with a spoon. I used to own
+one of which I often said that it could do anything but talk."</p>
+
+<p>Major Jennings shuddered as if he were very cold; while General Bullwigg
+swung his spoon and made another fine shot. He had a perfect four for
+the first hole, to Major Jennings's imperfect and doddering seven.</p>
+
+<p>"The enemy," said General Bullwigg, "had a breastwork of pine logs all
+along this line. I remember the general said to me: 'Bullwigg,' he said,
+'to get them out of that timber is like getting rats out of the walls of
+a house.' And I said: 'General&mdash;&mdash;'"</p>
+
+<p>"It's your honor," the major interrupted mildly.</p>
+
+<p>But General Bullwigg would not drive until he had brought his anecdote
+to a self-laudatory end. And his ball was not half through its course
+before he had begun another. The major, compelled to listen,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> again
+foozled, and a dull red began to mantle his whole face. And in his
+peaceful and affable heart there waxed a sullen, feverish rage against his companion.</p>
+
+<p>The battle of Aiken was on.</p>
+
+<p>Sing, O chaste and reluctant Muse, the battle of Aiken! Only don't sing
+it! State it, as is the fashion of our glorious times, in humble and
+perishable prose. Fling grammar of which nothing is now known to the
+demnition bow-wows, and state how in the beginning General Bullwigg had
+an advantage of many strokes, not wasted, over his self-effacing
+companion. State how, because of the general's incessant chatter, the
+gentle and gallant major foozled shot after shot; how once his ball hid
+in a jasmine bower, once behind the stem of a tree, and once in a sort
+of cavern over which the broom straw waved. But omit not, O truthful and
+ecstatic one, to mention that dull rage which grew from small beginnings
+in the major's breast until it became furious and all-consuming, like a
+prairie fire. At this stage your narrative becomes heroic, and it might
+be in order for you, O capable and delectable one, to switch from humble
+stating to loud singing. Only don't do it. State on. State how the rage
+into which he had fallen served to lend precision to the major's eye,
+steel to his wrist, rhythm to his tempo, and fiery ambition to his
+gentle and retiring soul. He is filled with memories of daring: of other
+battles in other days. He remembers what times he sought the bubble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+reputation in the cannon's mouth, and spiked the aforementioned cannon's
+touch-hole into the bargain. And he remembers the greater war that he
+fought single-handed for a number of years against the demon rum.</p>
+
+<p>State, too, exquisite Parnassian, and keep stating, how that General
+Bullwigg did incessantly talk, prattle, jabber, joke, boast, praise
+himself, stand in the wrong place, and rehearse the noble deeds that he
+himself had performed in the first battle of Aiken. And state how the
+major answered him less and less frequently, but more and more loudly
+and curtly&mdash;but I see that you are exhausted, and, thanking you kindly,
+I shall resume the narrative myself.</p>
+
+<p>They came to the pond hole, which was the twelfth; the general, still
+upon his interminable reminiscences of his own military glory, stood up
+to drive, and was visited by his first real disaster. He swung&mdash;and he
+looked up. His ball, beaten downward into the hard clay tee, leaped
+forward with a sound as of a stone breaking in two and dove swiftly into
+the centre of the pond. The major spoke never a word. For the first time
+during the long dreary round his risibles were tickled and he wanted to
+laugh. Instead he concentrated all his faculties upon his ball and made a fine drive.</p>
+
+<p>Not so the general with his second attempt. Again he found water, and
+fell into a panic at the sudden <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>losing of so many invaluable strokes
+(not to mention two brand-new balls at seventy-five cents each).</p>
+
+<p>It was at the pond hole that the major's luck began to ameliorate. For
+the first time in his life he made it in three&mdash;a long approach close to
+the green; a short mashie shot that trickled into the very cup. And it
+was at the pond hole that the general, who had hitherto played far above
+his ordinary form, began to go to pieces. He was a little dashed in
+spirit, but not in eloquence.</p>
+
+<p>Going to the long fourteenth, they found the first evidence of those who
+had gone before. In the very midst of the fair green they saw, shining
+afar, like a white tombstone, stuck in its cleft stick, the card of the
+first competitor to use up the whole of his allotted strokes. They
+paused a moment to read:</p>
+
+<p class="center">Sacred to the Memory of<br />W. H. Lands<br />78 + 6 = 84<br />Who Sliced Himself<br />to Pieces</p>
+
+<p>Forty yards beyond, another obituary confronted them:</p>
+
+<p class="center">In Loving Memory of<br />J. C. Nappin<br />78 + 10 = 88<br />
+Died of a Broken Mashie<br />And of Such is the<br />Kingdom of Heaven</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span></p><p>"Ha!" said General Bullwigg. "He little realizes that here where he has
+pinned his little joke in the lap of mother earth I have seen the dead
+men lie as thick as kindlings in a wood-yard. Sir, across this very fair
+green there were no less than three desperate charges, unremembered and
+unsung, of which I may say without boasting that Magna Pars Fui. But for
+the desperation of our last charge the battle must have been lost&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p class="center">Damn the memory of<br />E. Hewett<br />78 + 10 = 88<br />
+Couldn't Put<br /><br />Here Lies<br />G. Norris<br />
+78 + 10 = 88<br />A Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted</p>
+
+<p>The little tombstones came thick and fast now. The fairway to the
+seventeenth, most excellent of all four-shot holes, was dotted with
+them, and it actually began to look as if General Bullwigg or Major
+Jennings (they were now on even terms) might be the winner.</p>
+
+<p>It was that psychological moment when of all things a contestant most
+desires silence. Major Jennings was determined to triumph over his
+boastful companion. And he was full of courage and resolve. They had
+reached the seventeenth green in the same number of strokes from the
+first tee. That is to say, each had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> used up ninety-five of his allotted
+ninety-eight. Neither holed his approach put, and the match, so far as
+they two were concerned, resolved itself into a driving contest. If
+General Bullwigg drove the farther with his one remaining stroke he
+would beat the major, and vice versa. As for the other competitors,
+there was but one who had reached the eighteenth tee, and he, as his
+tombstone showed, had played his last stroke neither far nor well.</p>
+
+<p>For the major the suspense was terrible. He had never won a tournament.
+He had never had so golden an opportunity to down a boaster. But it was
+General Bullwigg's honor, and it occurred to him that the time was riper
+for talk than play.</p>
+
+<p>"You may think that I am nervous," he said. "But I am not. During one
+period of the battle of Aiken the firing between ourselves on this spot
+and the enemy intrenched where the club-house now stands, and spreading
+right and left in a half-moon, was fast and furious. Once they charged
+up to our guns; but we drove them back, and after that charge yonder
+fair green was one infernal shambles of dead and dying. Among the
+wounded was one of the enemy's general officers; he whipped and thrashed
+and squirmed like a newly landed fish and screamed for water. It was
+terrible; it was unendurable. Next to me in the trench was a young
+fellow named&mdash;named Jennings&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p><p>"Jennings?" said the major breathlessly. "And what did he do?"</p>
+
+<p>"He," said General Bullwigg. "Nothing. He said, however, and he was
+careful not to show his head above the top of the trench: 'I can't stand
+this,' he said; 'somebody's got to bring that poor fellow in.' As for
+me, I only needed the suggestion. I jumped out of the trench and ran
+forward, exposing myself to the fire of both armies. When, however, I
+reached the general officer, and my purpose was plain, the firing ceased
+upon both sides, and the enemy stood up and cheered me."</p>
+
+<p>General Bullwigg teed his ball and drove it far.</p>
+
+<p>Major Jennings bit his lip; it was hardly within his ability to hit so long a ball.</p>
+
+<p>"This&mdash;er&mdash;Jennings," said he, "seems to have been a coward."</p>
+
+<p>General Bullwigg shrugged his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"Have I got it straight?" asked Major Jennings. "It was you who brought
+in the general officer, and not&mdash;er&mdash;this&mdash;er&mdash;Jennings who did it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought I had made it clear," said General Bullwigg stiffly. And he
+repeated the anecdote from the beginning. Major Jennings's comment was simply this:</p>
+
+<p>"So <i>that</i> was the way of it, was it?"</p>
+
+<p>A deep crimson suffused him. He looked as if he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> were going to burst. He
+teed his ball. He trembled. He addressed. He swung back, and then with
+all the rage, indignation, and accuracy of which he was
+capable&mdash;forward. It was the longest drive he had ever made. His ball
+lay a good yard beyond the General's. He had beaten all competitors, but
+that was nothing. He had beaten his companion, and that was worth more
+to him than all the wealth of Ormuzd and of Ind. He had won the second battle of Aiken.</p>
+
+<p>In silence he took his tombstone from his caddie's hand, in silence
+wrote upon it, in silence planted it where his ball had stopped. General
+Bullwigg bent himself stiffly to see what the fortunate winner had
+written. And this was what he read:</p>
+
+<p class="center">Sacred to the Memory of<br />E. O. Jennings<br />
+78 + 20 = 98<br />Late Major in the Gallant 29th, Talked to<br />Death by a Liar</p>
+
+<p>As for the gallant major (still far from mollified), he turned his back
+upon a foe for the first time in his life and made off&mdash;almost running.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="AN_IDYL_OF_PELHAM_BAY_PARK" id="AN_IDYL_OF_PELHAM_BAY_PARK"></a>AN IDYL OF PELHAM BAY PARK</h2>
+
+<p>"It's real country out there," Fannie Davis had said. "Buttercups and
+daisies. Come on, Lila! I won't go if you won't."</p>
+
+<p>This sudden demonstration of friendship was too much for Lila. She
+forgot that she had no stylish dress for the occasion, or that her
+mother could not very well spare her for a whole day, and she promised
+to be ready at nine o'clock on the following Sunday morning.</p>
+
+<p>"Fannie Davis," she explained to her mother, "has asked me to go out to
+Pelham Bay Park with her Sunday. And finally I said I would. I feel
+sometimes as if I'd blow up if I didn't get a breath of fresh air after
+all this hot spell."</p>
+
+<p>She set her pretty mouth defiantly. She expected an argument. But he
+mother only shrugged her shoulders and said,</p>
+
+<p>"We could make your blue dress look real nice with a few trimmings."</p>
+
+<p>They discussed ways and means until long after the younger children were
+in bed and asleep.</p>
+
+<p>By Saturday night the dress was ready, and Lila had turned her week's
+wages back into the coffers of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> the department store where she worked in
+exchange for a pair of near-silk brown stockings and a pair of stylish
+oxford ties of patent leather.</p>
+
+<p>"You look like a show-girl," was Fannie's enthusiastic comment. "I
+wouldn't have believed it of you. Why, Lila, you're a regular little peach!"</p>
+
+<p>Lila became crimson with joy.</p>
+
+<p>They boarded the subway for Simpson Street. The atmosphere was hot and
+rancid. The two girls found standing-room only. Whenever the express
+curved they were thrown violently from one side of the car to the other.
+A young man who stood near them made a point on these occasions of
+laying a hand on Lila's waist to steady her. She didn't know whether it
+was proper to be angry or grateful.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't pay any attention to him," said Fannie; "he's just trying to be
+fresh, and he doesn't know how."</p>
+
+<p>She said it loud enough for the young man to hear. Lila was very much frightened.</p>
+
+<p>They left the subway at Simpson Street and boarded a jammed trolley-car
+for Westchester. Fannie paid all the fares.</p>
+
+<p>"It's my treat," she said; "I'm flush. Gee, ain't it hot! I wish we'd
+brought our bathing-suits."</p>
+
+<p>Much to Lila's relief the young man who had annoyed her was no longer
+visible. Fannie talked all the way to Westchester in so loud a voice
+that nearly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> everybody in the car could hear her. Lila was shocked and
+awed by her friend's showiness and indifference.</p>
+
+<p>From Westchester they were to walk the two hot miles to the park.
+Already Lila's new shoes had blistered her feet. But she did not mention
+this. It was her own fault. She had deliberately bought shoes that were
+half a size too small.</p>
+
+<p>In the main street of Westchester they prinked, smoothing each other's
+rumpled dresses and straightening each other's peach-basket hats.</p>
+
+<p>"Lila," said Fannie, "everybody's looking at you. I say you're <i>too</i>
+pretty. Lucky for me I've got my young man where I want him, or else
+you'd take him away from me."</p>
+
+<p>"I would not!" exclaimed Lila, "and it's you they're looking at."</p>
+
+<p>Fannie was delighted. "<i>Do</i> I look nice?" she wheedled.</p>
+
+<p>"You look sweet!"</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, Fannie looked bold and handsome. Her clothes were
+too expensive for her station in life. Her mother suspected how she came
+by them, but was so afraid of actually knowing that she never brought
+the point to an issue; only sighed in secret and tried not to see or understand.</p>
+
+<p>Now and then motors passed through the crowds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> straggling to the park,
+and in exchange for gratuitous insults from small boys and girls left
+behind them long trails of thick dust and the choking smell of burnt
+gasoline. In the sun the mercury was at one hundred and twenty degrees.</p>
+
+<p>"There's a hog for you," exclaimed Fannie. She indicated a stout man in
+shirt-sleeves. He had his coat over one arm, his collar and necktie
+protruding from the breast pocket. His wife, a meagre woman, panted at
+his side. She carried two heavy children, one of them not yet born.</p>
+
+<p>Half the people carried paper parcels or little suitcases made of straw
+in which were bathing-suits and sandwiches. It would be low tide, but
+between floating islands of swill and sewage there would be water, salt, wet, and cool.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother," said Fannie, "doesn't like me to come to these places
+alone. It's a real nice crowd uses Pelham Park, but there's always a
+sprinkling of freshies."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that why you invited me?" said Lila gayly. Inwardly she flattered
+herself to think that she had been asked for herself alone. But Fannie's
+answer had in it something of a slap in the face.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said this one, "mother forbade me to come alone. But I do want
+to get better acquainted with you. Honest."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p><p>They rested for a while sitting on a stone wall in the shade of a tree.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother," said Fannie grandly, "thinks everybody's rotten, including
+me. My God!" she went on angrily, "do me and you work six days of the
+week only to be bossed about on the seventh? I tell you I won't stand it
+much longer. I'm going to cut loose. Nothing but work, work, work, and
+scold, scold, scold."</p>
+
+<p>"If I had all the pretty things you've got," said Lila gently, "I don't
+believe I'd complain."</p>
+
+<p>Fannie blushed. "It's hard work and skimping does it," she said. "Ever
+think of marrying, kid?"</p>
+
+<p>Lila admitted that she had.</p>
+
+<p>"Got a beau?"</p>
+
+<p>Lila blushed and shook her head.</p>
+
+<p>"You have, too. Own up. What's he like?"</p>
+
+<p>Lila continued to deny and protest. But she enjoyed being teased upon
+such a subject.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you haven't," said Fannie at last, "I have. It's a dead
+secret, kid. I wouldn't tell a soul but you. He's got heaps of money,
+and he's been after me&mdash;to marry him&mdash;for nearly a year."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you like him?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm just crazy about him."</p>
+
+<p>"Then why don't you marry him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," Fannie temporized, "you never want to be in a rush about these things."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p><p>Fannie sighed, and was silent. She might have married the young man in
+question if she had played her cards better. And she knew it, now that
+it was too late, and there could not be a new deal. He had wanted her,
+even at the price of marriage. He was still fond of her. And he was very
+generous with his money. She met him whenever she could. He would be
+waiting for her now at the entrance to the park.</p>
+
+<p>"He's got a motor-boat," she explained to Lila, "that he wants to show
+me. She's a cabin launch, almost new. You won't mind?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mind? Are you going out for a sail with him, and leave me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the truth is," said Fannie, "I've just about made up my mind to
+say yes, and of course if there was a third party around he couldn't
+bring the matter up, could he? We wouldn't be out long."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mind me," said Lila. Inwardly she was terribly hurt and
+disappointed. "I'll just sit in the shade and wish you joy."</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't play it so low down on you," said Fannie, "only my whole
+future's mixed up in it. We'll be back in lots of time to eat."</p>
+
+<p>Lila walked with them to the end of the pier at the bathing-beach. The
+water was full of people and rubbish. The former seemed to be enjoying
+themselves immensely and for the most part innocently,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> though now and
+then some young girl would shriek aloud in a sort of delighted terror as
+her best young man, swimming under water, tugged suddenly at her
+bathing-skirt or pinched the calf of her leg.</p>
+
+<p>Lila watched Fannie and her young man embark in a tiny rowboat and row
+out to a clumsy cabin catboat from which the mast had been removed and
+in whose cockpit a low-power, loud-popping motor had been installed. The
+young man started the motor, and presently his clumsy craft was dragging
+herself, like a crippled duck, down Pelham Bay toward the more open
+water of Long Island Sound.</p>
+
+<p>Lila felt herself abandoned. She would have gone straight home but for
+the long walk to Westchester and the fact that she had no car fare. She
+could have cried. The heat on the end of the dock and the glare from the
+water were intolerable. She was already faint with hunger, and her shoes
+pinched her so that she could hardly walk without whimpering. It seemed
+to her that she had never seen so many people at once. And in all the
+crowds she hadn't a single friend or acquaintance. Several men, seeing
+that she was without male escort, tried to get to know her, but gave up,
+discouraged by her shy, frightened face. She was pretty, yes. But a
+doll. No sport in her. Such was their mental attitude.</p>
+
+<p>"She might have left me the sandwiches," thought Lila. "Suppose the
+motor breaks down!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span></p><p>Which was just what it was going to do&mdash;'way out there in the sound. It
+always did sooner or later when Fannie was on board. She seemed to have
+been born with an influence for evil over men and gas-engines.</p>
+
+<p>At the other side of green lawns on which were a running-track, swings,
+trapezes, parallel bars, and a ball-field, were woods. The shade, from
+where she was, looked black and cold. She walked slowly and timidly
+toward it. She could cool herself and return in time to meet Fannie. But
+she returned sooner than she had expected.</p>
+
+<p>She found a smooth stone in the woods and sat down. After the sun there
+was a certain coolness. She fanned herself with some leaves. They were
+poison-ivy, but she did not know that. The perspiration dried on her
+face. There were curious whining, humming sounds in the woods. She began
+to scratch her ankles and wrists. Her ankles especially tickled and
+itched to the point of anguish. She was the delightful centre of
+interest to a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. She leaped to her feet and
+fought them wildly with her branch of poison-ivy. Then she started to
+run and almost stepped on a man who was lying face up in the underwood,
+peacefully snoring. She screamed faintly and hurried on. Some of the
+bolder mosquitoes followed her into the sunlight, but it was too hot
+even for them, and one by one they dropped behind and returned to the
+woods. The drunken man continued<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> his comfortable sleep. The mosquitoes
+did not trouble him. It is unknown why.</p>
+
+<p>Lila returned to the end of the dock and saw far off a white speck that
+may or may not have been the motor-boat in which Fannie had gone for a "sail."</p>
+
+<p>If there hadn't been so many people about Lila must have sat down and
+cried. The warmth of affection which she had felt that morning for
+Fannie had changed into hatred. Three times she returned to the end of the dock.</p>
+
+<p>All over the park were groups of people eating sandwiches and
+hard-boiled eggs. They shouted and joked. Under certain circumstances,
+not the least of sports is eating. Lila was so angry and hungry and
+abused that she forgot her sore feet. She couldn't stay still. She must
+have walked&mdash;coming and going&mdash;a good many miles in all.</p>
+
+<p>At last, exhausted as she had never been even after a day at the
+department store during the Christmas rush, she found a deep niche
+between two rough rocks on the beach, over which the tide was now gently
+rising, and sank into it. The rocks and the sand between them gave out
+coolness; the sun shone on her head and shoulders, but with less than
+its meridianal fury. She could look down Pelham Bay and see most of the
+waters between Fort Schuyler and City Island. Boats of all sorts and
+descriptions came and went. But there was no sign of that in which Fannie had embarked.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p><p>Lila fell asleep. It became quiet in the park. The people were dragging
+themselves wearily home, dishevelled, dirty, sour with sweat. The sun
+went down, copper-red and sullen. The trunks of trees showed ebony black
+against it, swarms of infinitesimal gnats rose from the beaches, and
+made life hideous to the stragglers still in the park.</p>
+
+<p>Lila was awakened by the tide wetting her feet. She rose on stiff,
+aching legs. There was a kink in her back; one arm, against which she
+had rested heavily, was asleep.</p>
+
+<p>"Fannie," Lila thought with a kind of falling despair, "must have come
+back, looked for me, given me up, and gone home."</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of Pelham Bay a fire twinkled, burning low. It looked like
+a camp-fire deserted and dying in the centre of a great open plain. Lila
+gave it no more than a somnambulant look. It told her nothing: no story
+of sudden frenzied terror, of inextinguishable, unescapable flames, of
+young people in the midst of health and the vain and wicked pursuit of
+happiness, half-burned to death, half-drowned. It told her no story of
+guilt providentially punished, or accidentally.</p>
+
+<p>She had slept through all the shouting and screaming. The boats that had
+attempted rescue had withdrawn; there remained only the hull of a
+converted catboat, gasoline-soaked, burnt to the water's edge, a
+cinder&mdash;still smouldering.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span></p><p>Somewhere under the placid waters, gathering speed in the tidal
+currents, slowing down and swinging in the eddies, was all that remained
+of Fannie Davis, food for crabs, eels, dogfish, lobsters, and all the
+thousand and one scavengers of Atlantic bays, blackened shreds of
+garments still clinging to her.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Next to Pelham Bay Park toward the south is a handsome private property.
+On the low boundary wall of this, facing the road and directly under a
+ragged cherry-tree, Lila seated herself. She was "all in." She must wait
+until a vehicle of some sort passed and beg for a lift. She was
+half-starved; her feet could no longer carry her. A motor thrilled by at
+high speed, a fiery, stinking dragon in the night. Mosquitoes tormented
+her. She had no strength with which to oppose them. The hand in which
+she had held the poison-ivy was beginning to itch and swell.</p>
+
+<p>A second motor approached slowly and came to a halt. A young man got
+out, opened one of the headlights, struck a match, and lighted it. Then
+he lighted the other. The low stone wall on which Lila sat and Lila
+herself were embraced by the ring of illumination. It must have been
+obvious to any one but a fool that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> Lila was out of place in her
+surroundings; her peach-basket hat, the oxford ties of which she had
+been so proud, told a story of city breeding. Her face, innocent and
+childlike, was very touching.</p>
+
+<p>The young man shut off his motor, so that there was a sudden silence.
+"Want a lift somewhere?" he asked cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>Lila could not remember when she had been too young to be warned against
+the advances of strange men. "They give you a high old time, and then
+they expect to be paid for it," had been so dinned into her that if she
+had given the young man a sharp "No" for an answer it would have been
+almost instinctive. Training and admonition rose strong within her. She
+felt that she was going to refuse help. The thought was intolerable.
+Wherefore, instead of answering, she burst into tears.</p>
+
+<p>A moment later the young man was sitting by her side, and she was
+pouring her tale of a day gone wrong into amused but sympathetic ears.</p>
+
+<p>His voice and choice of words belonged to a world into which she had
+never looked. She could not help trusting him and believing that he was
+good&mdash;even when he put his arm around her and let her finish her cry on his shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>"And your friend left you&mdash;and you've got no car fare, and you've had
+nothing to eat, and you can't<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span> walk any more because your shoes are too
+tight. And you live&mdash;&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>She told him.</p>
+
+<p>"I could take you right home to your mother," he said, "but I won't.
+That would be a good ending to a day gone wrong, but not the best. Come."</p>
+
+<p>He supported her to his motor, a high-power runabout, and helped her in.
+Never before had she sat in such reclining comfort. It was better than
+sitting up in bed.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll send your mother a telegram from New Rochelle so that she won't
+worry," he said. "Just you let yourself go and try to enjoy everything.
+Fortunately I know of a shoe store in New Rochelle. It won't be open;
+but the proprietor has rooms above the store, and he'll be glad to make
+a sale even if it is Sunday. The first principle to be observed in a
+pleasant outing is a pair of comfortable feet."</p>
+
+<p>"But I have no money," protested Lila.</p>
+
+<p>"I have," said the young man; "too much, some people think."</p>
+
+<p>Lila had been taught that if she accepted presents from young men she
+put herself more or less in their power.</p>
+
+<p>They whirled noiselessly across Pelham Bridge. Lila had given up in the
+matter of accepting a present of shoes. In so doing she feared that she
+had <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>committed herself definitely to the paths that lead to destruction.
+And when, having tried in vain to get a table at two inns between New
+Rochelle and Larchmont, the young man said that he would take her to his
+own home to dinner, she felt sure of it. But she was too tired to care,
+and in the padded seat, and the new easy shoes, too blissfully
+comfortable. They had sent her mother a telegram. The young man had
+composed it. He had told the mother not to worry. "I'm dining out and
+won't be home till late."</p>
+
+<p>"We won't say how late," he had explained with an ingenuous smile,
+"because we don't know, do we?"</p>
+
+<p>They had gone to a drug store, and the clerk had bound a soothing
+dressing on Lila's poisoned hand.</p>
+
+<p>They turned from the main road into a long avenue over which trees met
+in a continuous arch. The place was all a-twinkle with fireflies. Box,
+roses, and honeysuckle filled the air with delicious odors&mdash;then strong,
+pungent, bracing as wine, the smell of salt-marshes, and coldness off
+the water. On a point of land among trees many lights glowed.</p>
+
+<p>"That's my place," said the young man.</p>
+
+<p>"We'll have dinner on the terrace&mdash;deep water comes right up to it.
+There's no wind to-night. The candles won't even flicker."</p>
+
+<p>As if the stopping of the automobile had been a signal, the front door
+swung quietly open and a Chinese<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> butler in white linen appeared against
+a background of soft coloring and subdued lights.</p>
+
+<p>As Lila entered the house her knees shook a little. She felt that she
+was definitely committing herself to what she must always regret. She
+was a fly walking deliberately into a spider's parlor. That the young
+man hitherto had behaved most circumspectly, she dared not count in his
+favor. Was it not always so in the beginning? He seemed like a jolly,
+kindly boy. She had the impulse to scream and to run out of the house,
+to hide in the shrubbery, to throw herself into the water. Her heart
+beat like that of a trapped bird. She heard the front door close behind her.</p>
+
+<p>"I think you'd be more comfy," said the young man, "if you took off your
+hat, don't you? Dinner'll be ready in about ten minutes. Fong will show
+you where to go."</p>
+
+<p>She followed the Chinaman up a flight of broad low steps. Their feet
+made no sound on the thick carpeting. He held open the door of a
+bedroom. It was all white and delicate and blue. Through a door at the
+farther end she had a glimpse of white porcelain and shining nickel.</p>
+
+<p>Her first act when the Chinaman had gone was to lock the door by which
+she had entered. Then she looked from each of the windows in turn. The
+terrace was beneath her, brick with a balustrade of white,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> with white
+urns. The young man, bareheaded, paced the terrace like a sentinel. He
+was smoking a cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>To the left was a round table, set for two. She could see that the
+chairs were of white wicker, with deep, soft cushions. In the centre of
+the table was a bowl of red roses. Four candles burned upright in
+massive silver candlesticks.</p>
+
+<p>She took off her hat mechanically, washed her face and the hand that had
+not been bandaged, and "did" her hair. She looked wonderfully pretty in
+the big mirror over the dressing-table. The heavy ivory brushes looked
+enormous in her delicate hands. Her eyes were great and round like those
+of a startled deer.</p>
+
+<p>She heard his voice calling to her from the terrace: "Hello, up there!
+Got everything you want? Dinner's ready when you are."</p>
+
+<p>She hesitated a long time with her hand on the door-key. But what was a
+locked door in an isolated house to a bad man? She drew a deep breath,
+turned the key, waited a little longer, and then, as a person steps into
+a very cold bath, pushed the door open and went out.</p>
+
+<p>He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. She went down slowly,
+her hand on the rail. She had no idea that she was making an exquisite
+picture. She knew only that she was frightened.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span></p><p>"It's turned cool," said the young man. He caught up a light scarf of
+Chinese embroidery and laid it lightly about her shoulders. She looked
+him for the first time squarely in the face. She saw chiefly a pair of
+rather small, deep-set blue eyes; at the outer corners were
+multitudinous little wrinkles, dug by smiling. The eyes were clear as a
+child's, full of compassionate laughter.</p>
+
+<p>A feeling of perfect security came over her. She thanked Heaven that she
+had not made a ridiculous scene. The chimes of a tall clock broke the
+silence with music.</p>
+
+<p>He offered her his arm, and she laid her fingers on it.</p>
+
+<p>"I think we are served," he said, and led her to the terrace. He was
+solicitous about placing cushions to the best advantage for her. He took
+one from his own chair, and, on one knee, put it under her feet. He
+smiled at her across the bowl of roses.</p>
+
+<p>"How old are you?" he said. "You look like a man's kid sister."</p>
+
+<p>She told him that she was seventeen and that she had worked for two
+years in a department store.</p>
+
+<p>"My father was a farmer," she said, "but he lost one arm, and couldn't
+make it pay. So we had to come to the city."</p>
+
+<p>"Is your father living?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span></p><p>"Yes. But he says he is dead. He can't find any work to do. Mother
+works like a horse, though, and so does Bert, and so do I. The others are at school."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you like your work?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only for what it brings in."</p>
+
+<p>"What does it bring in?"</p>
+
+<p>"Six dollars a week."</p>
+
+<p>The young man smiled. "Never mind," he said; "eat your soup."</p>
+
+<p>It did her good, that soup. It was strong and very hot. It put heart
+into her. When she had finished, he laughed gleefully.</p>
+
+<p>"It's all very well to talk about rice-powder, and cucumber-cream, and
+beauty-sleeps, but all you needed to make you look perfectly lovely was
+a cup of soup. That scarf's becoming to you, too."</p>
+
+<p>She blushed happily. She had lost all fear of him.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you pinching yourself for?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"To see if I'm awake."</p>
+
+<p>"You are," he said, "wide awake. Take my word for it, and I hope you're
+having a good time."</p>
+
+<p>The Chinaman poured something light and sparkling into her glass from a
+bottle dressed in a napkin. Misgivings returned to her. She had heard of
+girls being drugged.</p>
+
+<p>"You don't have to drink it," said the young man. "I had some served
+because dinner doesn't look like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> dinner without champagne. Still, after
+the thoroughly unhappy day you've put in, I think a mouthful or two would do you good."</p>
+
+<p>She lifted the glass of champagne, smiled, drank, and choked. He laughed at her merrily.</p>
+
+<p>All through dinner he kept lighting cigarettes and throwing them away.
+Between times he ate with great relish and heartiness.</p>
+
+<p>Lila was in heaven. All her doubts and fears had vanished. She felt
+thoroughly at home, as if she had always been used to service and linen
+and silver and courtesy.</p>
+
+<p>They had coffee, and then they strolled about in the moonlight, while
+the young man smoked a very long cigar.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at his watch, and sighed. "Well, Miss," he said, "if we're to
+get you safe home to your mother!"</p>
+
+<p>"I won't be a minute," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"You know the way?"</p>
+
+<p>She ran upstairs, and, having put on her hat, decided that it looked
+cheap and vulgar, and took it off again.</p>
+
+<p>He wrapped her in a soft white polo-coat for the long run to New York.
+She looked back at the lights of his house. Would she ever see them
+again, or smell the salt and the box and the roses?</p>
+
+<p>By the time they had reached the Zoological <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>Gardens at Fordham she had
+fallen blissfully asleep. He ran the car with considerate slowness, and
+looked at her very often. She waked as they crossed the river. Her eyes
+shrank from the piled serried buildings of Manhattan. The air was no
+longer clean and delicious to the lungs.</p>
+
+<p>"Have I been asleep?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," she cried, "how could I! How could I! I've missed some of it. And
+it never happened before, and it will never happen again."</p>
+
+<p>"Not in the same way, perhaps," he said gravely. "But how do you know? I
+think you are one girl in ten million, and to you all things are possible."</p>
+
+<p>"How many men in ten million are like you?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Men are all pretty much alike," he said. "They have good impulses and bad."</p>
+
+<p>In the stark darkness between the outer and the inner door of the
+tenement in which she lived, there was an awkward, troubled silence. He
+wished very much to kiss her, but had made up his mind that he would
+not. She thought that he might, and had made up her mind that if he
+attempted to she would resist. She was not in the least afraid of him
+any more, but of herself.</p>
+
+<p>He kissed her, and she did not resist.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span></p><p>"Good-night," he said, and then with a half-laugh, "Which is your
+bell?"</p>
+
+<p>She found it and rang it. Presently there was a rusty click, and the
+inner door opened an inch or so. Neither of them spoke for a full
+minute. Then she, her face aflame in the darkness:</p>
+
+<p>"When you came I was only a little fool who'd bought a pair of shoes
+that were too tight for her. I didn't <i>know</i> anything. I'm wise now. I
+know that I'm dreaming, and that if I wake up before the dream is ended I shall die."</p>
+
+<p>She tried to laugh gayly and could not.</p>
+
+<p>"I've made things harder for you instead of easier," he said. "I'm
+terribly sorry. I meant well."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, it isn't that," she said. "Thank you a thousand thousand times. And good-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait," he said. "Will you play with me again some time? How about Saturday?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," she said. "It wouldn't be fair&mdash;to me. Good-night."</p>
+
+<p>She passed through the inner door and up the narrow creaking stair to
+the dark tenement in which she lived; she could hear the restless
+breathing of her sleeping family.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my God!" she thought, "if it weren't for <i>them</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>As for the young man, having lighted a long cigar,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> he entered his car
+and drove off, muttering to himself:</p>
+
+<p>"Damnation! Why does a girl like that <i>have</i> a family!"</p>
+
+<p>He never saw her again, nor was he ever haunted by the thought that he
+had perhaps spoiled her whole life as thoroughly as if he had taken
+advantage of her ignorance and her innocence.</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="BACK_THERE_IN_THE_GRASS" id="BACK_THERE_IN_THE_GRASS"></a>BACK THERE IN THE GRASS</h2>
+
+<p>It was spring in the South Seas when, for the first time, I went ashore
+at Batengo, which is the Polynesian village, and the only one on the big
+grass island of the same name. There is a cable station just up the
+beach from the village, and a good-natured young chap named Graves had
+charge of it. He was an upstanding, clean-cut fellow, as the fact that
+he had been among the islands for three years without falling into any
+of their ways proved. The interior of the corrugated iron house in which
+he lived, for instance, was bachelor from A to Z. And if that wasn't a
+sufficient alibi, my pointer dog, Don, who dislikes anything Polynesian
+or Melanesian, took to him at once. And they established a romping
+friendship. He gave us lunch on the porch, and because he had not seen a
+white man for two months, or a liver-and-white dog for two years, he
+told us the entire story of his young life, with reminiscences of early
+childhood and plans for the future thrown in.</p>
+
+<p>The future was very simple. There was a girl coming out to him from the
+States by the next steamer but one; the captain of that steamer would
+join them <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>together in holy wedlock, and after that the Lord would
+provide.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow," he said, "you think I'm asking her to share a very
+lonely sort of life, but if you could imagine all the&mdash;the affection and
+gentleness, and thoughtfulness that I've got stored up to pour out at
+her feet for the rest of our lives, you wouldn't be a bit afraid for her
+happiness. If a man spends his whole time and imagination thinking up
+ways to make a girl happy and occupied, he can think up a whole lot....
+I'd like ever so much to show her to you."</p>
+
+<p>He led the way to his bedroom, and stood in silent rapture before a
+large photograph that leaned against the wall over his dressing-table.</p>
+
+<p>She didn't look to me like the sort of girl a cable agent would happen
+to marry. She looked like a swell&mdash;the real thing&mdash;beautiful and simple
+and unaffected.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, "isn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>I hadn't spoken a word. Now I said:</p>
+
+<p>"It's easy to see why you aren't lonely with that wonderful girl to look
+at. Is she really coming out by the next steamer but one? It's hard to
+believe because she's so much too good to be true."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," he said, "isn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>"The usual cable agent," I said, "keeps from going mad by having a dog
+or a cat or some pet or other to talk to. But I can understand a
+photograph like this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> being all-sufficient to any man&mdash;even if he had
+never seen the original. Allow me to shake hands with you."</p>
+
+<p>Then I got him away from the girl, because my time was short and I
+wanted to find out about some things that were important to <i>me</i>.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't asked me my business in these parts," I said, "but I'll
+tell you. I'm collecting grasses for the Bronx Botanical Garden."</p>
+
+<p>"Then, by Jove!" said Graves, "you have certainly come to the right
+place. There used to be a tree on this island, but the last man who saw
+it died in 1789&mdash;Grass! The place is all grass: there are fifty kinds
+right around my house here."</p>
+
+<p>"I've noticed only eighteen," I said, "but that isn't the point. The
+point is: when do the Batengo Island grasses begin to go to seed?" And I smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"You think you've got me stumped, don't you?" he said. "That a mere
+cable agent wouldn't notice such things. Well, that grass there," and he
+pointed&mdash;"beach nut we call it&mdash;is the first to ripen seed, and, as far
+as I know, it does it just six weeks from now."</p>
+
+<p>"Are you just making things up to impress me?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir, I am not. I know to the minute. You see, I'm a victim of hay-fever."</p>
+
+<p>"In that case," I said, "expect me back about the time your nose begins to run."</p>
+
+<p>"Really?" And his whole face lighted up. "I'm<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> delighted. Only six
+weeks. Why, then, if you'll stay round for only five or six weeks <i>more</i>
+you'll be here for the wedding."</p>
+
+<p>"I'll make it if I possibly can," I said. "I want to see if that girl's really true."</p>
+
+<p>"Anything I can do to help you while you're gone? I've got loads of
+spare time&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"If you knew anything about grasses&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't. But I'll blow back into the interior and look around. I've
+been meaning to right along, just for fun. But I can never get any of
+<i>them</i> to go with me."</p>
+
+<p>"The natives?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Poor lot. They're committing race suicide as fast as they can.
+There are more wooden gods than people in Batengo village, and the
+superstition's so thick you could cut it with a knife. All the manly
+virtues have perished.... Aloiu!"</p>
+
+<p>The boy who did Graves's chores for him came lazily out of the house.</p>
+
+<p>"Aloiu," said Graves, "just run back into the island to the top of that
+hill&mdash;see?&mdash;that one over there&mdash;and fetch a handful of grass for this
+gentleman. He'll give you five dollars for it."</p>
+
+<p>Aloiu grinned sheepishly and shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>"Fifty dollars?"</p>
+
+<p>Aloiu shook his head with even more firmness, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> I whistled. Fifty
+dollars would have made him the Rockefeller-Carnegie-Morgan of those parts.</p>
+
+<p>"All right, coward," said Graves cheerfully. "Run away and play with the
+other children.... Now, isn't that curious? Neither love, money, nor
+insult will drag one of them a mile from the beach. They say that if you
+go 'back there in the grass' something awful will happen to you."</p>
+
+<p>"As what?" I asked.</p>
+
+<p>"The last man to try it," said Graves, "in the memory of the oldest
+inhabitant was a woman. When they found her she was all black and
+swollen&mdash;at least that's what they say. Something had bitten her just
+above the ankle."</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense," I said, "there are no snakes in the whole Batengo group."</p>
+
+<p>"They didn't say it was a snake," said Graves. "They said the marks of
+the bite were like those that would be made by the teeth of a very
+little&mdash;child."</p>
+
+<p>Graves rose and stretched himself.</p>
+
+<p>"What's the use of arguing with people that tell yarns like that! All
+the same, if you're bent on making expeditions back into the grass,
+you'll make 'em alone, unless the cable breaks and I'm free to make 'em with you."</p>
+
+<p>Five weeks later I was once more coasting along the wavering hills of
+Batengo Island, with a sharp eye out for a first sight of the cable
+station and Graves. Five<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> weeks with no company but Kanakas and a
+pointer dog makes one white man pretty keen for the society of another.
+Furthermore, at our one meeting I had taken a great shine to Graves and
+to the charming young lady who was to brave a life in the South Seas for
+his sake. If I was eager to get ashore, Don was more so. I had a
+shot-gun across my knees with which to salute the cable station, and the
+sight of that weapon, coupled with toothsome memories of a recent big
+hunt down on Forked Peak, had set the dog quivering from stem to stern,
+to crouching, wagging his tail till it disappeared, and beating sudden
+tattoos upon the deck with his forepaws. And when at last we rounded on
+the cable station and I let off both barrels, he began to bark and race
+about the schooner like a thing possessed.</p>
+
+<p>The salute brought Graves out of his house. He stood on the porch waving
+a handkerchief, and I called to him through a megaphone; hoped that he
+was well, said how glad I was to see him, and asked him to meet me in Batengo village.</p>
+
+<p>Even at that distance I detected a something irresolute in his manner;
+and a few minutes later when he had fetched a hat out of the house,
+locked the door, and headed toward the village, he looked more like a
+soldier marching to battle than a man walking half a mile to greet a friend.</p>
+
+<p>"That's funny," I said to Don. "He's coming to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> meet us in spite of the
+fact that he'd much rather not. Oh, well!"</p>
+
+<p>I left the schooner while she was still under way, and reached the beach
+before Graves came up. There were too many strange brown men to suit
+Don, and he kept very close to my legs. When Graves arrived the natives
+fell away from him as if he had been a leper. He wore a sort of sickly
+smile, and when he spoke the dog stiffened his legs and growled menacingly.</p>
+
+<p>"Don!" I exclaimed sternly, and the dog cowered, but the spines along
+his back bristled and he kept a menacing eye upon Graves. The man's face
+looked drawn and rather angry. The frank boyishness was clean out of it.
+He had been strained by something or other to the breaking-point&mdash;so
+much was evident.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear fellow," I said, "what the devil is the matter?"</p>
+
+<p>Graves looked to right and left, and the islanders shrank still farther
+away from him.</p>
+
+<p>"You can see for yourself," he said curtly. "I'm taboo." And then, with
+a little break in his voice: "Even your dog feels it. Don, good boy! Come here, sir!"</p>
+
+<p>Don growled quietly.</p>
+
+<p>"You see!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don," I said sharply, "this man is my friend and yours. Pat him, Graves."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span></p><p>Graves reached forward and patted Don's head and talked to him
+soothingly.</p>
+
+<p>But although Don did not growl or menace, he shivered under the caress
+and was unhappy.</p>
+
+<p>"So you're taboo!" I said cheerfully. "That's the result of anything,
+from stringing pink and yellow shells on the same string to murdering
+your uncle's grandmother-in-law. Which have <i>you</i> done?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've been back there in the grass," he said, "and because&mdash;because
+nothing happened to me I'm taboo."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that all?"</p>
+
+<p>"As far as they know&mdash;yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" said I, "my business will take me back there for days at a time,
+so I'll be taboo, too. Then there'll be two of us. Did you find any
+curious grasses for me?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know about grasses," he said, "but I found something very
+curious that I want to show you and ask your advice about. Are you going
+to share my house?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think I'll keep head-quarters on the schooner," I said, "but if
+you'll put me up now and then for a meal or for the night&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll put you up for lunch right now," he said, "if you'll come. I'm my
+own cook and bottle-washer since the taboo, but I must say the change
+isn't for the worse so far as food goes."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span></p><p>He was looking and speaking more cheerfully.</p>
+
+<p>"May I bring Don?"</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"Why&mdash;yes&mdash;of course."</p>
+
+<p>"If you'd rather not?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, bring him. I want to make friends again if I can."</p>
+
+<p>So we started for Graves's house, Don very close at my heels.</p>
+
+<p>"Graves," I said, "surely a taboo by a lot of fool islanders hasn't
+upset you. There's something on your mind. Bad news?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, no," he said. "She's coming. It's other things. I'll tell you by
+and by&mdash;everything. Don't mind me. I'm all right. Listen to the wind in
+the grass. That sound day and night is enough to put a man off his feed."</p>
+
+<p>"You say you found something very curious back there in the grass?"</p>
+
+<p>"I found, among other things, a stone monolith. It's fallen down, but
+it's almost as big as the Flatiron Building in New York. It's ancient as
+days&mdash;all carved&mdash;it's a sort of woman, I think. But we'll go back one
+day and have a look at it. Then, of course, I saw all the different
+kinds of grasses in the world&mdash;they'd interest you more&mdash;but I'm such a
+punk botanist that I gave up trying to tell 'em apart. I like the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>
+flowers best&mdash;there's millions of 'em&mdash;down among the grass.... I tell
+you, old man, this island is the greatest curiosity-shop in the whole world."</p>
+
+<p>He unlocked the door of his house and stood aside for me to go in first.</p>
+
+<p>"Shut up, Don!"</p>
+
+<p>The dog growled savagely, but I banged him with my open hand across the
+snout, and he quieted down and followed into the house, all tense and watchful.</p>
+
+<p>On the shelf where Graves kept his books, with its legs hanging over,
+was what I took to be an idol of some light brownish wood&mdash;say
+sandalwood, with a touch of pink. But it was the most lifelike and
+astounding piece of carving I ever saw in the islands or out of them. It
+was about a foot high, and represented a Polynesian woman in the prime
+of life, say, fifteen or sixteen years old, only the features were finer
+and cleaner carved. It was a nude, in an attitude of easy repose&mdash;the
+legs hanging, the toes dangling&mdash;the hands resting, palms downward, on
+the blotter, the trunk relaxed. The eyes, which were a kind of steely
+blue, seemed to have been made, depth upon depth, of some wonderful
+translucent enamel, and to make his work still more realistic the artist
+had planted the statuette's eyebrows, eyelashes, and scalp with real
+hair, very soft and silky, brown on the head and black for the lashes
+and eyebrows. The thing was so lifelike that it frightened<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> me. And when
+Don began to growl like distant thunder I didn't blame him. But I leaned
+over and caught him by the collar, because it was evident that he wanted
+to get at that statuette and destroy it.</p>
+
+<p>When I looked up the statuette's eyes had moved. They were turned
+downward upon the dog, with cool curiosity and indifference. A kind of
+shudder went through me. And then, lo and behold, the statuette's tiny
+brown breasts rose and fell slowly, and a long breath came out of its nostrils.</p>
+
+<p>I backed violently into Graves, dragging Don with me and half-choking
+him. "My God Almighty!" I said. "It's alive!"</p>
+
+<p>"Isn't she!" said he. "I caught her back there in the grass&mdash;the little
+minx. And when I heard your signal I put her up there to keep her out of
+mischief. It's too high for her to jump&mdash;and she's very sore about it."</p>
+
+<p>"You found her in the grass," I said. "For God's sake!&mdash;are there more of them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Thick as quail," said he, "but it's hard to get a sight of 'em. But
+<i>you</i> were overcome by curiosity, weren't you, old girl? You came out to
+have a look at the big white giant and he caught you with his thumb and
+forefinger by the scruff of the neck&mdash;so you couldn't bite him&mdash;and here you are."</p>
+
+<p>The womankin's lips parted and I saw a flash of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> white teeth. She looked
+up into Graves's face and the steely eyes softened. It was evident that
+she was very fond of him.</p>
+
+<p>"Rum sort of a pet," said Graves. "What?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rum?" I said. "It's horrible&mdash;it isn't decent&mdash;it&mdash;it ought to be
+taboo. Don's got it sized up right. He&mdash;he wants to kill it."</p>
+
+<p>"Please don't keep calling her It," said Graves. "She wouldn't like
+it&mdash;if she understood." Then he whispered words that were Greek to me,
+and the womankin laughed aloud. Her laugh was sweet and tinkly, like the
+upper notes of a spinet.</p>
+
+<p>"You can speak her language?"</p>
+
+<p>"A few words&mdash;Tog ma Lao?"</p>
+
+<p>"Na!"</p>
+
+<p>"Aba Ton sug ato."</p>
+
+<p>"Nan Tane dom ud lon anea!"</p>
+
+<p>It sounded like that&mdash;only all whispered and very soft. It sounded a
+little like the wind in the grass.</p>
+
+<p>"She says she isn't afraid of the dog," said Graves, "and that he'd
+better let her alone."</p>
+
+<p>"I almost hope he won't," said I. "Come outside. I don't like her. I
+think I've got a touch of the horrors."</p>
+
+<p>Graves remained behind a moment to lift the womankin down from the
+shelf, and when he rejoined me I had made up my mind to talk to him like a father.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span></p><p>"Graves," I said, "although that creature in there is only a foot high,
+it isn't a pig or a monkey, it's a woman, and you're guilty of what's
+considered a pretty ugly crime at home&mdash;abduction. You've stolen this
+woman away from kith and kin, and the least you can do is to carry her
+back where you found her and turn her loose. Let me ask you one
+thing&mdash;what would Miss Chester think?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, that doesn't worry me," said Graves. "But I <i>am</i> worried&mdash;worried
+sick. It's early&mdash;shall we talk now, or wait till after lunch?"</p>
+
+<p>"Now," I said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said he, "you left me pretty well enthused on the subject of
+botany&mdash;so I went back there twice to look up grasses for you. The
+second time I went I got to a deep sort of valley where the grass is
+waist-high&mdash;that, by the way, is where the big monolith is&mdash;and that
+place was alive with things that were frightened and ran. I could see
+the directions they took by the way the grass tops acted. There were
+lots of loose stones about and I began to throw 'em to see if I could
+knock one of the things over. Suddenly all at once I saw a pair of
+bright little eyes peering out of a bunch of grass&mdash;I let fly at them,
+and something gave a sort of moan and thrashed about in the grass&mdash;and
+then lay still. I went to look, and found that I'd stunned&mdash;<i>her</i>. She
+came to and tried to bite me,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> but I had her by the scruff of the neck
+and she couldn't. Further, she was sick with being hit in the chest with
+the stone, and first thing I knew she keeled over in the palm of my hand
+in a dead faint. I couldn't find any water or anything&mdash;and I didn't
+want her to die&mdash;so I brought her home. She was sick for a week&mdash;and I
+took care of her&mdash;as I would a sick pup&mdash;and she began to get well and
+want to play and romp and poke into everything. She'd get the lower
+drawer of my desk open and hide in it&mdash;or crawl into a rubber boot and
+play house. And she got to be right good company&mdash;same as any pet
+does&mdash;a cat or a dog&mdash;or a monkey&mdash;and naturally, she being so small, I
+couldn't think of her as anything but a sort of little beast that I'd
+caught and tamed.... You see how it all happened, don't you? Might have
+happened to anybody."</p>
+
+<p>"Why, yes," I said. "If she didn't give a man the horrors right at the
+start&mdash;I can understand making a sort of pet of her&mdash;but, man, there's
+only one thing to do. Be persuaded. Take her back where you found her,
+and turn her loose."</p>
+
+<p>"Well and good," said Graves. "I tried that, and next morning I found
+her at my door, sobbing&mdash;horrible, dry sobs&mdash;no tears.... You've said
+one thing that's full of sense: she isn't a pig&mdash;or a monkey&mdash;she's a woman."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span></p><p>"You don't mean to say," said I, "that that mite of a thing is in love
+with you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what else you'd call it."</p>
+
+<p>"Graves," I said, "Miss Chester arrives by the next steamer. In the
+meanwhile something has got to be done."</p>
+
+<p>"What?" said he hopelessly.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know," I said. "Let me think."</p>
+
+<p>The dog Don laid his head heavily on my knee, as if he wished to offer a
+solution of the difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>A week before Miss Chester's steamer was due the situation had not
+changed. Graves's pet was as much a fixture of Graves's house as the
+front door. And a man was never confronted with a more serious problem.
+Twice he carried her back into the grass and deserted her, and each time
+she returned and was found sobbing&mdash;horrible, dry sobs&mdash;on the porch.
+And a number of times we took her, or Graves did, in the pocket of his
+jacket, upon systematic searches for her people. Doubtless she could
+have helped us to find them, but she wouldn't. She was very sullen on
+these expeditions and frightened. When Graves tried to put her down she
+would cling to him, and it took real force to pry her loose.</p>
+
+<p>In the open she could run like a rat; and in open country it would have
+been impossible to desert her; she would have followed at Graves's heels
+as fast as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> he could move them. But forcing through the thick grass
+tired her after a few hundred yards, and she would gradually drop
+farther and farther behind&mdash;sobbing. There was a pathetic side to it.</p>
+
+<p>She hated me; and made no bones about it; but there was an armed truce
+between us. She feared my influence over Graves, and I feared her&mdash;well,
+just as some people fear rats or snakes. Things utterly out of the
+normal always do worry me, and Bo, which was the name Graves had learned
+for her, was, so far as I know, unique in human experience. In
+appearance she was like an unusually good-looking island girl observed
+through the wrong end of an opera-glass, but in habit and action she was
+different. She would catch flies and little grasshoppers and eat them
+all alive and kicking, and if you teased her more than she liked her
+ears would flatten the way a cat's do, and she would hiss like a
+snapping-turtle, and show her teeth.</p>
+
+<p>But one got accustomed to her. Even poor Don learned that it was not his
+duty to punish her with one bound and a snap. But he would never let her
+touch him, believing that in her case discretion was the better part of
+valor. If she approached him he withdrew, always with dignity, but
+equally with determination. He knew in his heart that something about
+her was horribly wrong and against nature. I knew it, too, and I think
+Graves began to suspect it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span></p><p>Well, a day came when Graves, who had been up since dawn, saw the smoke
+of a steamer along the horizon, and began to fire off his revolver so
+that I, too, might wake and participate in his joy. I made tea and went ashore.</p>
+
+<p>"It's <i>her</i> steamer," he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said I, "and we've got to decide something."</p>
+
+<p>"About Bo?"</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose I take her off your hands&mdash;for a week or so&mdash;till you and Miss
+Chester have settled down and put your house in order. Then Miss
+Chester&mdash;Mrs. Graves, that is&mdash;can decide what is to be done. I admit
+that I'd rather wash my hands of the business&mdash;but I'm the only white
+man available, and I propose to stand by my race. Don't say a word to
+Bo&mdash;just bring her out to the schooner and leave her."</p>
+
+<p>In the upshot Graves accepted my offer, and while Bo, fairly bristling
+with excitement and curiosity, was exploring the farther corners of my
+cabin, we slipped out and locked the door on her. The minute she knew
+what had happened she began to tear around and raise Cain. It sounded a
+little like a cat having a fit.</p>
+
+<p>Graves was white and unhappy. "Let's get away quick," he said; "I feel like a skunk."</p>
+
+<p>But Miss Chester was everything that her photograph said about her, and
+more too, so that the trick<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> he had played Bo was very soon a negligible
+weight on Graves's mind.</p>
+
+<p>If the wedding was quick and business-like, it was also jolly and
+romantic. The oldest passenger gave the bride away. All the crew came
+aft and sang "The Voice That Breathed O'er E-den That Earliest
+Wedding-Day"&mdash;to the tune called "Blairgowrie." They had worked it up in
+secret for a surprise. And the bride's dove-brown eyes got a little
+teary. I was best man. The captain read the service, and choked
+occasionally. As for Graves&mdash;I had never thought him handsome&mdash;well,
+with his brown face and white linen suit, he made me think, and I'm sure
+I don't know why, of St. Michael&mdash;that time he overcame Lucifer. The
+captain blew us to breakfast, with champagne and a cake, and then the
+happy pair went ashore in a boat full of the bride's trousseau, and the
+crew manned the bulwarks and gave three cheers, and then something like
+twenty-seven more, and last thing of all the brass cannon was fired, and
+the little square flags that spell G-o-o-d L-u-c-k were run up on the signal halyards.</p>
+
+<p>As for me, I went back to my schooner feeling blue and lonely. I knew
+little about women and less about love. It didn't seem quite fair. For
+once I hated my profession&mdash;seed-gatherer to a body of scientific
+gentlemen whom I had never seen. Well, there's nothing so good for the
+blues as putting things in order.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span></p><p>I cleaned my rifle and revolver. I wrote up my note-book. I developed
+some plates; I studied a brand-new book on South Sea grasses that had
+been sent out to me, and I found some mistakes. I went ashore with Don,
+and had a long walk on the beach&mdash;in the opposite direction from
+Graves's house, of course&mdash;and I sent Don into the water after sticks,
+and he seemed to enjoy it, and so I stripped and went in with him. Then
+I dried in the sun, and had a match with my hands to see which could
+find the tiniest shell. Toward dusk we returned to the schooner and had
+dinner, and after that I went into my cabin to see how Bo was getting on.</p>
+
+<p>She flew at me like a cat, and if I hadn't jerked my foot back she must
+have bitten me. As it was, her teeth tore a piece out of my trousers.
+I'm afraid I kicked her. Anyway, I heard her land with a crash in a far
+corner. I struck a match and lighted candles&mdash;they are cooler than
+lamps&mdash;very warily&mdash;one eye on Bo. She had retreated under a chair and
+looked out&mdash;very sullen and angry. I sat down and began to talk to her.
+"It's no use," I said, "you're trying to bite and scratch, because
+you're only as big as a minute. So come out here and make friends. I
+don't like you and you don't like me; but we're going to be thrown
+together for quite some time, so we'd better make the best of it. You
+come out here and behave pretty and I'll give you a bit of gingersnap."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span></p><p>The last word was intelligible to her, and she came a little way out
+from under the chair. I had a bit of gingersnap in my pocket, left over
+from treating Don, and I tossed it on the floor midway between us. She
+darted forward and ate it with quick bites.</p>
+
+<p>Well, then, she looked up, and her eyes asked&mdash;just as plain as day:
+"Why are things thus? Why have I come to live with you? I don't like
+you. I want to go back to Graves."</p>
+
+<p>I couldn't explain very well, and just shook my head and then went on
+trying to make friends&mdash;it was no use. She hated me, and after a time I
+got bored. I threw a pillow on the floor for her to sleep on, and left
+her. Well, the minute the door was shut and locked she began to sob. You
+could hear her for quite a distance, and I couldn't stand it. So I went
+back&mdash;and talked to her as nicely and soothingly as I could. But she
+wouldn't even look at me&mdash;just lay face down&mdash;heaving and sobbing.</p>
+
+<p>Now I don't like little creatures that snap&mdash;so when I picked her up it
+was by the scruff of the neck. She had to face me then, and I saw that
+in spite of all the sobbing her eyes were perfectly dry. That struck me
+as curious. I examined them through a pocket magnifying-glass, and
+discovered that they had no tear-ducts. Of course she couldn't cry.
+Perhaps I squeezed the back of her neck harder than I meant <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span>to&mdash;anyway,
+her lips began to draw back and her teeth to show.</p>
+
+<p>It was exactly at that second that I recalled the legend Graves had told
+me about the island woman being found dead, and all black and swollen,
+back there in the grass, with teeth marks on her that looked as if they
+had been made by a very little child.</p>
+
+<p>I forced Bo's mouth wide open and looked in. Then I reached for a candle
+and held it steadily between her face and mine. She struggled furiously
+so that I had to put down the candle and catch her legs together in my
+free hand. But I had seen enough. I felt wet and cold all over. For if
+the swollen glands at the base of the deeply grooved canines meant
+anything, that which I held between my hands was not a woman&mdash;but a snake.</p>
+
+<p>I put her in a wooden box that had contained soap and nailed slats over
+the top. And, personally, I was quite willing to put scrap-iron in the
+box with her and fling it overboard. But I did not feel quite justified
+without consulting Graves.</p>
+
+<p>As an extra precaution in case of accidents, I overhauled my
+medicine-chest and made up a little package for the breast pocket&mdash;a
+lancet, a rubber bandage, and a pill-box full of permanganate crystals.
+I had still much collecting to do, "back there in the grass," and I did
+not propose to step on any of Bo's cousins or her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> sisters or her
+aunts&mdash;without having some of the elementary first-aids to the
+snake-bitten handy.</p>
+
+<p>It was a lovely starry night, and I determined to sleep on deck. Before
+turning in I went to have a look at Bo. Having nailed her in a box
+securely, as I thought, I must have left my cabin door ajar. Anyhow she
+was gone. She must have braced her back against one side of the box, her
+feet against the other, and burst it open. I had most certainly
+underestimated her strength and resources.</p>
+
+<p>The crew, warned of peril, searched the whole schooner over, slowly and
+methodically, lighted by lanterns. We could not find her. Well, swimming
+comes natural to snakes.</p>
+
+<p>I went ashore as quickly as I could get a boat manned and rowed. I took
+Don on a leash, a shot-gun loaded, and both pockets of my jacket full of
+cartridges. We ran swiftly along the beach, Don and I, and then turned
+into the grass to make a short cut for Graves's house. All of a sudden
+Don began to tremble with eagerness and nuzzle and sniff among the roots
+of the grass. He was "making game."</p>
+
+<p>"Good Don," I said, "good boy&mdash;hunt her up! Find her!"</p>
+
+<p>The moon had risen. I saw two figures standing in the porch of Graves's
+house. I was about to call to them and warn Graves that Bo was loose and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>dangerous&mdash;when a scream&mdash;shrill and frightful&mdash;rang in my ears. I saw
+Graves turn to his bride and catch her in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>When I came up she had collected her senses and was behaving splendidly.
+While Graves fetched a lantern and water she sat down on the porch, her
+back against the house, and undid her garter, so that I could pull the
+stocking off her bitten foot. Her instep, into which Bo's venomous teeth
+had sunk, was already swollen and discolored. I slashed the teeth-marks
+this way and that with my lancet. And Mrs. Graves kept saying: "All
+right&mdash;all right&mdash;don't mind me&mdash;do what's best."</p>
+
+<p>Don's leash had wedged between two of the porch planks, and all the time
+we were working over Mrs. Graves he whined and struggled to get loose.</p>
+
+<p>"Graves," I said, when we had done what we could, "if your wife begins
+to seem faint, give her brandy&mdash;just a very little&mdash;at a time&mdash;and&mdash;I
+think we were in time&mdash;and for God's sake don't ever let her know <i>why</i>
+she was bitten&mdash;or by <i>what</i>&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Then I turned and freed Don and took off his leash.</p>
+
+<p>The moonlight was now very white and brilliant. In the sandy path that
+led from Graves's porch I saw the print of feet&mdash;shaped just like human
+feet&mdash;less than an inch long. I made Don smell them, and said:</p>
+
+<p>"Hunt close, boy! Hunt close!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span></p><p>Thus hunting, we moved slowly through the grass toward the interior of
+the island. The scent grew hotter&mdash;suddenly Don began to move more
+stiffly&mdash;as if he had the rheumatism&mdash;his eyes straight ahead saw
+something that I could not see&mdash;the tip of his tail vibrated
+furiously&mdash;he sank lower and lower&mdash;his legs worked more and more
+stiffly&mdash;his head was thrust forward to the full stretch of his neck
+toward a thick clump of grass. In the act of taking a wary step he came
+to a dead halt&mdash;his right forepaw just clear of the ground. The tip of
+his tail stopped vibrating. The tail itself stood straight out behind
+him and became rigid like a bar of iron. I never saw a stancher point.</p>
+
+<p>"Steady, boy!"</p>
+
+<p>I pushed forward the safety of my shot-gun and stood at attention.</p>
+
+<p class="tbrk">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"How is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Seems to be pulling through. I heard you fire both barrels. What luck?"</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="ASABRI" id="ASABRI"></a>ASABRI</h2>
+
+<p>Asabri, head of the great banking house of Asabri Brothers in Rome, had
+been a great sportsman in his youth. But by middle-age he had grown a
+little tired, you may say; so that whereas formerly he had depended upon
+his own exertions for pleasure and exhilaration, he looked now with
+favor upon automobiles, motor-boats, and saddle-horses.</p>
+
+<p>Almost every afternoon he rode alone in the Campagna, covering great
+distances on his stanch Irish mare, Biddy. She was the handsomest horse
+in Rome; her master was the handsomest man. He looked like some old
+Roman consul going out to govern and civilize. Peasants whom he passed
+touched their hats to him automatically. His face in repose was a sort of command.</p>
+
+<p>One day as he rode out of Rome he saw that fog was gathering; and he
+resolved, for there was an inexhaustible well of boyishness within him,
+to get lost in it. He had no engagement for that night; his family had
+already left Rome for their villa on Lake Como. Nobody would worry about
+him except Luigi, his valet. And as for this one, Asabri said to
+himself:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> "He is a spoiled child of fortune; let him worry for once."</p>
+
+<p>He did not believe in fever; he believed in a good digestion and good
+habits. He knew every inch of the Campagna, or thought he did; and he
+knew that under the magic of fog the most familiar parts of it became
+unfamiliar and strange. He had lost himself upon it once or twice
+before, to his great pleasure and exhilaration. He had felt like some
+daring explorer in an unknown country. He thought that perhaps he might
+be forced to spend the night in some peasant's home smelling of cheese
+and goats. He would reward his hosts in the morning beyond the dreams of
+their undoubted avarice. There would be a beautiful daughter with a
+golden voice: he would see to it that she became a famous singer. He
+would give the father a piece of fertile land with an ample house upon
+it. Every day the happy family would go down on their knees and pray for
+his soul. He knew of nothing more delicious than to surprise unexpecting
+and deserving people with stable benefactions. And besides, if only for
+the sake of his boyhood, he loved dearly the smell of cheese and goats.</p>
+
+<p>A goat had been his foster-mother; it was to her that he attributed his
+splendid constitution and activity, which had filled in the spaces
+between his financial successes with pleasure. As he trotted on into the
+fog<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> he tried to recall having knowingly done harm to somebody or other;
+and because he could not, his face of a Roman emperor took on a great look of peace.</p>
+
+<p>"Biddy," he said after a time, in English (she was an Irish horse, and
+English was the nearest he could get to her native language), "this is
+no common Roman mist; it's a genuine fog that has been sucked up Tiber
+from the salt sea. You can smell salt and fish. We shall be lost,
+possibly for a long time. There will be no hot mash for you to-night.
+You will eat what goats eat and be very grateful. Perhaps you will meet
+some rural donkey during our adventures, and I must ask you to use the
+poor little beast's rustic ignorance with the greatest tact and
+forbearance. You will tell her tales of cities and travels; but do not
+lie to excess, or appear condescending, lest you find her rude wits a
+match for your own and are ashamed."</p>
+
+<p>Asabri did not spend the night in a peasant's hut. Biddy did not meet
+any country donkey to swap yarns with. But inasmuch as the pair lost
+themselves thoroughly, it must be admitted that some of the banker's
+wishes came true.</p>
+
+<p>He had not counted on two things. At dinner-time he was hungry; at
+supper-time he was ravenous. And he no longer thought of losing himself
+on purpose, but made all the efforts in his power to get back to Rome.</p>
+
+<p>"Good Heavens," he muttered, "we ought to have stumbled on something by this time."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span></p><p>Biddy might have answered: "I've done some stumbling, thank you, and
+thanks to you." But she didn't. Instead, she lifted her head and ears,
+looked to the left, snorted, and shied. She shied very carefully,
+however, because she did not know what she might shy into; and Asabri laughed.</p>
+
+<p>There was a glimmering point of light off to the left, and he urged
+Biddy toward it. He saw presently that it was a fire built against a
+ruined and unfamiliar tomb.</p>
+
+<p>The fire was cooking something in a kettle. There was a smell of garlic.
+Three young men sat cross-legged, watching the fire and the kettle.
+Against the tomb leaned three long guns, very old and dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>"Brigands!" smiled Asabri, and he hailed them:</p>
+
+<p>"Ho there! Wake up! I am a squadron of police attacking you from the rear."</p>
+
+<p>He rode unarmed into their midst and slid unconcernedly from his saddle
+to the ground.</p>
+
+<p>"Put up your weapons, brothers," he said; "I was joking. It seems that I
+am in danger, not you."</p>
+
+<p>The young men, upon whom "brigand" was written in no uncertain signs,
+were very much embarrassed. One of them smiled nervously and showed a
+great many very white teeth.</p>
+
+<p>"Lucky for us," he said, "that you weren't what you said you were."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Asabri; "I should have potted the lot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span> of you with one
+volley and reported at head-quarters that it had been necessary, owing
+to the stubborn resistance which you offered."</p>
+
+<p>The three young men smiled sheepishly.</p>
+
+<p>"I see that you are familiar with the ways of the police," said one of them.</p>
+
+<p>"May I sit with you?" Asabri asked. "Thanks."</p>
+
+<p>He sat in silence for a moment; and the three young men examined with
+great respect the man's splendid round head, and his face of a Roman emperor.</p>
+
+<p>"Whose tomb is this?" he asked them.</p>
+
+<p>"It is ours," said the one who had first smiled. "It used to hallow the
+remains of Attulius Cimber."</p>
+
+<p>"Oho!" said Asabri. "Attulius Cimber, a direct ancestor of my friend and
+associate Sullandenti. And tell me how far is it to Rome?"</p>
+
+<p>"A long way. You could not find the half of it to-night."</p>
+
+<p>"Brothers," said Asabri, "has business been good? I ask for a reason."</p>
+
+<p>"The reason, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said he, "I thought, if I should not be considered grasping, to
+ask you for a mouthful of soup."</p>
+
+<p>Confusion seized the brigands. They protested that they were ungrateful
+dogs to keep the noble guest upon the tenterhooks of hunger. They called
+upon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> God to smite them down for inhospitable ne'er-do-weels. They plied
+him with soup, with black bread; they roasted strips of goat's flesh for
+him; and from the hollow of the tomb they fetched bottles of red wine in straw jackets.</p>
+
+<p>Presently Asabri sighed, and offered them cigarettes from a gold case.</p>
+
+<p>"For what I have received," said he, "may a courteous and thoughtful God
+make me truly thankful.... I wish that I could offer you, in return for
+your hospitality, something more substantial than cigarettes. The case?
+If it were any case but that one! A present from my wife."</p>
+
+<p>He drew from its pocket a gold repeater upon which his initials were
+traced in brilliants.</p>
+
+<p>"Midnight. Listen!"</p>
+
+<p>He pressed a spring, and the exquisite chimes of the watch spoke in the
+stillness like the bells of a fairy church.</p>
+
+<p>"And this," he said, "was a present from my mother, who is dead."</p>
+
+<p>The three brigands crossed themselves, and expressed the regrets which
+good-breeding required of them. The one that had been the last to help
+himself to a cigarette now returned the case to Asabri, with a bow and a
+mumbling of thanks.</p>
+
+<p>"What a jolly life you lead," exclaimed the banker.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> "Tell me, you have
+had some good hauls lately? What?"</p>
+
+<p>The oldest of the three, a dark, taciturn youth, answered, "The
+gentleman is a great joker."</p>
+
+<p>"Believe me," said Asabri, "it is from habit&mdash;not from the heart. When I
+rode out from Rome to-day, it was with the intention never to return.
+When I came upon you and saw your long guns and suspected your
+profession in life, I said: 'Good! Perhaps these young men will murder
+me for my watch and cigarette case and the loose silver in my breeches
+pocket, and save me a world of trouble&mdash;&mdash;'"</p>
+
+<p>The three brigands protested that nothing had ever been farther from their thoughts.</p>
+
+<p>"Instead of which," he went on, "you have fed me and put heart in me. I
+shall return to Rome in the morning and face whatever music my own
+infatuated foolishness has set going. Do you understand anything of finance?"</p>
+
+<p>The taciturn brigand grinned sheepishly.</p>
+
+<p>He said that he had had one once; but that the priest had touched it
+with a holy relic and it had gone away. "It was on the back of my neck," he said.</p>
+
+<p>Asabri laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"I should have said banking," said he, "stocks and bonds."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span></p><p>The brigands admitted that they knew nothing of these things. Asabri
+sighed.</p>
+
+<p>"Two months ago," he said, "I was a rich man. To-day I have nothing. In
+a few days it will be known that I have nothing; and then, my
+friends&mdash;the deluge. Such is finance. From great beginnings, lame
+endings. And yet the converse may be true. I have seen great endings
+come of small beginnings. Even now there is a chance for a man with a
+little capital...."</p>
+
+<p>He raised his eyes and hands to heaven.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," he cried, "if I could touch even five thousand lire I could
+retrieve my own fortunes and make the fortunes of whomsoever advanced me the money."</p>
+
+<p>The sullen brigand had been doing a sum on his fingers.</p>
+
+<p>"How so, excellency?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Asabri, "it is very simple! I should buy certain stocks,
+which owing to certain conditions are very cheap, and I should sell them
+very dear. You have heard of America?"</p>
+
+<p>They smiled and nodded eagerly.</p>
+
+<p>"Of Wall Street?"</p>
+
+<p>They looked blank.</p>
+
+<p>"Doubtless," said the banker, "you have been taught by your priests to
+believe that the great church of St. Peter, in Rome, is the actual
+centre of the universe. Is it not so?"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span></p><p>They assented, not without wonder, since the fact was well known.</p>
+
+<p>"Recent geographers," said Asabri, "unwilling to take any statement for
+granted, have, after prolonged and scientific investigation, discovered
+that this idea is hocus pocus. The centre of the universe is in the
+United States, in the city of New York, in Wall Street. The number in
+the street, to be precise, is fifty-nine. From fifty-nine Wall Street,
+the word goes out to the extremities of the world: 'Let prices be low.'
+Or: 'Let them be high.' And so they become, according to the word. But
+unless I can find five thousand lire with which to take advantage of
+this fact, why to-morrow&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow?" asked the brigand who had been first to smile.</p>
+
+<p>"Two months ago," said Asabri, "I was perhaps the most envied man in
+Italy. To-morrow I shall be laughed at." He shrugged his powerful shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>"But if five thousand lire could be found?"</p>
+
+<p>It was the sullen brigand who spoke, and his companions eyed him with
+some misgiving.</p>
+
+<p>"In that case," said Asabri, "I should rehabilitate my fortune and that
+of the man, or men, who came to my assistance."</p>
+
+<p>"Suppose," said the sullen one, "that I were in a position to offer you
+the loan of five thousand lire, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> four thousand eight hundred and
+ninety-two, to be exact, what surety should I receive that my fortunes
+and those of my associates would be mended thereby?"</p>
+
+<p>"My word," said Asabri simply, and he turned his face of a Roman emperor
+and looked the sullen brigand directly in the eye.</p>
+
+<p>"Words," said this one, although his eyes fell before the steadiness of
+the banker's, "are of all kinds and conditions, according to whoso gives them."</p>
+
+<p>Asabri smiled, and sure of his notoriety: "I am Asabri," said he.</p>
+
+<p>They examined him anew with a great awe. The youngest said:</p>
+
+<p>"And <i>you</i> have fallen upon evil days! I should have been less
+astonished if some one were to tell me that the late pope had received
+employment in hell."</p>
+
+<p>"Beppo," said the sullen brigand, "whatever the state of his fortunes,
+the word of Asabri is sufficient. Go into the tomb of Attulius and fetch
+out the money."</p>
+
+<p>The money&mdash;silver, copper, and notes of small denominations&mdash;was in a
+dirty leather bag.</p>
+
+<p>"Will you count it, sir?"</p>
+
+<p>With the palms of his hands Asabri answered that he would not. Inwardly,
+it was as if he had been made of smiles; but he showed them a stern
+countenance when he said:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span></p><p>"One thing! Before I touch this money, is there blood on it?"</p>
+
+<p>"High hands only," said the sullen brigand; but the youngest protested.</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed, yes," he said, "there is blood upon it. Look, see, and behold!"</p>
+
+<p>He bared a breast on which the skin was fine and satiny like a woman's,
+and they saw in the firelight the cicatrice of a newly healed wound.</p>
+
+<p>"A few drops of mine," he said proudly. "May they bring the money luck."</p>
+
+<p>"One thing more," said Asabri; "I have said that I will mend your
+fortunes. What sum apiece would make you comfortable for the rest of
+your days and teach you to see the evil in your present manner of life?"</p>
+
+<p>"If the money were to be doubled," said the sullen brigand, "then each
+of us could have what he most desires."</p>
+
+<p>"And what is that?" asked the banker.</p>
+
+<p>"For me," said the sullen brigand, "there is a certain piece of land
+upon which are grapes, figs, and olives."</p>
+
+<p>The second brigand said: "I am a waterman by birth and by longing. If I
+could purchase a certain barge upon which I have long had an eye, I
+should do well and honestly in the world, and happily."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span></p><p>"And you? What do you want?" Asabri smiled paternally in the face of
+the youngest brigand.</p>
+
+<p>This one showed his beautiful teeth a moment, and drew the rags together
+over his scarred breast.</p>
+
+<p>"I am nineteen years of age," he said, and his eyes glistened. "There is
+a girl, sir, in my village. Her eyes are like velvet; her skin is smooth
+as custard. She is very beautiful. If I could go to her father with a
+certain sum of money, he would not ask where I had gotten it&mdash;that is
+why I have robbed on the highway. He would merely stretch forth his
+hands and roll his fat eyes heavenward, and say: 'Bless you, my children.'"</p>
+
+<p>"But the girl," said Asabri.</p>
+
+<p>"It is wonderful," said the youngest brigand, "how she loves me. And
+when I told her that I was going upon the road to earn the moneys
+necessary for our happiness, she said that she would climb down from her
+window at night and come with me. But," he concluded unctuously, "I
+pointed out to her that from sin springs nothing but unhappiness."</p>
+
+<p>"We formed a fellowship, we three," said the second brigand, "and swore
+an oath: to take from the world so much as would make us happy, and no more."</p>
+
+<p>"My friends," said Asabri, "there are worse brigands than yourselves
+living in palaces."</p>
+
+<p>The fog had lifted, and it was beginning to grow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> light. Asabri gathered
+up the heavy bag of money and prepared to depart.</p>
+
+<p>"How long," said the sullen brigand, "with all respect, before your own
+fortunes will be mended, sir, and ours?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are quite sure you know nothing of stocks?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing, excellency."</p>
+
+<p>"Then listen. They shall be mended to-day. To-morrow come to my bank&mdash;&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sir, we dare not show our faces in Rome."</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then; to-morrow at ten sharp I shall leave Rome in a
+motor-car. Watch for me along the Appian Way."</p>
+
+<p>He shook them by their brown, grimy hands, mounted the impatient Biddy,
+and was gone&mdash;blissfully smiling.</p>
+
+<p>Upon reaching Rome he rode to his palace and assured Luigi the valet
+that all was well. Then he bathed, changed, breakfasted, napped, and
+drove to the hospital of Our Lady in Emergencies. He saw the superior
+and gave her the leather bag containing the brigands' savings.</p>
+
+<p>"For my sins," he said. "I have told lies half the night."</p>
+
+<p>Then he drove to his great banking house and sent for the cashier.</p>
+
+<p>"Make me up," said he, "three portable parcels of fifty thousand lire each."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span></p><p>The next day at ten he left Rome in a black and beauteous motor-car,
+and drove slowly along the Appian Way. He had left his mechanic behind,
+and was prepared to renew his tires and his youth. Packed away, he had
+luncheon and champagne enough for four; and he had not forgotten to
+bring along the three parcels of money.</p>
+
+<p>The three brigands stepped into the Appian Way from behind a mass of
+fallen masonry. They had found the means to shave cleanly, and perhaps
+to wash. They were adorned with what were evidently their very best
+clothes. The youngest, whose ambition was the girl he loved, even wore a necktie.</p>
+
+<p>Asabri brought the motor to a swift, oily, and polished halt.</p>
+
+<p>"Well met," he said, "since all is well. If you," he smiled into the
+face of the sullen brigand, "will be so good as to sit beside me!... The
+others shall sit in behind.... We shall go first," he continued, when
+all were comfortably seated, "to have a look at that little piece of
+land on which grow figs, olives, and grapes. We shall buy it, and break
+our fast in the shade of the oldest fig tree. It is going to be a hot day."</p>
+
+<p>"It is below Rome, and far," said the sullen brigand; "but since the
+barge upon which my friend has set his heart belongs to a near neighbor,
+we shall be killing two birds with one stone. But with all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span>deference,
+excellency, have you really retrieved your fortunes?"</p>
+
+<p>"And yours," said Asabri. "Indeed, I am to-day as rich as ever I was,
+with the exception"&mdash;his eyes twinkled behind his goggles&mdash;"of about a
+hundred and fifty thousand lire."</p>
+
+<p>The sullen brigand whistled; and although the roads were rough, they
+proceeded, thanks to the shock-absorbers on Asabri's car, in complete
+comfort, at a great pace.</p>
+
+<p>In the village nearest to the property upon which the sullen brigand had
+cast his eye, they picked up a notary through whom to effect the purchase.</p>
+
+<p>The little farm was rather stony, but sweet to the eye as a bouquet of
+flowers, with the deep greens of the figs and grapes and the silvery
+greens of the olives. Furthermore, there were roses in the door-yard,
+and the young and childless widow to whom the homestead belonged stood
+among the roses. She was brown and scarlet, and her eyes were black and merry.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, yes, she agreed, she would sell! There was a mortgage on the place.
+She intended to pay that off and have a little over. True, the place
+paid. But, Good Lord, she lived all alone, and she didn't enjoy that!</p>
+
+<p>They invited the pretty widow to luncheon, and she helped them spread
+the cloth under a fig tree that had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> thrown shade for five hundred
+years. Asabri passed the champagne, and they all became very merry
+together. Indeed, the sullen brigand became so merry and happy that he
+no longer addressed Asabri respectfully as "excellency," but gratefully
+and affectionately as "my father."</p>
+
+<p>This one became more and more delighted with the term, until finally he said:</p>
+
+<p>"It is true, that in a sense I am this young man's father, since I
+believe that if I were to advise him to do a certain thing he would do it."</p>
+
+<p>"That is God's truth," cried the sullen brigand; "if he advised me to
+advance single-handed against the hosts of hell, I should do so."</p>
+
+<p>"My son," said Asabri, "our fair guest affirms that upon this beautiful
+little farm she has had everything that she could wish except
+companionship. Are you not afraid that you, in your turn, will here
+suffer from loneliness?" He turned to the pretty widow. "I wish," said
+he, "to address myself to you in behalf of this young man."</p>
+
+<p>The others became very silent. The notary lifted his glass to his lips.
+The widow blushed. Said she:</p>
+
+<p>"I like his looks well enough; but I know nothing about him."</p>
+
+<p>"I can tell you this," said Asabri, "that he has been a man of exemplary
+honesty since&mdash;yesterday,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> and that under the seat of my automobile he
+has, in a leather bag, a fortune of fifty thousand lire."</p>
+
+<p>The three brigands gasped.</p>
+
+<p>"He is determined, in any case," the banker continued, "to purchase your
+little farm; but it seems to me that it would be a beautiful end to a
+story that has not been without a certain aroma of romance if you, my
+fair guest, were, so to speak, to throw yourself into the bargain. Think
+it over. The mortgage lifted, a handsome husband, and plenty of money in
+the bank.... Think it over. And in any case&mdash;the pleasure of a glass of
+wine with you!"</p>
+
+<p>They touched glasses. Across the golden bubbling, smiles leapt.</p>
+
+<p>"Let us," said the second brigand, "leave the pair in question to talk
+the matter over, while the rest of us go and attend to the purchase of my barge."</p>
+
+<p>"Well thought," said Asabri. "My children, we shall be gone about an
+hour. See if, in that time, you cannot grow fond of each other. Perhaps,
+if you took the bag of money into the house and pretended that it
+already belonged to both of you, and counted it over, something might be accomplished."</p>
+
+<p>The youngest brigand caught the sullen one by the sleeve and whispered in his ear.</p>
+
+<p>"If you want her, let her count the money. If you don't, count it yourself."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span></p><p>The second brigand turned to Asabri. "Excellency," he whispered, "you
+are as much my father as his."</p>
+
+<p>"True," said Asabri, "what of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing! Only, the man who owns the barge which I desire to purchase
+has a very beautiful daughter."</p>
+
+<p>Asabri laughed so that for a moment he could not bend over to crank his
+car. And he cried aloud:</p>
+
+<p>"France, France, I thank thee for thy champagne! And I thank thee, O
+Italy, for thy merry hearts and thy suggestive climate!... My son, if
+the bargeman's daughter is to be had for the asking, she is yours. But
+we must tell the father that until recently you have been a very naughty fellow."</p>
+
+<p>They remained with the second brigand long enough to see him exchange a
+kiss of betrothal with the bargeman's daughter, while the bargeman
+busied himself counting the money; and then they returned to see how the
+sullen brigand and the pretty widow were getting on.</p>
+
+<p>The sullen brigand was cutting dead-wood out of a fig tree with a saw.
+His face was supremely happy. The widow stood beneath and directed him.</p>
+
+<p>"Closer to the tree, stupid," she said, "else the wound will not heal properly."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span></p><p>The youngest brigand laid a hand that trembled upon Asabri's arm.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my father," he said, "these doves are already cooing! And it is
+very far to the place where I would be."</p>
+
+<p>But Asabri went first to the fig tree, and he said to the widow:</p>
+
+<p>"Is all well?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," she said, "we have agreed to differ for the rest of our lives. It
+seems that this stupid fellow needs somebody to look after him. And it
+seems to be God's will that that somebody should be I."</p>
+
+<p>"Bless you then, my children," said Asabri; "and farewell! I shall come
+to the wedding."</p>
+
+<p>They returned the notary to his little home in the village; and the fees
+which he was to receive for the documents which he was to draw up made
+him so happy that he flung his arms about his wife, who was rather a
+prim person, and fell to kissing her with the most boisterous good will.</p>
+
+<p>It was dusk when they reached the village in which the sweetheart of the
+youngest brigand lived. Asabri thought that he had never seen a girl
+more exquisite.</p>
+
+<p>"And we have loved each other," said the youngest brigand, his arm about
+her firm, round waist, "since we were children.... I think I am dying, I
+am so happy."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span></p><p>"Shall you buy a farm, a barge, a business?" asked the banker.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever is decided," said the girl, "it will be a paradise."</p>
+
+<p>Her old father came out of the house.</p>
+
+<p>"I have counted the money. It is correct."</p>
+
+<p>Then he rolled his fat eyes heavenward, just as the youngest brigand had
+prophesied, and said: "Bless you, my children!"</p>
+
+<p>"I must be going," said Asabri; "but there is one thing."</p>
+
+<p>Four dark luminous eyes looked into his.</p>
+
+<p>"You have not kissed," said Asabri; "let it be now, so that I may remember."</p>
+
+<p>Without embarrassment, the young brigand and his sweetheart folded their
+arms closely about each other, and kissed each other, once, slowly, with
+infinite tenderness.</p>
+
+<p>"I am nineteen," said the youngest brigand; then, and he looked
+heavenward: "God help us to forget the years that have been wasted!"</p>
+
+<p>Asabri drove toward Rome, his headlights piercing the darkness. The
+champagne was no longer in his blood. He was in a calm, judicial mood.</p>
+
+<p>"To think," he said to himself, "that for a mere matter of a hundred and
+fifty thousand lire, a rich old man can be young again for a day or two!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span></p><p>It was nearly one o'clock when he reached his palace in Rome. Luigi,
+the valet, was sitting up for him, as usual.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the second time in three days," said Luigi, "that you have been
+out all night.... A telegram," he threatened, "would bring the mistress back to Rome."</p>
+
+<p>"Forgive me, old friend," said Asabri, and he leaned on Luigi's
+shoulder; "but I have fallen in love...."</p>
+
+<p>"What!" screamed the valet. "At your age?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is quite true," said Asabri, a little sadly, "that at my age a man
+most easily falls in love&mdash;with life."</p>
+
+<p>"You shall go to bed at once," said Luigi sternly. "I shall prepare a
+hot lemonade, and you shall take five grains of quinine.... You are
+damp.... The mist from the Campagna...."</p>
+
+<p>Asabri yawned in the ancient servitor's face.</p>
+
+<p>"Luigi," he said, "I think I shall buy you a farm and a wife; or a barge
+and a wife...."</p>
+
+<p>"You do, do you?" said Luigi. "And I think you'll take your quinine like
+a Trojan, or I'll know the reason why."</p>
+
+<p>"Everybody regards me as rather an important person," complained Asabri,
+"except you."</p>
+
+<p>"You were seven years old," said Luigi, "when I came to serve you. I
+have aged. But you haven't. You didn't know enough then to come in when
+it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> rained, as the Americans say. You don't now. I would not speak of
+this to others. But to you&mdash;yes&mdash;for your own good."</p>
+
+<p>Asabri smiled blissfully.</p>
+
+<p>"In all the world," he said, "there is only one thing for a man to fear,
+that he will learn to take the world seriously; in other words, that he
+will grow up.... You may bring the hot lemonade and the quinine when
+they are ready."</p>
+
+<p>And then he blew his nose of a Roman emperor; for he had indeed
+contracted a slight cold.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's IT and Other Stories, by Gouverneur Morris
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of IT and Other Stories, by Gouverneur Morris
+
+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: IT and Other Stories
+
+Author: Gouverneur Morris
+
+Release Date: January 30, 2009 [EBook #27934]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IT AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IT
+
+AND OTHER STORIES
+
+BY
+
+GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
+
+AUTHOR OF "THE FOOTPRINT, AND OTHER STORIES,"
+"THE SPREAD EAGLE AND OTHER STORIES," ETC.
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1912
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+Published March, 1912
+
+
+TO ELSIE
+
+                   I
+
+     Crown the heads of better men
+       With lilies and with morning-glories!
+     I'm unworthy of a pen--
+       These are Bread-and-Butter stories.
+          Shall I tell you how I know?
+          Strangers wrote and told me so.
+
+                   II
+
+     He who only toils for fame
+       I pronounce a silly Billy.
+     _I_ can't dine upon a name,
+       Or look dressy in a lily.
+          And--oh shameful truth to utter!--
+          I _won't_ live on bread and butter.
+
+                   III
+
+     Sometimes now (and sometimes then)
+       Meat and wine my soul requires.
+     Satan tempted me--my pen
+       Fills the house with open fires.
+          I _must_ have a horse or two--
+          Babies, oh my Love--and you!
+
+G. M.
+
+AIKEN, _February 10, 1912_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                 PAGE
+_It_                                1
+
+_Two Business Women_               31
+
+_The Trap_                         73
+
+_Sapphira_                        119
+
+_The Bride's Dead_                169
+
+_Holding Hands_                   199
+
+_The Claws of The Tiger_          235
+
+_Growing Up_                      273
+
+_The Battle of Aiken_             297
+
+_An Idyl of Pelham Bay Park_      313
+
+_Back There in the Grass_         337
+
+_Asabri_                          363
+
+
+
+
+IT
+
+
+Prana Beach would be a part of the solid west coast if it wasn't for a
+half circle of the deadliest, double-damned, orchid-haunted black
+morass, with a solid wall of insects that bite, rising out of it. But
+the beach is good dry sand, and the wind keeps the bugs back in the
+swamp. Between the beach and the swamp is a strip of loam and jungle,
+where some niggers live and a god.
+
+I landed on Prana Beach because I'd heard--but it wasn't so and it
+doesn't matter. Anyhow, I landed--all alone; the canoemen wouldn't come
+near enough for me to land dry, at that. Said the canoe would shrivel
+up, like a piece of hide in a fire, if it touched that beach; said
+they'd turn white and be blown away like puffs of smoke. They nearly
+backed away with my stuff; would have if I hadn't pulled a gun on them.
+But they made me wade out and get it myself--thirty foot of rope with
+knots, dynamite, fuses, primers, compass, grub for a week, and--well, a
+bit of skin in a half-pint flask with a rubber and screw-down top. Not
+nice, it wasn't, wading out and back and out and back. There was one
+shark, I remember, came in so close that he grounded, snout out, and
+made a noise like a pig. Sun was going down, looking like a bloody
+murder victim, and there wasn't going to be any twilight. It's an
+uncertain light that makes wading nasty. It might be salt-water soaking
+into my jeans, but with that beastly red light over it, it looked like
+blood.
+
+The canoe backed out to the--you can't call 'em a nautical name. They've
+one big, square sail of crazy-quilt work--raw silk, pieces of rubber
+boots, rattan matting, and grass cloth, all colors, all shapes of
+patches. They point into the wind and then go sideways; and they _don't_
+steer with an oar that Charon discarded thousands of years ago, that's
+painted crimson and raw violet; and the only thing they'd be good for
+would be fancy wood-carpets. Mine, or better, ours, was made of
+satinwood, and was ballasted with scrap-iron, rotten ivory, and ebony.
+There, I've told you what she was like (except for the live
+entomological collection aboard), and you may call her what you please.
+The main point is that she took the canoe aboard, and then disobeyed
+orders. Orders were to lie at anchor (which was a dainty thing of stone,
+all carved) till further orders. But she'd gotten rid of me, and she
+proposed to lie farther off, and come back (maybe) when I'd finished my
+job. So she pointed straight in for where I was standing amid my duds
+and chattels, just as if she was going to thump herself ashore--and then
+she began to slip off sideways like a misbegotten crab, and backward,
+too--until what with the darkness tumbling down, and a point o' palms, I
+lost sight of her. Why didn't I shout, and threaten, and jump up and
+down?
+
+Because I was alone on Prana Beach, between the sea and the swamp. And
+because the god was beginning to get stirred up; and because now that
+I'd gone through six weeks' fever and boils to get where I was, I wished
+I hadn't gotten there. No, I wasn't scared. You wouldn't be if you were
+alone on a beach, after sundown, deserted you may say, your legs shaky
+with being wet, and your heart hot and mad as fire because you couldn't
+digest the things you had to put into your stomach, and if you'd heard
+that the beach was the most malodorous, ghoul-haunted beach of the seas,
+and if just as you were saying to yourself that _you_ for one didn't
+believe a word of it--if, I say, just then _It_ began to cut loose--back
+of you--way off to the left--way off to the right--why you'd have been
+scared.
+
+It wasn't the noise it made so much as the fact that it could make any
+noise at all.... Shut your mouth tight and hum on the letter
+m-mmmmmmm--that's it exactly. Only It's was ten times as loud, and
+vibrating. The vibrations shook me where I stood.
+
+With the wind right, that humming must have carried a mile out to sea;
+and that's how it had gotten about that there was a god loose on Prana
+Beach. It was an It-god, the niggers all agreed. You'll have seen 'em
+carved on paddles--shanks of a man, bust of a woman, nose of a
+snapping-turtle, and mouth round like the letter O. But the Prana Beach
+one didn't show itself that first night. It hummed
+awhile--m-m-m-m-m--oh, for maybe a minute--stopped and began
+again--jumped a major fifth, held it till it must have been half burst
+for breath, and then went down the scale an octave, hitting every note
+in the middle, and giving the effect of one damned soul meeting another
+out in eternity and yelling for pure joy and malice. The finish was a
+whoop on the low note so loud that it lifted my hair. Then the howl was
+cut off as sharp and neat and sudden as I've seen a Chinaman's head
+struck from his body by the executioner at Canton--Big Wan--ever seen
+him work? Very pretty. Got to perfection what golfers call "the follow
+through."
+
+Yes. I sauntered into the nearest grove, whistling "Yankee Doodle,"
+lighted a fire, cooked supper, and turned in for the night. Not!... I
+took to the woods all right, but on my stomach. And I curled up so tight
+that my knees touched my chin. Ever try it? It's the nearest thing to
+having some one with you, when you're cold and alone. Adam must have
+had a hard-shell back and a soft-shell stomach, like an armadillo--how
+does it run?--"dillowing in his armor." Because in moments of real or
+imaginary danger it's the first instinct of Adam's sons to curl up, and
+of Eve's daughters. Ever touch a Straits Settlement Jewess on the back
+of the hand with a lighted cigarette?...
+
+As I'm telling you, I curled up good and tight, head and knees on the
+grub sack, Colt and dynamite handy, hair standing perfectly straight up,
+rope round me on the ground in a circle--I had a damn-fool notion that
+It mightn't be allowed to cross knotted ropes, and I shook with chills
+and nightmares and cramps. I could only lie on my left side, for the
+boils on my right. I couldn't keep my teeth quiet. I couldn't do
+anything that a Christian ought to do, with a heathen It-god strolling
+around. Yes, ... the thing came out on the beach, in full view of where
+I was, but I couldn't see it, because of the pitch dark. It came out,
+and made noises with its feet in the sand--up and down--up and
+down--scrunch--scrunch--something like a man walking, and not in a
+hurry. Something like it, but not exactly. The It's feet (they have
+seven toes according to the nigger paddles) didn't touch the ground as
+often as a man's would have done in walking the distance. There'd be one
+scrunch and then quite a long pause before the next. It sounded like a
+very, very big man, taking the very longest steps he could. But there
+wasn't any more mouth work. And for that I'm still offering up prayers
+of thanksgiving; for, if--say when it was just opposite where I lay, and
+not fifty yards off--it had let off anything sudden and loud, I'd have
+been killed as dead as by a stroke of lightning.
+
+Well, I was just going to break, when day did. Broke so sweet, and calm,
+and pretty; all pink landward over the black jungle, all smooth and
+baby-blue out to sea. Till the sun showed, there was a land breeze--not
+really a breeze, just a stir, a cool quiet moving of spicy smells from
+one place to another--nothing more than that. Then the sea breeze rose
+and swept the sky and ocean till they were one and the same blue, the
+blue that comes highest at Tiffany's; and little puffs of shore birds
+came in on the breeze and began to run up and down on the beach, jabbing
+their bills into the damp sand and flapping their little wings. It was
+like Eden--Eden-by-the-Sea--I wouldn't have been surprised if Eve had
+come out of the woods yawning and stretching herself. And I wouldn't
+have cared--if I'd been shaved.
+
+I took notice of all this peacefulness and quiet, twenty grains of
+quinine, some near food out of a can, and then had a good look around
+for a good place to stop, in case I got started running.
+
+I fixed on a sandy knoll that had a hollow in the top of it, and one
+twisted beach ebony to shade the hollow. At the five points of a star
+with the knoll for centre, but at safe blasting distance, I planted
+dynamite, primed and short-fused. If anything chased me I hoped to have
+time to spring one of these mines in passing, tumble into my hollow and
+curl up, with my fingers in my ears.
+
+I didn't believe in heathen gods when the sea and sky were that
+exclusive blue; but I had learned before I was fifteen years old that
+day is invariably followed by night, and that between the two there is a
+time toward the latter end of which you can believe anything. It was
+with that dusky period in view that I mined the approaches to my little
+villa at Eden-by-the-Sea.
+
+Well, after that I took the flask that had the slip of skin in it,
+unscrewed the top, pulled the rubber cork, and fished the skin out, with
+a salvage hook that I made by unbending and rebending a hair-pin....
+Don't smile. I've always had a horror of _accidentally_ finding a
+hair-pin in my pocket, and so I carry one on purpose.... See? Not an
+airy, fairy Lillian, but an honest, hard-working Jane ... good to clean
+a pipe with. So I fished out the slip of skin (with the one I had then)
+and spread it out on my knee, and translated what was written on it, for
+the thousandth time.
+
+Can you read that? The old-fashioned S's mix you up. It's straight
+modern Italian. I don't know what the ink's made of, but the skin's the
+real article--it's taken from just above the knee where a man can get at
+himself best. It runs this way, just like a "personal" in the _Herald_,
+only more so:
+
+
+     Prisoner on Prana Beach will share treasure with rescuing party.
+     Come at once.
+
+
+Isn't that just like an oil-well-in-the-South-west-Company's prospectus?
+"Only a little stock left; price of shares will be raised shortly to
+thirteen cents."
+
+I bit. It was knowing what kind of skin the ad. was written on that got
+me. I'd seen cured human hide before. In Paris they've got a
+Constitution printed on some that was peeled off an aristocrat in the
+Revolution, and I've seen a seaman's upper arm and back, with the
+tattoos, in a bottle of alcohol in a museum on Fourteenth Street, New
+York--boys under fourteen not admitted. I wasn't a day over eight when I
+saw those tattoos. However....
+
+To get that prisoner loose was the duty that I owed to humanity; to
+share the treasure was the duty that I owed to myself. So I got together
+some niggers, and the fancy craft I've described (on shares with a
+Singapore Dutchman, who was too fat to come himself, and too much
+married), and made a start.... You're bothered by my calling them
+niggers. Is that it? Well, the Mason and Dixon line ran plump through
+my father's house; but mother's room being in the south gable, I was
+born, as you may say, in the land of cotton, and consequently in my
+bright Southern lexicon the word nigger is defined as meaning anything
+black or brown. I think I said that Prana is on the west coast, and that
+may have misled you. But Africa isn't the only God-forsaken place that
+has a west coast; how about Staten Island?
+
+Malaysian houses are built mostly of reed and thatch work standing in
+shallow water on bamboo stalks, highly inflammable and subject to
+alterations by a blunt pocket-knife. So a favorite device for holding a
+man prisoner is a hole in the ground too deep and sheer for him to climb
+out of. That's why I'd brought a length of knotted rope. The dynamite
+was instead of men, which we hadn't means to hire or transport, and who
+wouldn't have landed on that beach anyhow, unless drowned and washed up.
+Now dynamite wouldn't be a pleasant thing to have round your club or
+your favorite restaurant; but in some parts of the world it makes the
+best company. It will speak up for you on occasion louder than your best
+friend, and it gives you the feeling of being Jove with a handful of
+thunderbolts. My plan was to find in what settlement there was the most
+likely prisoner, drive the inhabitants off for two or three days--one
+blast would do that, I calculated (especially if preceded and followed
+by blowings on a pocket siren)--let my rope down into his well, lift the
+treasure with him, and get away with it.
+
+This was a straight ahead job--except for the god. And in daylight it
+didn't seem as if It could be such an awful devil of a god. But It did
+have the deuce of a funny spoor, as I made haste to find out. The thing
+had five toes, like a man, which was a relief. But unlike nigger feet,
+the thumb toe and the index weren't spread. The thumb bent sharply
+inward, and mixed its pad mark with that of the index. Furthermore,
+though the impress of the toes was very deep (down-slanting like a man
+walking on tiptoe), the heel marks were also very deep, and between toe
+and heel marks there were no other marks at all. In other words, the
+thing's feet must have been arched like a croquet wicket. And It's heels
+were not rounded; they were _perfectly_ round--absolute circles they
+were, about the diameter of the smallest sized cans in which Capstan
+tobacco is sold. If ever a wooden idol had stopped squatting and gone
+out for a stroll on a beach, it would have left just such a track. Only
+it might not have felt that it had to take such peculiarly long steps.
+
+My knoll being near the south end of Prana Beach (pure patriotism I
+assure you), my village hunts must be to the northward. I had one good
+hunt, the first day, and I got near some sort of a village, a jungle
+one built over a pool, as I found afterward. The reason I gave up
+looking that day was because the god got between me and where I was
+trying to get; burst out humming, you might say, right in my face,
+though I couldn't see It, and directly I had turned and was tiptoeing
+quietly away (I remember how the tree trunks looked like teeth in a
+comb, or the nearest railroad ties from the window of an express train),
+It set up the most passionate, vindictive, triumphant vocal fireworks
+ever heard out of hell. It made black noises like Niagara Falls, and
+white noises higher than Pike's Peak. It made leaps, lighting on tones
+as a carpenter's hammer lights on nails. It ran up and down the major
+and minor diatonics, up and down the chromatic, with the speed and fury
+of a typhoon, and the attention to detail of Paderewski--at his best,
+when he makes the women faint--and with the power and volume of a church
+organ with all the stops pulled out. It shook and It trilled and It
+quavered, and It gargled as if It had a barrel of glycothermoline in
+It's mouth and had been exposed to diphtheria, and It finished--just as
+I tripped on a snake and fell--with a round bar of high C sound, that
+lasted a good minute (or until I was a quarter of a mile beyond where I
+had fallen), and was the color of butter, and could have been cut with a
+knife. And It stopped short--biff--just as if It had been chopped off.
+
+That was the end of my village hunting. Let the prisoner of Prana Beach
+drown in his hole when the rains come, let his treasure remain unlifted
+till Gabriel blows his trumpet; but let yours truly bask in the shade of
+the beach ebony, hidden from view, and fortified by dynamite--until the
+satinwood shallop should see fit to return and take him off.
+
+Except for a queer dream (queer because of the time and place, and
+because there seemed absolutely nothing to suggest it to the mind
+asleep), I put in six hours' solid sleep. In my dream I was in Lombardy
+in a dark loft where there were pears laid out to ripen; and we were
+frightened and had to keep creepy-mouse still--because the father had
+come home sooner than was expected, and was milking his goats in the
+stable under the loft, and singing, which showed that he was in liquor,
+and not his usual affable, bland self. I could hear him plainly in my
+dream, tearing the heart out of that old folk-song called _La
+Smortina_--"The Pale Girl":
+
+
+     "T' ho la scia to e son contento
+     Non m'in cresca niente, niente
+     Altro giovine hogia in mente
+     Pin belino assai di te."
+
+
+And I woke up tingling with the remembered fear (it was a mixed feeling,
+half fright, and half an insane desire to burst out laughing to see what
+the old man would do), and I looked over the rim of my hat, and there
+walking toward me, in the baby-blue and pink of the bright dawn (but a
+big way off), came a straggling line of naked niggers, headed by the
+It-god, Itself.
+
+One look told me that, one look at a great bulk of scarletness, that
+walked upright like a man. I didn't look twice, I scuttled out to my
+nearest mine, lighted the fuse, tumbled back into the hollow, fingers in
+ears, face screwed up as tight as a face can be screwed, and waited.
+
+When it was over, and things had stopped falling, I looked out again.
+The tropic dawn remained as before, but the immediate landscape was
+somewhat altered for the worse, and in the distance were neither niggers
+nor the god. It is possible that I stuck my thumbs into my armpits and
+waggled my fingers. I don't remember. But it's no mean sensation to have
+pitted yourself against a strange god, with perfectly round heels, and
+to have won out.
+
+About noon, though, the god came back, fortified perhaps by reflection,
+and more certainly by a nigger who walked behind him with a spear.
+You've seen the donkey boys in Cairo make the donkeys trot?... This time
+I put my trust in the Colt forty-five; and looked the god over, as he
+came reluctantly nearer and nearer, singing a magic.
+
+Do you know the tragedian walk as taken off on the comic opera stage,
+the termination of each strutting, dragging step accentuated by cymbals
+smashed together F-F-F? That was how the god walked. He was all in
+scarlet, with a long feather sticking straight up from a scarlet cap.
+And the magic he sang (now that you knew the sounds he made were those
+of a tenor voice, you knew that it was a glorious tenor voice) was a
+magic out of "Aida." It was the magic that what's-his-name sings when he
+is appointed commander-in-chief of all the Egyptian forces. Now the
+niggers may have thought that their god's magics were stronger than my
+dynamite. But the god, though very, very simple, was not so simple as
+that. He was an Italian colored man, black bearded, and shaped like
+Caruso, only more so, if that is possible; and he sang, because he was a
+singing machine, but he couldn't have talked. I'll bet on that. He was
+too plumb afraid.
+
+When he reached the hole that the dynamite had made in the landscape--I
+showed myself; trying to look as much like a dove of peace as possible.
+
+"Come on alone," I called in Italian, "and have a bite of lunch."
+
+That stopped his singing, but I had to repeat. Well he had an argument
+with the nigger, that finished with all the gestures that two monkeys
+similarly situated would have made at each other, and after a time the
+nigger sat down, and the god came on alone, puffing and indignant.
+
+We talked in Dago, but I'll give the English of it, so's not to appear
+to be showing off.
+
+"Who and what in the seventh circle of hell _are_ you?" I asked.
+
+He seemed offended that I should not have known. But he gave his name,
+sure of his effect. "Signor ----" and the name sounded like that tower
+in Venice that fell down the other day.
+
+"You don't mean it!" I exclaimed joyfully. "Be seated," and, I added,
+being silly with joy and relief at having my awful devil turn into a
+silly child--"there may be some legacy--though trifling."
+
+Well, he sat down, and stuck his short, immense hirsute legs out, all
+comfy, and I, remembering the tracks on the beach, had a look at his
+feet. And I turned crimson with suppressed laughter. He had wooden
+cylinders three inches high strapped to his bare heels. They made him
+five feet five inches high instead of five feet two. They were just such
+heels (only clumsier and made of wood instead of cork and crimson
+morocco or silk) as _Siegfried_ wears for mountain climbing, dragon
+fighting, or other deeds of derring-do. And with these heels to guide
+me, I sighed, and said:
+
+"Signor Recent-Venetian-Tower, you have the most beautiful pure golden
+tenor voice that I have ever heard in my life."
+
+Have you ever been suddenly embraced by a pile-driver, and kissed on
+both cheeks by a blacking-brush? I have. Then he held me by the
+shoulders at arm's length, and looked me in the eyes as if I had been a
+long-lost son returned at last. Then he gathered a kiss in his finger
+tips and flung it to the heavens. Then he asked if by any chance I had
+any spaghetti with me. He cried when I said that I had not; but quietly,
+not harassingly. And then we got down to real business, and found out
+about each other.
+
+_He_ was the prisoner of Prana Beach. The treasure that he had to share
+with his rescuer was his voice. Two nights a week during the season, at
+two thousand a night. But--There was a great big But.
+
+Signor What-I-said-before, his voice weakened by pneumonia, had taken a
+long travelling holiday to rest up. But his voice, instead of coming
+back, grew weaker and weaker, driving him finally into a suicidal
+artistic frenzy, during which he put on his full suit of evening
+clothes, a black pearl shirt stud, a tall silk hat, in the dead of
+night, and flung himself from the stern of a P. & O. boat into the sea.
+He had no knowledge of swimming and expected to drown at once. But he
+was not built for drowning. The laws of buoyancy and displacement caused
+him to float upon his back, high out of the water, like an empty
+barrel. Nor was the water into which he had fallen as tepid as he had
+expected. From his description, with its accompaniment of shudderings
+and shiverings, the temperature must have been as low as 80 deg.
+Fahrenheit, which is pretty sharp for dagoes. Anyhow, the double shock
+of the cold and of not drowning instantly acted on his vocal chords.
+Without even trying, he said, he knew that his voice had come back.
+Picture the poor man's despair--overboard in the ocean, wanting to die
+because he had nothing to live for, and suddenly discovering that he had
+everything to live for. He asserts that he actually forgot the cold, and
+thought only of how to preserve that glorious instrument, his voice; not
+for himself but for mankind. But he could not think out a way, and he
+asserted that a passion of vain weeping and delirium, during which he
+kicked himself warm, was followed by a noble and godlike calm, during
+which, lying as easily upon the sea as on a couch, and inspired by the
+thought that some ear might catch the notes and die the happier for it,
+he lifted his divine voice and sang a swan song. After that he sang
+twenty-nine others. And then, in the very midst of _La Bella Napoli_,
+with which he intended to close (fearing to strain his voice if he sang
+any more), he thought of sharks.
+
+Spurred by that thought, he claims to have kicked and beaten with his
+hands until he was insensible. Otherwise, he would, he said, have
+continued to float about placidly, singing swan songs at intervals
+until, at last, thinned by starvation to the sinking point, he would
+have floated no more.
+
+To shorten up. Signor You-know-what, either owing to his struggles, or
+to the sea breeze pressing against his stomach, came ashore on Prana
+Beach; was pounced upon by the niggers, stripped of his glad rags (the
+topper had been lost in the shuffle), and dropped into a hole eight feet
+deep, for safe-keeping. It was in this hole, buried in sand, that he
+found the flask I have told you about. Well, one day, for he had a bit
+of talent that way, he fell to sketching on his legs, knees, upper thigh
+and left forearm, using for ink something black that they had given him
+for breakfast. That night it rained; but next morning his drawings were
+as black and sharp as when he had made them; this, coupled with the
+flask, furnished him with an idea, a very forlorn and hopeless one, but
+an idea for all that. He had, however, nothing to write his C Q D on but
+himself, none of which (for he held himself in trust for his Maker as a
+complete whole, he explained) he intended to part with.
+
+It was in trying to climb out of the hole that he tore a flap of skin
+from his left thigh just above the knee, clean off, except for one
+thread by which it hung. In less than two days he had screwed up his
+courage to breaking that thread with a sudden jerk. He cured his bit of
+hide in a novel way. Every morning he cried on it, and when the tears
+had dried, leaving their minute residue of salt, he would work the raw
+skin with his thumb and a bit of stick he had found. Then a nigger boy,
+one beast of a hot day, lowered him a gourd of sea-water as a joke, and
+Signor What-we-agreed-on, made salt of that while the sun shone, and
+finished his job of tanning.
+
+The next time he was given a black breakfast, he wrote his hurry-call
+message and corked it into the flask. And there only remained the
+somewhat herculean task of getting that flask flung into the sea.
+
+You'll never believe how it got there finally. But I'll tell you for all
+that. A creek flowed near the dungeon in which the famous tenor was
+incarcerated. And one night of cloud-burst that creek burst its
+cerements, banks I mean, filled the singing man's prison in two jerks of
+a lamb's tail, and floated both him and his flask out of it. He grounded
+as usual, but the flask must have been rushed down to the sea. For in
+the sea it was found, calmly bobbing, and less than two years later. A
+nigger fisherman found it, and gave it to me, in exchange for a
+Waterbury watch. He tried to make me take his daughter instead, but I
+wouldn't.
+
+Signor What-you-would-forget-if-I-told-you wasn't put back in his
+dungeon till the rainy season was at an end. Instead he was picketed. A
+rope ran from his wrists, which were tied behind his back, and was
+inserted through the handles (it had a pair of them like ears just above
+the trunnions) of a small bronze cannon, that had Magellan's name and
+the arms of Spain engraved around the touch-hole. And thus picketed, he
+was rained on, joked on, and abused until dry weather. Then, it was the
+first happiness that he had had among them, they served him one day with
+a new kind of fish that had begun to run in the creek. It tasted like
+Carlton sole, he said. And it made him feel so good that, being quite by
+himself and the morning blue and warm, he began, sitting on his little
+cannon, to hum an aria. Further inspirited by his own tunefulness, he
+rose (and of course struck an attitude) and opened his mouth and sang.
+
+Oh, how good it was to hear--as he put it himself--after all those
+months of silence!
+
+Well, the people he belonged to came running up with eyes like saucers
+and mouths open, and they squatted at his feet in a semicircle, and
+women came and children. They had wonder in their faces and fear. Last
+came the old chief, who was too old to walk, and was carried always in a
+chair which two of his good-natured sons-in-law made with their hands.
+And the old chief, when he had listened awhile with his little bald
+monkey head cocked on one side, signed to be put down. And he stood on
+his feet and walked.
+
+And he took out a little khris and walked over to the Divo, and cut the
+ropes that bound him, and knelt before him and kowtowed, and pressed the
+late prisoner's toes with his forehead. Then--and this was terribly
+touching, my informant said, and reminded him of St. Petersburg--one of
+the old chief's granddaughters, a little brown slip of a girl, slender
+and shapely as a cigar, flung her arms round his neck, and hung--just
+hung. When they tried to get her away she kicked at them, but she never
+so much as once changed the expression of her upturned face, which was
+one of adoration. Well, the people hollered and made drums of their
+cheeks and beat on them, and the first thing Signor Recent-Disaster knew
+he was being dressed in a scarlet coat that had belonged to a British
+colonel dead this hundred years. The girl by now had had to let go and
+had dropped at his feet like a ripe guava--and he was being ushered into
+the largest bamboo-legged house that the place boasted, and told as
+plainly as round eyes, gesticulations, and moans can, that the house was
+his to enjoy. Then they began to give him things. First his own dress
+suit, ruined by sea-water and shrinking, his formerly boiled shirt, his
+red silk underwear still wearable, his black pearl stud and every
+stiver of gold, silver, copper, and English banknotes that had been
+found in his pockets. They gave him knives, rough silver bangles, heaps
+of elaborate mats, a handful of rather disappointing pearls, a scarlet
+head-dress with a feather that had been a famous chief's, a gun without
+a lock, and, what pleased him most (must have), a bit of looking-glass
+big enough to see half of his face in at a time. They allowed him to
+choose his own house-keeper; and, although several beauties were knocked
+down in the ensuing riot, he managed to satisfy them that his
+unalterable choice rested upon the little lady who had been the most
+convincing in her recognition of his genius, and--what's the
+line?--"Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die."
+
+Well, he offered to put me up, and show me how the gods keep house. I
+counter-offered to keep him with me, by force of dynamite, carry him
+back to civilization, and go shares on his voice, as per circular. And
+this is where the big But comes in. My offer was pestilential; he
+shunned it.
+
+"You shall have my black pearl stud for your trouble," he said. "I
+bought her years ago in a pawnshop at Aix. But _me_--no. I have found my
+niche, and my temple. But you shall be the judge of that."
+
+"You don't _want_ to escape?"
+
+His mouth curled in scorn at the very idea.
+
+"Try to think of how much spaghetti you could buy for a song."
+
+His eyes and mouth twitched. But he sighed, and shook his head.
+
+"Do you know," said he, "when you demonstrated against us with your
+dynamite it was instantly concluded that you were some new kind of a god
+come to inhabit the beach. It was proposed that I go against you singing
+a charm that should drive you away. But, as you saw, I came only at the
+spear's point. Do you think I was afraid? I was; but not of your
+godship. I had seen your tracks, I had seen the beach rise to your
+explosive, and I knew that as one Christian gentleman I had nothing on
+the lines of violence to fear from another. Your explosion was like a
+note, asking me when I should next call to bring fewer attendants. I
+_was_ afraid; I was afraid that you were not one, alone, but several,
+and that you would compel me to return with you to a world in which,
+take it for all and all, the good things, such as restaurants,
+artificial heat, Havana cigars, and Steinway pianos, are nullified by
+climatic conditions unsuited to vocal chords, fatal jealousies among
+members of the same artistic professions, and a public that listens but
+does not hear; or that hears and does not listen. But you shall stop
+with me a few days, in my house. You shall see for yourself that among
+all artists I alone enjoy an appreciation and solicitude that are better
+than gold."
+
+Signor Shall-we-let-it-go-at-that had not lied to me. And all he asked
+was, with many apologies, that I should treat him with a certain
+reverence, a little as if he were a conqueror. So all the way to the
+village I walked two paces right flank rear, and wore a solemn and
+subdued expression. My host approached the dwellings of his people with
+an exaggeration of tragi-comic stride, dragging his high-heeled feet as
+Henry Irving used, raising and advancing his chest to the bursting
+point, and holding his head so proudly that the perpendicular feather of
+his cap leaned backward at a sharp angle. With his scarlet soldier's
+coat, all burst along the seams, and not meeting by a yard over his red
+silk undershirt, with his bit of broken mirror dangling at his waist
+like a lady's jewelled "vanity set," with his china-ink black mustache
+and superb beard, he presented for all the purposes of the time and
+place an appearance in keeping with the magnificence of his voice and of
+his dreams.
+
+When we got among the houses, from which came a great peeping of shy
+eyes, the Signor suddenly raised his fingers to his throat and sounded a
+shocking b-r-rr-rrr of alarm and anxiety. Then there arose a murmur,
+almost pitiful it was so heartfelt, as of bees who fear an irreparable
+tragedy in the hive. The old chief came out of the council-house upon
+the hands of his good-natured sons-in-law, and he was full of tenderness
+and concern. I saw my friend escorted into his own dwelling by ladies
+who sighed and commiserated. But already the call for help had reached
+the tenor's slip of a wife; and she, with hands that shook, was
+preparing a compress of leaves that smelt of cinnamon and cloves. I,
+too, showed solicitude, and timidly helped my conqueror to the heaped
+mats upon which he was wont to recline in the heat of the day. He had
+made himself a pair of very round terrified eyes, and he had not taken
+the compress from his throat. But he spoke quietly, and as one possessed
+of indomitable fortitude. In Malay he told his people that it was
+"nothing, just a little--brrr--soreness and thickening," and he let slip
+such a little moan as monkeys make. To me he spoke in Italian.
+
+"I shall have to submit to a bandage," said he. "But there is nothing
+the matter with my throat" (slight monkey moan here for benefit of
+adorers), "absolutely nothing. I have invented a slight soreness so--so
+that you could see for yourself ... so that you could see for
+yourself.... If you were to count those here assembled and those
+assembled without, you would number our entire population, including
+children and babes in arms" (a slight moan while compress is being
+readjusted over Adam's apple by gentle, tremulous brown fingers), "and
+among these, my friend, are no dissenters. There is none here to stand
+forth and say that on Tuesday night Signor And-he-pronounced-it's
+singing was lacking in those golden tones for which we used to look to
+him. His voice, indeed, is but a skeleton of its former self, and shall
+we say that the public must soon tire of a singer with so pronounced a
+tendency to flat?
+
+"Here in this climate," he continued, "my voice by dint of constant and
+painstaking care and practice has actually improved. I should not have
+said that this was possible; but a man must believe experience.... And
+then these dear, amiable people are one in their acclaim of me; although
+I sometimes grieve, not for myself, but for them, to think that they can
+never _really_ know what they've got...."
+
+
+I sometimes wonder how the god of Prana Beach will be treated when he
+begins to age and to lose his voice. It worries me--a little.
+
+The black pearl stud? Of course not, you wretched materialist. I sold it
+in the first good market I came to. No good ever came of material
+possessions, and always much payment of storage bills. But I have a
+collection of memories that I am fond of.
+
+Still, on second thought, and if I had the knack of setting them
+straight on paper, I'd part even with them for a consideration,
+especially if I felt that I could reach such an appreciative audience as
+that of Prana Beach, which sits upon its heels in worship and humility
+and listens to the divine fireworks of Signor I-have-forgotten-too.
+
+
+
+
+TWO BUSINESS WOMEN
+
+
+They engaged themselves to be married when they were so young they
+couldn't tell anybody about it for fear of being laughed at; and if I
+mentioned their years to you, you would laugh at me. They thought they
+were full-grown, but they weren't even that. When they were finally
+married they couldn't either of them have worn the clothes they got
+engaged in. The day they got engaged they wore suits made of white
+woollen blankets, white knitted toques, and white knitted sashes. It was
+because they were dressed exactly alike that they first got excited
+about each other. And Cynthia said: "You look just like a snowman." And
+G. G.--which was his strange name--said: "You look just like a
+snowbird."
+
+G. G. was in Saranac for his health. Cynthia had come up for the
+holidays to skate and to skee and to coast, and to get herself engaged
+before she was full-grown to a boy who was so delicate that climate was
+more important for him than education. They met first at the rink. And
+it developed that if you crossed hands with G. G. and skated with him
+you skated almost as well as he did. He could teach a girl to waltz in
+five minutes; and he had a radiant laugh that almost moved you to tears
+when you went to bed at night and got thinking about it. Cynthia had
+never seen a boy with such a beautiful round head and such beautiful
+white teeth and such bright red cheeks. She always said that she loved
+him long before he loved her. As a matter of fact, it happened to them
+both right away. As one baby, unabashed and determined, embraces a
+strange baby--and is embraced--so, from their first meeting in the great
+cold stillness of the North Woods, their young hearts snuggled together.
+
+G. G. was different from other boys. To begin with, he had been born at
+sea. Then he had lived abroad and learned the greatest quantity of
+foreign languages and songs. Then he had tried a New England
+boarding-school and had been hurt playing games he was too frail to
+play. And doctors had stethoscoped him and shaken their heads over him.
+And after that there was much naming of names which, instead of
+frightening him, were magic to his ear--Arizona, California,
+Saranac--but, because G. G.'s father was a professional man and
+perfectly square and honest, there wasn't enough money to send G. G. far
+from New York and keep him there and visit him every now and then. So
+Saranac was the place chosen for him to get well in; and it seemed a
+little hard, because there was almost as much love of sunshine and
+warmth and flowers and music in G. G. as there was patience and courage.
+
+The day they went skeeing together--which was the day after they had
+skated together--he told Cynthia all about himself, very simply and
+naturally, as a gentleman farmer should say: "This is the dairy; this is
+the blacksmith shop; this is the chicken run." And the next day, very
+early, when they stood knee-deep in snow, armed with shot-guns and
+waiting for some dogs that thought they were hounds to drive rabbits for
+them to shoot at, he told her that nothing mattered so long as you were
+happy and knew that you were happy, because when these two stars came
+into conjunction you were bound to get well.
+
+A rabbit passed. And G. G. laid his mitten upon his lips and shook his
+head; and he whispered:
+
+"I wouldn't shoot one for anything in the world."
+
+And she said: "Neither would I."
+
+Then she said: "If you don't shoot why did you come?"
+
+"Oh, Miss Snowbird," he said, "don't I look why I came? Do I have to say
+it?"
+
+He looked and she looked. And their feet were getting colder every
+moment and their hearts warmer. Then G. G. laughed aloud--bright, sudden
+music in the forest. Snow, balanced to the fineness of a hair, fell
+from the bowed limbs of trees. Then there was such stillness as may be
+in Paradise when souls go up to the throne to be forgiven. Then, far
+off, one dog that thought he was a hound began to yap and thought he was
+belling; but still G. G. looked into the snowbird's eyes and she into
+his, deeper and deeper, until neither had any secret of soul from the
+other. So, upon an altar cloth, two wax candles burn side by side, with
+clear, pure light.
+
+Cynthia had been well brought up, but she came of rich, impatient stock,
+and never until the present moment had she thought very seriously about
+God. Now, however, when she saw the tenderness there was in G. G.'s eyes
+and the smile of serene joyousness that was upon his lips, she
+remembered the saying that God has made man--and boys--in His image--and
+understood what it meant.
+
+She said: "I know why you think you've come."
+
+"Think?" he said. "Think!"
+
+And then the middle ends of his eyebrows rose--all tender and quizzical;
+and with one mitten he clutched at his breast--just over his heart. And
+he said:
+
+"If only I could get it out I would give it to you!"
+
+Cynthia, too, began to look melting tender and wondrous quizzical; and
+she bent her right arm forward and plucked at its sleeve as if she were
+looking for something. Then, in a voice of dismay:
+
+"Only three days ago it was still there," she said; "and now it's
+gone--I've lost it."
+
+"Oh!" said G. G. "You don't suspect me of having purloined--" His voice
+broke.
+
+"We're only kids," said Cynthia.
+
+"Yes," said he; "but you're the dearest kid!"
+
+"Since you've taken my heart," said she, "you'll not want to give it
+back, will you? I think that would break it."
+
+"I oughtn't to have taken it!" said G. G.
+
+And then on his face she saw the first shadow that ever he had let her
+see of doubt and of misgiving.
+
+"Listen!" he said. "My darling! I think that I shall get well.... I
+think that, once I am well, I shall be able to work very hard. I have
+nothing. I love you so that I think even angels don't want to do right
+more than I do. Is that anything to offer? Not very much."
+
+"Nobody in all the world," said she, "will ever have the chance to offer
+me anything else--just because I'm a kid doesn't mean that I don't know
+the look of forever when I see it."
+
+"Is it really forever?" he said. "For you too?"
+
+"For me--surely!"
+
+"Ah," said he, "what shall I think of to promise you?"
+
+His face was a flash of ecstasy.
+
+"You don't even have to promise that you will get well," she said. "I
+know you will try your hardest. No matter what happens--we're final--and
+I shall stick to you always, and nothing shall take you from me, and
+nobody.... When I am of age I shall tell my papa about us and then we
+shall be married to each other! And meanwhile you shall write to me
+every day and I shall write to you three times every day!" Her breath
+came like white smoke between her parted lips and she stood valiant and
+sturdy in the snow--a strong, resolute girl, built like a
+boy--clean-cut, crystal-pure, and steel-true. A shot sounded and there
+came to them presently the pungent, acid smell of burnt powder.
+
+"And we shall never hurt things or kill them," said G. G. "And every day
+when I've been good I shall kiss your feet and your hands."
+
+"And when I've been good," she said, "you'll smile at me the way you're
+smiling now--and it won't be necessary to die and go to Heaven to see
+what the gentlemen angels look like."
+
+"But," cried G. G., "whoever heard of going to Heaven? It comes to
+people. It's here."
+
+"And for us," she said, "it's come to stay."
+
+All the young people came to the station to see Cynthia off and G. G.
+had to content himself with looking things at her. And then he went back
+to his room and undressed and went to bed. Because for a week he had
+done all sorts of things that he shouldn't have done, just to be with
+Cynthia--all the last day he had had fever and it had been very hard for
+him to look like a joyous boy angel--he knew by experience that he was
+in for a "time." It is better that we leave him behind closed doors with
+his doctors and his temperature. We may knock every morning and ask how
+he is, and we shall be told that he is no better. He was even delirious
+at times. And it is only worth while going into this setback of G. G's
+because there are miracles connected with it--his daily letter to
+Cynthia.
+
+Each day she had his letter--joyous, loving, clearly writ, and full of
+flights into silver-lined clouds and the plannings of Spanish castles.
+Each day G. G. wrote his letter and each day he descended a little
+farther into the Valley of the Shadow, until at last he came to Death
+Gate--and then rested, a voyager undecided whether to go on or to go
+back. Who may know what it cost him to write his letter, sitting there
+at the roadside!
+
+His mother was with him. It was she who took the letter from his hands
+when he sank back into his pillows; and they thought for a little that
+he had gone from that place--for good and all. It was she who put it
+into the envelope and who carried it with her own hands to the
+post-office. Because G. G. had said: "To get there, it must go by the
+night's mail, Mumsey."
+
+G. G.'s mother didn't read the letter; but you may be sure she noted
+down the name and address in her heart of hearts, and that for the girl
+who seemed to mean so much to G. G. she developed upon the spot a
+heavenly tenderness, mixed with a heavenly jealousy.
+
+
+II
+
+One day there came to G. G., in convalescence--it was after his mother
+had gone back to New York--a great, thick package containing photographs
+and a letter. I think the letter contained rouge--because it made G.
+G.'s cheeks so red.
+
+Cynthia had collected all the pictures she could find of herself in her
+father's house and sent them to G. G. There were pictures of her in the
+longest baby clothes and in the shortest. There were pictures posed for
+occasions, pictures in fancy clothes, and a quart of kodaks. He had her
+there on his knees--riding, driving, diving, skating, walking, sitting
+on steps, playing with dogs, laughing, looking sad, talking, dimpling,
+smiling. There were pictures that looked right at G. G., no matter at
+what angle he held them. There were pictures so delicious of her that
+he laughed aloud for delight.
+
+All the stages of her life passed before his eyes--over and over--all
+day long; and, instead of growing more and more tired, he grew more and
+more refreshed. He made up his spotless mind to be worthy of her and to
+make, for her to bear, a name of which nobody should be able to say
+anything unkind.
+
+If G. G. had had very little education he had made great friends with
+some of the friendliest and most valuable books that had ever been
+written. And he made up his mind, lying at full length--the livelong
+day--in the bright, cold air--his mittened hands plunged into deep
+pockets full of photographs--that, for her sake and to hasten that time
+when they might always be together, he would learn to write books,
+taking infinite pains. And he determined that these books should be as
+sweet and clean and honorable as he could make them. You see, G. G. had
+been under the weather so much and had suffered so much all alone by
+himself, with nobody to talk to, that his head was already full of
+stories about make-believe places and people that were just dying to get
+themselves written. So many things that are dead to most people had
+always been alive to him--leaves, flowers, fairies. He had always been a
+busy maker of verses, which was because melody, rhythm, and harmony had
+always been delicious to his ear. And he had had, as a little boy, a
+soprano voice that was as true as truth and almost as agile as a canary
+bird's.
+
+He decided, then, very deliberately--lying upon his back and healing
+that traitor lung of his--to be a writer. He didn't so decide entirely
+because that was what he had always wanted to be, but for many reasons.
+First place, he could say things to her through prose and verse that
+could not be expressed in sculpture, music, painting, groceries, or
+dry-goods. Second place, where she was, there his heart was sure to be;
+and where the heart is, there the best work is done. And, third place,
+he knew that the chances were against his ever living in dusty cities or
+in the places of business thereof.
+
+"I am so young," he wrote to her, "that I can begin at the beginning and
+learn to be anything--in time to be it! And so every morning now you
+shall think of G. G. out with his butterfly net, running after winged
+words. That's nonsense. I've a little pad and a big pencil, and a hot
+potato in my pocket for to warm the numb fingers at. And father's got an
+old typewriter in his office that's to be put in order for me; and
+nights I shall drum upon it and print off what was written down in the
+morning, and study to see why it's all wrong. I think I'll never write
+anything but tales about people who love each other. 'Cause a fellow
+wants to stick to what he knows about...."
+
+Though G. G. was not to see Cynthia again for a whole year he didn't
+find any trouble in loving her a little more every day. To his mind's
+eye she was almost as vivid as if she had been standing right there in
+front of him. And as for her voice, that dwelt ever in his ear, like
+those lovely airs which, once heard, are only put aside with death. You
+may have heard your grandmother lilting to herself, over her mending,
+some song of men and maidens and violets that she had listened to in her
+girlhood and could never forget.
+
+And then, of course, everything that G. G. did was a reminder of
+Cynthia. With the help of one of Doctor Trudeau's assistants, who came
+every day to see how he was getting on, he succeeded in understanding
+very well what was the matter with him and under just what conditions a
+consumptive lung heals and becomes whole. To live according to the
+letter and spirit of the doctor's advice became almost a religion with
+him.
+
+For six hours of every day he sat on the porch of the house where he had
+rooms, writing on his little pad and making friends with the keen,
+clean, healing air. Every night the windows of his bedroom stood wide
+open, so that in the morning the water in his pitcher was a solid block.
+And he ate just the things he was told to--and willed himself to like
+milk and sugar, and snow and cold, and short days!
+
+In his writing he began to see progress. He was like a musical person
+beginning to learn an instrument; for, just as surely as there are
+scales to be run upon the piano before your virtuoso can weave music,
+binding the gallery gods with delicious meshes of sound, so in
+prose-writing there must be scales run, fingerings worked out, and
+harmonies mastered. For in a page of _lo bello stile_ you will find
+trills and arpeggios, turns, grace notes, a main theme, a sub theme,
+thorough-bass, counterpoint, and form.
+
+Music is an easier art than prose, however. It comes to men as a more
+direct and concrete gift of those gods who delight in sound and the
+co-ordination of parts. The harmonies are more quickly grasped by the
+well-tuned ear. We can imagine the boy Mozart discoursing lovely music
+at the age of five; but we cannot imagine any one of such tender years
+compiling even a fifth-rate paragraph of prose.
+
+Those men who have mastered _lo bello stile_ in music can tell us pretty
+clearly how the thing is done. There be rules. But your prose masters
+either cannot formulate what they have learned--or will not.
+
+G. G. was very patient; and there were times when the putting together
+of words was fascinating, like the putting together of those picture
+puzzles which were such a fad the other day. And such reading as he did
+was all in one book--the dictionary. For hours, guided by his nice ear
+for sound, he applied himself to learning the derivatives and exact
+meanings of new words--or he looked up old words and found that they
+were new.
+
+As for his actual compositions, he had only the ambition to make them as
+workmanlike as he could. He made little landscapes; he drew little
+interiors. He tried to get people up and down stairs in the fewest words
+that would make the picture. And when he thought that he had scored a
+little success he would count the number of words he had used and
+determine to achieve the same effect with the use of only half that
+number.
+
+Well, G. G.'s lung healed again; and this time he was very careful not
+to overdo. He had gained nine pounds, he wrote to Cynthia--"saved them"
+was the way he put it; and he was determined that this new tissue, worth
+more than its weight in gold, should go to bank and earn interest for
+him--and compound interest.
+
+"Shall I get well?" he asked that great dreamer who dreamed that there
+was hope for people who had never hoped before--and who has lived to see
+his dream come true; and the great dreamer smiled and said:
+
+"G. G., if growing boys are good boys and do what they are told, and
+have any luck at all--they always get well!"
+
+Then G. G. blushed.
+
+"And when I am well can I live where I please--and--and get
+married--and all that sort of thing?"
+
+"You can live where you please, marry and have children; and if you
+aren't a good husband and a good father I dare say you'll live to be
+hanged at ninety. But if I were you, G. G., I'd stick by the Adirondacks
+until you're old enough to--know better."
+
+And G. G. went back to his rooms in great glee and typewrote a story
+that he had finished as well as he could, and sent it to a magazine. And
+six days later it came back to him, with a little note from the editor,
+who said:
+
+"There's nothing wrong with your story except youth. If you say so we'll
+print it. We like it. But, personally, and believing that I have your
+best interests at heart, I advise you to wait, to throw this story into
+your scrap basket, and to study and to labor until your mind and your
+talent are mature. For the rest, I think you are going to do some fine
+things. This present story isn't that--it's not fine. At the same time,
+it is so very good in some ways that we are willing to leave its
+publication or its destruction to your discretion."
+
+G. G. threw his story into the scrap basket and went to bed with a
+brand-new notion of editors.
+
+"Why," said he to the cold darkness--and his voice was full of awe and
+astonishment--"they're--alive!"
+
+
+III
+
+Cynthia couldn't get at G. G. and she made up her mind that she must get
+at something that belonged to him--or die. She had his letter, of
+course, and his kodaks; and these spoke the most eloquent language to
+her--no matter what they said or how they looked--but she wanted somehow
+or other to worm herself deeper into G. G.'s life. To find somebody, for
+instance, who knew all about him and would enjoy talking about him by
+the hour. Now there are never but two people who enjoy sitting by the
+hour and saying nice things about any man--and these, of course, are the
+woman who bore him and the woman who loves him. Fathers like their sons
+well enough--sometimes--and will sometimes talk about them and praise
+them; but not always. So it seemed to Cynthia that the one and only
+thing worth doing, under the circumstances, was to make friends with G.
+G.'s mother. To that end, Cynthia donned a warm coat of pony-skin and
+drove in a taxicab to G. G.'s mother's address, which she had long since
+looked up in the telephone book.
+
+"If she isn't alone," said Cynthia, "I shan't know what to say or what
+to do."
+
+And she hesitated, with her thumb hovering about the front-door
+bell--as a humming-bird hovers at a flower.
+
+Then she said: "What does it matter? Nobody's going to eat me." And she
+rang the bell.
+
+G. G.'s mother was at home. She was alone. She was sitting in G. G.'s
+father's library, where she always did sit when she was alone. It was
+where she kept most of her pictures of G. G.'s father and of G. G.,
+though she had others in her bedroom; and in her dressing-room she had a
+dapple-gray horse of wood that G. G. had galloped about on when he was
+little. She had a sweet face, full of courage and affection. And
+everything in her house was fresh and pretty, though there wasn't
+anything that could have cost very much. G. G.'s father was a lawyer. He
+was more interested in leaving a stainless name behind him than a pot of
+money. And, somehow, fruit doesn't tumble off your neighbor's tree and
+fall into your own lap--unless you climb the tree when nobody is looking
+and give the tree a sound shaking. I might have said of G. G., in the
+very beginning, that he was born of poor _and_ honest parents. It would
+have saved all this explanation.
+
+G. G.'s mother didn't make things hard for Cynthia. One glance was
+enough to tell her that dropping into the little library out of the blue
+sky was not a pretty girl but a blessed angel--not a rich man's
+daughter but a treasure. It wasn't enough to give one hand to such a
+maiden. G. G.'s mother gave her two. But she didn't kiss her. She felt
+things too deeply to kiss easily.
+
+"I've come to talk about G. G.," said Cynthia. "I couldn't help it. I
+think he's the _dearest_ boy!"
+
+She finished quite breathless--and if there had been any Jacqueminot
+roses present they might have hung their lovely heads in shame and left
+the room.
+
+"G. G. has shown me pictures of you," said his mother. "And once, when
+we thought we were going to lose him, he used his last strength to write
+to you. I mailed the letter. That is a long time ago. Nearly two years.
+
+"And I didn't know that he'd been ill in all that time," said Cynthia;
+"he never told me."
+
+"He would have cut off his hand sooner than make you anxious. That was
+why he _would_ write his daily letter to you. That one must have been
+almost as hard to write as cutting off a hand."
+
+"He writes to me every day," said Cynthia, "and I write to him; but I
+haven't seen him for a year and I don't feel as if I could stand it much
+longer. When he gets well we're going to be married. And if he doesn't
+get well pretty soon we're going to be married anyway."
+
+"Oh, my dear!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother. "You know that wouldn't be
+right!"
+
+"I don't know," said Cynthia; "and if anybody thinks I'm going to be
+tricked out of the man I love by a lot of silly little germs they are
+very much mistaken!"
+
+"But, my dear," said G. G.'s mother, "G. G. can't support a wife--not
+for a long time anyway. We have nothing to give him. And, of course, he
+can't work now--and perhaps can't for years."
+
+"I, too," said Cynthia--with proper pride--"have parents. Mine are
+rolling in money. Whenever I ask them for anything they always give it
+to me without question."
+
+"You have never asked them," said G. G.'s mother, "for a sick, penniless
+boy."
+
+"But I shall," said Cynthia, "the moment G. G.'s well--and maybe
+sooner."
+
+There was a little silence.
+
+Then G. G.'s mother leaned forward and took both of Cynthia's hands in
+hers.
+
+"I don't wonder at him," she said--"I don't. I was ever so jealous of
+you, but I'm not any more. I think you're the _dearest_ girl!"
+
+"Oh!" cried Cynthia. "I am so glad! But will G. G.'s father like me
+too?"
+
+"He has never yet failed," said G. G.'s mother, "to like with his whole
+heart anything that was stainless and beautiful."
+
+"Is he like G. G.?"
+
+"He has the same beautiful round head, but he has a rugged look that G.
+G. will never have. He has a lion look. He might have been a terrible
+tyrant if he hadn't happened, instead, to be a saint."
+
+And she showed Cynthia, side by side, pictures of the father and the
+boy.
+
+"They have such valiant eyes!" said Cynthia.
+
+"There is nothing base in my young men," said G. G.'s mother.
+
+Then the two women got right down to business and began an interminable
+conversation of praise. And sometimes G. G.'s mother's eyes cried a
+little while the rest of her face smiled and she prattled like a brook.
+And the meeting ended with a great hug, in which G. G.'s mother's tiny
+feet almost parted company with the floor.
+
+And it was arranged that they two should fly up to Saranac and be with
+G. G. for a day.
+
+
+IV
+
+It wasn't from shame that G. G. signed another name than his own to the
+stories that he was making at the rate of one every two months. He
+judged calmly and dispassionately that they were "going to be pretty
+good some day," and that it would never be necessary for him to live in
+a city. He signed his stories with an assumed name because he was full
+of dramatic instinct. He wanted to be able--just the minute he was
+well--to say to Cynthia:
+
+"Let us be married!" Then she was to say: "Of course, G. G.; but what
+are we going to live on?" And G. G. was going to say: "Ever hear of
+so-and-so?"
+
+CYNTHIA: Goodness gracious! Sakes alive! Yes; I should think I had! And,
+except for you, darlingest G. G., I think he's the very greatest man in
+all the world!
+
+G. G.: Goosey-Gander, know that he and I are one and the same
+person--and that we've saved seventeen hundred dollars to get married
+on!
+
+(Tableau not to be seen by the audience.)
+
+So far as keeping Cynthia and his father and mother in ignorance of the
+fledgling wings he was beginning to flap, G. G. succeeded admirably; but
+it might have been better to have told them all in the beginning.
+
+Now G. G.'s seventeen hundred dollars was a huge myth. He was writing
+short stories at the rate of six a year and he had picked out to do
+business with one of the most dignified magazines in the world.
+Dignified people do not squander money. The magazine in question paid G.
+G. from sixty to seventy dollars apiece for his stories and was much too
+dignified to inform him that plenty of other magazines--very frivolous
+and not in the least dignified--would have been ashamed to pay so little
+for anything but the poems, which all magazines use to fill up blank
+spaces. So, even in his own ambitious and courageous mind, a "married
+living" seemed a very long way off.
+
+He refused to be discouraged, however. His health was too good for that.
+The doctor pointed to him with pride as a patient who followed
+instructions to the letter and was not going to die of the disease which
+had brought him to Saranac. And they wrote to G. G's father--who was
+finding life very expensive--that, if he could keep G. G. at Saranac, or
+almost anywhere out of New York, for another year or two, they
+guaranteed--as much as human doctors can--that G. G. would then be as
+sound as a bell and fit to live anywhere.
+
+This pronouncement was altogether too much of a good thing for Fate. As
+G. G's father walked up-town from his office, Fate raised a dust in his
+face which, in addition to the usual ingredients of city dust, contained
+at least one thoroughly compatible pair of pneumonia germs. These went
+for their honey-moon on a pleasant, warm journey up G. G's father's left
+nostril and to house-keeping in his lungs. In a few hours they raised a
+family of several hundred thousand bouncing baby germs; and these grew
+up in a few minutes and began to set up establishments of their own
+right and left.
+
+G. G.'s father admitted that he had a "heavy cold on the chest." It was
+such a heavy cold that he became delirious, and doctors came and sent
+for nurses; and there was laid in the home of G. G.'s father the
+corner-stone of a large edifice of financial disaster.
+
+He had never had a partner. His practice came to a dead halt. The
+doctors whom G. G.'s mother called in were, of course, the best she had
+ever heard of. They would have been leaders of society if their persons
+had been as fashionable as their prices. The corner drug store made its
+modest little profit of three or four hundred per cent on the drugs
+which were telephoned for daily. The day nurse rolled up twenty-five
+dollars a week and the night nurse thirty-five. The servant's wages
+continued as usual. The price of beef, eggs, vegetables, etc., rose. The
+interest on the mortgage fell due. And it is a wonder, considering how
+much he worried, that G. G.'s father ever lived to face his obligations.
+
+Cynthia, meanwhile, having heard that G. G. was surely going to get
+well, was so happy that she couldn't contain the news. And she proceeded
+to divulge it to her father.
+
+"Papa," she said, "I think I ought to tell you that years ago, at
+Saranac--that Christmas when I went up with the Andersons--I met the
+man that I am going to marry. He was a boy then; but now we're both
+grown up and we feel just the same about each other."
+
+And she told her father G. G.'s name and that he had been very delicate,
+but that he was surely going to get well. Cynthia's father, who had
+always given her everything she asked for until now, was not at all
+enthusiastic.
+
+"I can't prevent your marrying any one you determine to marry, Cynthia,"
+he said. "Can this young man support a wife?"
+
+"How could he!" she exclaimed--"living at Saranac and not being able to
+work, and not having any money to begin with! But surely, if the way
+_we_ live is any criterion, you could spare us some money--couldn't
+you?"
+
+"You wish me to say that I will support a delicate son-in-law whom I
+have never seen? Consult your intelligence, Cynthia."
+
+"I have my allowance," she said, her lips curling.
+
+"Yes," said her father, "while you live at home and do as you're told."
+
+"Now, papa, don't tell me that you're going to behave like a lugubrious
+parent in a novel! Don't tell me that you are going to cut me off with a
+shilling!"
+
+"I shan't do that," he said gravely; "it will be without a shilling."
+But he tempered this savage statement with a faint smile.
+
+"Papa, dear, is this quite definite? Are you talking in your right mind
+and do you really mean what you say?"
+
+"Suppose you talk the matter over with your mother--she's always
+indulged you in every way. See what she says."
+
+It developed that neither of Cynthia's parents was enthusiastic at the
+prospect of her marrying a nameless young man--she had told them his
+name, but that was all she got for her pains--who hadn't a penny and who
+had had consumption, and might or might not be sound again. Personally
+they did not believe that consumption can be cured. It can be arrested
+for a time, they admitted, but it always comes back. Cynthia's mother
+even made a physiological attack on Cynthia's understanding, with the
+result that Cynthia turned indignantly pink and left the room, saying:
+
+"If the doctor thinks it's perfectly right and proper for us to marry I
+don't see the least point in listening to the opinions of excited and
+prejudiced amateurs."
+
+The ultimatum that she had from her parents was distinct, final, and
+painful.
+
+"Marry him if you like. We will neither forgive you nor support you."
+
+They were perfectly calm with her--cool, affectionate, sensible, and
+worldly, as it is right and proper for parents to be. She told them they
+were wrong-headed, old-fashioned, and unintelligent; but as long as they
+hadn't made scenes and talked loud she found that she couldn't help
+loving them almost as much as she always had; but she loved G. G. very
+much more. And having definitely decided to defy her family, to marry G.
+G. and live happily ever afterward, she consulted her check-book and
+discovered that her available munition of war was something less than
+five hundred dollars--most of it owed to her dress-maker.
+
+"Well, well!" she said; "she's always had plenty of money from me; she
+can afford to wait."
+
+And Cynthia wrote to her dress-maker, who was also her friend!
+
+
+     MY DEAR CELESTE: I have decided that you will have to afford to
+     wait for your money. I have an enterprise in view which calls for
+     all the available capital I have. Please write me a nice note and
+     say that you don't mind a bit. Otherwise we shall stop being
+     friends and I shall always get my clothes from somebody else. Let
+     me know when the new models come....
+
+
+V
+
+On her way down-town Cynthia stopped to see G. G.'s mother and found the
+whole household in the throes occasioned by its head's pneumonia.
+
+"Why haven't you let me know?" exclaimed Cynthia. "There must be so
+many little things that I could have done to help you."
+
+Though the sick man couldn't have heard them if they had shouted, the
+two women talked in whispers, with their heads very close together.
+
+"He's better," said G. G.'s mother, "but yesterday they wanted me to
+send for G. G. 'No,' I said. 'You may have given him up, but I haven't.
+If I send for my boy it would look as if I had surrendered,' And almost
+at once, if you'll believe it, he seemed to shake off something that was
+trying to strangle him and took a turn for the better; and now they say
+that, barring some long names, he will get well.... It does look, my
+dear, as if death had seen that there was no use facing a thoroughly
+determined woman."
+
+At this point, because she was very much overwrought, G. G.'s mother had
+a mild little attack of hysteria; and Cynthia beat her on the back and
+shook her and kissed her until she was over it. Then G. G.'s mother told
+Cynthia about her financial troubles.
+
+"It isn't us that matters," she said, "but that G. G. ought to have one
+more year in a first-rate climate; and it isn't going to be possible to
+give it to him. They say that he's well, my dear, absolutely well; but
+that now he should have a chance to build up and become strong and
+heavy, so that he can do a man's work in the world. As it is, we shall
+have to take him home to live; and you know what New York dust and
+climate can do to people who have been very, very ill and are still
+delicate and high-strung."
+
+"There's only one thing to do for the present," said Cynthia--"anybody
+with the least notion of business knows that--we must keep him at
+Saranac just as long as our credit holds out, mustn't we?--until the
+woman where he boards begins to act ugly and threatens to turn him out
+in the snow."
+
+"Oh, but that would be dreadful!" said G. G.'s mother. Cynthia smiled in
+a superior way.
+
+"I don't believe," she said, "that you understand the first thing about
+business. Even my father, who is a prude about bills, says that all the
+business of the country is done on credit.... Now you're not going to be
+silly, are you?--and make G. G. come to New York before he has to?"
+
+"It will have to be pretty soon, I'm afraid," said G. G.'s mother.
+
+"Sooner than run such risks with any boy of mine," said Cynthia, with a
+high color, "I'd beg, I'd borrow, I'd forge, I'd lie--I'd steal!"
+
+"Don't I know you would!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother. "My darling girl,
+you've got the noblest character--it's just shining in your eyes!"
+
+"There's another thing," said Cynthia: "I have to go down-town now on
+business, but you must telephone me around five o'clock and tell me how
+G. G.'s father is. And you must spend all your time between now and then
+trying to think up something really useful that I can do to help you.
+And"--here Cynthia became very mysterious--"I forbid you to worry about
+money until I tell you to!"
+
+Cynthia had a cousin in Wall Street; his name was Jarrocks Bell. He was
+twenty years older than Cynthia and he had been fond of her ever since
+she was born. He was a great, big, good-looking man, gruff without and
+tender within. Clever people, who hadn't made successful brokers,
+wondered how in the face of what they called his "obvious stupidity"
+Jarrocks Bell had managed to grow rich in Wall Street. The answer was
+obvious enough to any one who knew him intimately. To begin with, his
+stupidity was superficial. In the second place, he had studied bonds and
+stocks until he knew a great deal about them. Then, though a drinking
+man, he had a head like iron and was never moved by exhilaration to
+mention his own or anybody else's affairs. Furthermore, he was
+unscrupulously honest. He was so honest and blunt that people thought
+him brutal at times. Last and not least among the elements of his
+success was the fact that he himself never speculated.
+
+When the big men found out that there was in Wall Street a broker who
+didn't speculate himself, who didn't drink to excess, who was absolutely
+honest, and who never opened his mouth when it was better shut, they
+began to patronize that man's firm. In short, the moment Jarrocks Bell's
+qualities were discovered, Jarrocks Bell was made. So that now, in
+speculative years, his profits were enormous.
+
+Cynthia had always been fond of her big, blunt cousin, as he of her; and
+in her present trouble her thoughts flew to him as straight as a homing
+aeroplane to the landing-stage.
+
+Even a respectable broker's office is a noisome, embarrassing place, and
+among the clients are men whose eyes have become popped from staring at
+paper-tapes and pretty girls; but Cynthia had no more fear of men than a
+farmer's daughter has of cows, and she flashed through Jarrocks's outer
+office--preceded by a very small boy--with her color unchanged and only
+her head a little higher than usual.
+
+Jarrocks must have wondered to the point of vulgar curiosity what the
+deuce had brought Cynthia to see him in the busiest hour of a very busy
+day; but he said "Hello, Cynthia!" as naturally as if they two had been
+visiting in the same house and he had come face to face with her for the
+third or fourth time that morning.
+
+"I suppose," said Cynthia, "that you are dreadfully busy; but, Jarrocks
+dear, my affairs are so much more important to me than yours can
+possibly be to you--do you mind?"
+
+"May I smoke?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Then I don't mind. What's your affair, Cynthia--money or the heart?"
+
+"Both, Jarrocks." And she told him pretty much what the reader has
+already learned. As for Jarrocks's listening, he was a perfect study of
+himself. He laughed gruffly when he ought to have cried; and when
+Cynthia tried to be a little humorous he looked very solemn and not
+unlike the big bronze Buddha of the Japanese. Inside, however, his big
+heart was full of compassion and tenderness for his favorite girl in all
+the world. Nobody will ever know just how fond Jarrocks was of Cynthia.
+It was one of those matters on which--owing, perhaps, to his being her
+senior by twenty years--he had always thought it best to keep his mouth
+shut.
+
+"What's your plan?" he asked. "Where do I come in? I'll give you
+anything I've got." Cynthia waived the offer; it was a little unwelcome.
+
+"I've got about five hundred dollars," she said, "and I want to
+speculate with it and make a lot of money, so that I can be independent
+of papa and mamma."
+
+"Lots of people," said Jarrocks, "come to Wall Street with five hundred
+dollars, more or less, and they wish to be independent of papa and
+mamma. They end up by going to live in the Mills Hotel."
+
+"I know," said Cynthia; "but this is really important. If G. G. could
+work it would be different."
+
+"Tell me one thing," said Jarrocks: "If you weren't in love with G. G.
+what would you think of him as a candidate for your very best friend's
+hand?"
+
+Cynthia counted ten before answering.
+
+"Jarrocks, dear," she said--and he turned away from the meltingness of
+her lovely face--"he's so pure, he's so straight, he's so gentle and so
+brave, that I don't really think I can tell you what I think of him."
+
+There was silence for a moment, then Jarrocks said gruffly:
+
+"That's a clean-enough bill of health. Guess you can bring him into the
+family, Cynthia."
+
+Then he drummed with his thick, stubby fingers on the arm of his chair.
+
+"The idea," he said at last, "is to turn five hundred dollars into a
+fortune. You know I don't speculate."
+
+"But you make it easy for other people?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"If you'd come a year ago," he said, "I'd have sent you away. Just at
+the present moment your proposition isn't the darn-fool thing it
+sounds."
+
+"I knew you'd agree with me," said Cynthia complacently. "I knew you'd
+put me into something that was going 'way up."
+
+Jarrocks snorted.
+
+"Prices are at about the highest level they've ever struck and money was
+never more expensive. I think we're going to see such a tumble in values
+as was never seen before. It almost tempts me to come out of my shell
+and take a flyer--if I lose your five hundred for you, you won't squeal,
+Cynthia?"
+
+"Of course not."
+
+"Then I'll tell you what I think. There's nothing certain in this
+business, but if ever there was a chance to turn five hundred dollars
+into big money it's now. You've entered Wall Street, Cynthia, at what
+looks to me like the psychological moment."
+
+"That's a good omen," said Cynthia. "I believe we shall succeed. And I
+leave everything to you."
+
+Then she wrote him a check for all the money she had in the world. He
+held it between his thumb and forefinger while the ink dried.
+
+"By the way, Cynthia," he said, "do you want the account to stand in
+your own name?"
+
+She thought a moment, then laughed and told him to put it in the name of
+G. G.'s mother. "But you must report to me how things go," she said.
+
+Jarrocks called a clerk and gave him an order to sell something or
+other. In three minutes the clerk reported that "it"--just some letter
+of the alphabet--had been sold at such and such a price.
+
+For another five minutes Jarrocks denied himself to all visitors. Then
+he called for another report on the stock which he had just caused to be
+sold. It was selling "off a half."
+
+"Well, Cynthia," said Jarrocks, "you're fifty dollars richer than when
+you came. Now I've got to tell you to go. I'll look out for your
+interests as if they were my own."
+
+And Jarrocks, looking rather stupid and bored, conducted Cynthia through
+his outer offices and put her into an elevator "going down." Her face
+vanished and his heart continued to mumble and grumble, just the way a
+tooth does when it is getting ready to ache.
+
+Cynthia had entered Wall Street at an auspicious moment. Stocks were at
+that high level from which they presently tumbled to the panic
+quotations of nineteen-seven. And Jarrocks, whom the unsuccessful
+thought so very stupid, had made a very shrewd guess as to what was
+going to happen.
+
+Two weeks later he wrote Cynthia that if she could use two or three
+thousand dollars she could have them, without troubling her balance very
+perceptibly.
+
+"I thought you had a chance," he wrote. "I'm beginning to think it's a
+sure thing! Keep a stiff upper lip and first thing you know you'll have
+the laugh on mamma and papa. Give 'em my best regards."
+
+
+VI
+
+If it is wicked to gamble Cynthia was wicked. If it is wicked to lie
+Cynthia was wicked. If the money that comes out of Wall Street belonged
+originally to widows and orphans, why, that is the kind of money which
+she amassed for her own selfish purposes. Worst of all, on learning from
+Jarrocks that the Rainbow's Foot--where the pot of gold is--was almost
+in sight, this bad, wicked girl's sensations were those of unmixed
+triumph and delight!
+
+The panic of nineteen-seven is history now. Plenty of people who lost
+their money during those exciting months can explain to you how any
+fool, with the least luck, could have made buckets of it instead.
+
+As a snowball rolling down a hill of damp snow swells to gigantic
+proportions, so Cynthia's five hundred dollars descended the long slopes
+of nineteen-seven, doubling itself at almost every turn. And when, at
+last, values had so shrunk that it looked to Jarrocks as if they could
+not shrink any more, he told her that her account--which stood in the
+name of G. G.'s mother--was worth nearly four hundred thousand dollars.
+"And I think," he said, "that, if you now buy stocks outright and hold
+them as investments, your money will double again."
+
+So they put their heads together and Cynthia bought some Union Pacific
+at par and some Steel Common in the careless twenties, and other
+standard securities that were begging, almost with tears in their eyes,
+to be bought and cared for by somebody. She had the certificates of what
+she bought made out in the name of G. G.'s mother. And she went up-town
+and found G. G.'s mother alone, and said:
+
+"Oh, my dear! If anybody ever finds out _you_ will catch it!"
+
+G. G.'s mother knew there was a joke of some kind preparing at her
+expense, but she couldn't help looking a little puzzled and anxious.
+
+"It's bad enough to do what you have done," continued Cynthia; "but on
+top of it to be going to lie up and down--that does seem a little too
+awful!"
+
+"What are you going to tell me?" cried G. G.'s mother. "I know you've
+got some good news up your sleeve!"
+
+"Gambler!" cried Cynthia--"cold-blooded, reckless Wall Street
+speculator!" And the laughter that was pent up in her face burst its
+bonds, accompanied by hugs and kisses.
+
+"Now listen!" said Cynthia, as soon as she could. "On such and such a
+day, you took five hundred dollars to a Wall Street broker named
+Jarrocks Bell--you thought that conditions were right for turning into a
+Bear. You went short of the market. You kept it up for weeks and months.
+Do you know what you did? You pyramided on the way down!"
+
+"Mercy!" exclaimed G. G.'s mother, her eyes shining with wonder and
+excitement.
+
+"First thing you knew," continued Cynthia, "you were worth four hundred
+thousand dollars!"
+
+G. G.'s mother gave a little scream, as if she had seen a mouse.
+
+"And you invested it," went on Cynthia, relenting, "so that now you
+stand to double your capital; and your annual income is between thirty
+and forty thousand dollars!"
+
+After this Cynthia really did some explaining, until G. G.'s mother
+really understood what had really happened. It must be recorded that, at
+first, she was completely flabbergasted.
+
+"And you've gone and put it in my name!" she said. "But why?"
+
+"Don't you see," said Cynthia, "that if I came offering money to G. G.
+and G. G.'s father they wouldn't even sniff at it? But if you've got
+it--why, they've just got to share with you. Isn't that so?"
+
+"Y-e-e-s," admitted G. G.'s mother; "but, my dear, I can't take it.
+Even if I could, they would want to know where I'd gotten it and I'd
+have nothing to say."
+
+"Not if you're the one woman in a million that I think you are," said
+Cynthia. "Tell me, isn't your husband at his wit's end to think how to
+meet the bills for his illness and all and all? And wouldn't you raise
+your finger to bring all his miserable worries to an end? Just look at
+the matter from a business point of view! You must tell your husband and
+G. G. that what has really happened to me happened to you; that you were
+desperate; that you took the five hundred dollars to speculate with, and
+that this is the result."
+
+"But that wouldn't be true," said G. G.'s mother.
+
+"For mercy's sake," said Cynthia, "what has the truth got to do with it!
+This isn't a matter of religion or martyrdom; it's a matter of business!
+How to put an end to my husband's troubles and to enable my son to marry
+the girl he loves?--that's your problem; and the solution is--lie! Whom
+can the money come from if not from you? Not from me certainly. You must
+lie! You'd better begin in the dark, where your husband can't see your
+face--because I'm afraid you don't know how very well. But after a time
+it will get easy; and when you've told him the story two or three
+times--with details--you'll end by believing it yourself.... And, of
+course," she added, "you must make over half of the securities to G. G.,
+so that he will have enough money to support a wife."
+
+For two hours Cynthia wrestled with G. G.'s mother's conscience; but,
+when at last the struggling creature was thrown, the two women literally
+took it by the hair and dragged it around the room and beat it until it
+was deaf, dumb, and blind.
+
+And when G. G.'s father came home G. G.'s mother met him in the hall
+that was darkish, and hid her face against his--and lied to him! And as
+she lied the years began to fall from the shoulders of G. G.'s
+father--to the number of ten.
+
+
+VII
+
+Cynthia was also met in a front hall--but by her father.
+
+"I've been looking for you, Cynthia," he said gravely. "I want to talk
+to you and get your advice--no; the library is full of smoke--come in
+here."
+
+He led her into the drawing-room, which neither of them could remember
+ever having sat in before.
+
+"I've been talking with a young gentleman," said her father without
+further preliminaries, "who made himself immensely interesting to me. To
+begin with, I never saw a handsomer, more engaging specimen of young
+manhood; and, in the second place, he is the author of some stories that
+I have enjoyed in the past year more than any one's except O. Henry's.
+He doesn't write over his own name--but that's neither here nor there.
+
+"He came to me for advice. Why he selected me, a total stranger, will
+appear presently. His family isn't well off; and, though he expects to
+succeed in literature--and there's no doubt of it in my mind--he feels
+that he ought to give it up and go into something in which the financial
+prospects are brighter. I suggested a rich wife, but that seemed to hurt
+his feelings. He said it would be bad enough to marry a girl that had
+more than he had; but to marry a rich girl, when he had only the few
+hundreds a year that he can make writing stories, was an intolerable
+thought. And that's all the more creditable to him because, from what I
+can gather, he is desperately in love--and the girl is potentially
+rich."
+
+"But," said Cynthia, "what have I to do with all this?"
+
+Her father laughed. "This young fellow didn't come to me of his own
+accord. I sent for him. And I must tell you that, contrary to my
+expectations, I was charmed with him. If I had had a son I should wish
+him to be just like this youngster."
+
+Cynthia was very much puzzled.
+
+"He writes stories?" she said.
+
+"Bully stories! But he takes so much pains that his output is small."
+
+"Well," said she, "what did you tell him?"
+
+"I told him to wait."
+
+"That's conservative advice."
+
+"As a small boy," said her father, "he was very delicate; but now he's
+as sound as a bell and he looks as strong as an elk."
+
+Cynthia rose to her feet, trembling slightly.
+
+"What was the matter with him--when he was delicate?"
+
+"Consumption."
+
+She became as it were taller--and vivid with beauty.
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"In the library."
+
+Cynthia put her hands on her father's shoulders.
+
+"It's all right," she said; "his family has come into quite a lot of
+money. He doesn't know it yet. They're going to give him enough to marry
+on. You still think he ought to marry--don't you?"
+
+They kissed.
+
+Cynthia flew out of the room, across the hall, and into the library.
+
+_They_ kissed!
+
+
+
+
+THE TRAP
+
+     The animals went in two by two.
+           Hurrah! Hurrah!
+
+
+Given Bower for a last name, the boys are bound to call you "Right" or
+"Left." They called me "Right" because I usually held it, one way or
+another. I was shot with luck. No matter what happened, it always worked
+out to my advantage. All inside of six months, for instance, the mate
+fell overboard and I got his job; the skipper got drunk after weathering
+a cyclone and ran the old _Boldero_ aground in "lily-pad" weather--and I
+got his. Then the owner called me in and said: "Captain Bower, what do
+you know about Noah's Ark?" And I said: "Only that 'the animals went in
+two by two. Hurrah! Hurrah!'" And the owner said: "But how did he feed
+'em--specially the meat-eaters?" And I said: "He got hold of a Hindu who
+had his arm torn off by a black panther and who now looks after the same
+at the Calcutta Zoo--and he put it up to him."
+
+"The Bible doesn't say so," said the owner.
+
+"Everything the Bible says is true," said I. "But there're heaps of true
+sayings, you know, that aren't in it at all."
+
+"Well," says the owner, "you slip out to yon Zoo and you put it up to
+yon one-armed Hindu that a white Noah named Bower has been ordered to
+carry pairs of all the Indian fauna from Singapore to Sydney; and you
+tell him to shake his black panther and 'come along with.'"
+
+"What will you pay?" I asked.
+
+The owner winked his eye. "What will I promise?" said he. "I leave that
+to you."
+
+But I wasn't bluffed. The owner always talked pagan and practised
+Christian; loved his little joke. They called him "Bond" Hadley on the
+water-front to remind themselves that his word was just as good.
+
+I settled with Yir Massir in a long confab back of the snake-house, and
+that night Hadley blew me to Ivy Green's benefit at the opera-house.
+
+Poor little girl! There weren't fifty in the audience. She couldn't act.
+I mean she couldn't draw. The whole company was on the bum and
+stone-broke. They'd scraped out of Australia and the Sandwich Islands,
+but it looked as if they'd stay in Calcutta, doing good works, such as
+mending roads for the public, to the end of time.
+
+"Ivy Green is a pretty name for a girl," said the owner.
+
+"And Ivy Green is a pretty girl," I said; "and I'll bet my horned soul
+she's a good girl."
+
+To tell the truth, I was taken with her something terrible at first
+sight. I'd often seen women that I wanted, but she was the first
+girl--and the last. It's a different sort of wanting, that. It's the
+good in you that wants--instead of the bad.
+
+Her little face was like the pansies that used to grow in mother's
+dooryard; and a dooryard is the place for pansies, not a stage. When her
+act was over the fifty present did their best; but I knew, when she'd
+finished bobbing little curtsies and smiling her pretty smile, she'd
+slip off to her dressing-room and cry like a baby. I couldn't stand it.
+There were other acts to come, but I couldn't wait.
+
+"If Ivy Green is a pretty name for a girl, Ivy Bower is a prettier name
+for a woman," I said. "I'm going behind."
+
+He looked up, angry. Then he saw that I didn't mean any harm and he
+looked down. He said nothing. I got behind by having the pull on certain
+ropes in that opera-house, and I asked a comedian with a face like a
+walrus which was Miss Green's dressing-room.
+
+"Friend of hers?" he says.
+
+"Yes," says I, "a friend."
+
+He showed me which door and I knocked. Her voice was full of worry and
+tears.
+
+"Who's there?" she said.
+
+"A friend," said I.
+
+"Pass, friend," said she.
+
+And I took it to mean "Come in," but it didn't. Still, she wasn't so
+dishabilled as to matter. She was crying and rubbing off the last of her
+paint.
+
+"Miss Green," I said, "you've made me feel so mean and miserable that I
+had to come and tell you. My name is Bower. The boys call me 'Right'
+Bower, meaning that I'm lucky and straight. It was lucky for me that I
+came to your benefit, and I hope to God that it will be lucky for you."
+
+"Yes?" she says--none too warm.
+
+"As for you, Miss Green," I said, "you're up against it, aren't you? The
+manager's broke. You don't know when you've touched any salary. There's
+been no balm in your benefit. What are you going to do?"
+
+This time she looked me over before she spoke.
+
+"I don't know," she said.
+
+"I don't have to ask," said I, blushing red, "if you're a good girl.
+It's just naturally obvious. I guess that's what put me up to butting
+in. I want to help. Will you answer three questions?"
+
+She nodded.
+
+"Where," said I, "will you get breakfast to-morrow?--lunch
+to-morrow?--and dinner to-morrow?"
+
+"We disband to-night," she said, "and I don't know."
+
+"I suppose you know," said I, "what happens to most white girls who get
+stranded in Indian cities?"
+
+"I know," she said, "that people get up against it so hard that they
+oughtn't to be blamed for anything they do."
+
+"They aren't," I said, "by--Christians; but it's ugly just the same.
+Now----"
+
+"And you," she said, flaring up, "think that, as long as it's got to be,
+it might as well be you! Is that your song and dance, Mr. Smarty?"
+
+I shook my head and smiled.
+
+"Don't be a little goat!" I said; and that seemed to make her take to me
+and trust me.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" she asked.
+
+"I'll tell you," I said; and I found that it wasn't easy. "First place,"
+I said, "I've got some money saved up. That will keep you on Easy Street
+till I get back from Sydney. If by that time nothing's turned up that
+you want of your own free heart and will, I'll ask you to pay me back
+by--by changing your name."
+
+She didn't quite follow.
+
+"That," said I, "gives you a chance to look around--gives you one small
+chance in a million to light on some man you can care for and who'll
+care for you and take care of you. Failing that, it would be fair enough
+for you to take me, failing a better. See?"
+
+"You mean," she said, "that if things don't straighten out, it would be
+better for me to become Mrs. Bower than walk the streets? Is that it?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"But I don't see your point of view," she cried. "Just because you're
+sorry for a girl don't mean you want to make her your wife."
+
+"It isn't sorrowing," I said. "It's wanting. It's the right kind of
+wanting. It's the wanting that would rather wait than hurt you; that
+would rather do without you than hurt you."
+
+"And you'll trust me with all your savings and go away to Australia--and
+if I find some other man that I like better you'll let me off from
+marrying you? Is that it?"
+
+"That's about it," I said.
+
+"And suppose," says she, "that you don't come back, and nobody shows up,
+and the money goes?"
+
+That was a new point of view.
+
+"Well," said I, "we've got to take some chances in this world."
+
+"We have," said she. "And now look here--I don't know how much of it's
+wanting and how much of it's fear--but if you'll take chances I will."
+
+She turned as red as a beet and looked away.
+
+"In words of two syllables," said I, "what do you mean?"
+
+"I mean," she said--and she was still as red as a beet, but this time
+she looked me in my eyes without a flinch in hers--"that if you're dead
+sure you want me--are you?--if you're dead sure, why, I'll take chances
+on my wanting you. I believe every word you've said to me. Is that
+right?"
+
+"Every word," I said. "That is right."
+
+Then we looked at each other for a long time.
+
+"What a lot we'll have to tell each other," she said, "before we're
+really acquainted. But you're sure? You're quite sure?"
+
+"Sure that I want you? Yes," I said; "not sure that you ought not to
+wait and think me over."
+
+"You've begun," she said, "with everything that's noble and generous. I
+could never look myself in the face again if I felt called upon to begin
+by being mean."
+
+"Hadn't you better think it over?" I said. "Hadn't you?"
+
+But she put her hands on my shoulders.
+
+"If an angel with wings had come with gifts," she said, "would I have
+thought them over? And just because your wings don't show----"
+
+"It isn't fair," I mumbled. "I give you a choice between the streets and
+me and you feel forced to choose me."
+
+But she pulled my head down and gave me a quick, fierce kiss.
+
+"There," said she--"was that forced? Did you force me to do that? No,"
+she said; "you needn't think you're the only person in the world that
+wants another person.... If you go to Australia I don't wait here. I go
+too. If you sink by the way, I sink. And don't you go to thinking you've
+made me a one-sided bargain.... I can cook for you and mend for you and
+save for you. And if you're sick I can nurse you. And I can black your
+boots."
+
+"I thought," said I, "that you were just a little girl that I wanted,
+but you turn out to be the whole world that I've got to have. Slip the
+rest of your canvas on and I'll hook it up for you. Then we'll find some
+one to marry us--'nless you'd rather wait."
+
+"Wait?" said she, turning her back and standing still, which most women
+haven't sense enough to do when a man's ten thumbs are trying to hook
+them up. "I've been waiting all my life for this--and you!"
+
+"And I," said I, splitting a thumb-nail, "would go through an eternity
+of hell if I knew that this was at the end of it--and you!"
+
+"What is your church?" she asked of a sudden.
+
+"Same as yours," I said, "which is----"
+
+"Does it matter," said she, "if God is in it? Do you pray?"
+
+"No," said I; "do you?"
+
+"Always," she said, "before I go to bed."
+
+"Then I will," said I; "always--before we do."
+
+"Sometimes," she said, "I've been shaken about God. Was to-night--before
+you came. But He's made good--hasn't He?"
+
+"He has," I said. "And now you're hooked up. And I wish it was to do all
+over again. I loved doing it."
+
+"Did you?" said she.
+
+Her eyes were bright and brave like two stars. She slipped her hand
+through my arm and we marched out of the opera-house. Half a dozen young
+globe-trotters were at the stage-door waiting to take a chance on Miss
+Green as she came out, but none of them spoke. We headed for the nearest
+city directory and looked up a minister.
+
+
+II
+
+I had married April; she cried when she thought she wasn't good enough
+for me; she smiled like the sun when I swore she was.
+
+I had married June; she was like an armful of roses.
+
+We weren't two; we were one. What alloy does gold make mixed with brass?
+We were that alloy. I was the brass.
+
+We travelled down to Singapore first-class, with one-armed Yir Massir to
+look after us--down the old Hoogli with the stubs of half-burned Hindus
+bobbing alongside, crows sitting on 'em and tearing off strips. We ran
+aground on all the regular old sand-bars that are never twice in the
+same place; and one dusk we saw tigers come out of the jungle to drink.
+We'd both travelled quite some, but you wouldn't have thought it. Ivy
+Bower and Right Bower had just run away from school for to see the world
+"so new and all."
+
+Some honey-moons a man keeps finding out things about his wife that he
+don't like--little tricks of temper and temperature; but I kept finding
+out things about mine that I'd never even dared to hope for. I went
+pretty near crazy with love of her. At first she was a child that had
+had a wicked, cruel nightmare--and I'd happened to be about to comfort
+her when she waked and to soothe her. Then she got over her scare and
+began to play at matrimony, putting on little airs and dignities--just
+like a child playing grown-up. Then all of a sudden it came to her, that
+tremendous love that some women have for some of us dogs of men. It was
+big as a storm, but it wasn't too big for her. Nothing that's noble and
+generous was too big for her; nor was any way of showing her love too
+little. Any little mole-hill of thoughtfulness from me was
+changed--presto!--into a chain o' mountains; but she thought in
+mountains and made mole-hills of 'em.
+
+We steamed into Singapore and I showed her the old _Boldero_, that was
+to be our home, laid against the Copra Wharf, waiting to be turned into
+an ark. The animals weren't all collected and we had a day or two to
+chase about and enjoy ourselves; but she wasn't for expensive pleasures.
+
+"Wait," she said, "till you're a little tired of me; but now, when we're
+happy just to be together walking in the dust, what's the use of
+disbursing?"
+
+"If we save till I'm tired of you," says I, "we'll be rich."
+
+"Rich it is, then," said she, "for those who will need it more."
+
+"But," says I, "the dictionary says that a skunk is a man that
+economizes on his honey-moon."
+
+"If you're bound to blow yourself," says she, "let's trot down to the
+Hongkong-Shanghai Bank and buy some shares in something."
+
+"But," says I, "you have no engagement ring."
+
+"And I'm not engaged," says she. "I'm a married woman."
+
+"You're a married child."
+
+"My husband's arm around my waist is my ring," says she; "his heart is
+my jewel."
+
+Even if it had been broad daylight and people looking, I'd have put her
+ring on her at that. But it was dark, in a park of trees and
+benches--just like Central Park.
+
+"With this ring," says I, "I thee guard from all evil."
+
+"But there is no evil," said she. "The world's all new; it's been given
+a fresh start. There's no evil. The apple's back on the tree of
+knowledge. Eden's come back--and it's spring in Eden."
+
+"And among other items," says I, "that we've invoiced for Sydney is a
+python thirty feet long."
+
+"Look!" says she.
+
+A girl sat against one of the stems of a banyan, and a Tommy lay on his
+back with his head in her lap. She was playing with his hair. You could
+just see them for the dark.
+
+"'And they lived on the square like a true married pair,'" says I.
+
+"Can't people be naughty and good?" says she.
+
+"No," says I; "good and naughty only."
+
+"Suppose," says she, "you and I felt about each other the way we do, but
+you were married to a rich widow in Lisbon and I was married to a wicked
+old Jew in Malta--would that make you Satan and me Jezebel?"
+
+"No," says I; "only me. Nothing could change you." She thought a little.
+
+"No," says she; "I don't think anything could. But there isn't any
+wicked old Jew. You know that."
+
+"And you know about the rich widow?"
+
+"What about her?" This said sharp, with a tug at my arm to unwrap it.
+
+"She was born in Singapore," said I, "of a silly goose by an idle
+thought. And two minutes later she died."
+
+"There's nothing that can ever hurt us--is there?--nothing that's
+happened and gone before?"
+
+Man that is born of woman ought not to have that question put up to him;
+but she didn't let me answer.
+
+"Because, if there is," she said, "it's lucky I'm here to look after
+us."
+
+"Could I do anything that you wouldn't forgive?"
+
+"If you turned away from me," she said, "I'd die--but I'd forgive."
+
+Next daylight she was leaning on the rail of the _Boldero_ watching the
+animals come over the side and laughing to see them turn their heads to
+listen to what old Yir Massir said to them in Hindustani. He spoke words
+of comfort, telling them not to be afraid; and they listened. Even
+Bahut, the big elephant, as the slings tightened and he swung dizzily
+heavenward, cocked his moth-eaten ears to listen and refrained from
+whimpering, though the pit of his stomach was cold with fear; and he
+worked his toes when there was nothing under them but water.
+
+"The elephant is the strongest of all things," I said, "and the most
+gentle."
+
+Her little fingers pressed my arm, which was like marble in those days.
+
+"No," said she--"the man!"
+
+
+III
+
+That voyage was good, so far as it went, but there's no use talking
+about it, because what came afterward was better. We'd no sooner backed
+off the Copra Wharf and headed down the straits, leaving a trail of
+smoke and tiger smell, than Ivy went to house-keeping on the _Boldero_.
+There are great house-keepers, just as there are great poets and actors.
+It takes genius; that's all. And Ivy had that kind of genius. Yir Massir
+had a Hindu saying that fitted her like a glove. He looked in upon her
+work of preparing and systematizing for the cramped weeks at sea and
+said: "The little mem-sahib is a born woman."
+
+That's just what she is. There are born idiots and born leaders. Some
+are born male and some female; but a born woman is the rarest thing in
+the world, the most useful and the most precious. She had never kept
+house, but there was nothing for her to learn. She worked things so that
+whenever I could come off duty she was at leisure to give all her care
+and thought to me.
+
+There was never a millionaire who had more speckless white suits than I
+had, though it's a matter almost of routine for officers to go dirty on
+anything but the swell liners. Holes in socks grew together under her
+fingers, so that you had to look close to see where they'd been. She
+even kept a kind of dwarf hibiscus, with bright red flowers, alive and
+flourishing in the thick salt air; and she was always slipping into the
+galley to give a new, tasty turn to the old sea-standbys.
+
+The crew, engineer, and stokers were all Chinks. Hadley always put his
+trust in them and they come cheap. We had forty coolies who berthed
+forward, going out on contract to work on a new government dry-dock at
+Paiulu. I don't mind a Chink myself, so long as he keeps his habits to
+himself and doesn't over-smoke; but they're not sociable. Except for Yir
+Massir and myself, there was no one aboard for Ivy to talk to. Yir
+Massir's duty kept him busy with the health of the collection for the
+Sydney Zoo, and Ivy found time to help, to advise, and to learn. They
+made as much fuss between them over the beasts as if they had been
+babies; and the donkey-engine was busy most of the day hoisting cages to
+the main-deck and lowering them again, so that the beasts could have a
+better look at the sea and a bit of sun and fresh air. As it was, a good
+many of the beasts and all the birds roomed on the main-deck all the
+time. Sometimes Yir Massir would take out a chetah--a nasty, snarling,
+pin-headed piece of long-legged malice--and walk him up and down on a
+dog-chain, same as a woman walks her King Charlie. He gave the monkeys
+all the liberty they could use and abuse; it was good sport to see them
+chase themselves and each other over the masts and upper-works.
+
+The most you can say of going out with a big tonnage of beasts is that,
+if you're healthy and have no nerves, you can just stand it. Sometimes
+they'll all howl together for five or six hours at a time; sometimes
+they'll all be logy and still as death, except one tiger, who can't make
+his wants understood and who'll whine and rumble about them all round
+the clock. I don't know which is worse, the chorus or the solo. And
+then, of course, the smell side to the situation isn't a matter for
+print. If I say that we had twenty hogsheads of disinfectants and
+deodorizers along it's all you need know. Anyhow, according to Yir
+Massir, it was the smell that killed big Bahut's mate. And she'd been
+brought up in an Indian village and ought to have been used to all the
+smells, from A to Z.
+
+One elephant more or less doesn't matter to me, especially when it's
+insured, but Yir Massir's grief and self-reproach were appalling; and
+Ivy felt badly too. It was as much for her sake as Yir Massir's that I
+read a part of the burial service out of the prayer-book and committed
+the body of "this our sister" to the deep. It may have been
+sacrilegious, but I don't care. It comforted Ivy some and Yir Massir a
+heap. And it did this to me, that I can't look at a beast now without
+thinking that--well, that there's not such an awful lot of difference
+between two legs and four, and that maybe God put Himself out just as
+much to make one as the other.
+
+We swung her overside by heavy tackle. What with the roll of the ship
+and the fact that she swung feet down, she looked alive; and the funeral
+looked more like a drowning than a burial.
+
+We had no weights to sink her; and when I gave the word to cut loose she
+made a splash like a small tidal wave and then floated.
+
+We could see her for an hour, like a bit of a slate-colored island with
+white gulls sitting on it.
+
+And that night Yir Massir waited on us looking like some old crazy loon
+out of the Bible. He'd made himself a prickly shirt of sackcloth and had
+smeared his black head and brown face with gray ashes. Big Bahut
+whimpered all night and trumpeted as if his heart were broken.
+
+
+IV
+
+I've often noticed that when things happen it's in bunches. The tenth
+day south of the line we had a look at almost all the sea-events that
+are made into woodcuts for the high-school geographies. For days we'd
+seen nothing except sapphire-blue sea, big swells rolling under a satin
+finish without breaking through, and a baby-blue sky. On the morning of
+the tenth the sea was streaked with broad, oily bands, like State roads,
+and near and far were whales travelling south at about ten knots an
+hour, as if they had a long way to go.
+
+We saw heaps of porpoises and heaps of flying-fish; some birds; unhewn
+timber--a nasty lot of it--and big floats of sea-weed. We saw a whale
+being pounded to death by a killer; and in the afternoon as perfect an
+example of a brand-new coral island as was ever seen. It looked like a
+ring of white snow floating on the water, and inside the ring was a
+careened two-master--just the ribs and stumps left. There was a
+water-spout miles off to port, and there was a kind of electric jump and
+thrill to the baked air that made these things seem important, like
+omens in ancient times. Besides, the beasts, from Bahut the elephant to
+little Assam the mongoose, put in the whole day at practising the noises
+of complaint and uneasiness. Then, directly it was dark, we slipped into
+a "white sea." That's a rare sight and it has never been very well
+explained. The water looks as though it had been mixed with a quantity
+of milk, but when you dip it up it's just water.
+
+About midnight we ran out of this and Ivy and I turned in. The sky was
+clear as a bell and even the beasts were quiet. I hadn't been asleep
+ten minutes and Ivy not at all, when all at once hell broke loose. There
+was a bump that nearly drove my head through a bulkhead; though only
+half awake I could feel to the cold marrow of my bones that the old
+_Boldero_ was down by the head. The beasts knew it and the Chinks. Never
+since Babel was there such pandemonium on earth or sea. By a struck
+match I saw Ivy running out of the cabin and slipping on her
+bath-wrapper as she went. I called to her, but she didn't answer. I
+didn't want to think of anything but Ivy, but I had to let her go and
+think of the ship.
+
+There wasn't much use in thinking. The old _Boldero_ was settling by the
+head and the pumps couldn't hold up the inflood. In fifteen minutes I
+knew that it was all up with us--or all down, rather--and I ordered the
+boats over and began to run about like a maniac, looking for Ivy and
+calling to her. And why do you suppose I couldn't find her? She was
+hiding--hiding from me!
+
+She'd heard of captains of sinking ships sending off their wives and
+children and sweethearts and staying behind to drown out of a mistaken
+notion of duty. She'd got it into her head that I was that kind of
+captain and she'd hid so that she couldn't be sent away; but it was all
+my fault really. If I'd hurried her on deck the minute I did find her
+we'd have been in time to leave with the boats. But I stopped for
+explanations and to give her a bit of a lecture; so when we got on deck
+there were the boats swarming with Chinks slipping off to windward--and
+there at our feet was Yir Massir, lying in his own blood and brains, a
+wicked, long knife in his hand and the thread outpiece of a Chink's
+pigtail between his teeth.
+
+I like to think that he'd tried to make them wait for us, but I don't
+know. Anyhow, there we were, alone on a sinking deck and all through
+with earthly affairs as I reckoned it. But Ivy reckoned differently.
+
+"Why are they rowing in that direction?" she says. "They won't get
+anywhere."
+
+"Why not?" says I.
+
+She jerked her thumb to leeward.
+
+"Don't you feel that it's over there?--the land?" she says. "Just over
+there."
+
+"Why, no, bless you!" says I. "I don't have any feeling about it.... Now
+then, we've got to hustle around and find something that will float us.
+We want to get out of this before the old _Boldero_ goes and sucks us
+down after."
+
+"There's the life-raft," says she; "they left that."
+
+"Yes," says I; "if we can get it overboard. It weighs a ton. You make up
+a bundle of food on the jump, Ivy, and I'll try to rig a tackle."
+
+When the raft was floating quietly alongside I felt better. It looked
+then as if we were to have a little more run for our money.
+
+We worked like a couple of furies loading on food and water, Ivy
+lowering and I lashing fast.
+
+"There," says I at last; "she won't take any more. Come along. I can
+help you down better from here."
+
+"We've got to let the beasts loose," says she.
+
+"Why?" says I.
+
+"Oh, just to give 'em a chance," she says.
+
+So I climbs back to where she was standing.
+
+"It's rot!" I says. "But if you say so----"
+
+"There's loads of time," says she--"we're not settling so fast. Besides,
+even if I'm wrong about the land, they'll know. They'll show us which
+way to go. Big Bahut, he knows."
+
+"It don't matter," I says. "We can't work the raft any way but to
+leeward--not one man can't."
+
+"If the beasts go the other way," says she, "one man must try and one
+woman."
+
+"Oh, we'll try," says I, "right enough. We'll try."
+
+The first beast we loosed was the python. Ivy did the loosing and I
+stood by with a big rifle to guard against trouble; but, bless you,
+there was no need. One and all, the beasts knew the old _Boldero_ was
+doomed, and one and all they cried and begged and made eyes and signs to
+be turned loose. As for knowing where the nearest land was--well, if
+you'd seen the python, when he came to the surface, make a couple of
+loopy turns to get his bearings and his wriggles in order, and then hike
+off to leeward in a bee-line--you'd have believed that he--well, that he
+knew what he was talking about.
+
+And the beasts, one and all, big and little, the minute they were
+loosed, wanted to get overboard--even the cats; and off they went to
+leeward in the first flush of dawn, horned heads, cat heads, pig
+heads--the darnedest game of follow-my-leader that ever the skies looked
+down on. And the birds, white and colored, streaked out over the beasts.
+There was a kind of wonder to it all that eased the pinch of fear. Ivy
+clapped her hands and jumped up and down like a child when it sees the
+grand entry in Buffalo Bill's show for the first time--or the last, for
+that matter.
+
+There was some talk of taking a tow-line from around Bahut's neck to the
+raft; but the morning breeze was freshening and with a sail rigged the
+raft would swim pretty fast herself. Anyway, we couldn't fix it to get
+big Bahut overboard. The best we could do was to turn him loose, open
+all the hatches, and trust to his finding a way out when the _Boldero_
+settled.
+
+He did, bless him! We weren't two hundred yards clear when the _Boldero_
+gave a kind of shudder and went down by the bows, Bahut yelling bloody
+murder. Then, just when we'd given him up for lost, he shot up from the
+depths, half-way out of water. After blowing his nose and getting his
+bearings he came after the raft like a good old tugboat.
+
+We stood up, Ivy and I did, and cheered him as he caught up with us and
+foamed by.
+
+
+The worst kind of remembering is remembering what you've forgotten. I
+got redder and redder. It didn't seem as if I could tell Ivy; but I did.
+First I says, hopeful:
+
+"Have you forgotten anything?"
+
+She shakes her head.
+
+"I have," says I. "I've left my rifle, but I've got plenty of
+cartridges. I've got a box of candles, but I've forgotten to bring
+matches. A nice, thoughtful husband you've got!"
+
+
+V
+
+The beasts knew.
+
+There was land just around the first turn of the world--land that had
+what might be hills when you got to 'em and that was pale gray against
+the sun, with all the upper-works gilded; but it wasn't big land. You
+could see the north and south limits; and the trees on the hills could
+probably see the ocean to the east.
+
+They were funny trees, those; and others just like them had come down
+to the cove to meet us when we landed. They were a kind of pine and the
+branches grew in layers, with long spaces between. Since then I've seen
+trees just like them, but very little, in florists' windows; only the
+florists' trees have broad scarlet sashes round their waists, by way of
+decoration, maybe, or out of deference to Anthony Comstock.
+
+The cove had been worked out by a brook that came loafing down a turfy
+valley, with trees single and in spinneys, for all the world like an
+English park; and at the upper end of the valley, cutting the island in
+half lengthwise, as we learned later, the little wooded hills rolled
+north and south, and low spurs ran out from them, so as to make the
+valley a valley instead of a plain.
+
+There were flocks of goats in the valley, which was what made the grass
+so turfy, I suppose; and our own deer and antelopes were browsing near
+them, friendly as you please. Near at hand big Bahut, who had been the
+last but us to land, was quietly munching the top of a broad-leafed tree
+that he'd pulled down; but the cats and riffraff had melted into the
+landscape. So had the birds, except a pair of jungle-fowl, who'd found
+seed near the cove and were picking it up as fast as they could and
+putting it away.
+
+"Well," says I, "it's an island, sure, Ivy. The first thing to do is to
+find out who lives on it, owns it, and dispenses its hospitality, and
+make up to them."
+
+But she shook her head and said seriously:
+
+"I've a feeling, Right," she says--"a kind of hunch--that there's nobody
+on it but us."
+
+I laughed at her then, but half a day's tramping proved that she was
+right. I tell you women have ways of knowing things that we men haven't.
+The fact is, civilization slides off 'em like water off a duck; and at
+heart and by instinct they are people of the cave-dwelling period--on
+cut-and-dried terms with ghosts and spirits, all the unseen sources of
+knowledge that man has grown away from.
+
+I had sure proofs of this in the way Ivy took to the cave we found in a
+bunch of volcano rock that lifted sheer out of the cove and had bright
+flowers smiling out of all its pockets. No society lady ever entered her
+brand-new marble house at Newport with half the happiness.
+
+Ivy was crazy about the cave and never tired of pointing out its
+advantages. She went to house-keeping without any of the utensils, as
+keen and eager as she'd gone to it on the poor old _Boldero_, where at
+least there were pots and pans and pepper.
+
+We had grub to last a few weeks, a pair of blankets, the clothes we
+stood in, and an axe. I had, besides, a heavy clasp-knife, a watch, and
+seven sovereigns. The first thing Ivy insisted on was a change of
+clothes.
+
+"These we stand in," says she, "are the only presentable things we've
+got, and Heaven only knows how long they've got to last us for best."
+
+"We could throw modesty to the winds," I suggested.
+
+"Of course you can do as you please," she said. "I don't care one way or
+the other about the modesty; but I've got a skin that looks on the sun
+with distinct aversion, and I don't propose to go through a course of
+yellow blisters--and then turn black."
+
+"I've seen islanders weave cloth out of palm fibre--most any kind," I
+said. "It's clumsy and airy; but if you think it would do----"
+
+"It sounds scratchy."
+
+"It is, but it's good for the circulation."
+
+Well, we made a kind of cloth and cut it into shapes, and knotted the
+shapes together with more fibre; then we folded up our best and only
+Sunday-go-to-meeting suits and put the fibre things on; and then we went
+down to the cove to look at ourselves in the water. And Ivy laughed.
+
+"We're not clothed," she said; "we're thatched; and yet--and yet--it's
+accident, of course, but this skirt has got a certain hang that----"
+
+"Whatever that skirt's got," I said, "these pants haven't; but if you're
+happy I am."
+
+Well, there's worse situations than desert-islanding it with the one
+woman in the world. I even know one man who claims he was cast away with
+a perfect stranger that he hated the sight of at first--a terribly
+small-minded, conventional woman--and still he had the time of his life.
+They got to like each other over a mutual taste for cribbage, which they
+played for sea-shells, yellow with a pink edge, until the woman went
+broke and got heavily in debt to the man. He was nice about it and let
+her off. He says the affair must have ended in matrimony, only she took
+a month to think it over; during that month they were picked up and
+carried to Honolulu; then they quarrelled and never saw each other
+again.
+
+"Ivy," said I one day, "we'll be picked up by a passing steamer some
+day, of course, but meanwhile I'd rather be here with you than any place
+I can name."
+
+"It's Eden," she said, "and I'd like to live like this always. But----"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"But people grow old," she said, "and one dies before another. That's
+what's wrong with Eden."
+
+I laughed at her.
+
+"Old! You and I? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, Ivy Bower."
+
+"Right Bower," says she, "you don't understand----"
+
+"How not understand?"
+
+"You don't understand that Right Bower and Ivy Bower aren't the only
+people on this island."
+
+She didn't turn a fiery red and bolt--the way young wives do in stories.
+She looked at me with steady, brave, considering eyes.
+
+"Don't worry, dear," she says after a time; "everything will be all
+right. I know it will."
+
+"I know it too." I lied.
+
+Know it? I was cold with fright.
+
+"Don't be afraid," said she. "And--and meanwhile there's dinner to be
+got ready--and you can have a go at your firesticks."
+
+It was my ambition to get fire by friction. Now and then I got the
+sticks to smoke and I hoped that practice would give me the little extra
+speed and cunning that makes for flame. I'd always been pretty good at
+games, if a little slow to learn.
+
+
+VI
+
+You'd think anxiety about Ivy'd have been the hardest thing to bear in
+the life we were living; and so it would have been if she'd showed any
+anxiety about herself. Not she. You might have thought she was looking
+forward to a Christmas-box from home. If she was ever scared it was
+when I wasn't looking. No--it was the beasts that made us anxious.
+
+At first we'd go for long walks and make explorations up and down the
+island. The beasts hid from us according to the wild nature that's in
+them. You could only tell from fresh tracks in damp places that they
+hadn't utterly disappeared. Now and then we saw deer and antelopes far
+off; and at night, of course, there was always something doing in the
+way of a chorus. Beasts that gave our end of the island the go-by
+daytimes paid us visits nights and sat under the windows, you may say,
+and sang their songs.
+
+It seemed natural after a time to be cooped up in a big green prison
+with a lot of loose wild things that could bite and tear you to pieces
+if they thought of it. We were hard to scare. What scared me first was
+this: When we got to the island it was alive with goats. Well, these
+just casually disappeared. Then, one morning, bright and early, I came
+on the big python in the act of swallowing a baby antelope. It gave me a
+horrid start and set me thinking. How long could the island support a
+menagerie? What would the meat-eaters do when they'd killed off all the
+easy meat--finished up the deer and antelopes and all? Would they fight
+it out among themselves--big tiger eat little tiger--until only the
+fittest one survived? And what would that fittest one do if he got good
+and hungry and began to think that I'd make a square meal for him--or
+Ivy?
+
+I reached two conclusions--and the cave about the same time. First, I
+wouldn't tell Ivy I was scared. Second, I'd make fire by friction or
+otherwise--or bust. Once I got fire, I'd never let it go out. I set to
+work with the firesticks right off, and Ivy came and stood by and looked
+on.
+
+"Never saw you put so much elbow-grease into anything," she said.
+"What's the matter with you, anyway?"
+
+"It's a game," I grunted, "and these two fellows will have me beat if I
+don't look lively."
+
+"Right Bower," she says then, slow and deliberate, "I can see you're
+upside down about something. Tell Ivy."
+
+"Look," says I--"smoke! I never got it so quick before." I spun the
+pointed stick between the palms of my hands harder than ever and gloated
+over the wisp of smoke that came from where it was boring into the flat
+stick.
+
+"Make a bow," says Ivy. "Loop the bowstring round the hand-piece and
+you'll get more friction with less work."
+
+"By gorry!" says I; "you're right. I remember a picture in a
+geography--'Native Drilling a Conch Shell.' Fool that I am to forget!"
+
+"Guess you and I learned out of the same geography," said Ivy.
+
+"Only I didn't learn," said I. "I'm off to cut something tough to make
+the bow."
+
+"Don't go far," she says.
+
+"Why not?" said I--the sporty way a man does when he pretends that he's
+going to take a night off with the boys and play poker.
+
+"Because," she says smiling, "I'm afraid the beasts will get me while
+you're gone."
+
+"Rats!" says I.
+
+"Tigers!" says she. "Oh, Right, you unplumbable old idiot! Do you think
+you can come into this cave and hide anything from me under that
+transparent face of yours? The minute you came in and hemmed and hawed,
+and said as you had nothing to do you guessed you'd have a go with the
+firesticks--I knew. What scared you?"
+
+I surrendered and told her.
+
+"... And then," she said, "you think maybe they'll hurt--us?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"Why, it's war," she said. "I've read enough about war to know that
+there are two safe rules to follow. First, declare war yourself while
+the other fellow's thinking about it; and then strike him before he's
+even heard that you have declared it. That sounds mixed, but it's easy
+enough. We'll declare war on the dangerous beasts while I'm still in the
+months of hop, skip, and jump."
+
+"A certain woman," said I, "wouldn't let the beasts go down in the old
+_Boldero_, as would have been beneficial for all parties."
+
+"This is different," she said. "This island's got to be a safe place for
+a little child to play in or Ivy Bower's got to be told the reason why."
+
+"You're dead right, Ivy dear," I says, "and always was. But how? I'm
+cursed if I know how to kill a tiger without a rifle.... Let's get fire
+first and put the citadel in a state of siege. Then we'll try our hand
+at traps, snares, and pitfalls. I'm strong, but I'm cursed if I want to
+fall on a tiger with nothing in my hands but a knife or an axe."
+
+"All I care about," said Ivy, "is to get everything settled, so that
+when the time comes we can be comfortable and plenty domestic."
+
+She sat in the mouth of the cave and looked over the smooth cove to the
+rolling ocean beyond; and she had the expression of a little girl
+playing at being married with a little boy friend in the playhouse that
+her father had just given her for her birthday.
+
+I got a piece of springy wood to make a bow with, and sat by her shaping
+it with my knife. That night we got fire. Ivy caught some fish in the
+cove and we cooked them; and--thanks, O Lord!--how good they were! We
+sat up very late comparing impressions, each saying how each felt when
+the smoke began to show sparks and when the tinder pieces finally
+caught, and how each had felt when the broiled smell of the fish had
+begun to go abroad in the land. We told each other of all the good
+things we had eaten in our day, but how this surpassed them all. And
+later we told each other all our favorite names--boy names in case it
+should be a boy and girl names in case it shouldn't.
+
+Then, suddenly, something being hunted by something tore by in the
+dark--not very far off. The sweat came off me in buckets, and I heaped
+wood on the fire and flung burning brands into the night, this way and
+that, as far as I could fling them. Ivy said I was like Jupiter trying
+to hurl thunder-bolts, after the invention of Christianity, and not
+rightly understanding why they wouldn't explode any more.
+
+
+VII
+
+The pines of the island were full of pitch and a branch would burn
+torch-like for a long time. I kept a bundle of such handy, the short
+ends sharpened so's you could stick 'em round wherever the ground was
+soft enough and have an effect of altar candles in a draughty church. If
+there was occasion to leave the cave at night I'd carry one of the
+torches and feel as safe as if it had been an elephant rifle.
+
+We made a kind of a dooryard in front of the cave's mouth, with a
+stockade that we borrowed from Robinson Crusoe, driving pointed stakes
+close-serried and hoping they'd take root and sprout; but they didn't.
+Between times I made finger-drawings in the sand of plans for tiger
+traps and pitfalls. I couldn't dig pits, but I knew of two that might
+have been made to my order, a volcano having taken the contract. They
+were deep as wells, sheer-sided; anything that fell in would stay in. I
+made a wattle-work of branches and palm fibre to serve as lids for these
+nature-made tiger jars. The idea was to toss dead fish out to the middle
+of the lids for bait; then for one of the big cats to smell the fish,
+step out to get it, and fall through. Once in, it would be child's work
+to stone him to death.
+
+Another trap I made was more complicated and was a scheme to drop trees
+heavy enough to break a camel's back or whatever touched the trigger
+that kept them from falling. It was the devil's own job to make that
+trap. First place, I couldn't cut a tree big enough and lift it to a
+strategic position; so I had to fell trees in such a way that they'd be
+caught half-way to the ground by other trees. Then I'd have to clear
+away branches and roots so that when the trees did fall the rest of the
+way it would be clean, plumb, and sudden. It was a wonderful trap when
+it was finished and it was the most dangerous work of art I ever saw. If
+you touched any of a dozen triggers you stood to have a whole grove of
+trees come banging down on top of you--same as if you went for a walk in
+the woods and a tornado came along and blew the woods down. If the big
+cats had known how frightfully dangerous that trap was they'd have
+jumped overboard and left the island by swimming. I made two other traps
+something like it--the best contractor in New York wouldn't have
+undertaken to build one just like it at any price--and then it came
+around to be the seventh day, so to speak; and, like the six-day bicycle
+rider, I rested.
+
+"Days," is only a fashion of speaking. I was months getting my five
+death-traps into working order. I couldn't work steadily because there
+was heaps of cavework to do besides, fish to be caught, wood to be cut
+for the fire, and all; and then, dozens of times, I'd suddenly get
+scared about Ivy and go running back to the cave to see if she was all
+right. I might have known better; she was always all right and much
+better plucked than I was.
+
+Well, sir, my traps wouldn't work. The fish rotted on the wattle-lids of
+the pitfalls, but the beasts wouldn't try for 'em. They were getting
+ravenous, too--ready to attack big Bahut even; but they wouldn't step
+out on those wattles and they wouldn't step under my balanced trees.
+They'd beat about the neighborhood of the danger and I've found many a
+padmark within six inches of the edge of things. I even baited with a
+live kid. It belonged to the Thibet goats and I had a hard time catching
+it; and after it had bleated all night and done its baby best to be
+tiger food I turned it loose and it ran off with its mammy. She, poor
+soul, had gone right into the trap to be with her baby and, owing to the
+direct intervention of Providence, hadn't sprung the thing.
+
+The next fancy bait I tried was a chetah--dead. I found him just after
+his accident, not far from the cave. He was still warm; and he was
+flat--very flat, like a rug made of chetah skin. He had some shreds of
+elephant-hide tangled in his claws. It looked to me as if he'd gotten
+desperate with hunger and had pounced on big Bahut--pshaw! the story was
+in plain print: "Ouch!" says big Bahut. "A flea has bitten me. Here's
+where I play dead," and--rolls over. Result: one neat and very flat rug
+made out of chetah.
+
+I showed the rug to Ivy and then carried it off to the woods and spread
+it in my first and fanciest trap. Then I allowed I'd have a look at the
+pitfalls, which I hadn't visited for a couple of days--and I was a fool
+to do it. I'd told Ivy where I was going to spread the chetah and that
+after that I'd come straight home. Well, the day seemed young and I
+thought if I hurried I could go home the roundabout way by the pitfalls
+in such good time that Ivy wouldn't know the difference. Well, sir, I
+came to the first pitfall--and, lo and behold! something had been and
+taken the bait and got away with it without so much as putting a foot
+through the wattling. I'd woven it too strong. So I thought I'd just
+weaken it up a little--it wouldn't take five minutes. I tried it with my
+foot--very gingerly. Yes, it was too strong--much too strong. I put more
+weight into that foot--and bang, smash, crash--bump! There I was at the
+bottom of the pit, with half the wattling on top of me.
+
+The depth of that hole was full twenty-five feet; the sides were as
+smooth as bottle-glass; dusk was turning into dark. But these things
+weren't the worst of it. I'd told Ivy that I'd do one thing--and I'd
+gone and done another. I'd lied to her and I'd put her in for a time of
+anxiety, and then fright, that might kill her.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I wasted what little daylight was left trying to climb out, using
+nothing but hands and feet. And then I sat down and cursed myself for a
+triple-plated, copper-riveted, patent-applied-for fool. Nothing would
+have been easier, given light, than to take the wattling that had fallen
+into the pit with me to pieces, build a pole--sort of a split-bamboo
+fishing-rod on a big scale--shin up and go home. But to turn that trick
+in the dark wasn't any fun. I did it though--twice. I made the first
+pole too light and it smashed when I was half-way up. A splinter jabbed
+into my thigh and drew blood. That complicated matters. The smell of the
+blood went out of the pit and travelled around the island like a
+sandwich man saying: "Fine supply of fresh meat about to come out of
+Right Bower's pet pitfall; second on the left."
+
+When I'd shinned to the top of the second pole I built and crawled over
+the rim of the pit--there was a tiger sitting, waiting, very patient. I
+could just make him out in the starlight. He was mighty lean and looked
+like a hungry gutter-cat on a big scale. Some people are afraid to be
+alone in the dark. I'm not. Well, I just knelt there--I'd risen to my
+knees--and stared at him. And then I began to take in a long breath--I
+swelled and swelled with it. It's a wonder I didn't use up all the air
+on the island and create a vacuum--in which case the tiger would have
+blown up. I remember wondering what that big breath was going to do when
+it came out. I didn't know. I had no plan. I looked at the tiger and he
+looked at me and whined--like a spoiled spaniel asking for sugar. That
+was too much. I thought of Ivy, maybe needing me as she'd never needed
+any one before--and I looked at that stinking cat that meant to keep me
+from her. I made one jump at him--'stead of him at me--and at the same
+time I let out the big breath I'd drawn in a screech that very likely
+was heard in Jericho.
+
+The tiger just vanished like a Cheshire cat in a book I read once, and I
+was running through the night for home and Ivy. But the fire at the cave
+was dying, and Ivy was gone.
+
+Well, of course she'd have gone to look for me.... It was then that I
+began to whimper and cry. I lit a pine-torch, flung some wood on the
+embers, and went out to look for her--whimpering all the time. I'd told
+her that I was going out to bait a certain trap and would then come
+straight home. So of course she'd have gone straight to that trap--and
+it was there I found her.
+
+The torch showed her where she sat, right near the dead chetah, in the
+very centre of the trap--triggers all about her--to touch one of which
+spelt death; and all around the trap, in a ring--like an audience at a
+one-ring circus--were the meat-eaters--the tigers--the lions--the
+leopards--and, worst of all, the pigs. There she sat and there they
+sat--and no one moved--except me with the torch.
+
+She lifted her great eyes to me and she smiled. All the beasts looked at
+me and turned away their eyes from the light and blinked and shifted;
+and the old he-lion coughed. They wouldn't come near me because of the
+torch--and they wouldn't go near Ivy because of the trap. They knew it
+was a trap. They always had known it and so had Ivy. That was why she
+had gone into it when so many deaths looked at her in so many
+ways--because she knew that in there she'd be safe. All along she'd
+known that my old traps and pitfalls wouldn't catch anything; but she'd
+never said so--and she'd never laughed at them or at me. I could find it
+in my heart to call her a perfect wife--just by that one fact of tact
+alone; but there are other facts--other reasons--millions of them.
+
+Suddenly from somewhere near Ivy there came a thin, piping sound.
+
+"It's your little son talking to you," says Ivy, as calm as if she was
+sitting up in a four-poster.
+
+"My little son!" I says. That was all for a minute. Then I says:
+
+"Are you all right?"
+
+And she says:
+
+"Sure I am--now that I know you are."
+
+I turned my torch fire-end down and it began to blaze and sputter and
+presently roar. Then I steps over to the lion and he doesn't move; and I
+points the torch at his dirty face--and lunges.
+
+Ever see a kitten enjoying a fit? That was what happened to him. Then I
+ran about, beating and poking and shouting and burning. It was like
+Ulysses cleaning the house of suitors and handmaids. All the beasts ran;
+and some of 'em ran a long way, I guess, and climbed trees.
+
+I stuck the torch point-end in the ground, stepped into the trap, and
+lifted my family out. All the time I prayed aloud, saying: "Lord on
+high, keep Right Bower from touching his blamed foot against any of
+these triggers and dropping the forest on top of all he holds in his
+arms!" Ivy, she rubbed her cheek against mine to show confidence--and
+then we were safe out and I picked up the torch and carried the whole
+kit and boodle, family, torch, happiness--much too big to tote--and
+belief in God's goodness, watchfulness, and mercy, home to our cave.
+
+
+Right Bower added some uneventful details of the few days following--the
+ship's boat that put into the island for water and took them off, and
+so on. Then he asked me if I'd like to meet Mrs. Bower, and I went
+forward with him and was presented.
+
+She was deep in a steamer-chair, half covered with a somewhat gay
+assortment of steamer-rugs. I had noticed her before, in passing, and
+had mistaken her for a child.
+
+Bower beamed over us for a while and then left us and we talked for
+hours--about Bower, the children, and the home in East Orange to which
+they were returning after a holiday at Aix; but she wouldn't talk much
+about the island. "Right," she said, "was all the time so venturesome
+that from morning till night I died of worry and anxiety. Right says the
+Lord does just the right thing for the right people at the right
+time--always. That's his creed.... Sometimes," she said, "I wonder
+what's become of big Bahut. He was such a--white elephant!"
+
+Mrs. Gordon-Colfax took me to task for spending so much of the afternoon
+with Mrs. Bower.
+
+"Who," said she, "was that common little person you were flirting
+with?--and why?"
+
+"She's a Mrs. Bower," I said. "She has a mission."
+
+"I could tell that," said Mrs. Gordon-Colfax, "from the way she turned
+up her eyes at you."
+
+"As long as she doesn't turn up her nose at me--" I began; but Mrs.
+Gordon-Colfax put in:
+
+"The Lord did that for her."
+
+"And," I said, "so she was saying. She said the Lord does just the right
+thing for the right person at the right time.... Now, your nose is
+beautifully Greek; but, to be honest, it turns up ever so much more than
+hers does."
+
+"Oh, well," said Mrs. Gordon-Colfax, "I hate common people--and I can't
+help it. Let's have a bite in the grill."
+
+"Sorry," I said; "I'm dining with the Bowers."
+
+"You have a strong stomach," said she.
+
+"I have," I said, "but a weak heart--and they are going to strengthen it
+for me."
+
+And there arose thenceforth a coolness between Mrs. Gordon-Colfax and
+me, which proves once more that the Lord does just the right thing for
+the right people at the right time.
+
+
+
+
+SAPPHIRA
+
+
+Mr. Hemingway had transacted a great deal of business with Miss
+Tennant's father; otherwise he must have shunned the proposition upon
+which she came to him. Indeed, wrinkling his bushy brows, he as much as
+told her that he was a banker and not a pawnbroker.
+
+Outside, the main street of Aiken, broad enough to have made five New
+England streets, lay red and glaring in the sun. The least restless
+shifting of feet by horses and mules tied to hitching-posts raised
+clouds of dust, immense reddish ghosts that could not be laid. In the
+bank itself, ordinarily a cool retreat, smelling faintly of tobacco
+juice deposited by some of its clients, the mercury was swelling toward
+ninety. It was April Fools' day, and unless Miss Tennant was cool,
+nobody was. She looked cool. If the temperature had been 40 deg. below
+zero she would have looked warm; but she would have been dressed
+differently.
+
+It was her great gift always to look the weather and the occasion; no
+matter how or what she really felt. On the present occasion she wore a
+very simple, inexpensive muslin, flowered with faint mauve lilacs, and a
+wide, floppy straw-hat trimmed with the same. She had driven into town,
+half a mile or more, without getting a speck of dust upon herself. Even
+the corners of her eyes were like those of a newly laundered baby. She
+smelled of tooth-powder (precipitated chalk and orris root), as was her
+custom, and she wore no ring or ornament of any value. Indeed, such
+jewels as she possessed, a graceful diamond necklace, a pearl collar, a
+pearl pendant, and two cabochon sapphire rings, lay on the table between
+her and Mr. Hemingway.
+
+"I'm not asking the bank to do this for me," she said, and she looked
+extra lovely (on purpose, of course). "I'm asking you----"
+
+Mr. Hemingway poked the cluster of jewels very gingerly with his
+forefinger as if they were a lizard.
+
+"And, of course," she said, "they are worth twice the money; maybe three
+or four times."
+
+"Perhaps," said Mr. Hemingway, "you will take offence if I suggest that
+your father----"
+
+The muslin over her shoulders tightened the least in the world. She had
+shrugged them.
+
+"Of course," she said, "papa would do it; but he would insist on
+reasons. My reasons involve another, Mr. Hemingway, and so it would not
+be honorable for me to give them."
+
+"And yet," said the banker, twinkling, "your reasons would tempt me to
+accommodate you with the loan you ask for far more than your
+collateral."
+
+"Oh," she said, "you are a business man. I could give you reasons, and
+be sure they would go no further--even if you thought them funny. But if
+papa heard them, and thought them funny, as he would, he would play the
+sieve. I don't want this money for myself, Mr. Hemingway."
+
+"They never do," said he.
+
+She laughed.
+
+"I wish to lend it in turn," she said, "to a person who has been
+reckless, and who is in trouble, but in whom I believe.... But perhaps,"
+she went on, "the person, who is very proud, will take offence at my
+offer of help.... In which case, Mr. Hemingway, I should return you the
+money to-morrow."
+
+"This person--" he began, twinkling.
+
+"Oh," she said, "I couldn't bear to be teased. The person is a young
+gentleman. Any interest that I take in him is a business interest, pure
+and simple. I believe that, tided over his present difficulties, he will
+steady down and become a credit to his sex. Can I say more than that?"
+She smiled drolly.
+
+"Men who are a credit to their sex," said Mr. Hemingway, "are not rare,
+but young gentlemen----"
+
+"This one," said she, "has in him the makings of a man. Just now he is
+discouraged."
+
+"Is he taking anything for it?" asked Mr. Hemingway with some sarcasm.
+
+"Buckets," said Miss Tennant simply.
+
+"Was it cards?" he asked.
+
+"Cards, and betting--and the hopeless optimism of youth," said she.
+
+"And you wish to lend him five thousand dollars, and your interest in
+him is platonic?"
+
+"Nothing so ardent," said she demurely. "I wish him to pay his debts, to
+give me his word that he will neither drink nor gamble until he has paid
+back the debt to me, and I shall suggest that he go out to one of those
+big Western States and become a man."
+
+"If anybody," said Mr. Hemingway with gallantry, "could lead a young
+gentleman to so sweeping a reform, it would be yourself."
+
+"There is no sequence of generations," said Miss Tennant, "long enough
+to eradicate a drop of Irish blood."
+
+Mr. Hemingway swept the jewels together and wrapped them in the
+tissue-paper in which she had brought them.
+
+"Are you going to put them in your safe--or return them to me?" she
+asked plaintively.
+
+Mr. Hemingway affected gruffness.
+
+"I am thanking God fervently, ma'am," said he, "that you didn't ask me
+for more. You'll have to give me your note. By the way, are you of age?"
+
+Her charming eyes narrowed, and she laughed at him.
+
+"People," she said, "are already beginning to say, 'she will hardly
+marry now.' But it's how old we feel, Mr. Hemingway, isn't it?"
+
+"I feel about seven," said he, "and foolish at that."
+
+"And I," said she, "will be twenty-five for the second time on my next
+birthday."
+
+"And, by the way," she said, when the details of the loan had been
+arranged and she had stuffed the five thousand dollars into the palm of
+a wash glove, "nobody must know about this, because I shall have to say
+that--my gewgaws have been stolen."
+
+"But that will give Aiken a black eye," said he.
+
+"I'm afraid it can't be helped, Mr. Hemingway. Papa will ask point-blank
+why I never wear the pearls he gave me, and I shall have to anticipate."
+
+"How?" he asked.
+
+"Oh," she said demurely, "to-night or to-morrow night I shall rouse the
+household with screams, and claim that I woke and saw a man bending over
+my dressing-table--a man with a beautiful white mustache and imperial."
+
+Mr. Hemingway's right hand flew to his mouth as if to hide these
+well-ordered appendages, and he laughed.
+
+"Is the truth nothing to you?" he said.
+
+"In a business matter pure and simple," she said, after a moment's
+reflection, "it is nothing--absolutely nothing."
+
+"Not being found out by one's parents is hardly a business matter,"
+said Mr. Hemingway.
+
+"Oh," said she with a shiver, "as a little girl I went into the hands of
+a receiver at least once a month----"
+
+"A hand of iron in a velvet glove," murmured Mr. Hemingway.
+
+"Oh, no," she said, "a leather slipper in a nervous hand.... But how can
+I thank you?"
+
+She rose, still demure and cool, but with a strong sparkling in her eyes
+as from a difficult matter successfully adjusted.
+
+"You could make the burglar a clean-shaven man," Mr. Hemingway
+suggested.
+
+"I will," she said. "I will make him look like anybody you say."
+
+"God forbid," said he. "I have no enemies. But, seriously, Miss Tennant,
+if you possibly can, will you do without a burglary, for the good name
+of Aiken?"
+
+"I will do what I can," she said, "but I can't make promises."
+
+When she had gone, one of the directors pushed open the door of Mr.
+Hemingway's office and tiptoed in.
+
+"Well," said he, "for an old graybeard! You've been flirting fifty
+minutes, you sinner."
+
+"I haven't," said Mr. Hemingway, twisting his mustache and looking
+roguish. "I've been discussing a little matter of business with Miss
+Tennant."
+
+"_What_ business?"
+
+"Well, it wasn't any of yours, Frank, at the time, and I'm dinned if I
+think it is now. But if you must know, she came in to complain of the
+milk that your dairy has been supplying lately. She said it was the kind
+of thing you'd expect in the North, but for a Southern gentleman to put
+water in anything----"
+
+"You go to Augusta," said the director (it is several degrees hotter
+than Aiken). "Everybody knows that spoons stand up in the milk from my
+dairy, and as for the cream----"
+
+In the fall from grace of David Larkin there was involved no great show
+of natural depravity. The difference between a young man who goes right
+and a young man who goes wrong may be no more than the half of one per
+cent. And I do not know why we show the vicious such contempt and the
+virtuous such admiration. Larkin's was the case of a young man who tried
+to do what he was not old enough, strong enough, or wise enough to "get
+away with," as the saying is. Aiken did not corrupt him; he was corrupt
+when he came, with a bank account of thirty-five hundred dollars
+snatched from the lap of Dame Fortune, at a moment when she was minding
+some other small boy. Horses running up to their form, spectacular
+bridge hands (not well played), and bets upon every subject that can be
+thought of had all contributed. Then Larkin caught a cold in his nose,
+so that it ran all day and all night; and because the Browns had invited
+him to Aiken for a fortnight whenever he cared to come, he seized upon
+the excuse of his cold and boarded the first train. He was no sooner in
+Aiken than Dame Fortune ceased minding the other small boy, and turned
+her petulant eyes upon Larkin. Forthwith he began to lose.
+
+Let no man who does not personally know what a run of bad luck is judge
+another. What color is a lemon? Why, it is lemon-colored, to be sure.
+And behold, fortune produces you a lemon black as the ace of spades.
+When fortune goes against you, you cannot be right. The favorite falls
+down; the great jockey uses bad judgment for the first time in his life;
+the foot-ball team that ought to win is overtrained; the yacht carries
+away her bowsprit; your four kings are brought face to face, after much
+"hiking," with four aces; the cigarette that you try to flick into the
+fireplace hits the slender andiron and bounces out upon the rug; the
+liquor that you carried so amiably and sensibly in New York mixes with
+the exciting air of the place where the young lady you are attentive to
+lives, and you make four asses of yourself and seven fools, and wake up
+with your first torturing headache and your first humiliating apology.
+Americans (with the unfortunate exception of us who make a business of
+it) are the greatest phrase-makers the world has ever known. Larkin's
+judgment was good; he was a modest young fellow of very decent
+instincts, he was neither a born gambler nor a born drinker; but, in the
+American phrase, "he was _in_ wrong."
+
+Bad luck is not a good excuse for a failure in character; but God knows
+how wickedly provocative thereof it can be. The elders of the Aiken Club
+did not notice that Larkin was slipping from grace, because his slipping
+was gradual; but they noticed all of a sudden, with pity, chagrin (for
+they liked him), and kindly contempt, that he had fallen. Forthwith a
+wave of reform swept over the Aiken Club, or it amounted to that. Rich
+men who did not care a hang about what they won or lost refused to play
+for high stakes; Larkin's invitations to cocktails were very largely
+refused; no bets were made in his presence (and I must say that this was
+a great cause of languishment in certain men's conversation), and the
+young man was mildly and properly snubbed. This locking of the stable
+door, however, had the misfortune to happen just after the horse had
+bolted. Larkin had run through the most of his money; he did not know
+how he was to pay his bed and board at Willcox's, where he was now
+stopping; his family were in no position to help him; he knew that he
+was beginning to be looked on with contempt; he thought that he was
+seriously in love with Miss Tennant. He could not see any way out of
+anything; knew that a disgraceful crash was imminent, and for all these
+troubles he took the wrong medicine. Not the least foolish part of this
+was that it was medicine for which he would be unable to pay when the
+club bill fell due. From after breakfast until late at night he kept
+himself, not drunk, but stimulated.... And then one day the president of
+the club spoke to him very kindly--and the next day wouldn't speak to
+him at all.
+
+The proper course would have been for Larkin to open his heart to any of
+a dozen men. Any one of them would have straightened him out mentally
+and financially in one moment, and forgotten about it the next. But
+Larkin was too young, too foolish, and too full of false pride to make
+confessions to any one who could help him; and he was quite ignorant of
+the genuine kindness and wisdom that lurks in the average rich man, if
+once you can get his ear.
+
+But one night, being sure they could not be construed into an appeal for
+help, or anything but a sympathetic scolding, which he thought would be
+enjoyable (and because of a full moon, perhaps, and a whole chorus of
+mocking-birds pouring out their souls in song, and because of an arbor
+covered with the yellow jasmine that smells to heaven, and a little
+sweeter), he made his sorry confessions into the lovely pink hollow of
+Miss Tennant's ear.
+
+Instead of a scolding he received sympathy and understanding; and he
+misconstrued the fact that she caught his hand in hers and squeezed it
+very hard; and did not know that he had misconstrued that fact until he
+found that it was her cheek that he had kissed instead of her hastily
+averted lips.
+
+This rebuff did not prevent him from crowning the story of his young
+life with further confessions. And it is on record that when Larkin came
+into the brightly lighted club there was dust upon the knees of his
+trousers.
+
+"I _am_ fond of you, David," she had said, "and in spite of all the mess
+you have made of things, I believe in you; but even if I were fonder
+than fondest of you, I should despise myself if I listened to you--now."
+
+But she did not sleep all night for thinking how she could be of real,
+material help to the young man, and cause him to turn into the straight,
+narrow path that always leads to success and sometimes to achievement.
+
+Every spring the Mannings, who have nothing against them except that
+they live on the wrong side of town, give a wistaria party. The Mannings
+live for the blossoming of the wistaria which covers their charming
+porticoed house from top to toe and fills their grounds. Ever since they
+can remember they have specialized in wistaria; and they are not young,
+and wistaria grows fast. The fine old trees that stand in the Mannings'
+grounds are merely lofty trellises for the vines, white and mauve, to
+sport upon. The Mannings' garden cost less money, perhaps, than any
+notable garden in Aiken; and when in full bloom it is, perhaps, the most
+beautiful garden in the world. To appreciate wistaria, one vine with a
+spread of fifty feet bearing ten thousand racemes of blossoms a foot
+long is not enough; you must enter and disappear into a region of such
+vines, and then loaf and stroll with an untroubled nose and your heart's
+desire.
+
+Even Larkin, when he paused under the towering entrance vines, a mauve
+and a white, forgot his troubles. He filled his lungs with the delicious
+fragrance, and years after the consciousness of it would come upon him
+suddenly. And then coming upon tea-tables standing in the open and
+covered with good things, and finding, among the white flannel and
+muslin guests, Miss Tennant, very obviously on the lookout for him, his
+cup was full. When they had drunk very deep of orangeade, and eaten jam
+sandwiches followed by chicken sandwiches and walnut cake, they went
+strolling (Miss Tennant still looking completely ethereal--a creature
+that lived on the odor of flowers and kind thoughts rather than the more
+material edibles mentioned above), and then Larkin felt that his cup was
+overflowing.
+
+Either because the day was hot or because of the sandwiches, they found
+exclusive shade and sat in it, upon a white seat that looked like
+marble--at a distance. Larkin once more filled his lungs with the breath
+of wistaria and was for letting it out in further confessions of what he
+felt to be his heart's ultimate depths. But Miss Tennant was too quick
+for him. She drew five one-thousand-dollar bills from the palm of her
+glove and put them in his hand.
+
+"There," she said.
+
+Larkin looked at the money and fell into a dark mood.
+
+"What is this for?" he said presently.
+
+"This is a loan," said she, "from me to you; to be a tiding over of
+present difficulties, a reminder of much that has been pleasant in the
+past, and an earnest of future well-doing. Good luck to you, David."
+
+"I wish I could take it," said the young man with a swift, slanting
+smile. "And at least I can crawl upon my stomach at your feet, and pull
+my forelock and heap dust upon my head.... God bless you!" And he
+returned the bills to her.
+
+She smiled cheerfully but a little disdainfully.
+
+"Very well, then," said she. "I tear them up."
+
+"Oh!" cried Larkin. "Don't make a mess of a beautiful incident."
+
+"Then take them."
+
+"No."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Oh, you know as well as I do that a man can't borrow from a girl."
+
+"A man?" asked Miss Tennant simply, as if she doubted having heard
+correctly. Then, as he nodded, she turned a pair of eyes upon him that
+were at once kind, pained, and deeply thoughtful. And she began to speak
+in a quiet, repressed way upon the theme that he had suggested.
+
+"A man," she said; "what is a man? I can answer better by telling you
+what a man is not. A man is not a creature who loafs when he ought to be
+at work, who loses money that he hasn't got, who drinks liquor that he
+cannot carry, and who upon such a noble groundwork feels justified in
+making love to a decent, self-respecting girl. That is not a _man_,
+David. A man would have no need of any help from me.... But you--you are
+a child that has escaped from its nurse, a bird that has fallen out of
+its nest before it has learned to fly, and you have done nothing but
+foolish things.... But somehow I have learned to suspect you of a better
+self, where, half-strangled with foolishnesses and extravagance, there
+lurks a certain contrition and a certain sweetness.... God knows I
+should like to see you a man...."
+
+Larkin jumped to his feet, and all of him that showed was crimson, and
+he could have cried. But he felt no anger, and he kept his eyes upon
+hers.
+
+"Thank you," he said; "may I have them?"
+
+He stuffed the bills into his pocket.
+
+"I have no security," he said. "But I will give you my word of honor
+neither to drink, neither to gamble, neither to loaf, nor to make love
+until I have paid you back interest and principal."
+
+"Where will you go? What will you do, David?"
+
+"West--God knows. I _will_ do something.... You see that I can't say any
+thanks, don't you? That I am almost choking, and that at any moment I
+might burst into sobs?"
+
+They were silent, and she looked into his face unconsciously while he
+mastered his agitation. He sat down beside her presently, his elbows on
+his knees, his chin deep in his hands.
+
+"Is God blessing you by any chance?" he said. "Do you feel anything of
+the kind? Because I am asking Him to--so very hard. I shall ask Him to a
+million times every day until I die.... Would it be possible for one who
+has deserved nothing, but who would like it for the strengthingest,
+beautifulest memory...."
+
+"Quick, then," said she, "some one's coming."
+
+That very night screams pierced to every corner of the Tennants' great
+house on the Whiskey Road. Those whom screams affect in one way sprang
+from bed; those whom they affect in another hid under the bedclothes.
+Mr. Tennant himself, a man of sharp temper and implacable courage,
+dashed from his room in a suit of blue-and-white pajamas, and overturned
+a Chippendale cabinet worth a thousand dollars; young Mr. Tennant barked
+both shins on a wood-box and dropped a loaded Colt revolver into the
+well of the stair; Mrs. Tennant was longer in appearing, having tarried
+to try the effect upon her nerves and color sense of three divers
+wrappers. The butler, an Admirable Crichton of a man, came, bearing a
+bucket of water in case the house was on fire. Mrs. Tennant's French
+maid carried a case of her mistress's jewels, and seemed determined to
+leave.
+
+Miss Tennant stood in the door-way of her room. She was pale and greatly
+agitated, but her eyes shone with courage and resolve. Her arched,
+blue-veined feet were thrust into a pair of red Turkish slippers turning
+up at the toes. A mandarin robe of dragoned blue brocade was flung over
+her night-gown. In one hand she had a golf club--a niblick.
+
+"Oh!" she cried, when her father was sufficiently recovered from
+overturning the cabinet to listen, "there was a man in my room."
+
+
+     Mr. Tennant }          { furiously.
+     Young Mr.   }          {
+     Tennant     }          { sleepily.
+                 }          {
+     The butler  } "A man?" { as if he thought she
+                 }          { meant to say a fire.
+     The French  }          {
+     maid        }          { blushing crimson.
+
+
+Then, and again all together:
+
+
+     Mr. Tennant--        "Which way did he go?"
+     Young Mr. Tennant--  "Which man?"
+     The butler--         "A white man?"
+     The French maid (with a kind of ecstasy)--
+                          "A man!"
+
+
+"Out the window!" cried Miss Tennant.
+
+Her father and brother dashed downstairs and out into the grounds. The
+butler hurried to the telephone (still carrying his bucket of water) and
+rang Central and asked for the chief of police. Central answered, after
+a long interval, that the chief of police was out of order, and rang
+off.
+
+Meanwhile, Mrs. Tennant arrived, and, having coldly recovered her
+jewel-case from the custody of the French maid, prepared to be told the
+details of what hadn't happened.
+
+"He was bending over my dressing-table, mamma," said Miss Tennant. "I
+could see him plainly in the moonlight; he had a mask, and was smooth
+shaven, and he wore gloves."
+
+"I wonder why he wore gloves," mused Mrs. Tennant.
+
+"I suppose," said Miss Tennant, "that he had heard of the Bertillon
+system, and was afraid of being tracked by his finger-marks."
+
+"Did he say anything?"
+
+"Not to me, I think," said Miss Tennant, "but he kept mumbling to
+himself so I could hear: 'Slit her damn throat if she makes a move; slit
+it right into the backbone.' So, of course, I didn't make a move--I
+thought he was talking to a confederate whom I couldn't see."
+
+"Why a _confederate_?" asked Mrs. Tennant. "Oh, I see--you mean a sort
+of partner."
+
+"But there was only the one," said Miss Tennant. "And when he had filled
+his pockets and was gone by the window--I thought it was safe to scream,
+and I screamed."
+
+"Have you looked to see what he took?"
+
+"No. But my jewels were all knocking about on the dressing-table. I
+suppose he got them."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Tennant, "let's be thankful that he didn't get mine."
+
+"And only to think," said Miss Tennant, "that only last night papa
+asked me why I had given up wearing my pearls, and was put out about it,
+and I promised to wear them oftener!"
+
+"Never mind, my dear," said her mother confidentially; "if you are sorry
+enough long enough your father will buy you others. He can be
+wonderfully generous if you keep at him."
+
+"Oh," said Miss Tennant, "I feel sure that they will be recovered some
+day--it may not be to-morrow, or next day--but somehow--some time I feel
+sure that they will come back. Of course papa must offer a reward."
+
+"I wonder how much he will offer!"
+
+"Oh, a good round sum. I shall suggest five thousand dollars, if he asks
+me."
+
+
+The next day Miss Tennant despatched the following note to Mr.
+Hemingway:
+
+
+     DEAR, KIND MR. HEMINGWAY:
+
+     You have heard of the great robbery and of my dreadful fright. But
+     there is no use crying about it. It is one of those dreadful
+     things, I suppose, that simply _have_ to happen. The burglar was
+     smooth-shaven. How awful that this should have to happen in Aiken
+     of all cities. In Aiken where we never have felt hitherto that it
+     was ever necessary to lock the door. I suppose Mr. Powell's nice
+     hardware store will do an enormous business now in patent bolts.
+     Papa is going to offer five thousand dollars' reward for the return
+     of my jewels, and no questions asked. Do you know, I have a
+     feeling that you are going to be instrumental in finding the stolen
+     goods. I have a feeling that the thief (if he has any sense at all)
+     will negotiate through you for their return. And I am sure the
+     thief would never have taken them if he had known how badly it
+     would make me feel, and what a blow he was striking at the good
+     name of Aiken.
+
+     I am, dear Mr. Hemingway, contritely and sincerely yours,
+
+     SAPPHIRA TENNANT
+     (formerly Dolly Tennant).
+
+
+But Mr. Hemingway refused to touch the reward, and Miss Tennant remained
+in his debt for the full amount of her loan. She began at once to save
+what she could from her allowance. And she called this fund her
+"conscience money."
+
+Miss Tennant and David Larkin did not meet again until the moment of the
+latter's departure from Aiken. And she was only one of a number who
+drove to the station to see him off. Possibly to guard against his
+impulsive nature, she remained in her runabout during the brief
+farewell. And what they said to each other might have been (and probably
+was) heard by others.
+
+Aiken felt that it had misjudged Larkin, and he departed in high favor.
+He had paid what he owed, so Aiken confessed to having misjudged his
+resources. He had suddenly stopped short in all evil ways, so Aiken
+confessed to having misjudged his strength of character. He had
+announced that he was going out West to seek the bubble wealth in the
+mouth of an Idaho apple valley, so Aiken cheered him on and wished him
+well. And when Aiken beheld the calmness of his farewells to Miss
+Tennant, Aiken said: "And he seems to have gotten over that."
+
+But Larkin had done nothing of the kind, and he said to himself, as he
+lay feverish and restless in a stuffy upper berth: "It isn't because
+she's so beautiful or so kind; it's because she always speaks the truth.
+Most girls lie about everything, not in so many words, perhaps, but in
+fact. She doesn't. She lets you know what she thinks, and where you
+stand ... and I didn't stand very high."
+
+Despair seized him. How is it possible to go into a strange world, with
+only nine hundred dollars in your pocket, and carve a fortune? "When can
+I pay her back? What must I do if I fail?..." Then came thoughts that
+were as grains of comfort. Was her lending him money philanthropy pure
+and simple, an act emanating from her love of mankind? Was it not rather
+an act emanating from affection for a particular man? If so, that
+man--misguided boy, bird tumbled out of the nest, child that had escaped
+from its nurse--was not hard to find. "I could lay my finger on him,"
+thought Larkin, and he did so--five fingers, somewhat grandiosely upon
+the chest. A gas lamp peered at him over the curtain pole; snores shook
+the imprisoned atmosphere of the car. And Larkin's thoughts flitted from
+the past and future to the present.
+
+A question that he now asked himself was: "Do women snore?" And: "If
+people cannot travel in drawing-rooms, why do they travel at all?" The
+safety of his nine hundred dollars worried him; he knelt up to look in
+the inside pocket of his jacket, and bumped his head, a dull, solid
+bump. Pale golden stars, shaped like the enlarged pictures of
+snow-flakes, streamed across his consciousness. But the money was safe.
+
+Already his nostrils were irritable with cinders; he attempted to blow
+them clear, and failed. He was terribly thirsty. He wished very much to
+smoke. Whichever way he turned, the frogs on the uppers of his pajamas
+made painful holes in him. He woke at last with two coarse blankets
+wrapped firmly about his head and shoulders and the rest of him
+half-naked, gritty with cinders, and as cold as a well curb. Through the
+ventilators (tightly closed) daylight was struggling with gas-light. The
+car smelled of stale steam and man. The car wheels played a headachy
+tune to the metre of the Phoebe-Snow-upon-the-road-of-anthracite
+verses. David cursed Phoebe Snow, and determined that if ever God
+vouchsafed him a honey-moon it should be upon the clean, fresh ocean.
+
+There had been wistaria in Aiken. There was snow in New York. There was
+a hurricane in Chicago. But in the smoker bound West there was a fine
+old gentleman in a blue-serge suit and white spats who took a fancy to
+David, just when David had about come to the conclusion that nothing in
+the world looked friendly except suicide.
+
+If David had learned nothing else from Miss Tennant, he had learned to
+speak the truth. "Any employer that I am ever to have," he resolved,
+"shall know all that there is to be known about me. I shall not try to
+create the usual impression of a young man seeking his fortune in the
+West purely for amusement." And so, when the preliminaries of
+smoking-room acquaintance had been made--the cigar offered and refused,
+and one's reasons for or against smoking plainly stated--David was
+offered (and accepted) the opportunity to tell the story of his life.
+
+David shook his head at a brilliantly labelled cigar eight inches long.
+
+"I love to smoke," he said, "but I've promised not to."
+
+"Better habit than liquor," suggested the old gentleman in the white
+spats.
+
+"I've promised not to drink."
+
+"Men who don't smoke and who don't drink," said the old gentleman,
+"usually spend their time running after the girls. My name is Uriah
+Grey."
+
+"Mine is David Larkin," said David, and he smiled cheerfully, "and I've
+promised not to make love."
+
+"What--never?" exclaimed Mr. Grey.
+
+"Not until I have a right to," said David.
+
+Mr. Grey drew three brightly bound volumes from between his leg and the
+arm of his chair, and intimated that he was about to make them a subject
+of remark.
+
+"I love stories," he said, "and in the hope of a story I paid a dollar
+and a half for each of three novels. This one tells you how to prepare
+rotten meat for the market. This one tells you when and where to find
+your neighbor's wife without being caught. And in this one a noble young
+Chicagoan describes the life of society persons in the effete East."
+
+"Whom he does not know from Adam," said David.
+
+"Whom he does not distinguish from Adam," corrected Mr. Grey. "But I was
+thinking that I am disappointed in my appetite for stories, and that
+just now you made a most enticing beginning as--'I, Roger Slyweather of
+Slyweather Hall, Blankshire, England, having at the age of twenty-two or
+thereabouts made solemn promise neither to smoke nor to drink, nor to
+make love, did set forth upon a blustering day in April....'"
+
+"Oh," said David, "if it's my story you want, I don't mind a bit. It
+will chasten me to tell it, and you can stop me the minute you are
+bored."
+
+And then, slip by slip and bet by bet, he told his story, withholding
+only the sex of that dear friend who had loaned him the five thousand
+dollars, and to whom he had bound himself by promises.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Grey, when David had finished, "I don't know your
+holding-out powers, Larkin, but you do certainly speak the truth without
+mincing."
+
+"That," said David, "is a promise I have made to myself in admiration of
+and emulation of my friend. But I have had my little lesson, and I shall
+keep the other promises until I have made good."
+
+"And then?" Mr. Grey beamed.
+
+"Then," said David, "I shall smoke and I shall make love."
+
+"But no liquor."
+
+David laughed.
+
+"I have a secret clause in my pledge," said he; "it is not to touch
+liquor except on the personal invitation of my future father-in-law,
+whoever he may be." But he had Dolly Tennant's father in his mind, and
+the joke seemed good to him.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Grey, "I don't know as I'd go into apple-growing. You
+haven't got enough capital."
+
+"But," said David, "I intend to begin at the bottom and work up."
+
+"When I was a youngster," said Mr. Grey, "I began at the bottom of an
+apple tree and worked my way to the top. There I found a wasp's nest.
+Then I fell and broke both arms. That was a lesson to me. Don't go up
+for your pile, my boy. Go down. Go down into the beautiful earth, and
+take out the precious metals."
+
+"Good Heavens!" exclaimed David; "you're _the_ Mr. Grey of Denver."
+
+"I have a car hitched on to this train," said the magnate; "I'd be very
+glad of your company at dinner--seven-thirty. It's not every young man
+that I'd invite. But seeing that you're under bond not to make love
+until you've made good, I can see no objection to introducing you to my
+granddaughter."
+
+
+"Grandpa," said Miss Violet Grey, who was sixteen, spoiled, and
+exquisite, "make that poor boy stop off at Denver, and do something for
+him."
+
+"Since when," said her grandfather, "have you been so down on apples,
+miss?"
+
+"Oh," said she with an approving shudder, "all good women fear
+them--like so much poison."
+
+"But," said Mr. Grey (Mr. "Iron Grey," some called him), "if I take this
+young fellow up, it won't be to put him down in a drawing-room, but in a
+hole a thousand feet deep, or thereabouts."
+
+"And when he comes out," said she, "I shall have returned from being
+finished in Europe."
+
+"Don't know what there is so attractive about these young Eastern
+ne'er-do-weels," said the old gentleman, "but this one has got a certain
+something...."
+
+"It's his inimitable truthfulness," said she.
+
+"Not to me," said her grandfather, "so much as the way he says _w_
+instead of _r_ and at the same time gives the impression of having the
+makings of a man in him...."
+
+"Oh," she said, "make him, grandpa, do!"
+
+"And if I make him?" The old gentleman smiled provokingly.
+
+"Why," said she, "then I'll break him."
+
+"Or," said her grandfather, who was used to her sudden fancies and
+subsequent disenchantments, "or else you'll shake him."
+
+Then he pulled her ears for her and sent her to bed.
+
+
+In one matter David was, from the beginning of his new career, firmly
+resolved. He would in no case write Miss Tennant of his hopes and fears.
+If he was to be promoted she was not to hear of it until after the fact;
+and she should not be troubled with the sordid details of his
+savings-bank account. As to fears, very great at first, these dwindled,
+became atrophied, and were consumed in the fire of work from the moment
+when that work changed from a daily nuisance to a daily miracle, at once
+the exercise and the reward of intelligence. His work, really light at
+first, seemed stupendous to him because he did not understand it. As
+his understanding grew, he was given heavier work, and behold! it seemed
+more light. He discovered that great books had been written upon every
+phase of bringing forth metal from the great mother earth; and he
+snatched from long days of toil time for more toil, and burned his lamp
+into the night, so that he might add theory to practice.
+
+I should like to say that David's swift upward career owed thanks
+entirely to his own good habits, newly discovered gifts for mining
+engineering, and industry; but a strict regard for the truth prevents.
+Upon his own resources and talents he must have succeeded in the end;
+but his success was the swifter for the interest, and presently
+affection, that Uriah Grey himself contributed toward it. In short,
+David's chances came to him as soon as he was strong enough to handle
+them, and were even created on purpose for him; whereas, if he had had
+no one behind him, he must have had to wait interminably for them. But
+the main point, of course, is that, as soon as he began to understand
+what was required of him, he began to make good.
+
+His field work ended about the time that Miss Violet Grey returned from
+Europe "completely finished and done up," as she put it herself, and he
+became a fixture of growing importance in Mr. Grey's main offices in
+Denver and a thrill in Denver society. His baby _w_'s instead of rolling
+_r_'s thrilled the ladies; his good habits coupled with his manliness
+and success thrilled the men.
+
+"He doesn't drink," said one.
+
+"He doesn't smoke," said another.
+
+"He doesn't bet," said a third.
+
+"He can look the saints in the face," said a fourth; and a fifth,
+looking up, thumped upon a bell that would summon a waiter, and with
+emphasis said:
+
+"And we _like_ to have him around!"
+
+Among the youngest and most enthusiastic men it even became the habit to
+copy David in certain things. He was responsible for a small wave of
+reform in Denver, as he had once been in Aiken; but for the opposite
+cause. Little dialogues like the following might frequently be heard in
+the clubs:
+
+"Have a drink, Billy?"
+
+"Thanks; I don't drink."
+
+"Cigar, Sam?"
+
+"Thanks (with a moan); don't smoke."
+
+"Betcherfivedollars, Ned."
+
+"Sorry, old man; I don't bet."
+
+Or, in a lowered voice:
+
+"Say, let's drop round to----"
+
+"I've (chillingly) cut out all that sort of thing."
+
+Platonic friendships became the rage. David himself, as leader,
+maintained a dozen such, chiefest of which was with the newly finished
+Miss Grey. At first her very soul revolted against a friendship of this
+sort. She was lovely, and she knew it; with lovely clothes she made
+herself even lovelier, and she knew this, too. She was young, and she
+rejoiced in it. And she had always been a spoiled darling, and she
+wished to be made much of, to cause a dozen hearts to beat in the breast
+where but one beat before, to be followed, waited on, adored, bowed down
+to, and worshipped. She wished yellow-flowering jealousy to sprout in
+David's heart instead of the calm and loyal friendliness to which alone
+the soil seemed adapted. She knew that he often wrote letters to a Miss
+Tennant; and she would have liked very much to have this Miss Tennant in
+her power, and to have scalped her there and then.
+
+This was only at first, when she merely fancied David rather more than
+other young men. But a time came when her fancy was stronger for him
+than that; and then it seemed to her that even his platonic friendship
+was worth more than all the great passions of history rolled into one.
+Then from the character of that spoiled young lady were wiped clean
+away, as the sponge wipes marks from a slate, vanity, whims, temper,
+tantrums, thoughtlessness, and arrogance, and in their places appeared
+the opposites. She sought out hard spots in people's lives and made them
+soft; sympathy and gentleness radiated from her; thoughtfulness and
+steadfastness.
+
+Her grandfather, who had been reading Ibsen, remarked to himself: "It
+may be artistically and dramatically inexcusable for the ingenue
+suddenly to become the heroine--but _I_ like it. As to the cause----"
+and the old gentleman rested in his deep chair till far into the night,
+twiddling his thumbs and thinking long thoughts. Finally, frowning and
+troubled, he rose and went off to his bed.
+
+"Is it," thought he, "because he gave his word not to make love until he
+had made good--or is it because he really doesn't give a damn about poor
+little Vi? If it's the first reason, why he's absolved from that
+promise, because he has made good, and every day he's making better. But
+if it's the second reason, why then this world is a wicked, dreary
+place. Poor little Vi--poor little Vi ... only two things in the whole
+universe that she can't get--the moon, and David--the moon, and
+David----"
+
+
+About noon the next day, David requested speech with his chief.
+
+"Well?" said Uriah. The old man looked worn and feeble. He had had a
+sorrowful night.
+
+"I haven't had a vacation in a year," said David. "Will you give me
+three weeks, sir?"
+
+"Want to go back East and pay off your obligations?"
+
+David nodded.
+
+"I have the money and interest in hand," said he.
+
+Mr. Grey smiled.
+
+"I suppose you'll come back smoking like a chimney, drinking like a
+fish, betting like a book-maker, and keeping a whole chorus in
+picture-hats."
+
+"I think I'll not even smoke," said David. "About a month ago the last
+traces of hankering left me, and I feel like a free man at last."
+
+"But you'll be making love right and left," said Mr. Grey cheerfully,
+but with a shrewd eye upon the young man's expression of face.
+
+David looked grave and troubled. He appeared to be turning over
+difficult matters in his mind. Then he smiled gayly.
+
+"At least I shall be free to make love if I want to."
+
+"Nonsense," said Mr. Grey. "People don't make love because they want to.
+They do it because they have to."
+
+Again David looked troubled, and a little sad, perhaps.
+
+"True," said he. And he walked meditatively back to his own desk, took
+up a pen, meditated for a long time, and then wrote:
+
+
+     Best friend that any man ever had in the world! I shall be in
+     Aiken on the twenty-fifth, bringing with me that which I owe, and
+     can pay, and deeply conscious of that deeper debt that I owe, but
+     never can hope to pay. But I will do what I can. I will not now
+     take back the promises I gave, unless you wish; I will not do
+     anything that you do not wish. And if all the service and devotion
+     that is in me for the rest of time seem worth having to you, they
+     are yours. But you know that.
+
+     DAVID.
+
+
+This, looking white, tired, and austere, he reread, folded, enveloped,
+stamped, sealed, and addressed to Miss Tennant.
+
+
+Neither the hand which Miss Tennant laid on his, nor the cigarette which
+she lighted for him, completely mollified Mr. Billy McAllen. He was no
+longer young enough to dance with pleasure to a maiden's whims. The
+experience of dancing from New York to Newport and back, and over the
+deep ocean and back, and up and down Europe and back with the late Mrs.
+McAllen--now Mrs. Jimmie Greenleaf--had sufficed. He would walk to the
+altar any day with Miss Tennant, but he would not dance.
+
+"You have so many secrets with yourself," he complained, "and I'm so
+very reasonable."
+
+"True, Billy," said Miss Tennant. "But if I put up with your secrets,
+you should put up with mine."
+
+"I have none," said he, "unless you are rudely referring to the fact
+that I gave my wife such grounds for divorce as every gentleman must be
+prepared to give to a lady who has tired of him. I might have contracted
+a pleasant liaison; but I didn't. I merely drove up and down Piccadilly
+with a notorious woman until the courts were sufficiently scandalized.
+You know that."
+
+"But is it nothing," she said, "to have me feel this way toward you?"
+And she leaned and rested her lovely cheek against his.
+
+"At least, Dolly," said he, more gently, "announce our engagement, and
+marry me inside of six months. I've been patient for eighteen. It would
+have been easy if you had given a good reason...."
+
+"My reason," said she, "will be in Aiken to-morrow."
+
+"You speak with such assurance," said he, smiling, "that I feel sure
+your reason is not travelling by the Southern. And you'll tell me the
+reason to-morrow?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Not to-morrow, Billy--now."
+
+He made no comment, fearing that she might seize upon any as a pretext
+for putting him off. But he slipped an arm around her waist.
+
+"Tighter if you like," she said. "I don't mind. My reason, Billy, is a
+young man. Don't let your arm slacken that way. I don't see any one or
+anything beyond you in any direction in this world. You know that.
+There is nothing in the expression 'a young man' to turn you suddenly
+cold toward me. Don't be a goose.... Not so tight." They laughed
+happily. "I will even tell you his name," she resumed--"David Larkin;
+and I was a little gone on him, and he was over ears with me. You
+weren't in Aiken the year he was. Well, he misbehaved something
+dreadful, Billy; betted himself into a deep, deep hole, and tried to
+float himself out. I took him in hand, loaned him money, and took his
+solemn word that he would not even make love until he had paid me back.
+There was no real understanding between us, only----"
+
+"Only?" McAllen was troubled.
+
+"Only I think he couldn't have changed suddenly from a little fool into
+a man if _he_ hadn't felt that there was an understanding. And his
+letters, one every week, confirm that; though he's very careful, because
+of his promise, not to make love in them.... You see, he's been working
+his head off--there's no way out of it, Billy--for me.... If you hadn't
+crossed my humble path I think I should have possessed enough sentiment
+for David to have been--the reward."
+
+"But there _was_ no understanding."
+
+"No. Not in so many words. But at the last talk we had together he was
+humble and pathetic and rather manly, and I did a very foolish thing."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh," she said with a blush, "I sat still."
+
+"Let me blot it out," said McAllen, drawing her very close.
+
+"But I can only remember up to seven," said she, "and I am afraid that
+nothing can blot them out as far as David is concerned. He will come
+to-morrow as sure that I have been faithful to him as that he has been
+faithful to me.... It's all very dreadful.... He will pay me back the
+money, and the interest; and then I shall give him back the promises
+that he gave, and then he will make love to me...."
+
+She sighed, and said that the thought of the pickle she had got herself
+into made her temples ache. McAllen kissed them for her.
+
+"But why," he said, "when you got to care for me, didn't you let this
+young man learn gradually in your letters to him that--that it was all
+off?"
+
+"I was afraid, don't you see," said she, "that if the incentive was
+suddenly taken away from him--he might go to pieces. And I was fond of
+him, and I am proud to think that he has made good for my sake, and the
+letters.... Oh, Billy, it's a dreadful mess. My letters to him have been
+rather warm, I am afraid."
+
+"Damn!" said McAllen.
+
+"Damn!" said Miss Tennant.
+
+"If he would have gone to pieces before this," said McAllen, "why not
+now?--after you tell him, I mean."
+
+"Why not?" said she dismally. "But if he does, Billy, I can only be
+dreadfully sorry. I'm certainly not going to wreck our happiness just to
+keep him on the war-path."
+
+"But you'll not be weak, Dolly?"
+
+"How!--weak?"
+
+"He'll be very sad and miserable--you won't be carried away? You won't,
+upon the impulse of the moment, feel that it is your duty to go on
+saving him?... If that should happen, Dolly, _I_ should go to pieces."
+
+"Must I tell him," she said, "that I never really cared? He will think
+me such a--a liar. And I'm not a liar, Billy, am I? I'm just unlucky."
+
+"I don't believe," said he tenderly, "that you ever told a story in your
+whole sweet life."
+
+"Oh," she cried, "I _do_ love you when you say things like that to
+me.... Let's not talk about horrid things any more, and mistakes, and
+bugbears.... If we're going to show up at the golf club tea.... It's
+Mrs. Carrol's to-day and we promised her to come."
+
+"Oh," said McAllen, "we need not start for ten minutes.... When will you
+marry me?"
+
+"In May," she said.
+
+"_Good_ girl," said he.
+
+"Billy," she said presently, "it was _all_ the first Mrs. Billy's
+fault--wasn't it?"
+
+"No, dear," said he, "it wasn't. It's never all of anybody's fault. Do
+you care?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you afraid?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How much?"
+
+"So much," and she made the gesture that a baby makes when you ask, "How
+big's the baby?"
+
+"What's your name?"
+
+"Dolly."
+
+"Whose girl are you?"
+
+"I'm Billy McAllen's girl."
+
+"All of you?"
+
+She grew very serious in a moment.
+
+"All of me, Billy--all that is straight in me, all that is crooked, all
+that is white, all that is black...."
+
+But he would not be serious.
+
+"How about this hand? Is that mine?"
+
+"Yours."
+
+He kissed it.
+
+"This cheek?"
+
+"Yours."
+
+"And this?"
+
+"Yours."
+
+"These eyes?"
+
+"Both yours."
+
+He closed them, first one, then the other.
+
+Then a kind of trembling seized him, so that it was evident in his
+speech.
+
+"This mouth, Dolly?"
+
+"Mumm."
+
+And so, as the romantic school has it, "the long day dragged slowly on."
+
+
+David may have thought it pure chance that he should find Dolly Tennant
+alone. But it was not. She had given the matter not a little strategy
+and arrangement. Why, however, in view of her relations with McAllen,
+she should have made herself as attractive as possible to the eye is for
+other women to say.
+
+It was to be April in a few days, and March was going out like a fiery
+dragon. The long, broad shadow of the terrace awning helped to darken
+the Tennants' drawing-room, and Venetian blinds, half-drawn, made a kind
+of cool dusk, in which it came natural to speak in a lowered voice, and
+to move quietly, as if some one were sick in the house. Miss Tennant sat
+very low, with her hands clasped over her knees; a brocade and Irish
+lace work-bag spilled its contents at her feet. She wore a twig of tea
+olive in her dress so that the whole room smelled of ripe peaches. She
+had never looked lovelier or more desirable.
+
+"David!" she exclaimed. Her tone at once expressed delight at seeing
+him, and was an apology for remaining languidly seated. And she looked
+him over in a critical, maternal way.
+
+"If you hadn't sent in your name," she said, "I should never have known
+you. You stand taller and broader, David. You filled the door-way. But
+you're not really much bigger, now that I look at you. It's your
+character that has grown.... I'm _so_ proud of you."
+
+David was very pale. It may have been from his long journey. But he at
+least did not know, because he said that he didn't when she asked him.
+
+"And now," she said, "you must tell me all that you haven't written."
+
+"Not quite yet," said David. "There is first a little matter of
+business...."
+
+"Oh--" she protested.
+
+But David counted out his debt to her methodically, with the accrued
+interest.
+
+"Put it in my work-bag," she said.
+
+"Did you ever expect to see it again?"
+
+"Yes, David."
+
+"Thank you," he said.
+
+"But I," she said, "I, too, have things of yours to return."
+
+"Of mine?" He lifted his eyebrows expectantly.
+
+She waved a hand, white and clean as a cherry blossom, toward a
+claw-footed table on which stood decanters, ice, soda, cigarettes,
+cigars, and matches.
+
+"Your collateral," she said.
+
+"Oh," said David. "But I have decided not to be a backslider."
+
+"I know," she said. "But in business--as a matter of form."
+
+"Oh," said David, "if it's a matter of form, it must be complied with."
+
+He stepped to the table, smiling charmingly, and poured from the nearest
+decanter into a glass, added ice and soda, and lifting the mixture
+touched it to his lips, and murmured, "To you."
+
+Then he put a cigarette in his mouth, and, after drawing the one breath
+that served to light it, flicked it, with perfect accuracy, half across
+the room and into the fireplace.
+
+Still smiling, he walked slowly toward Miss Tennant, who was really
+excited to know what he would do next.
+
+"Betcher two cents it snows to-morrow," said he.
+
+"Done with you, David," she took him up merrily. And after that a
+painful silence came over them. David set his jaws.
+
+"I gave you one more promise," he said. "Is that, too, returned?"
+
+"Of course," she said, "all the promises you gave are herewith
+returned."
+
+"Then I may make love?" he asked very gently.
+
+She did not answer for some moments, and then, steeling herself, for she
+thought that she must hurt him:
+
+"Yes, David," she said slowly, "you may--as a matter of form."
+
+"Only in that way?"
+
+"In that way only, David--to me."
+
+"I thought--I thought," said the young man in confusion.
+
+"I made you think so," she said generously. "Let all of the punishment,
+that can, be heaped on me ... David...." There was a deep appeal in her
+voice as for mercy and forgiveness.
+
+"Then," said he, "you never did care--at all."
+
+But even at this juncture Miss Tennant could not speak the truth.
+
+"Never, David--never at all--at least not in _that_ way," she said. "If
+I let you think so it was because I thought it would help you to be
+strong and to succeed.... God knows I think I was wrong to let you think
+so...."
+
+But she broke off suddenly a stream of extenuation that was welling in
+her mind; for David did not look like a man about to be cut off in the
+heyday of his youth by despair.
+
+She had the tenderest heart; and in a moment the truth blossomed
+therein--a truth that brought her pleasure, bewilderment, and was not
+unmixed with mortification.
+
+"The man," she said gently, "has found him another girl!"
+
+The man bowed his head and blushed.
+
+"But I have kept my promise, Dolly."
+
+"Of course you have, you poor, dear, long-suffering soul. Oh, David,
+when I think what I have been taking for granted I am humiliated, and
+ashamed--but I am glad, too. I cannot tell you how glad."
+
+A pair of white gloves, still showing the shape of her hands, lay in the
+chair where Miss Tennant had tossed them. David brought her one of these
+gloves.
+
+"Put it on," he said.
+
+When she had done so, he took her gloved hand in his and kissed it.
+
+"As a matter of form," he said.
+
+She laughed easily, though the blush of humiliation had not yet left her
+cheeks.
+
+"Tell me," she said, "what you would have done, David, if--if I _did_
+care."
+
+"God punish me," he said gravely, "oh, best friend that ever a man had
+in the world, if I should not then have made you a good husband."
+
+
+Not long after McAllen was with her.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"Well," said she, "there was a train that he could catch. And I suppose
+he caught it."
+
+"How did he--er, behave?"
+
+"Considering the circumstances," said she, "he behaved very well."
+
+"Is he hard hit?"
+
+She considered a while; but the strict truth was not in that young lady.
+
+"I think," she said, "that you may say that he is hard hit--very hard
+hit."
+
+"Poor soul," said Billy tenderly.
+
+"Oh, Billy!" she exclaimed, "I feel so false and so old."
+
+"Old!" he cried. "You! You at twenty-five say that to me at----"
+
+"It isn't as if I was _just_ twenty-five, Billy," and she burst out
+laughing. "The terrible part of it is that I'm still twenty-five."
+
+But he only smiled and smiled. She seemed like a little child to him,
+all innocence, and inexperience, and candor.
+
+Then as her laughter merged into tears he knelt and caught her in his
+arms.
+
+"Dolly--Dolly!" he said in a choking voice. "What is your name?"
+
+"Dolly." The tears came slowly.
+
+"Whose girl are you?"
+
+"I'm Billy McAllen's girl." The tears ceased.
+
+"All of you?"
+
+"All of me.... Oh, Billy--love me always--only love me...."
+
+And for these two the afternoon dragged slowly on, and very much as
+usual.
+
+
+"You are two days ahead of schedule, David. I'm glad to see you."
+
+Though Uriah Grey's smile was bland and simple, beneath it lay a
+complicated maze of speculation; and the old man endeavored to read in
+the young man's face the answers to those questions which so greatly
+concerned him. Uriah Grey's eyesight was famous for two things: for its
+miraculous, almost chemical ability to detect the metals in ore and the
+gold in men. He sighed; but not so that David could hear. The magnate
+detected happiness where less than two weeks before he had read doubt,
+hesitation, and a kind of dumb misery.
+
+"You have had a pleasant holiday?"
+
+"A happy one, Mr. Grey." David's eyes twinkled and sparkled.
+
+"Tell me about it."
+
+"Well, sir, I paid my debts and got back my collateral."
+
+"Well, sir?"
+
+"I tasted whiskey," said David. "I lighted a cigarette, I registered a
+bet of two cents upon the weather, and I made love."
+
+Uriah Grey with difficulty suppressed a moan.
+
+"Did you!" he said dully.
+
+"Yes," said David. "I kissed the glove upon a lady's hand." He laughed.
+"It smelled of gasoline," he said.
+
+Mr. Grey grunted.
+
+"And what are your plans?"
+
+"What!" cried David offendedly. "Are you through with me?"
+
+"No, my boy--no."
+
+David hesitated.
+
+"Mr. Grey," he began, and paused.
+
+"Well, sir?"
+
+"It is now lawful for me to make love," said David; "but I should do so
+with a better grace if I had your permission and approval."
+
+Mr. Grey was puzzled.
+
+"What have I to do with it?"
+
+"You have a granddaughter...."
+
+"What!" thundered the old man. "You want to make love to my
+granddaughter!"
+
+"Yes," said David boldly, "and I wonder what you are going to say."
+
+"I have only one word to say--Hurry!"
+
+
+"David!"
+
+Spools of silk rattled from her lap to the floor. She was frankly and
+childishly delighted to see him again, and she hurried to him and gave
+him both her hands. But he looked so happy that her heart misgave her
+for a moment, and then she read his eyes aright, just as long since he
+must have read the confession in hers. At this juncture in their lives
+there could not have been detected in either of them the least show of
+hesitation or embarrassment. It was as if two travellers in the desert,
+dying of thirst, should meet, and each conceive in hallucination that
+the other was a spring of sweet water.
+
+Presently David was looking into the lovely face that he held between
+his hands. He had by this time squeezed her shoulders, patted her back,
+kissed her feet, her dress, her hands, her eyes, and pawed her hair.
+They were both very short of breath.
+
+"Violet," he gasped, "what is your name?"
+
+"Violet."
+
+"Whose girl are you?"
+
+"I'm David Larkin's girl."
+
+"All of you?"
+
+"All--all--all----"
+
+It was the beginning of another of those long, tedious afternoons. But
+to the young people concerned it seemed that never until then had such
+words as they spoke to each other been spoken, or such feelings of
+almost insupportable tenderness and adoration been experienced.
+
+Yet back there in Aiken, Sapphira was experiencing the same feelings,
+and thinking the same thoughts about them; and so was Billy McAllen. And
+when you think that he had already been divorced once, and that
+Sapphira, as she herself (for once truthfully) confessed, was still
+twenty-five, it gives you as high an opinion of the little bare god--as
+he deserves.
+
+
+
+
+THE BRIDE'S DEAD
+
+
+I
+
+Only Farallone's face was untroubled. His big, bold eyes held a kind of
+grim humor, and he rolled them unblinkingly from the groom to the bride,
+and back again. His duck trousers, drenched and stained with sea-water,
+clung to the great muscles of his legs, particles of damp sand glistened
+upon his naked feet, and the hairless bronze of his chest and columnar
+throat glowed through the openings of his torn and buttonless shirt.
+Except for the life and vitality that literally sparkled from him, he
+was more like a statue of a shipwrecked sailor than the real article
+itself. Yet he had not the proper attributes of a shipwrecked sailor.
+There was neither despair upon his countenance nor hunger; instead a
+kind of enjoyment, and the expression of one who has been set free.
+Indeed, he must have secured a kind of liberty, for after the years of
+serving one master and another, he had, in our recent struggle with the
+sea, but served himself. His was the mind and his the hand that had
+brought us at length to that desert coast. He it was that had extended
+to us the ghost of a chance. He who so recently had been but one of
+forty in the groom's luxurious employ; a polisher of brass, a
+holy-stoner of decks, a wage-earning paragon who was not permitted to
+think, was now a thinker and a strategist, a wage-taker from no man, and
+the obvious master of us three.
+
+The bride slept on the sand where Farallone had laid her. Her stained
+and draggled clothes were beginning to dry and her hair to blaze in the
+pulsing rays of the sun. Her breath came and went with the long-drawn
+placidity of deep sleep. One shoe had been torn from her by the surf,
+and through a tear in her left stocking blinked a pink and tiny toe. Her
+face lay upon her arm and was hidden by it, and by her blazing hair. In
+the loose-jointed abandon of exhaustion and sleep she had the effect of
+a flower that has wilted; the color and the fabric were still lovely,
+but the robust erectness and crispness were gone. The groom, almost
+unmanned and wholly forlorn, sat beside her in a kind of huddled
+attitude, as if he was very cold. He had drawn his knees close to his
+chest, and held them in that position with thin, clasped fingers. His
+hair, which he wore rather long, was in a wild tangle, and his neat
+eye-glasses with their black cord looked absurdly out of keeping with
+his general dishevelment. The groom, never strong or robust, looked as
+if he had shrunk. The bride, too, looked as if she had shrunk, and I
+certainly felt as if I had. But, however strong the contrast between us
+three small humans and the vast stretches of empty ocean and desert
+coast, there was no diminution about Farallone, but the contrary. I have
+never seen the presence of a man loom so strongly and so large. He sat
+upon his rock with a kind of vastness, so bold and strong he seemed, so
+utterly unperturbed.
+
+Suddenly the groom, a kind of querulous shiver in his voice, spoke.
+
+"The brandy, Farallone, the brandy."
+
+The big sailor rolled his bold eyes from the groom to the bride, but
+returned no answer.
+
+The groom's voice rose to a note of vexation.
+
+"I said I wanted the brandy," he said.
+
+Farallone's voice was large and free like a fresh breeze.
+
+"I heard you," said he.
+
+"Well," snapped the groom, "get it."
+
+"Get it yourself," said Farallone quickly, and he fell to whistling in a
+major key.
+
+The groom, born and accustomed to command, was on his feet shaking with
+fury.
+
+"You damned insolent loafer--" he shouted.
+
+"Cut it out--cut it out," said the big sailor, "you'll wake her."
+
+The groom's voice sank to an angry whisper.
+
+"Are you going to do what I tell you or not?"
+
+"Not," said Farallone.
+
+"I'll"--the groom's voice loudened--his eye sought an ally in mine. But
+I turned my face away and pretended that I had not seen or heard. There
+had been born in my breast suddenly a cold unreasoning fear of Farallone
+and of what he might do to us weaklings. I heard no more words and,
+venturing a look, saw that the groom was seating himself once more by
+the bride.
+
+"If you sit on the other side of her," said Farallone, "you'll keep the
+sun off her head."
+
+He turned his bold eyes on me and winked one of them. And I was so taken
+by surprise that I winked back and could have kicked myself for doing
+so.
+
+
+II
+
+Farallone helped the bride to her feet. "That's right," he said with a
+kind of nursely playfulness, and he turned to the groom.
+
+"Because I told you to help yourself," he said, "doesn't mean that I'm
+not going to do the lion's share of everything. I am. I'm fit. You and
+the writer man aren't. But you must do just a little more than you're
+able, and that's all we'll ask of you. Everybody works this voyage
+except the woman."
+
+"I can work," said the bride.
+
+"Rot!" said Farallone. "We'll ask you to walk ahead, like a kind of
+north star. Only we'll tell you which way to turn. Do you see that
+sugar-loaf? You head for that. Vamoose! We'll overhaul you."
+
+The bride moved upon the desert alone, her face toward an easterly hill
+that had given Farallone his figure of the sugar-loaf. She had no longer
+the effect of a wilted flower, but walked with quick, considered steps.
+What the groom carried and what I carried is of little moment. Our packs
+united would not have made the half of the lumbersome weight that
+Farallone swung upon his giant shoulders.
+
+"Follow the woman," said he, and we began to march upon the
+shoe-and-stocking track of the bride. Farallone, rolling like a ship (I
+had many a look at him over my shoulder) brought up the rear. From time
+to time he flung forward a phrase to us in explanation of his rebellious
+attitude.
+
+"I take command because I'm fit; you're not. I give the orders because I
+can get 'em obeyed; you can't." And, again: "You don't know east from
+west; I do."
+
+All the morning he kept firing disagreeable and very personal remarks at
+us. His proposition that we were not in any way fit for anything he
+enlarged upon and illustrated. He flung the groom's unemployed ancestry
+at him; he likened the groom to Rome at the time of the fall, which he
+attributed to luxury; he informed me that only men who were unable to
+work, or in any way help themselves, wrote books. "The woman's worth the
+two of you," he said. "Her people were workers. See it in her stride.
+She could milk a cow if she had one. If anything happens to me she'll
+give the orders. Mark my words. She's got a head on her shoulders, she
+has."
+
+The bride halted suddenly in her tracks and, turning, faced the groom.
+
+"Are you going to allow this man's insolence to run on forever?" she
+said.
+
+The groom frowned at her and shook his head covertly.
+
+"Pooh," said the bride, and I think I heard her call him "_my
+champion_," in a bitter whisper. She walked straight back to Farallone
+and looked him fearlessly in the face.
+
+"The bigger a man is, Mr. Farallone," she said, "and the stronger, the
+more he ought to mind his manners. We are grateful to you for all you
+have done, but if you cannot keep a civil tongue in your head, then the
+sooner we part company the better."
+
+For a full minute the fearless eyes snapped at Farallone, then, suddenly
+abashed, softened, and turned away.
+
+"There mustn't be any more mutiny," said Farallone. "But you've got
+sand, you have. I could love a woman like you. How did you come to hitch
+your wagon to little Nicodemus there? He's no star. You deserved a man.
+You've got sand, and when your poor feet go back on you, as they will in
+this swill (here he kicked the burning sand), I'll carry you. But if you
+hadn't spoken up so pert, I wouldn't. Now you walk ahead and pretend
+you're Christopher Columbus De Soto Peary leading a flock of sheep to
+the Fountain of Eternal Youth.... Bear to the left of the sage-brush,
+there's a tarantula under it...."
+
+We went forward a few steps, when suddenly I heard Farallone's voice in
+my ear. "Isn't she splendid?" he said, and at the same time he thumped
+me so violently between the shoulders that I stumbled and fell. For a
+moment all fear of the man left me on the wings of rage, and I was for
+attacking him with my fists. But something in his steady eye brought me
+to my senses.
+
+"Why did you do that?" I meant to speak sharply, but I think I whined.
+
+"Because," said Farallone, "when the woman spoke up to me you began to
+brindle and act lion-like and bold. For a minute you looked
+dangerous--for a little feller. So I patted your back, in a friendly
+way--as a kind of reminder--a feeble reminder."
+
+We had dropped behind the others. The groom had caught up with the
+bride, and from his nervous, irritable gestures I gathered that the poor
+soul was trying to explain and to ingratiate himself. But she walked on,
+steadily averted, you might say, her head very high, her shoulders drawn
+back. The groom, his eyes intent upon her averted face, kept stumbling
+with his feet.
+
+"Just look," said Farallone in a friendly voice. "Those whom God hath
+joined together. What did the press say of it?"
+
+"I don't remember," I said.
+
+"You lie," said Farallone. "The press called it an ideal match. My God!"
+he cried--and so loudly that the bride and the groom must have
+heard--"think of being a woman like that and getting hitched to a little
+bit of a fuss with a few fine feathers"; and with a kind of sing-song he
+began to misquote and extemporize:
+
+
+     "Just for a handful of silver she left me,
+        Just for a yacht and a mansion of stone,
+     Just for a little fool nest of fine feathers
+        She wed Nicodemus and left me alone."
+
+
+"But she'd never seen me," he went on, and mused for a moment. "Having
+seen me--do you guess what she's saying to herself? She's saying: 'Thank
+God I'm not too old to begin life over again,' or thinking it. Look at
+him! Even you wouldn't have been such a joke. I've a mind to kick the
+life out of him. One little kick with bare toes. Life? There's no life
+in him--nothing but a jenny-wren."
+
+The groom, who must have heard at least the half of Farallone's speech,
+stopped suddenly and waited for us to come up. His face was red and
+white--blotchy with rage and vindictiveness. When we were within ten
+feet of him he suddenly drew a revolver and fired it point-blank at
+Farallone. He had no time for a second shot. Farallone caught his wrist
+and shook it till the revolver spun through the air and fell at a
+distance. Then Farallone seated himself and, drawing the groom across
+his knee, spanked him. Since the beginning of the world children have
+been punished by spankings, and the event is memorable, if at all, as a
+something rather comical and domestic. But to see a grown man spanked
+for the crime of attempted murder is horrible. Farallone's fury got the
+better of him, and the blows resounded in the desert. I grappled his
+arm, and the recoil of it flung me head over heels. When Farallone had
+finished, the groom could not stand. He rolled in the sands, moaning and
+hiding his face.
+
+The bride was white as paper; but she had no eye for the groom.
+
+"Did he miss you?" she said.
+
+"No," said Farallone, "he hit me--Nicodemus hit me."
+
+"Where?" said the bride.
+
+"In the arm."
+
+Indeed, the left sleeve of Farallone's shirt was glittering with blood.
+
+"I will bandage it for you," she said, "if you will tell me how."
+
+Farallone ripped open the sleeve of his shirt.
+
+"What shall I bandage it with?" asked the bride.
+
+"Anything," said Farallone.
+
+The bride turned her back on us, stooped, and we heard a sound of
+tearing. When she had bandaged Farallone's wound (it was in the flesh
+and the bullet had been extracted by its own impetus) she looked him
+gravely in the face.
+
+"What's the use of goading him?" she said gently.
+
+"Look," said Farallone.
+
+The groom was reaching for the fallen revolver.
+
+"Drop it," bellowed Farallone.
+
+The groom's hand, which had been on the point of grasping the revolver's
+stock, jerked away. The bride walked to the revolver and picked it up.
+She handed it to Farallone.
+
+"Now," she said, "that all the power is with you, you will not go on
+abusing it."
+
+"_You_ carry it," said Farallone, "and any time _you_ think I ought to
+be shot, why, you just shoot me. I won't say a word."
+
+"Do you mean it?" said the bride.
+
+"I cross my heart," said Farallone.
+
+"I sha'n't forget," said the bride. She took the revolver and dropped it
+into the pocket of her jacket.
+
+"Vamoose!" said Farallone. And we resumed our march.
+
+
+III
+
+The line between the desert and the blossoming hills was as distinctly
+drawn as that between a lake and its shore. The sage-brush, closer
+massed than any through which we had yet passed, seemed to have gathered
+itself for a serried assault upon the lovely verdure beyond. Outposts of
+the sage-brush, its unsung heroes, perhaps, showed here and there among
+ferns and wild roses--leafless, gaunt, and dead; one knotted specimen
+even had planted its banner of desolation in the shade of a wild lilac
+and there died. A twittering of birds gladdened our dusty ears, and from
+afar there came a splashing of water. Our feet, burned by the desert
+sands, torn by yucca and cactus, trod now upon a cool and delicious
+moss, above which nodded the delicate blossoms of the shooting-star,
+swung at the ends of strong and delicate stems. In the shadows the
+chocolate lilies and trilliums dully glinted, and flag flowers trooped
+in the sunlight. The resinous paradisiacal smell of tarweed and
+bay-tree refreshed us, and the wonder of life was a something strong
+and tangible like bread and wine.
+
+The wine of it rushed in particular to Farallone's head; his brain
+became flooded with it; his feet cavorted upon the moss; his bellowed
+singing awoke the echoes, and the whole heavenly choir of the birds
+answered him.
+
+"You, Nicodemus," he cried gayly, "thought that man was given a nose to
+be a tripod for his eye-glasses--but now--oh, smell--smell!"
+
+His great bulk under its mighty pack tripped lightly, dancingly at the
+bride's elbow. Now his agile fingers nipped some tiny, scarce
+perceivable flower to delight her eye, and now his great hand scooped up
+whole sheaves of strong-growing columbine, and flung them where her feet
+must tread. He made her see great beauties and minute, and whatever had
+a look of smelling sweet he crushed in his hands for her to smell.
+
+He was no longer that limb of Satan, that sardonic bully of the desert
+days, but a gay wood-god intent upon the gentle ways of wooing. At first
+the bride turned away her senses from his offerings to eye and nostril;
+for a time she made shift to turn aside from the flowers that he cast
+for her feet to tread. But after a time, like one in a trance, she began
+to yield up her indifference and aloofness. The magic of the riotous
+spring began to intoxicate her. I saw her turn to the sailor and smile
+a gracious smile. And after awhile she began to talk with him.
+
+We came at length to a bright stream, from whose guileless
+superabundance Farallone, with a bent pin and a speck of red cloth,
+jerked a string of gaudy rainbow-trout. He made a fire and began to
+broil them; the bride searched the vicinal woods for dried branches to
+feed the fire. The groom knelt by the brook and washed the dust from his
+face and ears, snuffing the cool water into his dusty nose and blowing
+it out.
+
+And I lay in the shade and wondered by what courses the brook found its
+way to what sea or lake; whether it touched in its wanderings only the
+virginal wilderness, or flowed at length among the habitations of men.
+
+Farallone, of a sudden, jerked up his head from the broiling and
+answered my unspoken questions.
+
+"A man," he said, "who followed this brook could come in a few days to
+the river Maria Cleofas, and following that, to the town of that name,
+in a matter of ten days more. I tell you," he went on, "because some day
+some of you may be going that voyage; no ill-found voyage
+either--spring-water and trout all the way to the river; and all the
+rest of the way river-water and trout; and at this season birds' eggs in
+the reeds and a turtlelike terrapin, and Brodeia roots and wild onion,
+and young sassafras--a child could do it. Eat that...." he tossed me
+with his fingers a split, sputtering, piping hot trout....
+
+We spent the rest of that day and the night following by the stream.
+Farallone was in a riotous good-humor, and the fear of him grew less in
+us until we felt at ease and could take an unmixed pleasure in the
+loafing.
+
+Early the next morning he was astir, and began to prepare himself for
+further marching, but for the rest of us he said there would be one day
+more of rest.
+
+"Who knows," he said, "but this is Sunday?"
+
+"Where are you going?" asked the bride politely.
+
+"Me?" said Farallone, and he laughed. "I'm going house-hunting--not for
+a house, of course, but for a site. It's not so easy to pick out just
+the place where you want to spend the balance of your days. The
+neighborhood's easy, but the exact spot's hard." He spoke now directly
+to the bride, and as if her opinion was law to him. "There must be sun
+and shade, mustn't there? Spring-water?--running water? A hill handy to
+take the view from? An easterly slope to be out of the trades? A big
+tree or two.... I'll find 'em all before dark. I'll be back by dark or
+at late moonrise, and you rest yourselves, because to-morrow or the next
+day we go at house-raising."
+
+Had he left us then and there, I think that we would have waited for
+him. He had us, so to speak, abjectly under his thumbs. His word had
+come to be our law, since it was but child's play for him to enforce it.
+But it so happened that he now took a step which was to call into life
+and action that last vestige of manhood and independence that flickered
+in the groom and me. For suddenly, and not till after a moment of
+consideration, he took a step toward the bride, caught her around the
+waist, crushed her to his breast, and kissed her on the mouth.
+
+But she must have bitten him, for the tender passion changed in him to
+an unmanly fury.
+
+"You damned cat!" he cried; and he struck her heavily upon the face with
+his open palm. Not once only, but twice, three, four times, till she
+fell at his feet.
+
+By that the groom and I, poor, helpless atoms, had made shift to grapple
+with him. I heard his giant laugh. I had one glimpse of the groom's face
+rushing at mine--and then it was as if showers of stars fell about me.
+What little strength I had was loosened from my joints, and more than
+half-senseless I fell full length upon my back. Farallone had foiled our
+attack by the simple method of catching us by the hair and knocking our
+heads together.
+
+I could hear his great mocking laugh resounding through the forest.
+
+"Let him go," I heard the groom moan.
+
+The bride laughed. It was a very curious laugh. I could not make it out.
+There seemed to be no anger in it, and yet how, I wondered, could there
+be anything else?
+
+
+IV
+
+When distance had blotted from our ears the sound of Farallone's
+laughter, and when we had humbled ourselves to the bride for allowing
+her to be maltreated, I told the groom what Farallone had said about a
+man who should follow the stream by which we were encamped.
+
+"See," I said, "we have a whole day's start of him. Even he can't make
+that up. We must go at once, and there mustn't be any letting up till we
+get somewhere."
+
+The groom was all for running away, and the bride, silent and white,
+acquiesced with a nod. We made three light packs, and started--_bolted_
+is the better word.
+
+For a mile or more, so thick was the underwood, we walked in the bed of
+the stream; now freely, where it was smooth-spread sand, and now where
+it narrowed and deepened among rocks, scramblingly and with many a
+splashing stumble. The bride met her various mishaps with a kind of
+silent disdain; she made no complaints, not even comments. She made me
+think of a sleep-walker. There was a set, far-off, cold expression upon
+her usually gentle and vivacious face, and once or twice it occurred to
+me that she went with us unwillingly. But when I remembered the
+humiliation that Farallone had put upon her and the blows that he had
+struck her, I could not well credit the recurrent doubt of her
+willingness. The groom, on the other hand, recovered his long-lost
+spirits with immeasurable rapidity. He talked gayly and bravely, and you
+would have said that he was a man who had never had occasion to be
+ashamed of himself. He went ahead, the bride following next, and he kept
+giving a constant string of advices and imperatives. "That stone's
+loose"; "keep to the left, there's a hole." "Splash--dash--damn, look
+out for that one." Branches that hung low across our course he bent and
+held back until the bride had passed. Now he turned and smiled in her
+face, and now he offered her the helping hand. But she met his
+courtesies, and the whole punctilious fabric of his behavior, with the
+utmost absence and nonchalance. He had, it seemed, been too long in
+contempt to recover soon his former position of husband and beloved. For
+long days she had contemplated his naked soul, limited, weak, incapable.
+He had shown a certain capacity for sudden, explosive temper, but not
+for courage of any kind, or force. Nor had he played the gentleman in
+his helplessness. Nor had I. We had not in us the stuff of heroes; at
+first sight of instruments of torture we were of those who would confess
+to anything, abjure, swear falsely, beg for mercy, change our so-called
+religions--anything. The bride had learned to despise us from the bottom
+of her heart. She despised us still. And I would have staked my last
+dollar, or, better, my hopes of escaping from Farallone, that as man and
+wife she and the groom would never live together again. I felt terribly
+sorry for the groom. He had, as had I, been utterly inefficient,
+helpless, babyish, and cowardly--yet the odds against us had seemed
+overwhelming. But now as we journeyed down the river, and the distance
+between us and Farallone grew more, I kept thinking of men whom I had
+known; men physically weaker than the groom and I, who, had Farallone
+offered to bully them, would have fought him and endured his torture
+till they died. In my immediate past, then, there was nothing of which I
+was not burningly ashamed, and in the not-too-distant future I hoped to
+separate from the bride and the groom, and never see them or hear of
+them in this world again. At that, I had a real affection for the bride,
+a real admiration. On the yacht, before trouble showed me up, we had
+bid fair to become fast and enduring friends. But that was all over--a
+bud, nipped by the frost of conduct and circumstance, or ever the fruit
+could so much as set. For many days now I had avoided her eye; I had
+avoided addressing her; I had exerted my ingenuity to keep out of her
+sight. It is a terrible thing for a man to be thrown daily into the
+society of a woman who has found him out, and who despises him, mind,
+soul, marrow, and bone.
+
+The stream broke at length from the forest and, swelled by a sizable
+tributary, flowed broad and deep into a rolling, park-like landscape.
+Grass spread over the country's undulations and looked in the distance
+like well-kept lawns; and at wide intervals splendidly grown live-oaks
+lent an effect of calculated planting. Here our flight, for our muscles
+were hardened to walking, became easy and swift. I think there were
+hours when we must have covered our four miles, and even on long, upward
+slopes we must have made better than three. There is in swift walking,
+when the muscles are hard, the wind long, and the atmosphere
+exhilarating, a buoyant rhythm that more, perhaps, than merited success,
+or valorous conduct, smoothes out the creases in a man's soul. And so
+quick is a man to recover from his own baseness, and to ape outwardly
+his transient inner feelings, that I found myself presently, walking
+with a high head and a mind full of martial thoughts.
+
+All that day, except for a short halt at noon, we followed the river
+across the great natural park; now paralleling its convolutions, and now
+cutting diagonals. Late in the afternoon we came to the end of the park
+land. A more or less precipitous formation of glistening quartz marked
+its boundary, and into a fissure of this the stream, now a small river,
+plunged with accelerated speed. The going became difficult. The walls of
+the fissure through which the river rushed were smooth and water-worn,
+impossible to ascend; and between the brink of the river and the base of
+the walls were congestions of boulders, jammed drift-wood, and tangled
+alder bushes. There were times when we had to crawl upon our hands and
+knees, under one log and over the next. To add to our difficulties
+darkness was swiftly falling, and we were glad, indeed, when the wall of
+the fissure leaned at length so far from the perpendicular that we were
+able to scramble up it. We found ourselves upon a levelish little meadow
+of grass. In the centre of it there grew a monstrous and gigantic
+live-oak, between two of whose roots there glittered a spring. On all
+sides of the meadow, except on that toward the river, were
+superimpending cliffs of quartz. Along the base of these was a dense
+growth of bushes.
+
+"We'll rest here," said the groom. "What a place. It's a natural
+fortress. Only one way into it." He stood looking down at the noisy
+river and considering the steep slope we had just climbed. "See this
+boulder?" he said. "It's wobbly. If that damned longshoreman tries to
+get us here, all we've got to do is to choose the psychological moment
+and push it over on him."
+
+The groom looked quite bellicose and daring. Suddenly he flung his
+fragment of a cap high into the air and at the very top of his lungs
+cried: "Liberty!"
+
+The echoes answered him, and the glorious, abused word was tossed from
+cliff to cliff, across the river and back, and presently died away.
+
+At that, from the very branches of the great oak that stood in the
+centre of the meadow there burst a titanic clap of laughter, and
+Farallone, literally bursting with merriment, dropped lightly into our
+midst.
+
+I can only speak for myself. I was frightened--I say it deliberately and
+truthfully--_almost_ into a fit. And for fully five minutes I could not
+command either of my legs. The groom, I believe, screamed. The bride
+became whiter than paper--then suddenly the color rushed into her
+cheeks, and she laughed. She laughed until she had to sit down, until
+the tears literally gushed from her eyes. It was not hysterics
+either--could it have been amusement? After a while, and many prolonged
+gasps and relapses, she stopped.
+
+"This," said Farallone, "is my building site. Do you like it?"
+
+"Oh, oh," said the bride, "I think it's the m--most am--ma--musing site
+I ever saw," and she went into another uncontrollable burst of laughter.
+
+"Oh--oh," she said at length, and her shining eyes were turned from the
+groom to me, and back and forth between us, "if you _could_ have seen
+your faces!"
+
+
+V
+
+It seemed strange to us, an alteration in the logical and natural, but
+neither the groom nor I received corporal punishment for our attempt at
+escape. Farallone had read our minds like an open book; he had, as it
+were, put us up to the escapade in order to have the pure joy of
+thwarting us. That we should have been drawn to his exact waiting-place
+like needles to the magnet had a smack of the supernatural, but was in
+reality a simple and explicable happening. For if we had not ascended to
+the little meadow, Farallone, alertly watching, would have descended
+from it, and surprised us at some further point. That we should have
+caught no glimpse of his great bulk anywhere ahead of us in the day-long
+stretch of open, park-like country was also easily explained. For
+Farallone had made the most of the journey in the stream itself,
+drifting with a log.
+
+And although, as I have said, we were not to receive corporal
+punishment, Farallone visited his power upon us in other ways. He would
+not at first admit that we had intended to escape, but kept praising us
+for having followed him so loyally and devotedly, for saving him the
+trouble of a return journey, and for thinking to bring along the bulk of
+our worldly possessions. Tiring at length of this, he switched to the
+opposite point of view. He goaded us nearly to madness with his
+criticisms of our inefficiency, and he mocked repeatedly the groom's
+ill-timed cry of Liberty.
+
+"Liberty!" he said, "you never knew, you never will know, what that
+is--you miserable little pin-head. Liberty is for great natures.
+
+
+     'Stone walls do not a prison make,
+        Nor iron bars a cage.'
+
+
+But the woman shall know what liberty is. If she had wanted to leave me
+there was nothing to stop her. Do you think she'd have followed the
+river, leaving a broad trail? Do you think she'd have walked right into
+this meadow--unless she hadn't cared? Not she. Did you ask her advice,
+you self-sufficiencies? Not you. You were the men-folk, you thought, and
+you were to have the ordering of everything. You make me sick, the pair
+of you...."
+
+He kept us awake until far into the night with his jibes and his
+laughter.
+
+"Well," he said lastly, "good-night, girls. I'm about sick of you, and
+in the morning we part company...."
+
+At the break of dawn he waked us from heavy sleep--me with a cuff, the
+groom with a kick, the bride with a feline touch upon the hair.
+
+"And now," said he, "be off."
+
+He caught the bride by the shoulder.
+
+"Not _you_," he said.
+
+"I am to stay?" she asked, as if to settle some trivial and unimportant
+point.
+
+"Do you ask?" said he; "Was man meant to live alone? This will be enough
+home for us." And he turned to the groom. "Get," he said savagely.
+
+"Mr. Farallone," said the bride--she was very white, but calm,
+apparently, and collected--"you have had your joke. Let us go now, or
+better, come with us. We will forget our former differences, and you
+will never regret your future kindnesses."
+
+"Don't you _want_ to stay?" exclaimed Farallone in a tone of
+astonishment.
+
+"If I did," said the bride gently, "I could not, and I would not."
+
+"What's to stop you?" asked Farallone.
+
+"My place is with my husband," said the bride, "whom I have sworn to
+love, and to honor, and to obey."
+
+"Woman," said Farallone, "do you love him, do you honor him?"
+
+She pondered a moment, then held her head high.
+
+"I do," she said.
+
+"God bless you," cried the groom.
+
+"Rats," said Farallone, and he laughed bitterly. "But you'll get over
+it," he went on. "Let's have no more words." He turned to the groom and
+to me.
+
+"Will you climb down the cliff or shall I throw you?"
+
+"Let us all go," said the bride, and she caught at his trembling arm,
+"and I will bless you, and wish you all good things--and kiss you
+good-by."
+
+"If you go," said Farallone, and his great voice trembled, "I die. You
+are everything. You know that. Would I have hit you if I hadn't loved
+you so--poor little cheek!" His voice became a kind of mumble.
+
+"Let us go," said the bride, "if you love me."
+
+"Not _you_," said Farallone, "while I live. I would not be such a fool.
+Don't you know that in a little while you'll be glad?"
+
+"Is that your final word?" said the bride.
+
+"It must be," said Farallone. "Are you not a gift to me from God?"
+
+"I think you must be mad," said the bride.
+
+"I am unalterable," said Farallone, "as God made me--I _am_. And you
+are mine to take."
+
+"Do you remember," said the bride, "what you said when you gave me the
+revolver? You said that if ever I thought it best to shoot you--you
+would let me do it."
+
+"I remember," said Farallone, and he smiled.
+
+"That was just talk, of course?" said the bride.
+
+"It was not," said Farallone; "shoot me."
+
+"Let us go," said the bride. Her voice faltered.
+
+"Not you," said Farallone, "while I live."
+
+His voice, low and gentle, had in it a kind of far-off sadness. He
+turned his eyes from the bride and looked the rising sun in the face. He
+turned back to her and smiled.
+
+"You haven't the heart to shoot me," he said. "My darling."
+
+"Let us go."
+
+"_Let--you--go!_" He laughed. "_Send--away--my--mate!_"
+
+His eyes clouded and became vacant. He blinked them rapidly and raised
+his hand to his brow. It seemed to me that in that instant, suddenly
+come and suddenly gone, I perceived a look of insanity in his face. The
+bride, too, perhaps, saw something of the kind, for like a flash she had
+the revolver out and cocked it.
+
+"Splendid," cried Farallone, and his eyes blazed with a tremendous love
+and admiration. "This is something like," he cried. "Two forces face to
+face--a man and a bullet--love behind them both. Ah, you do love
+me--don't you?"
+
+"Let us go," said the bride. Her voice shook violently.
+
+"Not you," said Farallone, "while I live."
+
+He took a step toward her, his eyes dancing and smiling. "Do you know,"
+he said, "I don't know if you'll do it or not. By my soul, I don't know.
+This is living, this is. This is gambling. I'll do nothing violent," he
+said, "until my hands are touching you. I'll move toward you slowly one
+slow step at a time--with my arms open--like this--you'll have plenty of
+chance to shoot me--we'll see if you'll do it."
+
+"We shall see," said the bride.
+
+They faced each other motionless. Then Farallone, his eyes glorious with
+excitement and passion, his arms open, moved toward her one slow,
+deliberate step.
+
+"Wait," he cried suddenly. "This is too good for _them_." He jerked his
+thumb toward the groom and me. "This is a sight for gods--not jackasses.
+Go down to the river," he said to us. "If you hear a shot come back. If
+you hear a scream--then as you value your miserable hides--get!"
+
+We did not move.
+
+The bride, her voice tense and high-pitched, turned to us.
+
+"Do as you're told," she cried, "or I shall ask this man to throw you
+over the cliff." She stamped her foot.
+
+"And this man," said Farallone, "will do as he's told."
+
+There was nothing for it. We left them alone in the meadow and descended
+the cliff to the river. And there we stood for what seemed the ages of
+ages, listening and trembling.
+
+A faint, far-off detonation, followed swiftly by louder and fainter
+echoes, broke suddenly upon the rushing noises of the river. We
+commenced feverishly to scramble back up the cliff. Half-way to the top
+we heard another shot, a second later a third, and after a longer
+interval, as if to put a quietus upon some final show of life--a fourth.
+
+A nebulous drift of smoke hung above the meadow.
+
+Farallone lay upon his face at the bride's feet. The groom sprang to her
+side and threw a trembling arm about her.
+
+"Come away," he cried, "come away."
+
+But the bride freed herself gently from his encircling arm, and her eyes
+still bent upon Farallone----
+
+"Not till I have buried my dead," she said.
+
+
+
+
+HOLDING HANDS
+
+
+At first nobody knew him; then the Hotchkisses knew him, and then it
+seemed as if everybody had always known him. He had run the gauntlet of
+gossip and come through without a scratch. He was first noticed sitting
+in the warm corner made by Willcox's annex and the covered passage that
+leads to the main building. Pairs or trios of people, bareheaded, their
+tennis clothes (it was a tennis year) mostly covered from view by clumsy
+coonskin coats, passing Willcox's in dilapidated runabouts drawn by
+uncurried horses, a nigger boy sitting in the back of each, his thin
+legs dangling, had glimpses of him through the driveway gap in the tall
+Amor privet hedge that is between Willcox's and the road. These pairs or
+trios having seen would break in upon whatever else they may have been
+saying to make such remarks as: "He can't be, or he wouldn't be at
+Willcox's"; or, contradictorily: "He must be, or he'd do something
+besides sit in the sun"; or, "Don't they always have to drink lots of
+milk?" or, "Anyway, they're quite positive that it's not catching"; or,
+"Poor boy, what nice hair he's got."
+
+With the old-timers the new-comer, whose case was otherwise so
+doubtful, had one thing in common: a coonskin coat. It was handsome of
+its kind, unusually long, voluminous, and black. The upturned collar
+came above his ears, and in the opening his face showed thin and white,
+and his eyes, always intent upon the book in his lap, had a look of
+being closed. Two things distinguished him from other men: his great
+length of limb and the color and close-cropped, almost moulded, effect
+of his hair. It was the color of old Domingo mahogany, and showed off
+the contour of his fine round head with excellent effect.
+
+The suspicion that this interesting young man was a consumptive was set
+aside by Willcox himself. He told Mrs. Bainbridge, who asked (on account
+of her little children who, et cetera, et cetera), that Mr. Masters was
+recuperating from a very stubborn attack of typhoid. But was Mr. Willcox
+quite sure? Yes, Mr. Willcox had to be sure of just such things. So Mrs.
+Bainbridge drove out to Miss Langrais' tea at the golf club, and passed
+on the glad tidings with an addition of circumstantial detail. Mister
+Masters (people found that it was quite good fun to say this, with
+assorted intonations) had been sick for many months at--she thought--the
+New York Hospital. Sometimes his temperature had touched a hundred and
+fifteen degrees and sometimes he had not had any temperature at all.
+There was quite a romance involved, "his trained nurse, my dear, not one
+of the ordinary creatures, but a born lady in impoverished
+circumstances," et cetera, et cetera. And later, when even Mister
+Masters himself had contradicted these brightly colored statements, Mrs.
+Bainbridge continued to believe them. Even among wealthy and idle women
+she was remarkable for the number of impossible things she could believe
+before breakfast, and after. But she never made these things seem even
+half plausible to others, and so she wasn't dangerous.
+
+Mister Masters never remembered to have passed so lonely and dreary a
+February. The sunny South was a medicine that had been prescribed and
+that had to be swallowed. Aiken on the label had looked inviting enough,
+but he found the contents of the bottle distasteful in the extreme. "The
+South is sunny," he wrote to his mother, "but oh, my great jumping
+grandmother, how seldom! And it's cold, mummy, like being beaten with
+whips. And it rains--well, if it rained cats and dogs a fellow wouldn't
+mind. Maybe they'd speak to him, but it rains solid cold water, and it
+hits the windows the way waves hit the port-holes at sea; and the only
+thing that stops the rain is a wind that comes all the way from Alaska
+for the purpose. In protected corners the sun has a certain warmth. But
+the other morning the waiter put my milk on the wrong side of my chair,
+in the shade, namely, and when I went to drink it it was frozen solid.
+You were right about the people here all being kind; they are all the
+same kind. I know them all now--by sight; but not by name, except, of
+course, some who are stopping at Willcox's. We have had three ice
+storms--_'Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen bluehen?_' I am getting to
+_kennst_ it very well. But Willcox, who keeps a record of such things,
+says that this is the coldest winter Aiken has known since last winter!
+
+"But in spite of all this there is a truth that must be spoken. I feel a
+thousand times better and stronger than when I came. And yesterday,
+exercising in the privacy of my room, I discovered that there are once
+more calves upon my legs. This is truth, too. I have no one to talk to
+but your letters. So don't stint me. Stint me with money if you can
+(here I defy you), but for the love of Heaven keep me posted. If you
+will promise to write every day I will tell you the name of the
+prettiest girl in Aiken. She goes by eight times every day, and she
+looks my way out of the corner of her eye. And I pretend to be reading
+and try very hard to look handsome and interesting.... Mother! ... just
+now I rested my hand on the arm of my chair and the wood felt hot to the
+touch! It's high noon and the sun's been on it since eight o'clock, but
+still it seems very wonderful. Willcox says that the winter is
+practically over; but I begged him not to hurry...."
+
+Such was the usual trend of his letters. But that one dated March 7
+began with the following astonishing statement:
+
+"I love Aiken ..." and went on to explain why.
+
+But Mister Masters was not allowed to love Aiken until he had come
+through the whole gauntlet of gossip. It had first been suggested that
+he was a consumptive and a menace ("though of course one feels terribly
+sorry for them, my dear"). This had been disproved. Then it was spread
+about that he belonged to a wealthy family of Masters from the upper
+West Side ("very well in their way, no doubt, and the backbone of the
+country, my dear, but one doesn't seem to get on with them, and I
+shouldn't think they'd come to Aiken of all places"). But a gentleman
+who knew the West Side Masters, root and branch, shook his head to this,
+and went so far as to say, "Not much, he isn't"; and went further and
+shuddered. Then it got about that Mister Masters was poor (and that made
+people suspicious of him). Then it got about that he was rich (and that
+made them even more so). Then that he wrote for a living (and that was
+nearly as bad as to say that he cheated at cards--or at least it was the
+kind of thing that _they_ didn't do). And then, finally, the real truth
+about him, or something like it, got out; and the hatchet of suspicion
+was buried, and there was peace in Aiken. In that Aiken of whose peace
+the judge, referring to a pock-marked mulatto girl, had thundered that
+it should not be disturbed for any woman--"no--not even were she Helen
+of Troy."
+
+This was the truth that got out about Mister Masters. He was a nephew of
+the late Bishop Masters. His mother, on whom he was dependent, was very
+rich; she had once been prominent in society. He was thirty, and was
+good at games. He did not work at anything.
+
+So he was something that Aiken could understand and appreciate: a young
+man who was well-born, who didn't have to work--and who didn't _want_
+to.
+
+But old Mrs. Hotchkiss did not know of these things when, one bright day
+in passing Willcox's (she was on one good foot, one rheumatic foot, and
+a long black cane with a gold handle), she noticed the young man pale
+and rather sad-looking in his fur coat and steamer-rug, his eyes on his
+book, and stopped abruptly and spoke to him through the gap in the
+hedge.
+
+"I hope you'll forgive an old woman for scraping an acquaintance," she
+piped in her brisk, cheerful voice, "but I want to know if you're
+getting better, and I thought the best way to find out was to stop and
+ask."
+
+Mister Masters's steamer-rug fell from about his long legs and his face
+became rosy, for he was very shy.
+
+"Indeed I am," he said, "ever so much. And thank you for asking."
+
+"I'm tired," said the old lady, "of seeing you always sitting by
+yourself, dead tired of it. I shall come for you this afternoon at four
+in my carriage, and take you for a drive...."
+
+"It was abrupt," Mister Masters wrote to his mother, "but it was kind.
+When I had done blushing and scraping with my feet and pulling my
+forelock, we had the nicest little talk. And she remembered you in the
+old days at Lenox, and said why hadn't I told her before. And then she
+asked if I liked Aiken, and, seeing how the land lay, I lied and said I
+loved it. And she said that that was her nice, sensible young fellow, or
+words to that effect. And then she asked me why, and I said because it
+has such a fine climate; and then she laughed in my face, and said that
+I was without reverence for her age--not a man--a scalawag.
+
+"And do you know, Mrs. Hotchkiss is like one of those magic keys in
+fairy stories? All doors open to her. Between you and me I have been
+thinking Aiken's floating population snobbish, purse-proud, and
+generally absurd. And instead, the place seems to exist so that kindness
+and hospitality may not fail on earth. Of course I'm not up to genuine
+sprees, such as dining out and sitting up till half-past ten or eleven.
+But I can go to luncheons, and watch other people play tennis, and poke
+about gardens with old ladies, and guess when particular flowers will be
+out, and learn the names of birds and of hostile bushes that prick and
+of friendly bushes that don't.
+
+"All the cold weather has gone to glory; and it's really spring because
+the roosters crow all night. Mrs. Hotchkiss says it's because they are
+roosters and immoral. But I think they're crowing because they've
+survived the winter. I am...."
+
+Aiken took a great fancy to Mister Masters. First because Aiken was
+giving him a good time; and second because he was really good company
+when you got him well cornered and his habitual fright had worn off. He
+was the shyest, most frightened six-footer in the memory of Aiken. If
+you spoke to him suddenly he blushed, and if you prepared him by first
+clearing your throat he blushed just the same. And he had a crooked,
+embarrassed smile that was a delight to see.
+
+But gradually he became almost at ease with nearly everybody; and in the
+shyest, gentlest way enjoyed himself hugely. But the prettiest girl in
+Aiken had very hard work with him.
+
+As a stag fights when brought to bay, so Mister Masters when driven into
+a corner could talk as well and as freely as the next man; but on his
+own initiative there was, as we Americans say, "nothing doing." Whether
+or not the prettiest girl in Aiken ever rolled off a log is unknown;
+but such an act would have been no more difficult for her than to corner
+Mister Masters. The man courted cornering, especially by her. But given
+the desired situation, neither could make anything of it. Mister
+Masters's tongue became forthwith as helpless as a man tied hand and
+foot and gagged. He had nothing with which to pay for the delight of
+being cornered but his rosiest, steadiest blush and his crookedest and
+most embarrassed smile. But he retained a certain activity of mind and
+within himself was positively voluble with what he would say if he only
+could.
+
+I don't mean that the pair sat or stood or walked in absolute silence.
+Indeed, little Miss Blythe could never be silent for a long period nor
+permit it in others, but I mean that with the lines and the machinery of
+a North Atlantic liner, their craft of propinquity made about as much
+progress as a scow. Nevertheless, though neither was really aware of
+this, each kept saying things, that cannot be put into words, to the
+other; otherwise the very first cornering of Mister Masters by little
+Miss Blythe must have been the last. But even as it was way back at the
+beginning of things, and always will be, Beauty spoke to Handsome and
+Handsome up and spoke back.
+
+"No," said little Miss Blythe, upon being sharply cross-questioned by
+Mrs. Hotchkiss, "he practically never does say anything."
+
+Mrs. Hotchkiss dug a little round hole in the sand with her long black
+cane, and made an insulting face at little Miss Blythe.
+
+"Some men," said she, "can't say 'Boo' to a goose."
+
+If other countries produce girls like little Miss Blythe, I have never
+met a specimen; and I feel very sure that foreign young ladies do not
+become personages at the age of seventeen. When she met Mister Masters
+she had been a personage for six years, and it was time for her to yield
+her high place to another; to marry, to bear children, and to prove that
+all the little matters for which she was celebrated were merely passing
+phases and glitterings of a character which fundamentally was composed
+of simple and noble traits.
+
+Little Miss Blythe had many brothers and sisters; no money, as we reckon
+money; and only such prospects as she herself might choose from
+innumerable offers. She was little; her figure looked best in athletic
+clothes (low neck didn't do well with her, because her face was tanned
+so brown) and she was strong and quick as a pony. All the year round she
+kept herself in the pink of condition ("overkept herself" some said)
+dancing, walking, running, swimming, playing all games and eating to
+match. She had a beautiful, clean-cut face, not delicate and to be
+hidden and coaxed by veils and soft things, but a face that looked
+beautiful above a severe Eton collar, and at any distance. She had the
+bright, wide eyes of a collected athlete, unbelievably blue, and the
+whites of them were only matched for whiteness by her teeth (the deep
+tan of her skin heightened this effect, perhaps); and it was said by one
+admirer that if she were to be in a dark room and were to press the
+button of a kodak and to smile at one and the same instant, there would
+be a picture taken.
+
+She had friends in almost every country-clubbed city in America.
+Whenever, and almost wherever, a horse show was held she was there to
+show the horses of some magnate or other to the best advantage. Between
+times she won tennis tournaments and swimming matches, or tried her hand
+at hunting or polo (these things in secret because her father had
+forbidden them), and the people who continually pressed hospitality upon
+her said that they were repaid a thousand-fold. In the first place, it
+was a distinction to have her. "Who are the Ebers?" "Why, don't you
+know? They are the people Miss Blythe is stopping with."
+
+She was always good-natured; she never kept anybody waiting; and she
+must have known five thousand people well enough to call them by their
+first names. But what really distinguished her most from other young
+women was that her success in inspiring others with admiration and
+affection was not confined to men; she had the same effect upon all
+women, old and young, and all children.
+
+Foolish people said that she had no heart, merely because no one had as
+yet touched it. Wise people said that when she did fall in love sparks
+would fly. Hitherto her friendships with men, whatever the men in
+question may have wished, had existed upon a basis of good-natured
+banter and prowess in games. Men were absolutely necessary to Miss
+Blythe to play games with, because women who could "give her a game"
+were rare as ivory-billed woodpeckers. It was even thought by some, as
+an instance, that little Miss Blythe could beat the famous Miss May
+Sutton once out of three times at lawn-tennis. But Miss Sutton, with the
+good-natured and indomitable aggression of her genius, set this
+supposition at rest. Little Miss Blythe could not beat Miss Sutton once
+out of three or three hundred times. But for all that, little Miss
+Blythe was a splendid player and a master of strokes and strategy.
+
+Nothing would have astonished her world more than to learn that little
+Miss Blythe had a secret, darkly hidden quality of which she was
+dreadfully ashamed. At heart she was nothing if not sentimental and
+romantic. And often when she was thought to be sleeping the dreamless
+sleep of the trained athlete who stores up energy for the morrow's
+contest, she was sitting at the windows in her night-gown, looking at
+the moon (in hers) and weaving all sorts of absurd adventures about
+herself and her particular fancy of the moment.
+
+It would be a surprise and pleasure to some men, a tragedy perhaps to
+others, if they should learn that little Miss Blythe had fancied them
+all at different times, almost to the boiling point, and that in her own
+deeply concealed imagination Jim had rescued her from pirates and Jack
+from a burning hotel, or that just as her family were selling her to a
+rich widower, John had appeared on his favorite hunter and carried her
+off. The truth is that little Miss Blythe had engaged in a hundred love
+affairs concerning which no one but herself was the wiser.
+
+And at twenty-three it was high time for her to marry and settle down.
+First because she couldn't go on playing games and showing horses
+forever, and second because she wanted to. But with whom she wanted to
+marry and settle down she could not for the life of her have said.
+Sometimes she thought that it would be with Mr. Blagdon. He _was_ rich
+and he _was_ a widower; but wherever she went he managed to go, and he
+had some of the finest horses in the world, and he wouldn't take no for
+an answer. Sometimes she said to the moon:
+
+"I'll give myself a year, and if at the end of that time I don't like
+anybody better than Bob, why...." Or, in a different mood, "I'm tired of
+everything I do; if he happens to ask me to-morrow I'll say yes." Or,
+"I've ridden his horses, and broken his golf clubs, and borrowed his
+guns (and he won't lend them to anybody else), and I suppose I've got to
+pay him back." Or, "I really _do_ like him a lot," or "I really don't
+like him at all."
+
+Then there came into this young woman's life Mister Masters. And he
+blushed his blush and smiled his crooked smile and looked at her when
+she wasn't looking at him (and she knew that he was looking) and was
+unable to say as much as "Boo" to her; and in the hidden springs of her
+nature that which she had always longed for happened, and became, and
+was. And one night she said to the moon: "I know it isn't proper for me
+to be so attentive to him, and I know everybody is talking about it,
+but--" and she rested her beautiful brown chin on her shapely, strong,
+brown hands, and a tear like a diamond stood in each of her unbelievably
+blue eyes, and she looked at the moon, and said: "But it's Harry Masters
+or--_bust_!"
+
+
+Mr. Bob Blagdon, the rich widower, had been content to play a waiting
+game; for he knew very well that beneath her good-nature little Miss
+Blythe had a proud temper and was to be won rather by the man who should
+make himself indispensable to her than by him who should be forever
+pestering her with speaking and pleading his cause. She is an honest
+girl, he told himself, and without thinking of consequences she is
+always putting herself under obligations to me. Let her ride down
+lover's lane with young Blank or young Dash, she will not be able to
+forget that she is on my favorite mare. In his soul he felt a certain
+proprietorship in little Miss Blythe; but to this his ruddy,
+dark-mustached face and slow-moving eyes were a screen.
+
+Mr. Blagdon had always gone after what he wanted in a kind of slow,
+indifferent way that begot confidence in himself and in the beholder;
+and (in the case of Miss Blythe) a kind of panic in the object sought.
+She liked him because she was used to him, and because he could and
+would talk sense upon subjects which interested her. But she was afraid
+of him because she knew that he expected her to marry him some day, and
+because she knew that other people, including her own family, expected
+this of her. Sometimes she felt ready to take unto herself all the
+horses and country places and automobiles and yachts, and in a life
+lived regardless of expense to bury and forget her better self. But more
+often, like a fly caught in a spider's web, she wished by one desperate
+effort (even should it cost her a wing, to carry out the figure) to free
+herself once and forever from the entanglement.
+
+It was pleasant enough in the web. The strands were soft and silky;
+they held rather by persuasion than by force. And had it not been for
+the spider she could have lived out her life in the web without any very
+desperate regrets. But it was never quite possible to forget the spider;
+and that in his own time he would approach slowly and deliberately, sure
+of himself and of little Miss Fly....
+
+But, after all, the spider in the case was not such a terrible fellow.
+Just because a man wants a girl that doesn't want him, and means to have
+her, he hasn't necessarily earned a hard name. Such a man as often as
+not becomes one-half of a very happy marriage. And Mr. Bob Blagdon was
+considered an exceptionally good fellow. In his heart, though I have
+never heard him say so openly, I think he actually looked down on people
+who gambled and drank to excess, and who were uneducated and had
+acquired (whatever they may have been born with) perfectly empty heads.
+I think that he had a sound and sensible virtue; one ear for one side of
+an argument, and one for the other.
+
+There is no reason to doubt that he was a good husband to his first
+wife, and wished to replace her with little Miss Blythe, not to supplant
+her. To his three young children he was more of a grandfather than a
+father; though strong-willed and even stubborn, he was unable half the
+time to say no to them. And I have seen him going on all-fours with the
+youngest child perched on his back kicking him in the ribs and urging
+him to canter. So if he intended by the strength of his will and of his
+riches to compel little Miss Blythe to marry (and to be happy with him;
+he thought he could manage that, too), it is only one blot on a decent
+and upright character. And it is unjust to have called him spider.
+
+But when Mister Masters entered (so timidly to the eye, but really so
+masterfully) into little Miss Blythe's life, she could no longer
+tolerate the idea of marrying Mr. Blagdon. All in a twinkle she knew
+that horses and yachts and great riches could never make up to her for
+the loss of a long, bashful youth with a crooked smile. You can't be
+really happy if you are shivering with cold; you can't be really happy
+if you are dripping with heat. And she knew that without Mister Masters
+she must always be one thing or the other--too cold or too hot, never
+quite comfortable.
+
+Her own mind was made up from the first; even to going through any
+number of awful scenes with Blagdon. But as time passed and her
+attentions (I shall have to call it that) to Mister Masters made no
+visible progress, there were times when she was obliged to think that
+she would never marry anybody at all. But in her heart she knew that
+Masters was attracted by her, and to this strand of knowledge she clung
+so as not to be drowned in a sea of despair.
+
+Her position was one of extreme difficulty and delicacy. Sometimes
+Mister Masters came near her of his own accord, and remained in bashful
+silence; but more often she was obliged to have recourse to "accidents"
+in order to bring about propinquity. And even when propinquity had been
+established there was never any progress made that could be favorably
+noted. Behind her back, for instance, when she was playing tennis and he
+was looking on, he was quite bold in his admiration of her. And whereas
+most people's eyes when they are watching tennis follow the flight of
+the ball, Mister Masters's faithful eyes never left the person of his
+favorite player.
+
+One reason for his awful bashfulness and silence was that certain
+people, who seemed to know, had told him in the very beginning that it
+was only a question of time before little Miss Blythe would become Mrs.
+Bob Blagdon. "She's always been fond of him," they said, "and of course
+he can give her everything worth having." So when he was with her he
+felt as if he was with an engaged girl, and his real feelings not being
+proper to express in any way under such circumstances, and his nature
+being single and without deceit, he was put in a quandary that defied
+solution.
+
+But what was hidden from Mister Masters was presently obvious to Mr.
+Blagdon and to others. So the spider, sleepily watching the automatic
+enmeshment of the fly, may spring into alert and formidable action at
+seeing a powerful beetle blunder into the web and threaten by his
+stupid, aimless struggles to set the fly at liberty and to destroy the
+whole fabric spun with care and toil.
+
+To a man in love there is no redder danger signal than a sight of the
+object of his affections standing or sitting contentedly with another
+man and neither of them saying as much as "Boo" to the other. He may,
+with more equanimity, regard and countenance a genuine flirtation, full
+of laughter and eye-making. The first time Mr. Blagdon saw them together
+he thought; the second time he felt; the third time he came forward
+graciously smiling. The web might be in danger from the beetle; the fly
+at the point of kicking up her heels and flying gayly away; but it may
+be in the power of the spider to spin enough fresh threads on the spur
+of the moment to rebind the fly, and even to make prisoner the doughty
+beetle.
+
+"Don't you ride, Mister Masters?" said Mr. Blagdon.
+
+"Of course," said the shy one, blushing. "But I'm not to do anything
+violent before June."
+
+"Sorry," said Mr. Blagdon, "because I've a string of ponies that are
+eating their heads off. I'd be delighted to mount you."
+
+But Mister Masters smiled with unusual crookedness and stammered his
+thanks and his regrets. And so that thread came to nothing.
+
+The spider attempted three more threads; but little Miss Blythe looked
+serenely up.
+
+"I never saw such a fellow as you, Bob," said she, "for putting other
+people under obligations. When I think of the weight of my personal ones
+I shudder." She smiled innocently and looked up into his face. "When
+people can't pay their debts they have to go through bankruptcy, don't
+they? And then their debts all have to be forgiven."
+
+Mr. Blagdon felt as if an icy cold hand had been suddenly laid upon the
+most sensitive part of his back; but his expression underwent no change.
+His slow eyes continued to look into the beautiful, brightly colored
+face that was turned up to him.
+
+"Very honorable bankrupts," said he carelessly, "always pay what they
+can on the dollar."
+
+Presently he strolled away, easy and nonchalant; but inwardly he carried
+a load of dread and he saw clearly that he must learn where he stood
+with little Miss Blythe, or not know the feeling of easiness from one
+day to the next. Better, he thought, to be the recipient of a painful
+and undeserved ultimatum, than to breakfast, lunch, and dine with
+uncertainty.
+
+The next day, there being some dozens of people almost in earshot, Mr.
+Blagdon had an opportunity to speak to little Miss Blythe. Under the
+circumstances, the last thing she expected was a declaration; they were
+in full view of everybody; anybody might stroll up and interrupt. So
+what Mr. Blagdon had to say came to her with something the effect of
+sudden thunder from a clear sky.
+
+"Phyllis," said he, "you have been looking about you since you were
+seventeen. Will I do?"
+
+"Oh, Bob!" she protested.
+
+"I have tried to do," said he, not without a fine ring of manliness.
+"Have I made good?"
+
+She smiled bravely and looked as nonchalant as possible; but her heart
+was beating heavily.
+
+"I've liked being good friends--_so_ much," she said. "Don't spoil it."
+
+"I tell her," said he, "that in all the world there is only the one
+girl--only the one. And she says--Don't spoil it.'"
+
+"Bob----"
+
+"I will _make_ you happy," he said.... "Has it never entered your dear
+head that some time you must give me an answer?"
+
+She nodded her dear head, for she was very honest.
+
+"I suppose so," she said.
+
+"Well," said he.
+
+"In my mind," she said, "I have never been able to give you the same
+answer twice...."
+
+"A decision is expected from us," said he. "People are growing tired of
+our long backing and filling."
+
+"People! Do they matter?"
+
+"They matter a great deal. And you know it."
+
+"Yes. I suppose they do. Let me off for now, Bob. People are looking at
+us...."
+
+"I want an answer."
+
+But she would not be coerced.
+
+"You shall have one, but not now. I'm not sure what it will be."
+
+"If you can't be sure now, can you ever be sure?"
+
+"Yes. Give me two weeks. I shall think about nothing else."
+
+"Thank you," he said. "Two weeks.... That will be full moon.... I shall
+ask all Aiken to a picnic in the woods, weather permitting ... and--and
+if your answer is to be my happiness, why, you shall come up to me, and
+say, 'Bob--drive me home, will you?'"
+
+"And if it's the other answer, Bob?"
+
+He smiled in his usual bantering way.
+
+"If it's the other, Phyllis--why--you--you can walk home."
+
+She laughed joyously, and he laughed, just as if nothing but what was
+light and amusing was in question between them.
+
+
+Along the Whiskey Road nearly the whole floating population of Aiken
+moved on horseback or on wheels. Every fourth or fifth runabout carried
+a lantern; but the presence in the long, wide-gapped procession of
+other vehicles or equestrians was denoted only by the sounds of voices.
+Half a dozen family squabbles, half a dozen flirtations (which would
+result in family squabbles), and half a dozen genuine romances were
+moving through the sweet-smelling dark to Mr. Bob Blagdon's picnic in
+Red Oak Hollow. Only three of the guests knew where Red Oak Hollow was,
+and two of these were sure that they could only find it by daylight; but
+the third, a noted hunter and pigeon shot, rode at the head of the
+procession, and pretended (he was forty-five with the heart of a child)
+that he was Buffalo Bill leading a lost wagon-train to water. And though
+nobody could see him for the darkness, he played his part with minute
+attention to detail, listening, pulling up short, scowling to right and
+left, wetting a finger and holding it up to see from which direction the
+air was moving. He was so intent upon bringing his convoy safely through
+a hostile country that the sounds of laughter or of people in one
+runabout calling gayly to people in another were a genuine annoyance to
+him.
+
+Mr. Bob Blagdon had preceded his guests by half an hour, and was already
+at the scene of the picnic. Fate, or perhaps the weather bureau at
+Washington, had favored him with just the conditions he would have
+wished for. The night was hot without heaviness; in the forenoon of
+that day there had been a shower, just wet enough to keep the surfaces
+of roads from rising in dust. It was now clear and bestarred, and
+perhaps a shade less dark than when he had started. Furthermore, it was
+so still that candles burned without flickering. He surveyed his
+preparations with satisfaction. And because he was fastidious in
+entertainment this meant a great deal.
+
+A table thirty feet long, and low to the ground so that people sitting
+on rugs or cushions could eat from it with comfort, stood beneath the
+giant red oak that gave a name to the hollow. The white damask with
+which it was laid and the silver and cut glass gleamed in the light of
+dozens of candles. The flowers were Marechal Niel roses in a long bank
+of molten gold.
+
+Except for the lanterns at the serving tables, dimly to be seen through
+a dense hedgelike growth of Kalmia latifolia, there were no other lights
+in the hollow; so that the dinner-table had the effect of standing in a
+cave; for where the gleam of the candles ended, the surrounding darkness
+appeared solid like a wall.
+
+It might have been a secret meeting of smugglers or pirates, the
+Georgian silver on the table representing years of daring theft; it
+seemed as if blood must have been spilled for the wonderful glass and
+linen and porcelain. Even those guests most hardened in luxury and
+extravagance looked twice at Mr. Bob Blagdon's picnic preparations
+before they could find words with which to compliment him upon them; and
+the less experienced were beside themselves with enthusiasm and delight.
+But Mr. Bob Blagdon was wondering what little Miss Blythe would think
+and say, and he thought it unkind of her, under the circumstances, to be
+the last to arrive. Unkind, because her doing so was either a good omen
+or an evil one, and he could not make up his mind which.
+
+The guests were not homogeneously dressed. Some of the men were in
+dinner clothes; some were in full evening dress; some wore dinner coats
+above riding breeches and boots; some had come bareheaded, some with
+hats which they did not propose to remove. Half the women were in low
+neck and short sleeves; one with short curly hair was breeched and
+booted like a man; others wore what I suppose may be called theatre
+gowns; and a few who were pretty enough to stand it wore clothes suited
+to the hazards of a picnic in the woods.
+
+Mr. Blagdon's servants wore his racing colors, blue and silver,
+knee-breeches, black silk stockings, pumps with silver buckles, and
+powdered hair. They were men picked for their height, wooden faces, and
+well-turned calves. They moved and behaved as if utterly untouched and
+uninterested in their unusual and romantic surroundings; they were like
+jinns summoned for the occasion by the rubbing of a magic lamp.
+
+At the last moment, when to have been any later would have been either
+rude or accidental, little Miss Blythe's voice was heard calling from
+the darkness and asking which of two roads she should take. Half a dozen
+men rushed off to guide her, and presently she came blinking into the
+circle of light, followed by Mister Masters, who smiled his crookedest
+smile and stumbled on a root so that he was cruelly embarrassed.
+
+Little Miss Blythe blinked at the lights and looked very beautiful. She
+was all in white and wore no hat. She had a red rose at her throat. She
+was grave for her--and silent.
+
+The truth was that she had during the last ten minutes made up her mind
+to ask Mr. Bob Blagdon to drive her home when the picnic should be over.
+She had asked Mister Masters to drive out with her; and how much that
+had delighted him nobody knew (alas!) except Mister Masters himself. She
+had during the last few weeks given him every opportunity which her
+somewhat unconventional soul could sanction. In a hundred ways she had
+showed him that she liked him immensely; and well--if he liked her in
+the same way, he would have managed to show it, in spite of his shyness.
+The drive out had been a failure. They had gotten no further in
+conversation than the beauty and the sweet smells of the night. And
+finally, but God alone knows with what reluctance, she had given him up
+as a bad job.
+
+The long table with its dozens of candles looked like a huge altar, and
+she was Iphigenia come to the sacrifice. She had never heard of
+Iphigenia, but that doesn't matter. At Mister Masters, now seated near
+the other end of the table, she lifted shy eyes; but he was looking at
+his plate and crumbling a piece of bread. It was like saying good-by.
+She was silent for a moment; then, smiling with a kind of reckless
+gayety, she lifted her glass of champagne and turned to the host.
+
+"To you!" she said.
+
+Delight swelled in the breast of Mr. Bob Blagdon. He raised his hand,
+and from a neighboring thicket there rose abruptly the music of banjos
+and guitars and the loud, sweet singing of negroes.
+
+Aiken will always remember that dinner in the woods for its beauty and
+for its gayety. Two or three men, funny by gift and habit, were at their
+very best; and fortune adapted the wits of others to the occasion. So
+that the most unexpected persons became humorous for once in their
+lives, and said things worth remembering. People gather together for one
+of three reasons: to make laws, to break them, or to laugh. The first
+sort of gathering is nearly always funny, and if the last isn't, why
+then, to be sure, it is a failure. Mr. Bob Blagdon's picnic was an
+uproarious success. Now and then somebody's whole soul seemed to go
+into a laugh, in which others could not help joining, until
+uncontrollable snorts resounded in the hollow and eyes became blinded
+with tears.
+
+And then suddenly, toward dessert, laughter died away and nothing was to
+be heard but such exclamations as: "For Heaven's sake, look at the
+moon!" "Did you ever see anything like it?"
+
+Mr. Blagdon had paid money to the owner of Red Oak Hollow for permission
+to remove certain trees and thickets that would otherwise have
+obstructed his guests' view of the moonrise. At the end of the vista
+thus obtained the upper rim of the moon now appeared, as in a frame.
+And, watching in silence, Mr. Blagdon's guests saw the amazing luminary
+emerge, as it were, from the earth like a bright and blameless soul from
+the grave, and sail clear, presently, and upward into untroubled space;
+a glory, serene, smiling, and unanswerable.
+
+No one remembered to have seen the moon so large or so bright. Atomized
+silver poured like tides of light into the surrounding woods; and at the
+same time heavenly odors of flowers began to move hither and thither, to
+change places, to return, and pass, like disembodied spirits engaged in
+some tranquil and celestial dance.
+
+And it became cooler, so that women called for light wraps and men tied
+sweaters round their necks by the arms. Then at a long distance from
+the dinner-table a bonfire began to flicker, and then grow bright and
+red. And it was discovered that rugs and cushions had been placed (not
+too near the fire) for people to sit on while they drank their coffee
+and liquors, and that there were logs to lean against, and boxes of
+cigars and cigarettes where they could most easily be reached.
+
+It was only a question now of how long the guests would care to stay. As
+a gathering the picnic was over. Some did not use the rugs and cushions
+that had been provided for them, but strolled away into the woods. A
+number of slightly intoxicated gentlemen felt it their duty to gather
+about their host and entertain him. Two married couples brought candles
+from the dinner-table and began a best two out of three at bridge.
+Sometimes two men and one woman would sit together with their backs
+against a log; but always after a few minutes one of the men would go
+away "to get something" and would not return.
+
+It was not wholly by accident that Mister Masters found himself alone
+with little Miss Blythe. Emboldened by the gayety of the dinner, and
+then by the wonder of the moon, he had had the courage to hurry to her
+side; and though there his courage had failed utterly, his action had
+been such as to deter others from joining her. So, for there was nothing
+else to do, they found a thick rug and sat upon it, and leaned their
+backs against a log.
+
+Little Miss Blythe had not yet asked Mr. Blagdon to drive her home.
+Though she had made up her mind to do so, it would only be at the last
+possible moment of the twelfth hour. It was now that eleventh hour in
+which heroines are rescued by bold lovers. But Mister Masters was no
+bolder than a mouse. And the moon sailed higher and higher in the
+heavens.
+
+"Isn't it wonderful?" said little Miss Blythe.
+
+"Wonderful!"
+
+"Just smell it!"
+
+"Umm."
+
+Her sad, rather frightened eyes wandered over to the noisy group of
+which Mr. Bob Blagdon was the grave and silent centre. He knew that
+little Miss Blythe would keep her promise. He believed in his heart that
+her decision would be favorable to him; but he was watching her where
+she sat with Masters and knew that his belief in what she would decide
+was not strong enough to make him altogether happy.
+
+"_And_ he was old enough to be her father!" repeated the gentleman in
+the Scotch deer-stalker who had been gossiping. Mr. Blagdon smiled, but
+the words hurt--"old enough to be her father." "My God," he thought,
+"_I_ am old enough--just!" But then he comforted himself with "Why not?
+It's how old a man feels, not how old he is."
+
+Then his eyes caught little Miss Blythe's, but she turned hers instantly
+away.
+
+"This will be the end of the season," she said.
+
+Mister Masters assented. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked.
+
+"Do you see old Mr. Black over there?" she said. "He's pretending not to
+watch us, but he's watching us like a lynx.... Did you ever start a
+piece of news?"
+
+"Never," said Mister Masters.
+
+"It would be rather fun," said little Miss Blythe. "For instance, if we
+held hands for a moment Mr. Black would see it, and five minutes later
+everybody would know about it."
+
+Mister Masters screwed his courage up to the sticking point, and took
+her hand in his. Both looked toward Mr. Black as if inviting him to
+notice them. Mr. Black was seen almost instantly to whisper to the
+nearest gentleman.
+
+"There," said little Miss Blythe, and was for withdrawing her hand. But
+Masters's fingers tightened upon it, and she could feel the pulses
+beating in their tips. She knew that people were looking, but she felt
+brazen, unabashed, and happy. Mister Masters's grip tightened; it said:
+"My master has a dozen hearts, and they are all beating--for _you_." To
+return that pressure was not an act of little Miss Blythe's will. She
+could not help herself. Her hand said to Masters: "With the heart--with
+the soul." Then she was frightened and ashamed, and had a rush of color
+to the face.
+
+"Let go," she whispered.
+
+But Masters leaned toward her, and though he was trembling with fear and
+awe and wonder, he found a certain courage and his voice was wonderfully
+gentle and tender, and he smiled and he whispered: "Boo!"
+
+
+Only then did he set her hand free. For one reason there was no need now
+of so slight a bondage; for another, Mr. Bob Blagdon was approaching
+them, a little pale but smiling. He held out his hand to little Miss
+Blythe, and she took it.
+
+"Phyllis," said he, "I know your face so well that there is no need for
+me to ask, and for you--to deny." He smiled upon her gently, though it
+cost him an effort. "I wanted her for myself," he turned to Masters with
+charming frankness, "but even an old man's selfish desires are not proof
+against the eloquence of youth, and I find a certain happiness in saying
+from the bottom of my heart--bless you, my children...."
+
+The two young people stood before him with bowed heads.
+
+"I am going to send you the silver and glass from the table," said he,
+"for a wedding present to remind you of my picnic...." He looked upward
+at the moon. "If I could," said he, "I would give you that."
+
+Then the three stood in silence and looked upward at the moon.
+
+
+
+
+THE CLAWS OF THE TIGER
+
+
+What her given name was in the old country has never reached me; but
+when her family had learned a little English, and had begun to affect
+the manners and characteristics of their more Americanized
+acquaintances, they called her Daisy. She was the only daughter; her age
+was less than that of two brothers, and she was older than three. The
+family consisted of these six, Mr. and Mrs. Obloski, the parents,
+Grandfather Pinnievitch, and Great-grandmother Brenda--a woman so old,
+so shrunken, so bearded, and so eager to live that her like was not to
+be found in the city.
+
+Upon settling in America two chief problems seemed to confront the
+family: to make a living and to educate the five boys. The first problem
+was solved for a time by The Organization. Obloski was told by an
+interpreter that he would be taken care of if he and his father-in-law
+voted as directed and as often as is decent under a wise and paternal
+system of government. To Obloski, who had about as much idea what the
+franchise stands for as The Organization had, this seemed an agreeable
+arrangement. Work was found for him, at a wage. He worked with immense
+vigor, for the wage seemed good. Soon, however, he perceived that older
+Americans (of his own nationality) were laughing at him. Then he did not
+work so hard; but the wage, froth of the city treasury, came to him just
+the same. He ceased working, and pottered. Still he received pay. He
+ceased pottering. He joined a saloon. And he became the right-hand man
+of a right-hand man of a right-hand man who was a right-hand man of a
+very important man who was--left-handed.
+
+The two older boys were at school in a school; the three others were at
+school in the street. Mrs. Obloski was occupied with a seventh child,
+whose sex was not yet determined. Grandfather Pinnievitch was learning
+to smoke three cigars for five cents; and Great-grandmother Brenda sat
+in the sun, stroking her beard and clinging to life. Nose and chin
+almost obstructed the direct passage to Mrs. Brenda's mouth. She looked
+as if she had gone far in an attempt to smell her own chin, and would
+soon succeed.
+
+But for Daisy there was neither school, nor play in the street, nor
+sitting in the sun. She cooked, and she washed the dishes, and she did
+the mending, and she made the beds, and she slept in one of the beds
+with her three younger brothers. In spite of the great wage so easily
+won the Obloskis were very poor, for New York. All would be well when
+the two older boys had finished school and begun to vote. They were
+thirteen and fourteen, but the school records had them as fifteen and
+sixteen, for the interpreter had explained to their father that a man
+cannot vote until he is twenty-one.
+
+Daisy was twelve, but she had room in her heart for all her family, and
+for a doll besides. This was of rags; and on the way from Castle Garden
+to the tenement she had found it, neglected, forsaken--starving,
+perhaps--in a gutter. In its single garment, in its woollen hair, and
+upon its maculate body the doll carried, perhaps, the germs of typhoid,
+of pneumonia, of tetanus, and of consumption; but all night it lay in
+the arms of its little mother, and was not permitted to harm her or
+hers.
+
+The Obloskis, with the exception of Mrs. Brenda, were a handsome
+family--the grandfather, indeed, was an old beauty in his way, with
+streaming white hair and beard, and eyes that reminded you of locomotive
+headlights seen far off down a dark tunnel; but their good features were
+marred by an expression of hardness, of greed, of unsatisfied desire.
+And Mr. Obloski's face was beginning to bloat with drink. It was only
+natural that Daisy, upon whom all the work was put, should have been too
+busy to look hard or greedy. She had no time to brood upon life or to
+think upon unattainable things. She had only time to cook, time to wash
+the dishes, to mend the clothes, to make the beds, and to play the
+mother to her little brothers and to her doll. And so, and naturally, as
+the skin upon her little hands thickened and grew rough and red, the
+expression in her great eyes became more and more luminous, translucent,
+and joyous.
+
+Even to a class of people whose standards of beauty differ, perhaps,
+from ours, she promised to be very beautiful. She was a
+brown-and-crimson beauty, with ocean-blue eyes and teeth dazzling white,
+like the snow on mountains when the sun shines. And though she was only
+twelve, her name, underlined, was in the note-book of many an ambitious
+young man. I knew a young man who was a missionary in that quarter of
+the city (indeed, it was through him that this story reached me), an
+earnest, Christian, upstanding, and, I am afraid, futile young man, who,
+for a while, thought he had fallen in love with her, and talked of
+having his aunt adopt her, sending her to school, ladyizing her. He had
+a very pretty little romance mapped out. She would develop into an
+ornament to any society, he said. Her beauty--he snapped his
+fingers--had nothing to do with his infatuation. She had a soul, a great
+soul. This it was that had so moved him. "You should see her," he said,
+"with her kid brother, and the whole family shooting-match. I know;
+lots of little girls have the instinct of mothering things--but it's
+more in her case, it amounts to genius--and she's so clever, and so
+quick, and in spite of all the wicked hard work they put upon her she
+sings a little, and laughs a little, and mothers them all the time--the
+selfish beasts!"
+
+My friend's pipe-dreams came to nothing. He drifted out of missionizing,
+through a sudden hobby for chemistry, into orchids; sickened of having
+them turn black just when they ought to have bloomed; ran for Congress
+and was defeated; decided that the country was going to the dogs, went
+to live in England, and is now spending his time in a vigorous and, I am
+afraid, vain attempt to get himself elected to a first-class London
+club. He is quite a charming man--and quite unnecessary. I mention all
+this, being myself enough of a pipe-dreamer to think that, if he had not
+been frightened out of his ideas about Daisy, life might have dealt more
+handsomely with them both.
+
+As Obloski became more useful to the great organization that owned him
+he received proportionately larger pay; but as he drank proportionately
+more, his family remained in much its usual straits. Presently Obloski
+fell off in utility, allowing choice newly landed men of his nationality
+to miss the polls. Then strange things happened. The great man (who was
+left-handed) spoke an order mingled with the awful names of gods. Then
+certain shares, underwritten by his right-hand man, clamored for
+promised cash. A blue pallor appeared in the cheeks of the right-hand
+man, and he spoke an order, so that a contract for leaving the pavement
+of a certain city street exactly as it was went elsewhere. The defrauded
+contractor swore very bitterly, and reduced the salary of his right-hand
+man. This one caused a raid of police to ascend into the disorderly
+house of his. This one in turn punished his right-hand man; until
+finally the lowest of all in the scale, save only Mr. Obloski, remarked
+to the latter, pressing for his wage, that money was "heap scarce." And
+Mr. Obloski, upon opening his envelope, discovered that it contained but
+the half of that to which he had accustomed his appetite. Than Obloski
+there was none lower. Therefore, to pass on the shiver of pain that had
+descended to him from the throne, he worked upon his feelings with raw
+whiskey, then went home to his family and broke its workings to bits.
+Daisy should go sit in an employment agency until she was employed and
+earning money. The youngest boy and the next youngest should sell
+newspapers upon the street. Mrs. Obloski should stop mourning for the
+baby which she had rolled into a better world three years before, and do
+the housework. The better to fit her for this, for she was lazy and not
+strong, he kicked her in the ribs until she fainted, and removed
+thereby any possibility of her making good the loss for which her
+proneness to luxurious rolling had been directly responsible.
+
+So Daisy, who was now nearly sixteen, went to sit with other young women
+in a row: some were older than she, one or two younger; but no one of
+the others was lovely to look at or had a joyous face.
+
+
+II
+
+After about an hour's waiting in an atmosphere of sour garments
+disguised by cheap perfumery, employment came to Daisy in the stout form
+of a middle aged, showily dressed woman, decisive in speech, and rich,
+apparently, who desired a waitress.
+
+"I want something cheap and green," she explained to the manager. "I
+form 'em then to suit myself." Her eyes, small, quick, and decided,
+flashed along the row of candidates, and selected Daisy without so much
+as one glance at the next girl beyond. "There's my article, Mrs.
+Goldsmith," she said.
+
+Mrs. Goldsmith shook her head and whispered something.
+
+The wealthy lady frowned. "Seventy-five?" she said. "That's ridiculous."
+
+"My Gott!" exclaimed Mrs. Goldsmith. "Ain't she fresh? Loog at her.
+Ain't she a fresh, sweet liddle-thing?"
+
+"Well, she looks fresh enough," said the lady, "but I don't go on looks.
+But I'll soon find out if what you say is true. And then I'll pay you
+seventy-five. Meanwhile"--as Mrs. Goldsmith began to protest--"there's
+nothing in it--nothing in it."
+
+"But I haf your bromice--to pay up."
+
+The lady bowed grandly.
+
+"You are sugh an old customer--" Thus Mrs. Goldsmith explained her
+weakness in yielding.
+
+Daisy, carrying her few possessions in a newspaper bundle, walked
+lightly at the side of her new employer.
+
+"My name is Mrs. Holt, Daisy," said the lady. "And I think we'll hit
+things off, if you always try to do just what I tell you."
+
+Daisy was in high spirits. It was wonderful to have found work so easily
+and so soon. She was to receive three dollars a week. She could not
+understand her good fortune. Again and again Mrs. Holt's hard eyes
+flicked over the joyous, brightly colored young face. Less often an
+expression not altogether hard accompanied such surveys. For although
+Mrs. Holt knew that she had found a pearl among swine, her feelings of
+elation were not altogether free from a curious and most unaccustomed
+tinge of regret.
+
+"But I must get you a better dress than that," she said. "I want my
+help to look cared for and smart. I don't mean you're not neat and clean
+looking; but maybe you've something newer and nicer in your bundle?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Daisy. "I have my Sunday dress. That is almost new."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Holt, "I'll have a look at it. This is where I live."
+
+She opened the front door with a latch-key; and to Daisy it seemed as if
+paradise had been opened--from the carved walnut rack, upon which
+entering angels might hang their hats and coats, to the carpet upon the
+stair and the curtains of purple plush that, slightly parted, disclosed
+glimpses of an inner and more sumptuous paradise upon the right--a grand
+crayon of Mrs. Holt herself, life-size, upon an easel of bamboo; chairs
+and sofas with tremendously stuffed seats and backs and arms, a
+tapestry-work fire-screen--a purple puppy against a pink-and-yellow
+ground.
+
+"I'll take you up to your room right off," said Mrs. Holt, "and you can
+show me your other dress, and I'll tell you if it's nice enough."
+
+So up they went three flights. But it was in no garret that Daisy was to
+sleep. Mrs. Holt conducted her into a large, high-ceilinged,
+old-fashioned room. To be sure, it was ill lighted and ill
+ventilated--giving on a court; but its furniture, from the
+marble-topped wash-stand to the great double bed, was very grand and
+overpowering. Daisy could only gape with wonder and delight. To call
+such a room her own, to earn three dollars a week--with a golden promise
+of more later on if she proved a good girl--it was all very much too
+wonderful to be true.
+
+"Now, Daisy, let me see your Sunday dress--open the bundle on the bed
+there."
+
+Daisy, obedient and swift (but blushing, for she knew that her dress
+would look very humble in such surroundings), untied the string and
+opened the parcel. But it was not the Sunday dress that caught Mrs.
+Holt's eye. She spoke in the voice of one the most of whose breath has
+suddenly been snatched away.
+
+"And what," she exclaimed, "for mercy sake, is _that_?"
+
+"That," said Daisy, already in an anguish lest it be taken from her, "is
+my doll."
+
+Mrs. Holt took the doll in her hands and turned it over and back. She
+looked at it, her head bent, for quite a long time. Then, all of a
+sudden, she made a curious sound in the back of her throat that sounded
+like a cross between a choke and a sob. Then she spoke swiftly--and like
+one ashamed:
+
+"You won't suit me, girlie--I can see that. Wrap up those things again,
+and--No, you mustn't go back to Goldsmith's--she's a bad woman--you
+wouldn't understand. Can't you go back home? No?... They need what you
+can earn.... Here, you go to Hauptman's employment agency and tell him I
+sent you. No.... You're too blazing innocent. I'll go with you. I've got
+some influence. I'll see to it that he gets a job for you from some one
+who--who'll let you alone."
+
+"But," said Daisy, gone quite white with disappointment, "I would have
+tried so hard to please you, Mrs. Holt. I----"
+
+"You don't know what you're saying, child," exclaimed Mrs. Holt. "I--I
+don't need you. I've got trouble here." She touched what appeared to be
+an ample bosom. "One-half's the real thing and one-half's just padding.
+I'm not long for this world, and you've cost me a pretty penny, my dear;
+but it's all right. I don't need _you_!"
+
+So Mrs. Holt took Daisy to Hauptman's agency. And he, standing in fear
+of Mrs. Holt, found employment for her as waitress in a Polish
+restaurant. Here the work was cruel and hard, and the management
+thunderous and savage; but the dangers of the place were not machine
+made, and Daisy could sleep at home.
+
+
+III
+
+Daisy had not been at work in the restaurant many weeks before the
+proprietor perceived that business was increasing. The four tables to
+which Daisy attended were nearly always full, and the other waitresses
+were beginning to show symptoms of jealousy and nerves. More dishes were
+smashed; more orders went wrong; and Daisy, a smooth, quick, eager
+worker, was frequently delayed and thrown out of her stride, so to
+speak, by malicious stratagems and tricks. But Linnevitch, the
+proprietor, had a clear mind and an excellent knowledge of human nature.
+He got rid of his cash-girl, and put Daisy in her place; and this in
+face of the fact that Daisy had had the scantiest practice with figures
+and was at first dismally slow in the making of change. But Linnevitch
+bore with her, and encouraged her. If now and then she made too much
+change, he forgave her. He had only to look at the full tables to
+forget. For every nickel that she lost for him, she brought a new
+customer. And soon, too, she became at ease with money, and sure of her
+subtraction. Linnevitch advanced her sufficient funds to buy a neat
+black dress; he insisted that she wear a white turnover collar and white
+cuffs. The plain severity of this costume set off the bright coloring
+of her face and hair to wonderful advantage. In the dingy, ill-lighted
+restaurant she was like that serene, golden, glowing light that
+Rembrandt alone has known how to place among shadows. And her temper was
+so sweet, and her disposition so childlike and gentle, that one by one
+the waitresses who hated her for her popularity and her quick success
+forgave her and began to like her. They discussed her a great deal among
+themselves, and wondered what would become of her. Something good, they
+prophesied; for under all the guilelessness and simplicity she was able.
+And you had to look but once into those eyes to know that she was
+string-straight. Among the waitresses was no very potent or instructed
+imagination. They could not formulate the steps upon which Daisy should
+rise, nor name the happy height to which she should ascend. They knew
+that she was exceptional; no common pottery like themselves, but of that
+fine clay of which even porcelain is made. It was common talk among them
+that Linnevitch was in love with her; and, recalling what had been the
+event in the case of the Barnhelm girl, and of Lotta Gorski, they knew
+that Linnevitch sometimes put pleasure ahead of business. Yet it was
+their common belief that the more he pined after Daisy the less she had
+to fear from him.
+
+A new look had come into the man's protruding eyes. Either prosperity or
+Daisy, or both, had changed him for the better. The place no longer
+echoed with thunderous assaults upon slight faults. The words, "If you
+will, please, Helena"; "Well, well, pick it up," fell now from his lips,
+or the even more reassuring and courteous, "Never mind; I say, never
+mind."
+
+Meanwhile, if her position and work in the restaurant were pleasant
+enough, Daisy's evenings and nights at home were hard to bear. Her
+mother, sick, bitter, and made to work against her will, had no tolerant
+words for her. Grandfather Pinnievitch, deprived of even pipe tobacco by
+his bibulous son-in-law, whined and complained by the hour. Old Mrs.
+Brenda declared that she was being starved to death, and she reviled
+whomever came near her. The oldest boy had left school in disgrace,
+together with a classmate of the opposite sex, whom he abandoned shortly
+at a profit. The family had turned him off at first; had then seen that
+he had in spite of this an air of prosperity; invited him to live at
+home once more, and were told that he was done with them. His first
+venture in the business of pandering had been a success; a company,
+always on the lookout for bright young men, offered him good pay, work
+intricate but interesting, and that protection without which crime would
+not be profitable.
+
+Yes, in the secure shadow of The Organization's secret dark wings, there
+was room even for this obscure young Pole, fatherless, now, and
+motherless. For The Organization stands at the gates of the young
+Republic to welcome in the unfortunate of all nations, to find work for
+them, and security. Let your bent be what it will, if only you will
+serve the master, young immigrant, you may safely follow that bent to
+the uttermost dregs in which it ends. Whatever you wish to be, that you
+may become, provided only that your ambition is sordid, criminal, and
+unchaste.
+
+Mr. Obloski was now an incorrigible drunkard. He could no longer be
+relied on to cast even his own vote once, should the occasion for voting
+arise. So The Great Organization spat Obloski aside. He threatened
+certain reprisals and tale-bearings. He was promptly arrested for a
+theft which not only he had not committed, but which had never been
+committed at all. The Organization spared itself the expense of actually
+putting him in jail; but he had felt the power of the claws. He would
+threaten no more.
+
+To support the family on Daisy's earnings and the younger boys'
+newspaper sellings, and at the same time to keep drunk from morning to
+night, taxed his talents to the utmost. There were times when he had to
+give blows instead of bread. But he did his best, and was as patient and
+long-suffering as possible with those who sapped his income and kept him
+down.
+
+One night, in a peculiarly speculative mood, he addressed his business
+instincts to Daisy. "Fourteen dollars a month!" he said. "And there are
+girls without half your looks--right here in this city--that earn as
+much in a night. What good are you?"
+
+I cannot say that Daisy was so innocent as not to gather his meaning.
+She sat and looked at him, a terrible pathos in her great eyes, and said
+nothing.
+
+"Well," said her father, "what good are you?"
+
+"No good," said Daisy gently.
+
+That night she hugged her old doll to her breast and wept bitterly, but
+very quietly, so as not to waken her brothers. The next morning, very
+early, she made a parcel of her belongings, and carried it with her to
+the restaurant. The glass door with its dingy gilt lettering was being
+unlocked for the day by Mr. Linnevitch. He was surprised to see her a
+full half-hour before opening time.
+
+"Mr. Linnevitch," said Daisy, "things are so that I can't stay at home
+any more. I will send them the money, but I have to find another place
+to live."
+
+"We got a little room," he said; "you can have if Mrs. Linnevitch says
+so. I was going to give you more pay. We give you that room
+instead--eh?"
+
+Mrs. Linnevitch gave her consent. She was a dreary, weary woman of
+American birth. When she was alone with her husband she never upbraided
+him for his infidelities, or referred to them. But later, on this
+particular day, having a chance to speak, she said:
+
+"I hope you ain't going to bother this one, Linne?"
+
+He patted his wife's bony back and shook his head. "The better as I know
+that girl, Minnie," he said, "the sorrier I am for what I used to be
+doing sometimes. You and her is going to have a square deal."
+
+"I bin up to put her room straight," said Mrs. Linnevitch. "She's got a
+doll."
+
+She delivered this for what it was worth, in an uninterested,
+emotionless voice.
+
+"I tell you what she ought to have got," said her husband. "She ought to
+have got now a good husband, and some live dolls--eh?"
+
+
+IV
+
+New customers were not uncommon in the restaurant, but the young man who
+dropped in for noon dinner upon the following Friday was of a plumage
+gayer than any to which the waitresses and habitues of the place were
+accustomed. To Daisy, sitting at her high cashier's desk, like a young
+queen enthroned, he seemed to have something of the nature of a prince
+from a far country. She watched him eat. She saw in his cuffs the glint
+of gold; she noted with what elegance he held his little fingers aloof
+from his hands. She noted the polish and cleanliness of his nails, the
+shortness of his recent hair-cut, the great breadth of his shoulders
+(they were his coat's shoulders, but she did not know this), the
+narrowness of his waist, the interesting pallor of his face.
+
+Not until the restaurant was well filled did any one have the audacity
+to sit at the stranger's table. His elegance and refinement were as a
+barrier between him and all that was rude and coarse. If he glanced
+about the place, taking notes in his turn of this and that, it was
+covertly and quietly and without offence. His eyes passed across Daisy's
+without resting or any show of interest. Once or twice he spoke quietly
+to the girl who waited on him, his eyebrows slightly raised, as if he
+were finding fault but without anger. For the first time in her life
+Daisy had a sensation of jealousy; but in the pale nostalgic form,
+rather than the yellow corrosive.
+
+Though the interesting stranger had been one of the earliest arrivals,
+he ate slowly, busied himself with important-looking papers out of his
+coat-pockets, and was the last to go. He paid his bill, and if he looked
+at Daisy while she made change it was in an absent-minded, uninterested
+way.
+
+She had an access of boldness. "I hope you liked your dinner," she said.
+
+"I?" The young man came out of the clouds. "Oh, yes. Very nice." He
+thanked her as courteously for his change as if his receiving any at all
+was purely a matter for her discretion to decide, wished her good
+afternoon, and went out.
+
+The waitresses were gathered about the one who had served the stranger.
+It seemed that he had made her a present of a dime. It was vaguely known
+that up-town, in more favored restaurants, a system of tipping
+prevailed; but in Linnevitch's this was the first instance in a long
+history. The stranger's stock, as they say, went up by leaps and bounds.
+Then, on removing the cloth from the table at which he had dined, there
+was discovered a heart-shaped locket that resembled gold. The girls were
+for opening it, and at least one ill-kept thumb-nail was painfully
+broken over backward in the attempt. Daisy joined the group. She was
+authoritative for the first time in her life.
+
+"He wouldn't like us to open it," she said.
+
+A dispute arose, presently a clamor; Linnevitch came in. There was a
+silence.
+
+Linnevitch examined the locket. "Trible-plate," he said judicially.
+"Maybe there's a name and address inside." As the locket opened for his
+strong thumb-nail, Daisy gave out a little sound as of pain. Linnevitch
+stood looking into the locket, smiling.
+
+"Only hair," he said presently, and closed the thing with a snap, "Put
+that in the cash-drawer," he said, "until it is called for."
+
+Daisy turned the key on the locket and wondered what color the hair
+was. The stranger, of course, had a sweetheart, and of course the hair
+was hers. Was it brown, chestnut, red, blond, black? Beneath each of
+these colors in turn she imagined a face.
+
+Long before the first habitues had arrived for supper Daisy was at her
+place. All the afternoon her imagination had been so fed, and her
+curiosity thereby so aroused, that she was prepared, in the face of what
+she knew at heart was proper, to open the locket and see, at least, the
+color of the magic hair. But she still hesitated, and for a long time.
+Finally, however, overmastered, she drew out the cash-drawer a little
+way and managed, without taking it out, to open the locket. The lock of
+hair which it contained was white as snow.
+
+Daisy rested, chin on hands, looking into space. She had almost always
+been happy in a negative way, or, better, contented. Now she was
+positively happy. But she could not have explained why. She had closed
+the locket gently and tenderly, revering the white hairs and the filial
+piety that had enshrined them in gold ("triple-plated gold, at that!").
+And when presently the stranger entered to recover his property, Daisy
+felt as if she had always known him, and that there was nothing to know
+of him but good.
+
+He was greatly and gravely concerned for his loss, but when Daisy,
+without speaking, opened the cash-drawer and handed him his property,
+he gave her a brilliant smile of gratitude.
+
+"One of the girls found it under your table," she said.
+
+"Is she here now?" he asked. "But never mind; you'll thank her for me,
+won't you? And--" A hand that seemed wonderfully ready for financial
+emergencies slipped into a trousers pocket and pulled from a great roll
+of various denominations a dollar bill. "Thank her and give her that,"
+he said. Then, and thus belittling the transaction, "I have to be in
+this part of the city quite often on business," he said, "and I don't
+mind saying that I like to take my meals among honest people. You can
+tell the boss that I intend to patronize this place."
+
+He turned to go, but the fact that she had been included as being one of
+honest people troubled Daisy.
+
+"Excuse me," she said. He turned back. "It was wrong for me to do it,"
+she said, blushing deeply, and looking him full in the face with her
+great, honest eyes. "I opened your locket. And looked in."
+
+"Did you?" said the young man. He did not seem to mind in the least. "I
+do, often. That lock of hair," he said, rather solemn now, and a little
+sad, perhaps, "was my mother's."
+
+He now allowed his eyes to rest on Daisy's beautiful face for, perhaps,
+the first time.
+
+"In a city like this," he said, "there's always temptations to do
+wrong, but I think having this" (he touched his breast pocket where the
+locket was) "helps me to do what mother would have liked me to."
+
+He brushed the corner of one eye with the back of his hand. Perhaps
+there was a tear in it. Perhaps a cinder.
+
+
+V
+
+It came to be known in the restaurant that the stranger's name was
+Barstow, and very soon he had ceased to be a stranger. His business in
+that quarter of the city, whatever it may have been, was at first
+intermittent; he would take, perhaps, three meals in a week at
+Linnevitch's; latterly he often came twice in one day. Always orderly
+and quiet, Barstow gradually, however, established pleasant and even
+joking terms with the waitresses. But with Daisy he never joked. He
+called the other girls by their first names, as became a social
+superior, but Daisy was always Miss Obloski to him. With Linnevitch
+alone he made no headway. Linnevitch maintained a pointedly surly and
+repellent attitude, as if he really wished to turn away a profitable
+patronage. And Barstow learned to leave the proprietor severely alone.
+
+One night, after Barstow had received his change, he remained for a few
+minutes talking with Daisy. "What do you find to do with yourself
+evenings, Miss Obloski?" he asked.
+
+"I generally sit with Mr. and Mrs. Linnevitch and sew," she answered.
+
+"That's not a very exciting life for a young lady. Don't you ever take
+in a show, or go to a dance?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Don't you like to dance?"
+
+"I know I'd like it," she said with enthusiasm; "but I never had a
+chance to try."
+
+"You haven't!" exclaimed Barstow. "What a shame! Some night, if you
+like, I'll take you to an academy--a nice quiet one, mostly for
+beginners--where they give lessons. If you'd like, I'll teach you
+myself."
+
+Delight showed in Daisy's face.
+
+"Good!" said Barstow. "It's a go. How about to-n--" He broke off short.
+Linnevitch, very surly and very big, was within hearing, although his
+attention appeared elsewhere.
+
+"Some time soon, then," said Barstow in a lower voice, and aloud, "Well,
+good-night, Miss Obloski."
+
+Her eyes were upon the glass door and the darkness beyond into which
+Barstow had disappeared. She was returned to earth by Linnevitch's voice
+close to her ear. It was gentle and understanding.
+
+"You like dot feller--eh?"
+
+Daisy blushed very crimson, but her great eyes were steadfast and
+without guile. "I like him very much, Mr. Linnevitch."
+
+"Not too much--eh?"
+
+Daisy did not answer. She did not know the answer.
+
+"Liddle girl," said Linnevitch kindly, "you don't know noddings. What
+was he saying to you, just now?"
+
+"He said some evening he'd take me to an academy and learn me dancing,"
+said Daisy.
+
+"He said dot, did he?" said Linnevitch. "I say don't have nodding to do
+with them academies. You ask Mrs. Linnevitch to tell you some
+stories--eh?"
+
+"But he didn't mean a regular dance-hall," said Daisy. "He said a place
+for beginners."
+
+"For beginners!" said Linnevitch with infinite sarcasm. And then with a
+really tender paternalism, "If I am your father, I beat you sometimes
+for a liddle fool--eh?"
+
+Mrs. Linnevitch was more explicit. "I've knowed hundreds of girls that
+was taught to dance," she said. "First they go to the hall, and then
+they go to hell."
+
+Daisy defended her favorite character. "Any man," she said, "that
+carries a lock of his mother's white hair with him to help keep him
+straight is good enough for me, I guess."
+
+"How do you know it is not hair of some old man's beard to fool you? Or
+some goat--eh? How do you know it make him keep straight--eh?"
+
+Linnevitch began to mimic the quiet voice and elegant manner of Barstow:
+"Good-morning, Miss Obloski, I have just given one dollar to a poor
+cribble.... Oh, how do you do to-day, Miss Obloski? My mouth is full of
+butter, but it don't seem to melt.... Oh, Miss Obloski, I am ready to
+faint with disgust. I have just seen a man drink one stein of beer. I am
+a temptation this evening--let me just look in dot locket and save
+myself."
+
+Daisy was not amused. She was even angry with Linnevitch, but too gentle
+to show it. Presently she said good-night and went to bed.
+
+"_Now_," said Mrs. Linnevitch, "she'll go with that young feller sure.
+The way you mocked him made her mad. I've got eyes in my head. Whatever
+she used to think, now she thinks he's a live saint."
+
+"I wonder, now?" said Linnevitch. A few minutes' wondering must have
+brought him into agreement with his wife, for presently he toiled up
+three flights of stairs and knocked at Daisy's door.
+
+"Daisy," he said.
+
+"What is it, Mr. Linnevitch?" If her voice had not been tearful it would
+have been cold.
+
+The man winced. "Mebbe that young feller is O. K.," he said. "I have
+come just to say that. Mebbe he is. But you just let me look him up a
+liddle bit--eh?"
+
+He did not catch her answer.
+
+"You promise me that--eh? Mrs. Linnevitch and me, we want to do what is
+right and best. We don't want our liddle Daisy to make no mistakes."
+
+He had no answer but the sounds that go with tears. He knew by this that
+his mockings and insinuations had been forgiven.
+
+"Good-night, liddle girl," he said. "Sleep tight." His own voice broke.
+"I be your popper--eh?" he said.
+
+
+To Barstow's surprise and disappointment, when he named a time for her
+first lesson in dancing Daisy refused to go.
+
+"Mrs. Linnevitch thinks I better not be going out nights, Mr. Barstow,"
+she said. "But thank you ever so much, all the same."
+
+"Well," said Barstow, "I'm disappointed. But that's nothing, if you're
+not."
+
+Daisy blushed. "But I am," she said.
+
+"Then," said he, "never mind what _they_ say. Come on!"
+
+Daisy shook her head. "I promised."
+
+"Look here, Miss Obloski, what's wrong? Let's be honest, whatever else
+we are. Is it because they _know_ something against me, because they
+_think_ they do, or because they _know_ that they don't?"
+
+"It's that," said Daisy. "Mr. Linnevitch don't want me to be going out
+with any one he don't know about."
+
+Barstow was obviously relieved. "Thank you," he said. "That's all square
+now. It isn't Mrs. Linnevitch; it's the boss. It isn't going out in
+general; it's going out with me!"
+
+Then he surprised her. "The boss is absolutely right," he said. "I'm for
+him, and, Miss Obloski, I won't ask you to trust me until I've proved to
+Linnevitch that I'm a proper guardian----"
+
+"It's only Mr. Linnevitch," said Daisy, smiling very sweetly. "It's not
+me. _I_ trust you." Her eyes were like two serene stars.
+
+Barstow leaned closer and spoke lower. "Miss Obloski," he said,
+"Daisy"--and he lingered on the name--"there's only one thing you could
+say that I'd rather hear."
+
+Daisy wanted to ask what that was. But there was no natural coquetry in
+the girl. She did not dare.
+
+She did not see him again for three whole days; but she fed upon his
+last words to her until she was ready, and even eager, to say that other
+thing which alone he would rather hear than that she trusted him.
+
+Between breakfast and dinner on the fourth day a tremendous great man,
+thick in the chest and stomach, wearing a frock coat and a glossy silk
+hat, entered the restaurant. The man's face, a miracle of close shaving,
+had the same descending look of heaviness as his body. But it was a
+strong, commanding face in spite of the pouched eyes and the drooping
+flesh about the jaws and chin. Daisy, busy with her book-keeping, looked
+up and smiled, with her strong instinct for friendliness.
+
+The gentleman removed his hat. Most of his head was bald. "You'll be
+Miss Obloski," he said. "The top o' the mornin' to you, miss. My boy has
+often spoken of you. I call him my boy bekase he's been like a son to
+me--like a son. Is Linnevitch in? Never mind, I know the way."
+
+He opened, without knocking upon it, the door which led from the
+restaurant into the Linnevitches' parlor. Evidently a great man. And how
+beautifully and touchingly he had spoken of Barstow! Daisy returned to
+her addition. Two and three are six and seven are twelve and four are
+nineteen. Then she frowned and tried again.
+
+The great man was a long time closeted with Linnevitch. She could hear
+their voices, now loud and angry, now subdued. But she could not gather
+what they were talking about.
+
+At length the two emerged from the parlor--Linnevitch flushed, red,
+sullen, and browbeaten; the stranger grandly at ease, an unlighted cigar
+in his mouth. He took off his hat to Daisy, bent his brows upon her with
+an admiring glance, and passed out into the sunlight.
+
+"Who was it?" said Daisy.
+
+"That," said Linnevitch, "is Cullinan, the boss--Bull Cullinan. Once he
+was a policeman, and now he is a millionaire."
+
+There was a curious mixture of contempt, of fear, and of adulation in
+Linnevitch's voice.
+
+"He is come here," he said, "to tell me about that young feller."
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Daisy. "Mr. Barstow?"
+
+Linnevitch did not meet her eye. "I am wrong," he said, "and that young
+feller is O. K."
+
+When Daisy came back from her first dancing lesson, Mr. and Mrs.
+Linnevitch were sitting up for her. Her gayety and high spirits seemed
+to move the couple, especially Linnevitch, deeply. He insisted that she
+eat some crackers and drink a glass of milk. He was wonderfully gentle,
+almost tender, in his manner; but whenever she looked at him he looked
+away.
+
+
+VI
+
+It was as if heaven had opened before Daisy. The blood in her veins
+moved to the rhythm of dance music; her vision was being fed upon color
+and light. And, for she was still a child, she was taken great wonders
+to behold: dogs that rode upon bicycles, men who played upon fifty
+instruments, clowns that caused whole theatres to roar with laughter,
+ladies that dove from dizzy heights, bears that drank beer, Apollos that
+seemed to have been born turning wonderful somersaults. And always at
+her side was her man, her well-beloved, to explain and to protect. He
+was careful of her, careful as a man is careful who carries a glass of
+water filled to overflowing without losing a drop. And if little by
+little he explained what he called "life" to her, it was with delicacy,
+with gravity--even, as it seemed, with sorrow.
+
+His kisses filled her at first with a wonderful tenderness; at last with
+desire, so that her eyes narrowed and she breathed quickly. At this
+point in their relations Barstow put off his pleading, cajoling manner,
+and began, little by little, to play the master. In the matter of dress
+and deportment he issued orders now instead of suggestions; and she only
+worshipped him the more.
+
+When he knew in his heart that she could refuse him nothing he proposed
+marriage. Or rather, he issued a mandate. He had led her to a seat after
+a romping dance. She was highly flushed with the exercise and the
+contact, a little in disarray, breathing fast, a wonderful look of
+exaltation and promise in her face. He was white, as always, methodic,
+and cool--the man who arranges, who makes light of difficulties, who
+gives orders; the man who has money in his pocket.
+
+"Kid," he whispered, "when the restaurant closes to-morrow night I am
+going to take you to see a friend of mine--an alderman."
+
+She smiled brightly, lips parted in expectation. She knew by experience
+that he would presently tell her why.
+
+"You're to quit Linnevitch for good," he said. "So have your things
+ready."
+
+Although the place was so crowded that whirling couples occasionally
+bumped into their knees or stumbled over their feet, Barstow took her
+hand with the naive and easy manner of those East Siders whom he
+affected to despise.
+
+"You didn't guess we were going to be married so soon, did you?" he
+said.
+
+She pressed his hand. Her eyes were round with wonder.
+
+"At first," he went on, "we'll look about before we go to
+house-keeping. I've taken nice rooms for us--a parlor and bedroom suite.
+Then we can take our time looking until we find just the right
+house-keeping flat."
+
+"Oh," she said, "are you sure you want me?"
+
+He teased her. He said, "Oh, I don't know" and "I wouldn't wonder," and
+pursed up his lips in scorn; but at the same time he regarded her out of
+the corners of roguish eyes. "Say, kid," he said presently--and his
+gravity betokened the importance of the matter--"Cullinan's dead for it.
+He's going to be a witness, and afterward he's going to blow us to
+supper--just us two. How's that?"
+
+"Oh," she exclaimed, "that's fine!"
+
+The next morning Daisy told Mr. and Mrs. Linnevitch that she was to be
+married as soon as the restaurant closed. But they had schooled
+themselves by now to expect this event, and said very little.
+Linnevitch, however, was very quiet all day. Every now and then an
+expression little short of murderous came into his face, to be followed
+by a vacant, dazed look, and this in turn by sudden uncontrollable
+starts of horror. At these times he might have stood for "Judas
+beginning to realize what he has done."
+
+Barstow, carrying Daisy's parcel, went out first. He was always tactful.
+Daisy flung herself into Mrs. Linnevitch's arms. The undemonstrative
+woman shed tears and kissed her. Linnevitch could not speak. And when
+Daisy had gone at last, the couple stood and looked at the floor between
+them. So I have seen a father and mother stand and look into the coffin
+of their only child.
+
+If the reader's suspicions have been aroused, let me set them at rest.
+The marriage was genuine. It was performed in good faith by a genuine
+alderman. The groom and the great Mr. Cullinan even went so far as to
+disport genuine and generous white boutonnieres. Daisy cried a little;
+the words that she had to say seemed so wonderful to her, a new
+revelation, as it were, of the kingdom and glory of love. But when she
+was promising to cleave to Barstow in sickness and peril till death
+parted them, her heart beat with a great, valiant fierceness. So the
+heart of the female tiger beats in tenderness for her young.
+
+Barstow was excited and nervous, as became a groom. Even the great Mr.
+Cullinan shook a little under the paternal jocoseness with which he came
+forward to kiss the bride.
+
+There was a supper waiting in the parlor of the rooms which Barstow had
+hired: cold meats, salad, fruit, and a bottle of champagne. While the
+gentlemen divested themselves of their hats and overcoats, Daisy carried
+her parcel into the bedroom and opened it on the bureau. Then she took
+off her hat and tidied her hair. She hardly recognized the face that
+looked out of the mirror. She had never, before that moment, realized
+that she was beautiful, that she had something to give to the man she
+loved that was worth giving. Her eyes fell upon her old doll, the
+companion of so many years. She laughed a happy little laugh. She had
+grown up. The doll was only a doll now. But she kissed it, because she
+loved it still. And she put it carefully away in a drawer, lest the
+sight of a childishness offend the lord and master.
+
+As she passed the great double bed, with its two snow-white pillows, her
+knees weakened. It was like a hint to perform a neglected duty. She
+knelt, and prayed God to let her make Barstow happy forever and ever.
+Then, beautiful and abashed, she joined the gentlemen.
+
+As she seated herself with dignity, as became a good housewife presiding
+at her own table, the two gentlemen lifted their glasses of champagne.
+There was a full glass beside Daisy's plate. Her fingers closed lightly
+about the stem; but she looked to Barstow for orders. "Ought I?" she
+said.
+
+"Sure," said he, "a little champagne--won't hurt you."
+
+No, Daisy; only what was in the champagne. She had her little moment of
+exhilaration, of self-delighting ease and vivacity--then dizziness,
+then awful nausea, and awful fear, and oblivion.
+
+The great Mr. Cullinan--Bull Cullinan--caught her as she was falling. He
+regarded the bridegroom with eyes in which there was no expression
+whatever.
+
+"Get out!" he said.
+
+And then he was alone with her, and safe, in the dark shadow of the
+wings.
+
+
+
+
+GROWING UP
+
+
+The children were all down in the salt-marsh playing at
+marriage-by-capture. It was a very good play. You ran just as fast after
+the ugly girls as the pretty ones, and you didn't have to abide by the
+result. One little girl got so excited that she fell into the river, and
+it was Andramark who pulled her out, and beat her on the back till she
+stopped choking. It may be well to remember that she was named Tassel
+Top, a figure taken from the Indian-corn ear when it is in silk.
+
+Andramark was the name of the boy. He was the seventh son of Squirrel
+Eyes, and all his six brothers were dead, because they had been born in
+hard times, or had fallen out of trees, or had been drowned. To grow up
+in an Indian village, especially when it is travelling, is very
+difficult. Sometimes a boy's mother has to work so hard that she runs
+plumb out of milk; and sometimes he gets playing too roughly with the
+other boys, and gets wounded, and blood-poisoning sets in; or he finds a
+dead fish and cooks it and eats it, and ptomaine poisoning sets in; or
+he catches too much cold on a full stomach, or too much malaria on an
+empty one. Or he tries to win glory by stealing a bear cub when its
+mother isn't looking, or a neighboring tribe drops in between days for
+an unfriendly visit, and some big painted devil knocks him over the head
+and takes his scalp home to his own little boy to play with.
+
+Contrariwise, if he does manage to grow up and reach man's estate he's
+got something to brag of. Only he doesn't do it; because the first thing
+that people learn who have to live very intimately together is that bore
+and boaster are synonymous terms. So he never brags of what he has
+accomplished in the way of deeds and experiences until he is married.
+And then only in the privacy of his own lodge, when that big hickory
+stick which he keeps for the purpose assures him of the beloved one's
+best ears and most flattering attention.
+
+Andramark's father was worse than dead. He had been tried in the
+council-lodge by the elders, and had been found guilty of something
+which need not be gone into here, and driven forth into the wilderness
+which surrounded the summer village to shift for himself. By the same
+judgment the culprit's wife, Squirrel Eyes, was pronounced a widow. Most
+women in her position would have been ambitious to marry again, but
+Squirrel Eyes's only ambition was to raise her seventh son to be the
+pride and support of her old age. She had had quite enough of marriage,
+she would have thanked you.
+
+So, when Andramark was thirteen years old, and very swift and husky for
+his age, Squirrel Eyes went to the Wisest Medicine-man, and begged him
+to take her boy in hand and make a man of him.
+
+"Woman," the Wisest Medicine-man had said, "fifteen is the very greenest
+age at which boys are made men, but seeing that you are a widow, and
+without support, it may be that something can be done. We will look into
+the matter."
+
+That was why Owl Eyes, the Wisest Medicine-man, invited two of his
+cronies to sit with him on the bluff overlooking the salt-marsh and
+watch the children playing at marriage-by-capture.
+
+Those old men were among the best judges of sports and form living. They
+could remember three generations of hunters and fighters. They had all
+the records for jumping, swimming under water, spear-throwing,
+axe-throwing, and bow-shooting at their tongues' ends. And they knew the
+pedigree for many, many generations of every child at that moment
+playing in the meadow, and into just what sort of man or woman that
+child should grow, with good luck and proper training.
+
+Owl Eyes did not call his two cronies' attention to Andramark. If there
+was any precocity in the lad it would show of itself, and nothing would
+escape their black, jewel-like, inscrutable eyes. When Tassel Top fell
+into the river the aged pair laughed heartily, and when Andramark,
+without changing his stride, followed her in and fished her out, one of
+them said, "That's a quick boy," and the other said, "Why hasn't that
+girl been taught to swim?" Owl Eyes said, "That's a big boy for only
+thirteen--that Andramark."
+
+In the next event Andramark from scratch ran through a field--some of
+the boys were older and taller than himself--and captured yet another
+wife, who, because she expected and longed to be caught by some other
+boy, promptly boxed--the air where his ears had been. Andramark,
+smiling, caught both her hands in one of his, tripped her over a neatly
+placed foot, threw her, face down, and seated himself quietly on the
+small of her back and rubbed her nose in the mud.
+
+The other children, laughing and shouting, rushed to the rescue.
+Simultaneously Andramark, also laughing, was on his feet, running and
+dodging. Twice he passed through the whole mob of his pursuers without,
+so it seemed to the aged watchers on the bluff, being touched. Then,
+having won some ten yards clear of them, he wheeled about and stood with
+folded arms. A great lad foremost in the pursuit reached for him, was
+caught instead by the outstretched hand and jerked forward on his face.
+Some of the children laughed so hard that they had to stop running.
+Others redoubled their efforts to close with the once more darting,
+dodging, and squirming Andramark, who, however, threading through them
+for the third and last time in the most mocking and insulting manner,
+headed straight for the bluff a little to the right of where his elders
+and betters were seated with their legs hanging over, leaped at a
+dangling wild grape-vine, squirmed to the top, turned, and prepared to
+defend his position against any one insolent enough to assail it.
+
+The children, crowded at the base of the little bluff, looked up.
+Andramark looked down. With one hand and the tip of his nose he made the
+insulting gesture which is older than antiquity.
+
+Meanwhile, Owl Eyes had left his front-row seat, and not even a waving
+of the grasses showed that he was crawling upon Andramark from behind.
+
+Owl Eyes's idea was to push the boy over the bluff as a lesson to him
+never to concentrate himself too much on one thing at a time. But just
+at the crucial moment Andramark leaped to one side, and it was a
+completely flabbergasted old gentleman who descended through the air in
+his stead upon a scattering flock of children. Owl Eyes, still agile at
+eighty, gathered himself into a ball, jerked violently with his head
+and arms, and managed to land on his feet. But he was very much shaken,
+and nobody laughed. He turned and looked up at Andramark, and Andramark
+looked down.
+
+"I couldn't help it," said Andramark. "I knew you were there all the
+time."
+
+Owl Eyes's two cronies grinned behind their hands.
+
+"Come down," said Owl Eyes sternly.
+
+Andramark leaped and landed lightly, and stood with folded arms and
+looked straight into the eyes of the Wisest Medicine-man. Everybody made
+sure that there was going to be one heap big beating, and there were not
+wanting those who would have volunteered to fetch a stick, even from a
+great distance. But Owl Eyes was not called the Wisest Medicine-man for
+nothing. His first thought had been, "I will beat the life out of this
+boy." But then (it was a strict rule that he always followed) he recited
+to himself the first three stanzas of the Rain-Maker's song, and had a
+new and wiser thought. This he spoke aloud.
+
+"Boy," he said, "beginning to-morrow I myself shall take you in hand and
+make a man of you. You will be at the medicine-lodge at noon. Meanwhile
+go to your mother's lodge and tell her from me to give you a sound
+beating."
+
+The children marvelled, the boys envied, and Andramark, his head very
+high, his heart thumping, passed among them and went home to his mother
+and repeated what the Wisest Medicine-man had said.
+
+"And you are to give me a sound beating, mother," said Andramark,
+"because after to-day they will begin making a man of me, and when I am
+a man it will be the other way around, and I shall have to beat you."
+
+His back was bare, and he bent forward so that his mother could beat
+him. And she took down from the lodge-pole a heavy whip of raw buckskin.
+It was not so heavy as her heart.
+
+Then she raised the whip and said:
+
+"A blow for the carrying," and she struck; "a blow for the bearing," and
+she struck; "a blow for the milking," and she struck; "a blow for lies
+spoken," and she did _not_ strike; "a blow for food stolen," and she did
+_not_ strike.
+
+And she went through the whole litany of the beating ceremonial and
+struck such blows as the law demanded, and spared those she honestly
+could spare, and when in doubt she quibbled--struck, but struck lightly.
+
+When the beating was over they sat down facing each other and talked.
+And Squirrel Eyes said: "What must be, must. The next few days will soon
+be over."
+
+And Andramark shuddered (he was alone with his mother) and said, "If I
+show that they hurt me they will never let me be a man."
+
+And Squirrel Eyes did her best to comfort him and put courage in his
+heart, just as modern mothers do for sons who are about to have a tooth
+pulled or a tonsil taken out.
+
+The next day at noon sharp Andramark stood before the entrance of the
+medicine-lodge with his arms folded; and all his boy and girl friends
+watched him from a distance. And all the boys envied him, and all the
+girls wished that they were boys. Andramark stood very still, almost
+without swaying, for the better part of an hour. His body was nicely
+greased, and he resembled a wet terra-cotta statue. A few mosquitoes
+were fattening themselves on him, and a bite in the small of his back
+itched so that he wanted very much to squirm and wriggle. But that would
+have been almost as bad an offence against ceremonial as complaining of
+hunger during the fast or shedding tears under the torture.
+
+Andramark had never seen the inside of the medicine-lodge; but it was
+well known to be very dark, and to contain skulls and thigh-bones of
+famous enemies, and devil-masks, and horns and rattles and other
+disturbing and ghostly properties. Of what would happen to him when he
+had passed between the flaps of the lodge and was alone with the
+medicine-men he did not know. But he reasoned that if they really
+wanted to make a man of him they would not really try to kill him or
+maim him. And he was strong in the determination, no matter what should
+happen, to show neither surprise, fear, nor pain.
+
+A quiet voice spoke suddenly, just within the flaps of the lodge:
+
+"Who is standing without?"
+
+"The boy Andramark."
+
+"What do you wish of us?"
+
+"To be made a man."
+
+"Then say farewell to your companions of childhood."
+
+Andramark turned toward the boys and girls who were watching him. Their
+faces swam a little before his eyes, and he felt a big lump coming
+slowly up in his throat. He raised his right arm to its full length,
+palm forward, and said:
+
+"Farewell, O children; I shall never play with you any more."
+
+Then the children set up a great howl of lamentation, which was all part
+of the ceremonial, and Andramark turned and found that the flaps of the
+lodge had been drawn aside, and that within there was thick darkness and
+the sound of men breathing.
+
+"Come in, Andramark."
+
+The flaps of the lodge fell together behind him. Fingers touched his
+shoulder and guided him in the dark, and then a voice told him to sit
+down. His quick eyes, already accustomed to the darkness, recognized one
+after another the eleven medicine-men of his tribe. They were seated
+cross-legged in a semicircle, and one of them was thumbing tobacco into
+the bowl of a poppy-red pipe. Some of the medicine-men had rattles handy
+in their laps, others devil-horns. They were all smiling and looking
+kindly at the little boy who sat all alone by himself facing them. Then
+old Owl Eyes, who was the central medicine-man of the eleven, spoke.
+
+"In this lodge," he said, "no harm will befall you. But lest the women
+and children grow to think lightly of manhood there will be from time to
+time much din and devil-noises."
+
+At that the eleven medicine-men began to rock their bodies and groan
+like lost souls (they groaned louder and louder, with a kind of awful
+rhythm), and to shake the devil-rattles, which were dried gourds,
+brightly painted, and containing teeth of famous enemies, and one of the
+medicine-men tossed a devil-horn to Andramark, and the boy put it to his
+lips and blew for all he was worth. It was quite obvious that the
+medicine-men were just having fun, not with him, but with all the women
+and children of the village who were outside listening--at a safe
+distance, of course--and imagining that the medicine-lodge was at that
+moment a scene of the most awful visitations and terrors. And all that
+afternoon, at intervals, the ghastly uproar was repeated, until
+Andramark's lips were chapped with blowing the devil-horn and his
+insides felt very shaky. But between times the business of the
+medicine-men with Andramark was very serious, and they talked to him
+like so many fathers, and he listened with both ears and pulled at the
+poppy-red medicine-pipe whenever it was passed to him.
+
+They lectured him upon anatomy and hygiene; upon tribal laws and
+intertribal laws; and always they explained "why" as well as they could,
+and if they didn't know "why" they said it must be right because it's
+always been done that way. Sometimes they said things that made him feel
+very self-conscious and uncomfortable. And sometimes they became so
+interesting that it was the other way round.
+
+"The gulf," said Owl Eyes, "between the race of men and the races of
+women and children is knowledge. For, whereas many squaws and little
+children possess courage, knowledge is kept from them, even as the
+first-run shad of the spring. The duty of the child is to acquire
+strength and skill, of the woman to bear children, to labor in the
+corn-field, and to keep the lodge. But the duty of man is to hunt, and
+to fight, and to make medicine, to know, and to keep knowledge to
+himself. Hence the saying that whatever man betrays the secrets of the
+council-lodge to a squaw is a squaw himself. Hitherto, Andramark, you
+have been a talkative child, but henceforth you will watch your tongue
+as a warrior watches the prisoner that he is bringing to his village for
+torture. When a man ceases to be a mystery to the women and children he
+ceases to be a man. Do not tell them what has passed in the
+medicine-lodge, but let it appear that you could discourse of ghostly
+mysteries and devilish visitations and other dread wonders--if you
+would; so that even to the mother that bore you you will be henceforward
+and forever a thing apart, a thing above, a thing beyond."
+
+And the old medicine-man who sat on Owl Eyes's left cleared his throat
+and said:
+
+"When a man's wife is in torment, it is as well for him to nod his head
+and let her believe that she does not know what suffering is."
+
+Another said:
+
+"Should a man's child ask what the moon is made of, let that man answer
+that it is made of foolish questions, but at the same time let him
+smile, as much as to say that he could give the truthful answer--if he
+would."
+
+Another said:
+
+"When you lie to women and children, lie foolishly, so that they may
+know that you are making sport of them and may be ashamed. In this way a
+man may keep the whole of his knowledge to himself, like a basket of
+corn hidden in a place of his own secret choosing."
+
+Still another pulled one flap of the lodge a little so that a ray of
+light entered. He held his hand in the ray and said:
+
+"The palm of my hand is in darkness, the back is in light. It is the
+same with all acts and happenings--there is a bright side and a dark
+side. Never be so foolish as to look on the dark side of things; there
+may be somewhat there worth discovering, but it is in vain to look
+because it cannot be seen."
+
+And Owl Eyes said:
+
+"It will be well now to rest ourselves from seriousness with more din
+and devil-noises. And after that we shall lead the man-boy Andramark to
+the Lodge of Nettles, there to sit alone for a space and to turn over in
+his mind all that we have said to him."
+
+"One thing more." This from a very little medicine-man who had done very
+little talking. "When you run the gauntlet of the women and children
+from the Hot Lodge to the river, watch neither their eyes nor their
+whips; watch only their feet, lest you be tripped and thrown at the very
+threshold of manhood."
+
+Nettles, thistles, and last year's burdocks and sandspurs strewed the
+floor of the lodge to which Andramark was now taken. And he was told
+that he must not thrust these to one side and make himself comfortable
+upon the bare ground. He might sit, or stand, or lie down; he might walk
+about; but he mustn't think of going to sleep, or, indeed, of anything
+but the knowledge and mysteries which had been revealed to him in the
+medicine-lodge.
+
+All that night, all the next day, and all the next night he meditated.
+For the first six hours he meditated on knowledge, mystery, and the
+whole duty of man, just as he had been told to do. And he only stopped
+once to listen to a flute-player who had stolen into the forest back of
+the lodge and was trying to tell some young squaw how much he loved her
+and how lonely he was without her. The flute had only four notes and one
+of them was out of order; but Andramark had been brought up on that sort
+of music and it sounded very beautiful to him. Still, he only listened
+with one ear, Indian fashion. The other was busy taking in all the other
+noises of the night and the village. Somebody passed by the Lodge of
+Nettles, walking very slowly and softly. "A man," thought Andramark,
+"would not make any noise at all. A child would be in bed."
+
+The slow, soft steps were nearing the forest back of the lodge,
+quickening a little. Contrariwise, the flute was being played more and
+more slowly. Each of its three good notes was a stab at the feelings,
+and so, for that matter, was the note that had gone wrong. An owl
+hooted. Andramark smiled. If he had been born enough hundreds of years
+later he might have said, "You can't fool me!"
+
+The flute-playing stopped abruptly. Andramark forgot all about the
+nettles and sat down. Then he stood up.
+
+He meditated on war and women, just as he had been told to do. Then,
+because he was thirsty, he meditated upon suffering. And he finished the
+night meditating--upon an empty stomach.
+
+Light filtered under the skirts of the lodge. He heard the early women
+going to their work in the fields. The young leaves were on the oaks,
+and it was corn-planting time. Even very old corn, however, tastes very
+good prepared in any number of different ways. Andramark agreed with
+himself that when he gave himself in marriage it would be to a woman who
+was a thoroughly good cook. But quite raw food is acceptable at times.
+It is pleasant to crack quail eggs between the teeth, or to rip the roe
+out of a fresh-caught shad with your forefinger and just let it melt in
+your mouth.
+
+The light brightened. It was a fine day. It grew warm in the lodge, hot,
+intolerably hot. The skins of which it was made exhaled a smoky, meaty
+smell. Andramark was tempted to see if he couldn't suck a little
+nourishment out of them. A shadow lapped the skirts of the lodge and
+crawled upward. It became cool, cold. The boy, almost naked, began to
+shiver and shake. He swung his arms as cab-drivers do, and tried very
+hard to meditate upon the art of being a man.
+
+During the second night one of his former companions crept up to the
+lodge and spoke to him under its skirts. "Sst! Heh! What does it feel
+like to be a man?"--chuckled and withdrew.
+
+Andramark said to himself the Indian for "I'll lay for that boy." He was
+very angry. He had been gratuitously insulted in the midst of his new
+dignities.
+
+Suddenly the flaps of the lodge were opened and some one leaned in and
+set something upon the floor. Andramark did not move. His nostrils
+dilated, and he said to himself, "Venison--broiled to the second."
+
+In the morning he saw that there was not only venison, but a bowl of
+water, and a soft bearskin upon which he might stretch himself and
+sleep. His lips curled with a great scorn. And he remained standing and
+aloof from the temptations. And meditated upon the privileges of being a
+man.
+
+About noon he began to have visitors. At first they were vague, dark
+spots that hopped and ziddied in the overheated air. But these became,
+with careful looking, all sorts of devils and evil spirits, and beasts
+the like of which were not in the experience of any living man. There
+were creatures made like men, only that they were covered with long,
+silky hair and had cry-baby faces and long tails. And there was a vague,
+yellowish beast, very terrible, something like a huge cat, only that it
+had curling tusks like a very big wild pig. And there were other things
+that looked like men, only that they were quite white, as if they had
+been most awfully frightened. And suddenly Andramark imagined that he
+was hanging to a tree, but not by his hands or his feet, and the limb to
+which he was hanging broke, and, after falling for two or three days, he
+landed on his feet among burs and nettles that were spread over the
+floor of a lodge.
+
+The child had slept standing up, and had evolved from his
+subconsciousness, as children will, beasts and conditions that had
+existed when the whole human race was a frightened cry-baby in its
+cradle. He had never heard of a monkey or a sabre-tooth tiger; but he
+had managed to see a sort of vision of them both, and had dreamed that
+he was a monkey hanging by his tail.
+
+He was very faint and sick when the medicine-men came for him. But it
+did not show in his face, and he walked firmly among them to the great
+Torture Lodge, his head very high and the ghost of a smile hovering
+about his mouth.
+
+It was a grim business that waited him in the Torture Lodge. He was
+strung up by his thumbs to a peg high up the great lodge pole, and drawn
+taut by thongs from his big toes to another peg in the base of the pole,
+and then, without any unnecessary delays, for every step in the
+proceeding was according to a ceremonial that was almost as old as
+suffering, they gave him, what with blunt flint-knives and lighted
+slivers of pitch-pine, a very good working idea of hell. They told him,
+without words, which are the very tenderest and most nervous places in
+all the human anatomy, and showed him how simple it is to give a little
+boy all the sensations of major operations without actually removing his
+arms and legs. And they talked to him. They told him that because he
+came of a somewhat timorous family they were letting him off very
+easily; that they weren't really hurting him, because it was evident
+from the look of him that at the first hint of real pain he would scream
+and cry. And then suddenly, just when the child was passing through the
+ultimate border-land of endurance, they cut him down, and praised him,
+and said that he had behaved splendidly, and had taken to torture as a
+young duck takes to water. And poor little Andramark found that under
+the circumstances kindness was the very hardest thing of all to bear.
+One after another great lumps rushed up his throat, and he began to
+tremble and totter and struggle with the corners of his mouth.
+
+Old Owl Eyes, who had tortured plenty of brave boys in his day, was
+ready for this phase. He caught up a great bowl of ice-cold spring-water
+and emptied it with all his strength against Andramark's bloody back.
+The shock of that sudden icy blow brought the boy's runaway nerves back
+into hand. He shook himself, drew a long breath, and, without a quiver
+anywhere, smiled.
+
+And the old men were as glad as he was that the very necessary trial by
+torture was at an end. And, blowing triumphantly upon devil-horns and
+shaking devil-rattles, they carried him the whole length of the village
+to the base of the hill where the Hot Lodge was.
+
+This was a little cave, in the mouth of which was a spring, said to be
+very full of Big Medicine. The entrance to the cave was closed by a
+heavy arras of bearskins, three or four thick, and the ground in front
+was thickly strewn with round and flat stones cracked and blackened by
+fire. From the cave to the fifteen-foot bluff overhanging a deep pool of
+the river the ground was level, and worn in a smooth band eight or ten
+feet wide as by the trampling of many feet.
+
+Andramark, stark naked and still bleeding in many places, sat
+cross-legged in the cave, at the very rim of the medicine-spring. His
+head hung forward on his chest. All his muscles were soft and relaxed.
+After a while the hangings of the cave entrance were drawn a little to
+one side and a stone plumped into the spring with a savage hiss;
+another followed--another--and another and another. Steam began to rise
+from the surface of the spring, little bubbles darted up from the bottom
+and burst. More hot stones were thrown into the water. Steam, soft and
+caressing, filled the cave. The temperature rose by leaps and bounds.
+The roots of Andramark's hair began to tickle--the tickling became
+unendurable, and ceased suddenly as the sweat burst from every pore of
+his body. His eyes closed; in his heart it was as if love-music were
+being played upon a flute. He was no longer conscious of hunger or
+thirst. He yielded, body and soul, to the sensuous miracle of the steam,
+and slept.
+
+He was awakened by many shrill voices that laughed and dared him to come
+out.
+
+"It's only one big beating," he said, rose, stepped over the spring,
+pushed through the bearskins, and stood gleaming and steaming in the
+fading light.
+
+The gantlet that he was to run extended from the cave to the bluff
+overhanging the river. He looked the length of the double row of
+grinning women and children--the active agents in what was to come. Back
+of the women and children were warriors and old men, their faces relaxed
+into holiday expressions. Toward the river end of the gauntlet were
+stationed the youngest, the most vigorous, the most fun-loving of the
+women, and the larger boys, with only a negligible sprinkling of really
+little children. Every woman and child in the two rows was armed with a
+savage-looking whip of willow, hickory, or even green brier, and the
+still more savage intention of using these whips to the utmost extent of
+their speed and accuracy in striking.
+
+Upon a signal Andramark darted forward and was lost in a whistling
+smother. It was as if an untrimmed hedge had suddenly gone mad.
+Andramark made the best of a bad business, guarded his face and the top
+of his head with his arms, ran swiftly, but not too swiftly, and kept
+his eyes out for feet that were thrust forward to trip him.
+
+A dozen feet ahead he saw a pair of little moccasins that were familiar
+to him. As he passed them he looked into their owner's face, and
+wondered why, of all the little girls in the village, Tassel Top alone
+did not use her whip on him.
+
+At last, half blinded, lurching as he ran, he came to the edge of the
+bluff, and dived, almost without a splash, into the deep, fresh water.
+The cold of it stung his overheated, bleeding body like a swarm of wild
+bees, and it is possible that when he reached the Canoe Beach the water
+in his eyes was not all fresh. Here, however, smiling chiefs and
+warriors surrounded the stoic, and welcomed him to their number with
+kind words and grunts of approval. And then, because he that had been
+but a moment before a naked child was now a naked man, and no fit
+spectacle for women and children, they formed a bright-colored moving
+screen about him and conducted him to the great council-lodge. There
+they eased his wounds with pleasant greases, and dressed him in softest
+buckskin, and gave him just as much food as it was safe for him to
+eat--a couple of quail eggs and a little dish of corn and freshwater
+mussels baked.
+
+And after that they sent him home armed with a big stick. And there was
+his mother, squatting on the floor of their lodge, with her back bared
+in readiness for a good beating. But Andramark closed the lodge-flaps,
+and dropped his big stick, and began to blubber and sob. And his mother
+leaped up and caught him in her arms; and then--once a mother, always
+tactful--she began to howl and yell, just as if she were actually
+receiving the ceremonial beating which was her due. And the neighbors
+pricked up their ears and chuckled, and said the Indian for "Squirrel
+Eyes is getting what was coming to her."
+
+Maybe Andramark didn't sleep that night, and maybe he did. And all the
+dreams that he dreamed were pleasant, and he got the best of everybody
+in them, and he woke next morning to a pleasant smell of broiling shad,
+and lay on his back blinking and yawning, and wondering why of all the
+little girls in the village Tassel Top alone had not used her whip on
+him.
+
+
+
+
+THE BATTLE OF AIKEN
+
+
+At the Palmetto Golf Club one bright, warm day in January they held a
+tournament which came to be known as the Battle of Aiken. Colonel Bogey,
+however, was not in command.
+
+Each contestant's caddie was provided with a stick cleft at one end and
+pointed at the other. In the cleft was stuck a square of white
+card-board on which was printed the contestant's name, Colonel Bogey's
+record for the course, the contestant's handicap, and the sum of these
+two. Thus:
+
+
+     A. B. Smith
+     78 + 9 = 87
+
+
+And the winner was to be he who travelled farthest around the links in
+the number of strokes allotted to him.
+
+Old Major Jennings did not understand, and Jimmy Traquair, the
+professional, explained.
+
+"Do you know what the bogey for the course is?" said he. "It's
+seventy-eight. Do you know what your handicap is? It's twenty."
+
+Old Major Jennings winced slightly. His handicap had never seemed quite
+adequate to him.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+"Well," said Jimmie, who ever tempered his speech to his hearer's
+understanding, "what's twenty added to seventy-eight?"
+
+"Eighty-eight--ninety-eight," said old Major Jennings (but not
+conceitedly).
+
+"Right," said Jimmie. "Well, you start at the first tee and play
+ninety-eight strokes. Where the ball lies after the ninety-eighth, you
+plant the card with your name on it. And that's all."
+
+"Suppose after my ninety-eighth stroke that my ball lies in the pond?"
+said old Major Jennings with a certain timid conviction. The pond hole
+is only the twelfth, and Jimmie wanted to laugh, but did not.
+
+"If that happens," he said, "you'll have to report it, I'm afraid, to
+the Green Committee. Who are you going around with?"
+
+"I haven't got anybody to go around with," said the major. "I didn't
+know there was going to be a tournament till it was too late to ask any
+one to play with me."
+
+This conversation took place in the new shop, a place all windows,
+sunshine, labels, varnishes, vises, files, grips, and clubs of exquisite
+workmanship. At one of the benches a grave-eyed young negro, aproned and
+concentrated, was enamelling the head of a driver with shellac. Sudden
+cannon fire would not have shaken his hand. In one corner a rosy lad
+with curly yellow hair dangled his legs from the height of a
+packing-case and chewed gum. He had been born with a golden spoon in his
+mouth, and was learning golf from the inside. Sometimes he winked with
+one eye. But these silent comments were hidden from the major.
+
+"I don't care about the tournament," said the latter, his loose lip
+trembling slightly. "I'll just practice a little."
+
+"Don't be in a hurry, sir," said Jimmie sympathetically; "General
+Bullwigg hasn't any one to go around with either. And if you don't
+mind----"
+
+"Bullwigg," said the major vaguely; "I used to know a Bullwigg."
+
+"He's a very fine gentleman indeed, sir," said Jimmie. "Same handicap as
+yourself, sir, and if you don't mind----"
+
+"Where is he from?" asked the major.
+
+"I don't know, sir. Mr. Bowers extended the privileges of the club to
+him. He's stopping at the Park in the Pines."
+
+"Oh!" said the major, and then with a certain dignity and resolution:
+"If Mr. Bowers knows him, and if _he_ doesn't mind, I'm sure I don't. Is
+he here?"
+
+"He's waiting at the first tee," said Jimmie, and he averted his face.
+
+At the first tee old Major Jennings found a portly, red-faced gentleman,
+with fierce, bushy eyebrows, who seemed prepared to play golf under any
+condition of circumstance and weather. He had two caddies. One carried a
+monstrous bag, which, in addition to twice the usual number of clubs,
+contained a crook-handled walking-stick and a crook-handled umbrella;
+the other carried over his right arm a greatcoat, in case the June-like
+weather should turn cold, and over his left a mackintosh, in case rain
+should fall from the cloudless, azure heavens. The gentleman himself was
+swinging a wooden club, with pudgy vehemence, at an imaginary ball. Upon
+his countenance was that expression of fortitude which wins battles and
+championships. Old Major Jennings approached timidly. He was very shy.
+In the distance he saw two of his intimate friends finishing out the
+first hole. Except for himself and the well-prepared stranger they had
+been the last pair to start, and the old major's pale blue eyes clung to
+them as those of a shipwrecked mariner may cling to ships upon the
+horizon. Then he pulled himself together and said:
+
+"General Bullwigg, I presume."
+
+"The very man," said the general, and the two gentlemen lifted their
+plaid golfing caps and bowed to each other. Owing to extreme diffidence,
+Major Jennings did not volunteer his own name; owing to the fact that he
+seldom thought of anything but himself, General Bullwigg did not ask it.
+
+Major Jennings was impatient to be off, but it was General Bullwigg's
+honor, and he could not compel that gentleman to drive until he was
+quite ready. General Bullwigg apostrophized the weather and the links.
+He spoke at some length of "_My_ game," "_My_ swing," "_My_ wrist
+motion," "_My_ notion of getting out of a bunker." He told an anecdote
+which reminded him of another. He touched briefly upon the manufacture
+of balls, the principle of imparting pure back-spin; the best seed for
+Northern greens, the best sand for Southern. And then, by way of adding
+insult to injury, he stepped up to his ball and, with due consideration
+for his age and stomach, drove it far and straight.
+
+"Fine shot, sir," was Major Jennings's comment.
+
+"I've seen better, sir," said General Bullwigg. "But I won't take it
+over."
+
+Major Jennings teed up his ball, and addressed it, and waggled, and
+shifted his feet, and had just received that sudden inner knowledge that
+the time was come to strike, when General Bullwigg interrupted him.
+
+"My first visit to Aiken," said he, "was in the 60's. But that was no
+visit of pleasure. No, sir. Along the brow of this hill upon which we
+are standing was an earthwork. In the pines yonder, back of the first
+green, was a battery. In those days we did not fight it out with the
+pacific putter, but with bullets and bayonets."
+
+"Were you in the battle of Aiken?" asked the major, so quietly as to
+make the question sound purely perfunctory.
+
+General Bullwigg laughed, as strong men laugh, from the stomach, and
+with a sweeping gesture of his left hand appeared to dismiss a hundred
+flatterers.
+
+"I have heard men say," said he, "that I _was_ the battle of Aiken."
+
+With an involuntary shudder Major Jennings hastily addressed his ball,
+swung jerkily, and topped it feebly down the hill. Then, smiling a
+sickly smile, he said:
+
+"We're off."
+
+"Get a good one?" asked General Bullwigg. "I wasn't looking."
+
+"Not a very good one," said Major Jennings, inwardly writhing, "but
+straight--perfectly straight. A little on top."
+
+They sagged down the hill, the major in a pained silence, the general
+describing, with sweeping gestures, the positions of the various troops
+among the surrounding hills at the beginning of the battle of Aiken.
+
+"In those days," he went on, "I was second lieutenant in the gallant
+Twenty-ninth; but it often happens that a young man has an old head on
+his shoulders, and as one after the other of my superior
+officers--superior in rank--bit the dust---- That ball is badly cupped.
+You will hardly get it away with a brassy; if I were you I should play
+my niblick. Well out, sir! A fine recovery! On this very spot I saw a
+bomb burst. The air was filled with arms and legs. It seemed as if they
+would never come down. I shall play my brassy spoon, Purnell, the one
+with the yellow head. I see you don't carry a spoon. Most invaluable
+club. There are days when I can do anything with a spoon. I used to own
+one of which I often said that it could do anything but talk."
+
+Major Jennings shuddered as if he were very cold; while General Bullwigg
+swung his spoon and made another fine shot. He had a perfect four for
+the first hole, to Major Jennings's imperfect and doddering seven.
+
+"The enemy," said General Bullwigg, "had a breastwork of pine logs all
+along this line. I remember the general said to me: 'Bullwigg,' he said,
+'to get them out of that timber is like getting rats out of the walls of
+a house.' And I said: 'General----'"
+
+"It's your honor," the major interrupted mildly.
+
+But General Bullwigg would not drive until he had brought his anecdote
+to a self-laudatory end. And his ball was not half through its course
+before he had begun another. The major, compelled to listen, again
+foozled, and a dull red began to mantle his whole face. And in his
+peaceful and affable heart there waxed a sullen, feverish rage against
+his companion.
+
+The battle of Aiken was on.
+
+Sing, O chaste and reluctant Muse, the battle of Aiken! Only don't sing
+it! State it, as is the fashion of our glorious times, in humble and
+perishable prose. Fling grammar of which nothing is now known to the
+demnition bow-wows, and state how in the beginning General Bullwigg had
+an advantage of many strokes, not wasted, over his self-effacing
+companion. State how, because of the general's incessant chatter, the
+gentle and gallant major foozled shot after shot; how once his ball hid
+in a jasmine bower, once behind the stem of a tree, and once in a sort
+of cavern over which the broom straw waved. But omit not, O truthful and
+ecstatic one, to mention that dull rage which grew from small beginnings
+in the major's breast until it became furious and all-consuming, like a
+prairie fire. At this stage your narrative becomes heroic, and it might
+be in order for you, O capable and delectable one, to switch from humble
+stating to loud singing. Only don't do it. State on. State how the rage
+into which he had fallen served to lend precision to the major's eye,
+steel to his wrist, rhythm to his tempo, and fiery ambition to his
+gentle and retiring soul. He is filled with memories of daring: of other
+battles in other days. He remembers what times he sought the bubble
+reputation in the cannon's mouth, and spiked the aforementioned cannon's
+touch-hole into the bargain. And he remembers the greater war that he
+fought single-handed for a number of years against the demon rum.
+
+State, too, exquisite Parnassian, and keep stating, how that General
+Bullwigg did incessantly talk, prattle, jabber, joke, boast, praise
+himself, stand in the wrong place, and rehearse the noble deeds that he
+himself had performed in the first battle of Aiken. And state how the
+major answered him less and less frequently, but more and more loudly
+and curtly--but I see that you are exhausted, and, thanking you kindly,
+I shall resume the narrative myself.
+
+They came to the pond hole, which was the twelfth; the general, still
+upon his interminable reminiscences of his own military glory, stood up
+to drive, and was visited by his first real disaster. He swung--and he
+looked up. His ball, beaten downward into the hard clay tee, leaped
+forward with a sound as of a stone breaking in two and dove swiftly into
+the centre of the pond. The major spoke never a word. For the first time
+during the long dreary round his risibles were tickled and he wanted to
+laugh. Instead he concentrated all his faculties upon his ball and made
+a fine drive.
+
+Not so the general with his second attempt. Again he found water, and
+fell into a panic at the sudden losing of so many invaluable strokes
+(not to mention two brand-new balls at seventy-five cents each).
+
+It was at the pond hole that the major's luck began to ameliorate. For
+the first time in his life he made it in three--a long approach close to
+the green; a short mashie shot that trickled into the very cup. And it
+was at the pond hole that the general, who had hitherto played far above
+his ordinary form, began to go to pieces. He was a little dashed in
+spirit, but not in eloquence.
+
+Going to the long fourteenth, they found the first evidence of those who
+had gone before. In the very midst of the fair green they saw, shining
+afar, like a white tombstone, stuck in its cleft stick, the card of the
+first competitor to use up the whole of his allotted strokes. They
+paused a moment to read:
+
+
+     Sacred to the Memory of
+          W. H. Lands
+          78 + 6 = 84
+       Who Sliced Himself
+           to Pieces
+
+
+Forty yards beyond, another obituary confronted them:
+
+
+       In Loving Memory of
+         J. C. Nappin
+         78 + 10 = 88
+     Died of a Broken Mashie
+       And of Such is the
+       Kingdom of Heaven
+
+
+"Ha!" said General Bullwigg. "He little realizes that here where he has
+pinned his little joke in the lap of mother earth I have seen the dead
+men lie as thick as kindlings in a wood-yard. Sir, across this very fair
+green there were no less than three desperate charges, unremembered and
+unsung, of which I may say without boasting that Magna Pars Fui. But for
+the desperation of our last charge the battle must have been lost----"
+
+
+             Damn the memory of
+                 E. Hewett
+                78 + 10 = 88
+                Couldn't Put
+
+                  Here Lies
+                  G. Norris
+                78 + 10 = 88
+     A Fool and His Money Are Soon Parted
+
+
+The little tombstones came thick and fast now. The fairway to the
+seventeenth, most excellent of all four-shot holes, was dotted with
+them, and it actually began to look as if General Bullwigg or Major
+Jennings (they were now on even terms) might be the winner.
+
+It was that psychological moment when of all things a contestant most
+desires silence. Major Jennings was determined to triumph over his
+boastful companion. And he was full of courage and resolve. They had
+reached the seventeenth green in the same number of strokes from the
+first tee. That is to say, each had used up ninety-five of his allotted
+ninety-eight. Neither holed his approach put, and the match, so far as
+they two were concerned, resolved itself into a driving contest. If
+General Bullwigg drove the farther with his one remaining stroke he
+would beat the major, and vice versa. As for the other competitors,
+there was but one who had reached the eighteenth tee, and he, as his
+tombstone showed, had played his last stroke neither far nor well.
+
+For the major the suspense was terrible. He had never won a tournament.
+He had never had so golden an opportunity to down a boaster. But it was
+General Bullwigg's honor, and it occurred to him that the time was riper
+for talk than play.
+
+"You may think that I am nervous," he said. "But I am not. During one
+period of the battle of Aiken the firing between ourselves on this spot
+and the enemy intrenched where the club-house now stands, and spreading
+right and left in a half-moon, was fast and furious. Once they charged
+up to our guns; but we drove them back, and after that charge yonder
+fair green was one infernal shambles of dead and dying. Among the
+wounded was one of the enemy's general officers; he whipped and thrashed
+and squirmed like a newly landed fish and screamed for water. It was
+terrible; it was unendurable. Next to me in the trench was a young
+fellow named--named Jennings----"
+
+"Jennings?" said the major breathlessly. "And what did he do?"
+
+"He," said General Bullwigg. "Nothing. He said, however, and he was
+careful not to show his head above the top of the trench: 'I can't stand
+this,' he said; 'somebody's got to bring that poor fellow in.' As for
+me, I only needed the suggestion. I jumped out of the trench and ran
+forward, exposing myself to the fire of both armies. When, however, I
+reached the general officer, and my purpose was plain, the firing ceased
+upon both sides, and the enemy stood up and cheered me."
+
+General Bullwigg teed his ball and drove it far.
+
+Major Jennings bit his lip; it was hardly within his ability to hit so
+long a ball.
+
+"This--er--Jennings," said he, "seems to have been a coward."
+
+General Bullwigg shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Have I got it straight?" asked Major Jennings. "It was you who brought
+in the general officer, and not--er--this--er--Jennings who did it?"
+
+"I thought I had made it clear," said General Bullwigg stiffly. And he
+repeated the anecdote from the beginning. Major Jennings's comment was
+simply this:
+
+"So _that_ was the way of it, was it?"
+
+A deep crimson suffused him. He looked as if he were going to burst. He
+teed his ball. He trembled. He addressed. He swung back, and then with
+all the rage, indignation, and accuracy of which he was
+capable--forward. It was the longest drive he had ever made. His ball
+lay a good yard beyond the General's. He had beaten all competitors, but
+that was nothing. He had beaten his companion, and that was worth more
+to him than all the wealth of Ormuzd and of Ind. He had won the second
+battle of Aiken.
+
+In silence he took his tombstone from his caddie's hand, in silence
+wrote upon it, in silence planted it where his ball had stopped. General
+Bullwigg bent himself stiffly to see what the fortunate winner had
+written. And this was what he read:
+
+
+            Sacred to the Memory of
+                E. O. Jennings
+                 78 + 20 = 98
+     Late Major in the Gallant 29th, Talked to
+               Death by a Liar
+
+
+As for the gallant major (still far from mollified), he turned his back
+upon a foe for the first time in his life and made off--almost running.
+
+
+
+
+AN IDYL OF PELHAM BAY PARK
+
+
+"It's real country out there," Fannie Davis had said. "Buttercups and
+daisies. Come on, Lila! I won't go if you won't."
+
+This sudden demonstration of friendship was too much for Lila. She
+forgot that she had no stylish dress for the occasion, or that her
+mother could not very well spare her for a whole day, and she promised
+to be ready at nine o'clock on the following Sunday morning.
+
+"Fannie Davis," she explained to her mother, "has asked me to go out to
+Pelham Bay Park with her Sunday. And finally I said I would. I feel
+sometimes as if I'd blow up if I didn't get a breath of fresh air after
+all this hot spell."
+
+She set her pretty mouth defiantly. She expected an argument. But he
+mother only shrugged her shoulders and said,
+
+"We could make your blue dress look real nice with a few trimmings."
+
+They discussed ways and means until long after the younger children were
+in bed and asleep.
+
+By Saturday night the dress was ready, and Lila had turned her week's
+wages back into the coffers of the department store where she worked in
+exchange for a pair of near-silk brown stockings and a pair of stylish
+oxford ties of patent leather.
+
+"You look like a show-girl," was Fannie's enthusiastic comment. "I
+wouldn't have believed it of you. Why, Lila, you're a regular little
+peach!"
+
+Lila became crimson with joy.
+
+They boarded the subway for Simpson Street. The atmosphere was hot and
+rancid. The two girls found standing-room only. Whenever the express
+curved they were thrown violently from one side of the car to the other.
+A young man who stood near them made a point on these occasions of
+laying a hand on Lila's waist to steady her. She didn't know whether it
+was proper to be angry or grateful.
+
+"Don't pay any attention to him," said Fannie; "he's just trying to be
+fresh, and he doesn't know how."
+
+She said it loud enough for the young man to hear. Lila was very much
+frightened.
+
+They left the subway at Simpson Street and boarded a jammed trolley-car
+for Westchester. Fannie paid all the fares.
+
+"It's my treat," she said; "I'm flush. Gee, ain't it hot! I wish we'd
+brought our bathing-suits."
+
+Much to Lila's relief the young man who had annoyed her was no longer
+visible. Fannie talked all the way to Westchester in so loud a voice
+that nearly everybody in the car could hear her. Lila was shocked and
+awed by her friend's showiness and indifference.
+
+From Westchester they were to walk the two hot miles to the park.
+Already Lila's new shoes had blistered her feet. But she did not mention
+this. It was her own fault. She had deliberately bought shoes that were
+half a size too small.
+
+In the main street of Westchester they prinked, smoothing each other's
+rumpled dresses and straightening each other's peach-basket hats.
+
+"Lila," said Fannie, "everybody's looking at you. I say you're _too_
+pretty. Lucky for me I've got my young man where I want him, or else
+you'd take him away from me."
+
+"I would not!" exclaimed Lila, "and it's you they're looking at."
+
+Fannie was delighted. "_Do_ I look nice?" she wheedled.
+
+"You look sweet!"
+
+As a matter of fact, Fannie looked bold and handsome. Her clothes were
+too expensive for her station in life. Her mother suspected how she came
+by them, but was so afraid of actually knowing that she never brought
+the point to an issue; only sighed in secret and tried not to see or
+understand.
+
+Now and then motors passed through the crowds straggling to the park,
+and in exchange for gratuitous insults from small boys and girls left
+behind them long trails of thick dust and the choking smell of burnt
+gasoline. In the sun the mercury was at one hundred and twenty degrees.
+
+"There's a hog for you," exclaimed Fannie. She indicated a stout man in
+shirt-sleeves. He had his coat over one arm, his collar and necktie
+protruding from the breast pocket. His wife, a meagre woman, panted at
+his side. She carried two heavy children, one of them not yet born.
+
+Half the people carried paper parcels or little suitcases made of straw
+in which were bathing-suits and sandwiches. It would be low tide, but
+between floating islands of swill and sewage there would be water, salt,
+wet, and cool.
+
+"My mother," said Fannie, "doesn't like me to come to these places
+alone. It's a real nice crowd uses Pelham Park, but there's always a
+sprinkling of freshies."
+
+"Is that why you invited me?" said Lila gayly. Inwardly she flattered
+herself to think that she had been asked for herself alone. But Fannie's
+answer had in it something of a slap in the face.
+
+"Well," said this one, "mother forbade me to come alone. But I do want
+to get better acquainted with you. Honest."
+
+They rested for a while sitting on a stone wall in the shade of a tree.
+
+"My mother," said Fannie grandly, "thinks everybody's rotten, including
+me. My God!" she went on angrily, "do me and you work six days of the
+week only to be bossed about on the seventh? I tell you I won't stand it
+much longer. I'm going to cut loose. Nothing but work, work, work, and
+scold, scold, scold."
+
+"If I had all the pretty things you've got," said Lila gently, "I don't
+believe I'd complain."
+
+Fannie blushed. "It's hard work and skimping does it," she said. "Ever
+think of marrying, kid?"
+
+Lila admitted that she had.
+
+"Got a beau?"
+
+Lila blushed and shook her head.
+
+"You have, too. Own up. What's he like?"
+
+Lila continued to deny and protest. But she enjoyed being teased upon
+such a subject.
+
+"Well, if you haven't," said Fannie at last, "I have. It's a dead
+secret, kid. I wouldn't tell a soul but you. He's got heaps of money,
+and he's been after me--to marry him--for nearly a year."
+
+"Do you like him?"
+
+"I'm just crazy about him."
+
+"Then why don't you marry him?"
+
+"Well," Fannie temporized, "you never want to be in a rush about these
+things."
+
+Fannie sighed, and was silent. She might have married the young man in
+question if she had played her cards better. And she knew it, now that
+it was too late, and there could not be a new deal. He had wanted her,
+even at the price of marriage. He was still fond of her. And he was very
+generous with his money. She met him whenever she could. He would be
+waiting for her now at the entrance to the park.
+
+"He's got a motor-boat," she explained to Lila, "that he wants to show
+me. She's a cabin launch, almost new. You won't mind?"
+
+"Mind? Are you going out for a sail with him, and leave me?"
+
+"Well, the truth is," said Fannie, "I've just about made up my mind to
+say yes, and of course if there was a third party around he couldn't
+bring the matter up, could he? We wouldn't be out long."
+
+"Don't mind me," said Lila. Inwardly she was terribly hurt and
+disappointed. "I'll just sit in the shade and wish you joy."
+
+"I wouldn't play it so low down on you," said Fannie, "only my whole
+future's mixed up in it. We'll be back in lots of time to eat."
+
+Lila walked with them to the end of the pier at the bathing-beach. The
+water was full of people and rubbish. The former seemed to be enjoying
+themselves immensely and for the most part innocently, though now and
+then some young girl would shriek aloud in a sort of delighted terror as
+her best young man, swimming under water, tugged suddenly at her
+bathing-skirt or pinched the calf of her leg.
+
+Lila watched Fannie and her young man embark in a tiny rowboat and row
+out to a clumsy cabin catboat from which the mast had been removed and
+in whose cockpit a low-power, loud-popping motor had been installed. The
+young man started the motor, and presently his clumsy craft was dragging
+herself, like a crippled duck, down Pelham Bay toward the more open
+water of Long Island Sound.
+
+Lila felt herself abandoned. She would have gone straight home but for
+the long walk to Westchester and the fact that she had no car fare. She
+could have cried. The heat on the end of the dock and the glare from the
+water were intolerable. She was already faint with hunger, and her shoes
+pinched her so that she could hardly walk without whimpering. It seemed
+to her that she had never seen so many people at once. And in all the
+crowds she hadn't a single friend or acquaintance. Several men, seeing
+that she was without male escort, tried to get to know her, but gave up,
+discouraged by her shy, frightened face. She was pretty, yes. But a
+doll. No sport in her. Such was their mental attitude.
+
+"She might have left me the sandwiches," thought Lila. "Suppose the
+motor breaks down!"
+
+Which was just what it was going to do--'way out there in the sound. It
+always did sooner or later when Fannie was on board. She seemed to have
+been born with an influence for evil over men and gas-engines.
+
+At the other side of green lawns on which were a running-track, swings,
+trapezes, parallel bars, and a ball-field, were woods. The shade, from
+where she was, looked black and cold. She walked slowly and timidly
+toward it. She could cool herself and return in time to meet Fannie. But
+she returned sooner than she had expected.
+
+She found a smooth stone in the woods and sat down. After the sun there
+was a certain coolness. She fanned herself with some leaves. They were
+poison-ivy, but she did not know that. The perspiration dried on her
+face. There were curious whining, humming sounds in the woods. She began
+to scratch her ankles and wrists. Her ankles especially tickled and
+itched to the point of anguish. She was the delightful centre of
+interest to a swarm of hungry mosquitoes. She leaped to her feet and
+fought them wildly with her branch of poison-ivy. Then she started to
+run and almost stepped on a man who was lying face up in the underwood,
+peacefully snoring. She screamed faintly and hurried on. Some of the
+bolder mosquitoes followed her into the sunlight, but it was too hot
+even for them, and one by one they dropped behind and returned to the
+woods. The drunken man continued his comfortable sleep. The mosquitoes
+did not trouble him. It is unknown why.
+
+Lila returned to the end of the dock and saw far off a white speck that
+may or may not have been the motor-boat in which Fannie had gone for a
+"sail."
+
+If there hadn't been so many people about Lila must have sat down and
+cried. The warmth of affection which she had felt that morning for
+Fannie had changed into hatred. Three times she returned to the end of
+the dock.
+
+All over the park were groups of people eating sandwiches and
+hard-boiled eggs. They shouted and joked. Under certain circumstances,
+not the least of sports is eating. Lila was so angry and hungry and
+abused that she forgot her sore feet. She couldn't stay still. She must
+have walked--coming and going--a good many miles in all.
+
+At last, exhausted as she had never been even after a day at the
+department store during the Christmas rush, she found a deep niche
+between two rough rocks on the beach, over which the tide was now gently
+rising, and sank into it. The rocks and the sand between them gave out
+coolness; the sun shone on her head and shoulders, but with less than
+its meridianal fury. She could look down Pelham Bay and see most of the
+waters between Fort Schuyler and City Island. Boats of all sorts and
+descriptions came and went. But there was no sign of that in which
+Fannie had embarked.
+
+Lila fell asleep. It became quiet in the park. The people were dragging
+themselves wearily home, dishevelled, dirty, sour with sweat. The sun
+went down, copper-red and sullen. The trunks of trees showed ebony black
+against it, swarms of infinitesimal gnats rose from the beaches, and
+made life hideous to the stragglers still in the park.
+
+Lila was awakened by the tide wetting her feet. She rose on stiff,
+aching legs. There was a kink in her back; one arm, against which she
+had rested heavily, was asleep.
+
+"Fannie," Lila thought with a kind of falling despair, "must have come
+back, looked for me, given me up, and gone home."
+
+In the midst of Pelham Bay a fire twinkled, burning low. It looked like
+a camp-fire deserted and dying in the centre of a great open plain. Lila
+gave it no more than a somnambulant look. It told her nothing: no story
+of sudden frenzied terror, of inextinguishable, unescapable flames, of
+young people in the midst of health and the vain and wicked pursuit of
+happiness, half-burned to death, half-drowned. It told her no story of
+guilt providentially punished, or accidentally.
+
+She had slept through all the shouting and screaming. The boats that had
+attempted rescue had withdrawn; there remained only the hull of a
+converted catboat, gasoline-soaked, burnt to the water's edge, a
+cinder--still smouldering.
+
+Somewhere under the placid waters, gathering speed in the tidal
+currents, slowing down and swinging in the eddies, was all that remained
+of Fannie Davis, food for crabs, eels, dogfish, lobsters, and all the
+thousand and one scavengers of Atlantic bays, blackened shreds of
+garments still clinging to her.
+
+
+II
+
+Next to Pelham Bay Park toward the south is a handsome private property.
+On the low boundary wall of this, facing the road and directly under a
+ragged cherry-tree, Lila seated herself. She was "all in." She must wait
+until a vehicle of some sort passed and beg for a lift. She was
+half-starved; her feet could no longer carry her. A motor thrilled by at
+high speed, a fiery, stinking dragon in the night. Mosquitoes tormented
+her. She had no strength with which to oppose them. The hand in which
+she had held the poison-ivy was beginning to itch and swell.
+
+A second motor approached slowly and came to a halt. A young man got
+out, opened one of the headlights, struck a match, and lighted it. Then
+he lighted the other. The low stone wall on which Lila sat and Lila
+herself were embraced by the ring of illumination. It must have been
+obvious to any one but a fool that Lila was out of place in her
+surroundings; her peach-basket hat, the oxford ties of which she had
+been so proud, told a story of city breeding. Her face, innocent and
+childlike, was very touching.
+
+The young man shut off his motor, so that there was a sudden silence.
+"Want a lift somewhere?" he asked cheerfully.
+
+Lila could not remember when she had been too young to be warned against
+the advances of strange men. "They give you a high old time, and then
+they expect to be paid for it," had been so dinned into her that if she
+had given the young man a sharp "No" for an answer it would have been
+almost instinctive. Training and admonition rose strong within her. She
+felt that she was going to refuse help. The thought was intolerable.
+Wherefore, instead of answering, she burst into tears.
+
+A moment later the young man was sitting by her side, and she was
+pouring her tale of a day gone wrong into amused but sympathetic ears.
+
+His voice and choice of words belonged to a world into which she had
+never looked. She could not help trusting him and believing that he was
+good--even when he put his arm around her and let her finish her cry on
+his shoulder.
+
+"And your friend left you--and you've got no car fare, and you've had
+nothing to eat, and you can't walk any more because your shoes are too
+tight. And you live----?"
+
+She told him.
+
+"I could take you right home to your mother," he said, "but I won't.
+That would be a good ending to a day gone wrong, but not the best.
+Come."
+
+He supported her to his motor, a high-power runabout, and helped her in.
+Never before had she sat in such reclining comfort. It was better than
+sitting up in bed.
+
+"We'll send your mother a telegram from New Rochelle so that she won't
+worry," he said. "Just you let yourself go and try to enjoy everything.
+Fortunately I know of a shoe store in New Rochelle. It won't be open;
+but the proprietor has rooms above the store, and he'll be glad to make
+a sale even if it is Sunday. The first principle to be observed in a
+pleasant outing is a pair of comfortable feet."
+
+"But I have no money," protested Lila.
+
+"I have," said the young man; "too much, some people think."
+
+Lila had been taught that if she accepted presents from young men she
+put herself more or less in their power.
+
+They whirled noiselessly across Pelham Bridge. Lila had given up in the
+matter of accepting a present of shoes. In so doing she feared that she
+had committed herself definitely to the paths that lead to destruction.
+And when, having tried in vain to get a table at two inns between New
+Rochelle and Larchmont, the young man said that he would take her to his
+own home to dinner, she felt sure of it. But she was too tired to care,
+and in the padded seat, and the new easy shoes, too blissfully
+comfortable. They had sent her mother a telegram. The young man had
+composed it. He had told the mother not to worry. "I'm dining out and
+won't be home till late."
+
+"We won't say how late," he had explained with an ingenuous smile,
+"because we don't know, do we?"
+
+They had gone to a drug store, and the clerk had bound a soothing
+dressing on Lila's poisoned hand.
+
+They turned from the main road into a long avenue over which trees met
+in a continuous arch. The place was all a-twinkle with fireflies. Box,
+roses, and honeysuckle filled the air with delicious odors--then strong,
+pungent, bracing as wine, the smell of salt-marshes, and coldness off
+the water. On a point of land among trees many lights glowed.
+
+"That's my place," said the young man.
+
+"We'll have dinner on the terrace--deep water comes right up to it.
+There's no wind to-night. The candles won't even flicker."
+
+As if the stopping of the automobile had been a signal, the front door
+swung quietly open and a Chinese butler in white linen appeared against
+a background of soft coloring and subdued lights.
+
+As Lila entered the house her knees shook a little. She felt that she
+was definitely committing herself to what she must always regret. She
+was a fly walking deliberately into a spider's parlor. That the young
+man hitherto had behaved most circumspectly, she dared not count in his
+favor. Was it not always so in the beginning? He seemed like a jolly,
+kindly boy. She had the impulse to scream and to run out of the house,
+to hide in the shrubbery, to throw herself into the water. Her heart
+beat like that of a trapped bird. She heard the front door close behind
+her.
+
+"I think you'd be more comfy," said the young man, "if you took off your
+hat, don't you? Dinner'll be ready in about ten minutes. Fong will show
+you where to go."
+
+She followed the Chinaman up a flight of broad low steps. Their feet
+made no sound on the thick carpeting. He held open the door of a
+bedroom. It was all white and delicate and blue. Through a door at the
+farther end she had a glimpse of white porcelain and shining nickel.
+
+Her first act when the Chinaman had gone was to lock the door by which
+she had entered. Then she looked from each of the windows in turn. The
+terrace was beneath her, brick with a balustrade of white, with white
+urns. The young man, bareheaded, paced the terrace like a sentinel. He
+was smoking a cigarette.
+
+To the left was a round table, set for two. She could see that the
+chairs were of white wicker, with deep, soft cushions. In the centre of
+the table was a bowl of red roses. Four candles burned upright in
+massive silver candlesticks.
+
+She took off her hat mechanically, washed her face and the hand that had
+not been bandaged, and "did" her hair. She looked wonderfully pretty in
+the big mirror over the dressing-table. The heavy ivory brushes looked
+enormous in her delicate hands. Her eyes were great and round like those
+of a startled deer.
+
+She heard his voice calling to her from the terrace: "Hello, up there!
+Got everything you want? Dinner's ready when you are."
+
+She hesitated a long time with her hand on the door-key. But what was a
+locked door in an isolated house to a bad man? She drew a deep breath,
+turned the key, waited a little longer, and then, as a person steps into
+a very cold bath, pushed the door open and went out.
+
+He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. She went down slowly,
+her hand on the rail. She had no idea that she was making an exquisite
+picture. She knew only that she was frightened.
+
+"It's turned cool," said the young man. He caught up a light scarf of
+Chinese embroidery and laid it lightly about her shoulders. She looked
+him for the first time squarely in the face. She saw chiefly a pair of
+rather small, deep-set blue eyes; at the outer corners were
+multitudinous little wrinkles, dug by smiling. The eyes were clear as a
+child's, full of compassionate laughter.
+
+A feeling of perfect security came over her. She thanked Heaven that she
+had not made a ridiculous scene. The chimes of a tall clock broke the
+silence with music.
+
+He offered her his arm, and she laid her fingers on it.
+
+"I think we are served," he said, and led her to the terrace. He was
+solicitous about placing cushions to the best advantage for her. He took
+one from his own chair, and, on one knee, put it under her feet. He
+smiled at her across the bowl of roses.
+
+"How old are you?" he said. "You look like a man's kid sister."
+
+She told him that she was seventeen and that she had worked for two
+years in a department store.
+
+"My father was a farmer," she said, "but he lost one arm, and couldn't
+make it pay. So we had to come to the city."
+
+"Is your father living?"
+
+"Yes. But he says he is dead. He can't find any work to do. Mother
+works like a horse, though, and so does Bert, and so do I. The others
+are at school."
+
+"Do you like your work?"
+
+"Only for what it brings in."
+
+"What does it bring in?"
+
+"Six dollars a week."
+
+The young man smiled. "Never mind," he said; "eat your soup."
+
+It did her good, that soup. It was strong and very hot. It put heart
+into her. When she had finished, he laughed gleefully.
+
+"It's all very well to talk about rice-powder, and cucumber-cream, and
+beauty-sleeps, but all you needed to make you look perfectly lovely was
+a cup of soup. That scarf's becoming to you, too."
+
+She blushed happily. She had lost all fear of him.
+
+"What are you pinching yourself for?" he asked.
+
+"To see if I'm awake."
+
+"You are," he said, "wide awake. Take my word for it, and I hope you're
+having a good time."
+
+The Chinaman poured something light and sparkling into her glass from a
+bottle dressed in a napkin. Misgivings returned to her. She had heard of
+girls being drugged.
+
+"You don't have to drink it," said the young man. "I had some served
+because dinner doesn't look like dinner without champagne. Still, after
+the thoroughly unhappy day you've put in, I think a mouthful or two
+would do you good."
+
+She lifted the glass of champagne, smiled, drank, and choked. He laughed
+at her merrily.
+
+All through dinner he kept lighting cigarettes and throwing them away.
+Between times he ate with great relish and heartiness.
+
+Lila was in heaven. All her doubts and fears had vanished. She felt
+thoroughly at home, as if she had always been used to service and linen
+and silver and courtesy.
+
+They had coffee, and then they strolled about in the moonlight, while
+the young man smoked a very long cigar.
+
+He looked at his watch, and sighed. "Well, Miss," he said, "if we're to
+get you safe home to your mother!"
+
+"I won't be a minute," she said.
+
+"You know the way?"
+
+She ran upstairs, and, having put on her hat, decided that it looked
+cheap and vulgar, and took it off again.
+
+He wrapped her in a soft white polo-coat for the long run to New York.
+She looked back at the lights of his house. Would she ever see them
+again, or smell the salt and the box and the roses?
+
+By the time they had reached the Zoological Gardens at Fordham she had
+fallen blissfully asleep. He ran the car with considerate slowness, and
+looked at her very often. She waked as they crossed the river. Her eyes
+shrank from the piled serried buildings of Manhattan. The air was no
+longer clean and delicious to the lungs.
+
+"Have I been asleep?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh," she cried, "how could I! How could I! I've missed some of it. And
+it never happened before, and it will never happen again."
+
+"Not in the same way, perhaps," he said gravely. "But how do you know? I
+think you are one girl in ten million, and to you all things are
+possible."
+
+"How many men in ten million are like you?" she asked.
+
+"Men are all pretty much alike," he said. "They have good impulses and
+bad."
+
+In the stark darkness between the outer and the inner door of the
+tenement in which she lived, there was an awkward, troubled silence. He
+wished very much to kiss her, but had made up his mind that he would
+not. She thought that he might, and had made up her mind that if he
+attempted to she would resist. She was not in the least afraid of him
+any more, but of herself.
+
+He kissed her, and she did not resist.
+
+"Good-night," he said, and then with a half-laugh, "Which is your
+bell?"
+
+She found it and rang it. Presently there was a rusty click, and the
+inner door opened an inch or so. Neither of them spoke for a full
+minute. Then she, her face aflame in the darkness:
+
+"When you came I was only a little fool who'd bought a pair of shoes
+that were too tight for her. I didn't _know_ anything. I'm wise now. I
+know that I'm dreaming, and that if I wake up before the dream is ended
+I shall die."
+
+She tried to laugh gayly and could not.
+
+"I've made things harder for you instead of easier," he said. "I'm
+terribly sorry. I meant well."
+
+"Oh, it isn't that," she said. "Thank you a thousand thousand times. And
+good-night."
+
+"Wait," he said. "Will you play with me again some time? How about
+Saturday?"
+
+"No," she said. "It wouldn't be fair--to me. Good-night."
+
+She passed through the inner door and up the narrow creaking stair to
+the dark tenement in which she lived; she could hear the restless
+breathing of her sleeping family.
+
+"Oh, my God!" she thought, "if it weren't for _them_!"
+
+As for the young man, having lighted a long cigar, he entered his car
+and drove off, muttering to himself:
+
+"Damnation! Why does a girl like that _have_ a family!"
+
+He never saw her again, nor was he ever haunted by the thought that he
+had perhaps spoiled her whole life as thoroughly as if he had taken
+advantage of her ignorance and her innocence.
+
+
+
+
+BACK THERE IN THE GRASS
+
+
+It was spring in the South Seas when, for the first time, I went ashore
+at Batengo, which is the Polynesian village, and the only one on the big
+grass island of the same name. There is a cable station just up the
+beach from the village, and a good-natured young chap named Graves had
+charge of it. He was an upstanding, clean-cut fellow, as the fact that
+he had been among the islands for three years without falling into any
+of their ways proved. The interior of the corrugated iron house in which
+he lived, for instance, was bachelor from A to Z. And if that wasn't a
+sufficient alibi, my pointer dog, Don, who dislikes anything Polynesian
+or Melanesian, took to him at once. And they established a romping
+friendship. He gave us lunch on the porch, and because he had not seen a
+white man for two months, or a liver-and-white dog for two years, he
+told us the entire story of his young life, with reminiscences of early
+childhood and plans for the future thrown in.
+
+The future was very simple. There was a girl coming out to him from the
+States by the next steamer but one; the captain of that steamer would
+join them together in holy wedlock, and after that the Lord would
+provide.
+
+"My dear fellow," he said, "you think I'm asking her to share a very
+lonely sort of life, but if you could imagine all the--the affection and
+gentleness, and thoughtfulness that I've got stored up to pour out at
+her feet for the rest of our lives, you wouldn't be a bit afraid for her
+happiness. If a man spends his whole time and imagination thinking up
+ways to make a girl happy and occupied, he can think up a whole lot....
+I'd like ever so much to show her to you."
+
+He led the way to his bedroom, and stood in silent rapture before a
+large photograph that leaned against the wall over his dressing-table.
+
+She didn't look to me like the sort of girl a cable agent would happen
+to marry. She looked like a swell--the real thing--beautiful and simple
+and unaffected.
+
+"Yes," he said, "isn't she?"
+
+I hadn't spoken a word. Now I said:
+
+"It's easy to see why you aren't lonely with that wonderful girl to look
+at. Is she really coming out by the next steamer but one? It's hard to
+believe because she's so much too good to be true."
+
+"Yes," he said, "isn't she?"
+
+"The usual cable agent," I said, "keeps from going mad by having a dog
+or a cat or some pet or other to talk to. But I can understand a
+photograph like this being all-sufficient to any man--even if he had
+never seen the original. Allow me to shake hands with you."
+
+Then I got him away from the girl, because my time was short and I
+wanted to find out about some things that were important to _me_.
+
+"You haven't asked me my business in these parts," I said, "but I'll
+tell you. I'm collecting grasses for the Bronx Botanical Garden."
+
+"Then, by Jove!" said Graves, "you have certainly come to the right
+place. There used to be a tree on this island, but the last man who saw
+it died in 1789--Grass! The place is all grass: there are fifty kinds
+right around my house here."
+
+"I've noticed only eighteen," I said, "but that isn't the point. The
+point is: when do the Batengo Island grasses begin to go to seed?" And I
+smiled.
+
+"You think you've got me stumped, don't you?" he said. "That a mere
+cable agent wouldn't notice such things. Well, that grass there," and he
+pointed--"beach nut we call it--is the first to ripen seed, and, as far
+as I know, it does it just six weeks from now."
+
+"Are you just making things up to impress me?"
+
+"No, sir, I am not. I know to the minute. You see, I'm a victim of
+hay-fever."
+
+"In that case," I said, "expect me back about the time your nose begins
+to run."
+
+"Really?" And his whole face lighted up. "I'm delighted. Only six
+weeks. Why, then, if you'll stay round for only five or six weeks _more_
+you'll be here for the wedding."
+
+"I'll make it if I possibly can," I said. "I want to see if that girl's
+really true."
+
+"Anything I can do to help you while you're gone? I've got loads of
+spare time----"
+
+"If you knew anything about grasses----"
+
+"I don't. But I'll blow back into the interior and look around. I've
+been meaning to right along, just for fun. But I can never get any of
+_them_ to go with me."
+
+"The natives?"
+
+"Yes. Poor lot. They're committing race suicide as fast as they can.
+There are more wooden gods than people in Batengo village, and the
+superstition's so thick you could cut it with a knife. All the manly
+virtues have perished.... Aloiu!"
+
+The boy who did Graves's chores for him came lazily out of the house.
+
+"Aloiu," said Graves, "just run back into the island to the top of that
+hill--see?--that one over there--and fetch a handful of grass for this
+gentleman. He'll give you five dollars for it."
+
+Aloiu grinned sheepishly and shook his head.
+
+"Fifty dollars?"
+
+Aloiu shook his head with even more firmness, and I whistled. Fifty
+dollars would have made him the Rockefeller-Carnegie-Morgan of those
+parts.
+
+"All right, coward," said Graves cheerfully. "Run away and play with the
+other children.... Now, isn't that curious? Neither love, money, nor
+insult will drag one of them a mile from the beach. They say that if you
+go 'back there in the grass' something awful will happen to you."
+
+"As what?" I asked.
+
+"The last man to try it," said Graves, "in the memory of the oldest
+inhabitant was a woman. When they found her she was all black and
+swollen--at least that's what they say. Something had bitten her just
+above the ankle."
+
+"Nonsense," I said, "there are no snakes in the whole Batengo group."
+
+"They didn't say it was a snake," said Graves. "They said the marks of
+the bite were like those that would be made by the teeth of a very
+little--child."
+
+Graves rose and stretched himself.
+
+"What's the use of arguing with people that tell yarns like that! All
+the same, if you're bent on making expeditions back into the grass,
+you'll make 'em alone, unless the cable breaks and I'm free to make 'em
+with you."
+
+Five weeks later I was once more coasting along the wavering hills of
+Batengo Island, with a sharp eye out for a first sight of the cable
+station and Graves. Five weeks with no company but Kanakas and a
+pointer dog makes one white man pretty keen for the society of another.
+Furthermore, at our one meeting I had taken a great shine to Graves and
+to the charming young lady who was to brave a life in the South Seas for
+his sake. If I was eager to get ashore, Don was more so. I had a
+shot-gun across my knees with which to salute the cable station, and the
+sight of that weapon, coupled with toothsome memories of a recent big
+hunt down on Forked Peak, had set the dog quivering from stem to stern,
+to crouching, wagging his tail till it disappeared, and beating sudden
+tattoos upon the deck with his forepaws. And when at last we rounded on
+the cable station and I let off both barrels, he began to bark and race
+about the schooner like a thing possessed.
+
+The salute brought Graves out of his house. He stood on the porch waving
+a handkerchief, and I called to him through a megaphone; hoped that he
+was well, said how glad I was to see him, and asked him to meet me in
+Batengo village.
+
+Even at that distance I detected a something irresolute in his manner;
+and a few minutes later when he had fetched a hat out of the house,
+locked the door, and headed toward the village, he looked more like a
+soldier marching to battle than a man walking half a mile to greet a
+friend.
+
+"That's funny," I said to Don. "He's coming to meet us in spite of the
+fact that he'd much rather not. Oh, well!"
+
+I left the schooner while she was still under way, and reached the beach
+before Graves came up. There were too many strange brown men to suit
+Don, and he kept very close to my legs. When Graves arrived the natives
+fell away from him as if he had been a leper. He wore a sort of sickly
+smile, and when he spoke the dog stiffened his legs and growled
+menacingly.
+
+"Don!" I exclaimed sternly, and the dog cowered, but the spines along
+his back bristled and he kept a menacing eye upon Graves. The man's face
+looked drawn and rather angry. The frank boyishness was clean out of it.
+He had been strained by something or other to the breaking-point--so
+much was evident.
+
+"My dear fellow," I said, "what the devil is the matter?"
+
+Graves looked to right and left, and the islanders shrank still farther
+away from him.
+
+"You can see for yourself," he said curtly. "I'm taboo." And then, with
+a little break in his voice: "Even your dog feels it. Don, good boy!
+Come here, sir!"
+
+Don growled quietly.
+
+"You see!"
+
+"Don," I said sharply, "this man is my friend and yours. Pat him,
+Graves."
+
+Graves reached forward and patted Don's head and talked to him
+soothingly.
+
+But although Don did not growl or menace, he shivered under the caress
+and was unhappy.
+
+"So you're taboo!" I said cheerfully. "That's the result of anything,
+from stringing pink and yellow shells on the same string to murdering
+your uncle's grandmother-in-law. Which have _you_ done?"
+
+"I've been back there in the grass," he said, "and because--because
+nothing happened to me I'm taboo."
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"As far as they know--yes."
+
+"Well!" said I, "my business will take me back there for days at a time,
+so I'll be taboo, too. Then there'll be two of us. Did you find any
+curious grasses for me?"
+
+"I don't know about grasses," he said, "but I found something very
+curious that I want to show you and ask your advice about. Are you going
+to share my house?"
+
+"I think I'll keep head-quarters on the schooner," I said, "but if
+you'll put me up now and then for a meal or for the night----"
+
+"I'll put you up for lunch right now," he said, "if you'll come. I'm my
+own cook and bottle-washer since the taboo, but I must say the change
+isn't for the worse so far as food goes."
+
+He was looking and speaking more cheerfully.
+
+"May I bring Don?"
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"Why--yes--of course."
+
+"If you'd rather not?"
+
+"No, bring him. I want to make friends again if I can."
+
+So we started for Graves's house, Don very close at my heels.
+
+"Graves," I said, "surely a taboo by a lot of fool islanders hasn't
+upset you. There's something on your mind. Bad news?"
+
+"Oh, no," he said. "She's coming. It's other things. I'll tell you by
+and by--everything. Don't mind me. I'm all right. Listen to the wind in
+the grass. That sound day and night is enough to put a man off his
+feed."
+
+"You say you found something very curious back there in the grass?"
+
+"I found, among other things, a stone monolith. It's fallen down, but
+it's almost as big as the Flatiron Building in New York. It's ancient as
+days--all carved--it's a sort of woman, I think. But we'll go back one
+day and have a look at it. Then, of course, I saw all the different
+kinds of grasses in the world--they'd interest you more--but I'm such a
+punk botanist that I gave up trying to tell 'em apart. I like the
+flowers best--there's millions of 'em--down among the grass.... I tell
+you, old man, this island is the greatest curiosity-shop in the whole
+world."
+
+He unlocked the door of his house and stood aside for me to go in first.
+
+"Shut up, Don!"
+
+The dog growled savagely, but I banged him with my open hand across the
+snout, and he quieted down and followed into the house, all tense and
+watchful.
+
+On the shelf where Graves kept his books, with its legs hanging over,
+was what I took to be an idol of some light brownish wood--say
+sandalwood, with a touch of pink. But it was the most lifelike and
+astounding piece of carving I ever saw in the islands or out of them. It
+was about a foot high, and represented a Polynesian woman in the prime
+of life, say, fifteen or sixteen years old, only the features were finer
+and cleaner carved. It was a nude, in an attitude of easy repose--the
+legs hanging, the toes dangling--the hands resting, palms downward, on
+the blotter, the trunk relaxed. The eyes, which were a kind of steely
+blue, seemed to have been made, depth upon depth, of some wonderful
+translucent enamel, and to make his work still more realistic the artist
+had planted the statuette's eyebrows, eyelashes, and scalp with real
+hair, very soft and silky, brown on the head and black for the lashes
+and eyebrows. The thing was so lifelike that it frightened me. And when
+Don began to growl like distant thunder I didn't blame him. But I leaned
+over and caught him by the collar, because it was evident that he wanted
+to get at that statuette and destroy it.
+
+When I looked up the statuette's eyes had moved. They were turned
+downward upon the dog, with cool curiosity and indifference. A kind of
+shudder went through me. And then, lo and behold, the statuette's tiny
+brown breasts rose and fell slowly, and a long breath came out of its
+nostrils.
+
+I backed violently into Graves, dragging Don with me and half-choking
+him. "My God Almighty!" I said. "It's alive!"
+
+"Isn't she!" said he. "I caught her back there in the grass--the little
+minx. And when I heard your signal I put her up there to keep her out of
+mischief. It's too high for her to jump--and she's very sore about it."
+
+"You found her in the grass," I said. "For God's sake!--are there more
+of them?"
+
+"Thick as quail," said he, "but it's hard to get a sight of 'em. But
+_you_ were overcome by curiosity, weren't you, old girl? You came out to
+have a look at the big white giant and he caught you with his thumb and
+forefinger by the scruff of the neck--so you couldn't bite him--and here
+you are."
+
+The womankin's lips parted and I saw a flash of white teeth. She looked
+up into Graves's face and the steely eyes softened. It was evident that
+she was very fond of him.
+
+"Rum sort of a pet," said Graves. "What?"
+
+"Rum?" I said. "It's horrible--it isn't decent--it--it ought to be
+taboo. Don's got it sized up right. He--he wants to kill it."
+
+"Please don't keep calling her It," said Graves. "She wouldn't like
+it--if she understood." Then he whispered words that were Greek to me,
+and the womankin laughed aloud. Her laugh was sweet and tinkly, like the
+upper notes of a spinet.
+
+"You can speak her language?"
+
+"A few words--Tog ma Lao?"
+
+"Na!"
+
+"Aba Ton sug ato."
+
+"Nan Tane dom ud lon anea!"
+
+It sounded like that--only all whispered and very soft. It sounded a
+little like the wind in the grass.
+
+"She says she isn't afraid of the dog," said Graves, "and that he'd
+better let her alone."
+
+"I almost hope he won't," said I. "Come outside. I don't like her. I
+think I've got a touch of the horrors."
+
+Graves remained behind a moment to lift the womankin down from the
+shelf, and when he rejoined me I had made up my mind to talk to him like
+a father.
+
+"Graves," I said, "although that creature in there is only a foot high,
+it isn't a pig or a monkey, it's a woman, and you're guilty of what's
+considered a pretty ugly crime at home--abduction. You've stolen this
+woman away from kith and kin, and the least you can do is to carry her
+back where you found her and turn her loose. Let me ask you one
+thing--what would Miss Chester think?"
+
+"Oh, that doesn't worry me," said Graves. "But I _am_ worried--worried
+sick. It's early--shall we talk now, or wait till after lunch?"
+
+"Now," I said.
+
+"Well," said he, "you left me pretty well enthused on the subject of
+botany--so I went back there twice to look up grasses for you. The
+second time I went I got to a deep sort of valley where the grass is
+waist-high--that, by the way, is where the big monolith is--and that
+place was alive with things that were frightened and ran. I could see
+the directions they took by the way the grass tops acted. There were
+lots of loose stones about and I began to throw 'em to see if I could
+knock one of the things over. Suddenly all at once I saw a pair of
+bright little eyes peering out of a bunch of grass--I let fly at them,
+and something gave a sort of moan and thrashed about in the grass--and
+then lay still. I went to look, and found that I'd stunned--_her_. She
+came to and tried to bite me, but I had her by the scruff of the neck
+and she couldn't. Further, she was sick with being hit in the chest with
+the stone, and first thing I knew she keeled over in the palm of my hand
+in a dead faint. I couldn't find any water or anything--and I didn't
+want her to die--so I brought her home. She was sick for a week--and I
+took care of her--as I would a sick pup--and she began to get well and
+want to play and romp and poke into everything. She'd get the lower
+drawer of my desk open and hide in it--or crawl into a rubber boot and
+play house. And she got to be right good company--same as any pet
+does--a cat or a dog--or a monkey--and naturally, she being so small, I
+couldn't think of her as anything but a sort of little beast that I'd
+caught and tamed.... You see how it all happened, don't you? Might have
+happened to anybody."
+
+"Why, yes," I said. "If she didn't give a man the horrors right at the
+start--I can understand making a sort of pet of her--but, man, there's
+only one thing to do. Be persuaded. Take her back where you found her,
+and turn her loose."
+
+"Well and good," said Graves. "I tried that, and next morning I found
+her at my door, sobbing--horrible, dry sobs--no tears.... You've said
+one thing that's full of sense: she isn't a pig--or a monkey--she's a
+woman."
+
+"You don't mean to say," said I, "that that mite of a thing is in love
+with you?"
+
+"I don't know what else you'd call it."
+
+"Graves," I said, "Miss Chester arrives by the next steamer. In the
+meanwhile something has got to be done."
+
+"What?" said he hopelessly.
+
+"I don't know," I said. "Let me think."
+
+The dog Don laid his head heavily on my knee, as if he wished to offer a
+solution of the difficulty.
+
+A week before Miss Chester's steamer was due the situation had not
+changed. Graves's pet was as much a fixture of Graves's house as the
+front door. And a man was never confronted with a more serious problem.
+Twice he carried her back into the grass and deserted her, and each time
+she returned and was found sobbing--horrible, dry sobs--on the porch.
+And a number of times we took her, or Graves did, in the pocket of his
+jacket, upon systematic searches for her people. Doubtless she could
+have helped us to find them, but she wouldn't. She was very sullen on
+these expeditions and frightened. When Graves tried to put her down she
+would cling to him, and it took real force to pry her loose.
+
+In the open she could run like a rat; and in open country it would have
+been impossible to desert her; she would have followed at Graves's heels
+as fast as he could move them. But forcing through the thick grass
+tired her after a few hundred yards, and she would gradually drop
+farther and farther behind--sobbing. There was a pathetic side to it.
+
+She hated me; and made no bones about it; but there was an armed truce
+between us. She feared my influence over Graves, and I feared her--well,
+just as some people fear rats or snakes. Things utterly out of the
+normal always do worry me, and Bo, which was the name Graves had learned
+for her, was, so far as I know, unique in human experience. In
+appearance she was like an unusually good-looking island girl observed
+through the wrong end of an opera-glass, but in habit and action she was
+different. She would catch flies and little grasshoppers and eat them
+all alive and kicking, and if you teased her more than she liked her
+ears would flatten the way a cat's do, and she would hiss like a
+snapping-turtle, and show her teeth.
+
+But one got accustomed to her. Even poor Don learned that it was not his
+duty to punish her with one bound and a snap. But he would never let her
+touch him, believing that in her case discretion was the better part of
+valor. If she approached him he withdrew, always with dignity, but
+equally with determination. He knew in his heart that something about
+her was horribly wrong and against nature. I knew it, too, and I think
+Graves began to suspect it.
+
+Well, a day came when Graves, who had been up since dawn, saw the smoke
+of a steamer along the horizon, and began to fire off his revolver so
+that I, too, might wake and participate in his joy. I made tea and went
+ashore.
+
+"It's _her_ steamer," he said.
+
+"Yes," said I, "and we've got to decide something."
+
+"About Bo?"
+
+"Suppose I take her off your hands--for a week or so--till you and Miss
+Chester have settled down and put your house in order. Then Miss
+Chester--Mrs. Graves, that is--can decide what is to be done. I admit
+that I'd rather wash my hands of the business--but I'm the only white
+man available, and I propose to stand by my race. Don't say a word to
+Bo--just bring her out to the schooner and leave her."
+
+In the upshot Graves accepted my offer, and while Bo, fairly bristling
+with excitement and curiosity, was exploring the farther corners of my
+cabin, we slipped out and locked the door on her. The minute she knew
+what had happened she began to tear around and raise Cain. It sounded a
+little like a cat having a fit.
+
+Graves was white and unhappy. "Let's get away quick," he said; "I feel
+like a skunk."
+
+But Miss Chester was everything that her photograph said about her, and
+more too, so that the trick he had played Bo was very soon a negligible
+weight on Graves's mind.
+
+If the wedding was quick and business-like, it was also jolly and
+romantic. The oldest passenger gave the bride away. All the crew came
+aft and sang "The Voice That Breathed O'er E-den That Earliest
+Wedding-Day"--to the tune called "Blairgowrie." They had worked it up in
+secret for a surprise. And the bride's dove-brown eyes got a little
+teary. I was best man. The captain read the service, and choked
+occasionally. As for Graves--I had never thought him handsome--well,
+with his brown face and white linen suit, he made me think, and I'm sure
+I don't know why, of St. Michael--that time he overcame Lucifer. The
+captain blew us to breakfast, with champagne and a cake, and then the
+happy pair went ashore in a boat full of the bride's trousseau, and the
+crew manned the bulwarks and gave three cheers, and then something like
+twenty-seven more, and last thing of all the brass cannon was fired, and
+the little square flags that spell G-o-o-d L-u-c-k were run up on the
+signal halyards.
+
+As for me, I went back to my schooner feeling blue and lonely. I knew
+little about women and less about love. It didn't seem quite fair. For
+once I hated my profession--seed-gatherer to a body of scientific
+gentlemen whom I had never seen. Well, there's nothing so good for the
+blues as putting things in order.
+
+I cleaned my rifle and revolver. I wrote up my note-book. I developed
+some plates; I studied a brand-new book on South Sea grasses that had
+been sent out to me, and I found some mistakes. I went ashore with Don,
+and had a long walk on the beach--in the opposite direction from
+Graves's house, of course--and I sent Don into the water after sticks,
+and he seemed to enjoy it, and so I stripped and went in with him. Then
+I dried in the sun, and had a match with my hands to see which could
+find the tiniest shell. Toward dusk we returned to the schooner and had
+dinner, and after that I went into my cabin to see how Bo was getting
+on.
+
+She flew at me like a cat, and if I hadn't jerked my foot back she must
+have bitten me. As it was, her teeth tore a piece out of my trousers.
+I'm afraid I kicked her. Anyway, I heard her land with a crash in a far
+corner. I struck a match and lighted candles--they are cooler than
+lamps--very warily--one eye on Bo. She had retreated under a chair and
+looked out--very sullen and angry. I sat down and began to talk to her.
+"It's no use," I said, "you're trying to bite and scratch, because
+you're only as big as a minute. So come out here and make friends. I
+don't like you and you don't like me; but we're going to be thrown
+together for quite some time, so we'd better make the best of it. You
+come out here and behave pretty and I'll give you a bit of gingersnap."
+
+The last word was intelligible to her, and she came a little way out
+from under the chair. I had a bit of gingersnap in my pocket, left over
+from treating Don, and I tossed it on the floor midway between us. She
+darted forward and ate it with quick bites.
+
+Well, then, she looked up, and her eyes asked--just as plain as day:
+"Why are things thus? Why have I come to live with you? I don't like
+you. I want to go back to Graves."
+
+I couldn't explain very well, and just shook my head and then went on
+trying to make friends--it was no use. She hated me, and after a time I
+got bored. I threw a pillow on the floor for her to sleep on, and left
+her. Well, the minute the door was shut and locked she began to sob. You
+could hear her for quite a distance, and I couldn't stand it. So I went
+back--and talked to her as nicely and soothingly as I could. But she
+wouldn't even look at me--just lay face down--heaving and sobbing.
+
+Now I don't like little creatures that snap--so when I picked her up it
+was by the scruff of the neck. She had to face me then, and I saw that
+in spite of all the sobbing her eyes were perfectly dry. That struck me
+as curious. I examined them through a pocket magnifying-glass, and
+discovered that they had no tear-ducts. Of course she couldn't cry.
+Perhaps I squeezed the back of her neck harder than I meant to--anyway,
+her lips began to draw back and her teeth to show.
+
+It was exactly at that second that I recalled the legend Graves had told
+me about the island woman being found dead, and all black and swollen,
+back there in the grass, with teeth marks on her that looked as if they
+had been made by a very little child.
+
+I forced Bo's mouth wide open and looked in. Then I reached for a candle
+and held it steadily between her face and mine. She struggled furiously
+so that I had to put down the candle and catch her legs together in my
+free hand. But I had seen enough. I felt wet and cold all over. For if
+the swollen glands at the base of the deeply grooved canines meant
+anything, that which I held between my hands was not a woman--but a
+snake.
+
+I put her in a wooden box that had contained soap and nailed slats over
+the top. And, personally, I was quite willing to put scrap-iron in the
+box with her and fling it overboard. But I did not feel quite justified
+without consulting Graves.
+
+As an extra precaution in case of accidents, I overhauled my
+medicine-chest and made up a little package for the breast pocket--a
+lancet, a rubber bandage, and a pill-box full of permanganate crystals.
+I had still much collecting to do, "back there in the grass," and I did
+not propose to step on any of Bo's cousins or her sisters or her
+aunts--without having some of the elementary first-aids to the
+snake-bitten handy.
+
+It was a lovely starry night, and I determined to sleep on deck. Before
+turning in I went to have a look at Bo. Having nailed her in a box
+securely, as I thought, I must have left my cabin door ajar. Anyhow she
+was gone. She must have braced her back against one side of the box, her
+feet against the other, and burst it open. I had most certainly
+underestimated her strength and resources.
+
+The crew, warned of peril, searched the whole schooner over, slowly and
+methodically, lighted by lanterns. We could not find her. Well, swimming
+comes natural to snakes.
+
+I went ashore as quickly as I could get a boat manned and rowed. I took
+Don on a leash, a shot-gun loaded, and both pockets of my jacket full of
+cartridges. We ran swiftly along the beach, Don and I, and then turned
+into the grass to make a short cut for Graves's house. All of a sudden
+Don began to tremble with eagerness and nuzzle and sniff among the roots
+of the grass. He was "making game."
+
+"Good Don," I said, "good boy--hunt her up! Find her!"
+
+The moon had risen. I saw two figures standing in the porch of Graves's
+house. I was about to call to them and warn Graves that Bo was loose and
+dangerous--when a scream--shrill and frightful--rang in my ears. I saw
+Graves turn to his bride and catch her in his arms.
+
+When I came up she had collected her senses and was behaving splendidly.
+While Graves fetched a lantern and water she sat down on the porch, her
+back against the house, and undid her garter, so that I could pull the
+stocking off her bitten foot. Her instep, into which Bo's venomous teeth
+had sunk, was already swollen and discolored. I slashed the teeth-marks
+this way and that with my lancet. And Mrs. Graves kept saying: "All
+right--all right--don't mind me--do what's best."
+
+Don's leash had wedged between two of the porch planks, and all the time
+we were working over Mrs. Graves he whined and struggled to get loose.
+
+"Graves," I said, when we had done what we could, "if your wife begins
+to seem faint, give her brandy--just a very little--at a time--and--I
+think we were in time--and for God's sake don't ever let her know _why_
+she was bitten--or by _what_----"
+
+Then I turned and freed Don and took off his leash.
+
+The moonlight was now very white and brilliant. In the sandy path that
+led from Graves's porch I saw the print of feet--shaped just like human
+feet--less than an inch long. I made Don smell them, and said:
+
+"Hunt close, boy! Hunt close!"
+
+Thus hunting, we moved slowly through the grass toward the interior of
+the island. The scent grew hotter--suddenly Don began to move more
+stiffly--as if he had the rheumatism--his eyes straight ahead saw
+something that I could not see--the tip of his tail vibrated
+furiously--he sank lower and lower--his legs worked more and more
+stiffly--his head was thrust forward to the full stretch of his neck
+toward a thick clump of grass. In the act of taking a wary step he came
+to a dead halt--his right forepaw just clear of the ground. The tip of
+his tail stopped vibrating. The tail itself stood straight out behind
+him and became rigid like a bar of iron. I never saw a stancher point.
+
+"Steady, boy!"
+
+I pushed forward the safety of my shot-gun and stood at attention.
+
+
+"How is she?"
+
+"Seems to be pulling through. I heard you fire both barrels. What luck?"
+
+
+
+
+ASABRI
+
+
+Asabri, head of the great banking house of Asabri Brothers in Rome, had
+been a great sportsman in his youth. But by middle-age he had grown a
+little tired, you may say; so that whereas formerly he had depended upon
+his own exertions for pleasure and exhilaration, he looked now with
+favor upon automobiles, motor-boats, and saddle-horses.
+
+Almost every afternoon he rode alone in the Campagna, covering great
+distances on his stanch Irish mare, Biddy. She was the handsomest horse
+in Rome; her master was the handsomest man. He looked like some old
+Roman consul going out to govern and civilize. Peasants whom he passed
+touched their hats to him automatically. His face in repose was a sort
+of command.
+
+One day as he rode out of Rome he saw that fog was gathering; and he
+resolved, for there was an inexhaustible well of boyishness within him,
+to get lost in it. He had no engagement for that night; his family had
+already left Rome for their villa on Lake Como. Nobody would worry about
+him except Luigi, his valet. And as for this one, Asabri said to
+himself: "He is a spoiled child of fortune; let him worry for once."
+
+He did not believe in fever; he believed in a good digestion and good
+habits. He knew every inch of the Campagna, or thought he did; and he
+knew that under the magic of fog the most familiar parts of it became
+unfamiliar and strange. He had lost himself upon it once or twice
+before, to his great pleasure and exhilaration. He had felt like some
+daring explorer in an unknown country. He thought that perhaps he might
+be forced to spend the night in some peasant's home smelling of cheese
+and goats. He would reward his hosts in the morning beyond the dreams of
+their undoubted avarice. There would be a beautiful daughter with a
+golden voice: he would see to it that she became a famous singer. He
+would give the father a piece of fertile land with an ample house upon
+it. Every day the happy family would go down on their knees and pray for
+his soul. He knew of nothing more delicious than to surprise unexpecting
+and deserving people with stable benefactions. And besides, if only for
+the sake of his boyhood, he loved dearly the smell of cheese and goats.
+
+A goat had been his foster-mother; it was to her that he attributed his
+splendid constitution and activity, which had filled in the spaces
+between his financial successes with pleasure. As he trotted on into the
+fog he tried to recall having knowingly done harm to somebody or other;
+and because he could not, his face of a Roman emperor took on a great
+look of peace.
+
+"Biddy," he said after a time, in English (she was an Irish horse, and
+English was the nearest he could get to her native language), "this is
+no common Roman mist; it's a genuine fog that has been sucked up Tiber
+from the salt sea. You can smell salt and fish. We shall be lost,
+possibly for a long time. There will be no hot mash for you to-night.
+You will eat what goats eat and be very grateful. Perhaps you will meet
+some rural donkey during our adventures, and I must ask you to use the
+poor little beast's rustic ignorance with the greatest tact and
+forbearance. You will tell her tales of cities and travels; but do not
+lie to excess, or appear condescending, lest you find her rude wits a
+match for your own and are ashamed."
+
+Asabri did not spend the night in a peasant's hut. Biddy did not meet
+any country donkey to swap yarns with. But inasmuch as the pair lost
+themselves thoroughly, it must be admitted that some of the banker's
+wishes came true.
+
+He had not counted on two things. At dinner-time he was hungry; at
+supper-time he was ravenous. And he no longer thought of losing himself
+on purpose, but made all the efforts in his power to get back to Rome.
+
+"Good Heavens," he muttered, "we ought to have stumbled on something by
+this time."
+
+Biddy might have answered: "I've done some stumbling, thank you, and
+thanks to you." But she didn't. Instead, she lifted her head and ears,
+looked to the left, snorted, and shied. She shied very carefully,
+however, because she did not know what she might shy into; and Asabri
+laughed.
+
+There was a glimmering point of light off to the left, and he urged
+Biddy toward it. He saw presently that it was a fire built against a
+ruined and unfamiliar tomb.
+
+The fire was cooking something in a kettle. There was a smell of garlic.
+Three young men sat cross-legged, watching the fire and the kettle.
+Against the tomb leaned three long guns, very old and dangerous.
+
+"Brigands!" smiled Asabri, and he hailed them:
+
+"Ho there! Wake up! I am a squadron of police attacking you from the
+rear."
+
+He rode unarmed into their midst and slid unconcernedly from his saddle
+to the ground.
+
+"Put up your weapons, brothers," he said; "I was joking. It seems that I
+am in danger, not you."
+
+The young men, upon whom "brigand" was written in no uncertain signs,
+were very much embarrassed. One of them smiled nervously and showed a
+great many very white teeth.
+
+"Lucky for us," he said, "that you weren't what you said you were."
+
+"Yes," said Asabri; "I should have potted the lot of you with one
+volley and reported at head-quarters that it had been necessary, owing
+to the stubborn resistance which you offered."
+
+The three young men smiled sheepishly.
+
+"I see that you are familiar with the ways of the police," said one of
+them.
+
+"May I sit with you?" Asabri asked. "Thanks."
+
+He sat in silence for a moment; and the three young men examined with
+great respect the man's splendid round head, and his face of a Roman
+emperor.
+
+"Whose tomb is this?" he asked them.
+
+"It is ours," said the one who had first smiled. "It used to hallow the
+remains of Attulius Cimber."
+
+"Oho!" said Asabri. "Attulius Cimber, a direct ancestor of my friend and
+associate Sullandenti. And tell me how far is it to Rome?"
+
+"A long way. You could not find the half of it to-night."
+
+"Brothers," said Asabri, "has business been good? I ask for a reason."
+
+"The reason, sir?"
+
+"Why," said he, "I thought, if I should not be considered grasping, to
+ask you for a mouthful of soup."
+
+Confusion seized the brigands. They protested that they were ungrateful
+dogs to keep the noble guest upon the tenterhooks of hunger. They called
+upon God to smite them down for inhospitable ne'er-do-weels. They plied
+him with soup, with black bread; they roasted strips of goat's flesh for
+him; and from the hollow of the tomb they fetched bottles of red wine in
+straw jackets.
+
+Presently Asabri sighed, and offered them cigarettes from a gold case.
+
+"For what I have received," said he, "may a courteous and thoughtful God
+make me truly thankful.... I wish that I could offer you, in return for
+your hospitality, something more substantial than cigarettes. The case?
+If it were any case but that one! A present from my wife."
+
+He drew from its pocket a gold repeater upon which his initials were
+traced in brilliants.
+
+"Midnight. Listen!"
+
+He pressed a spring, and the exquisite chimes of the watch spoke in the
+stillness like the bells of a fairy church.
+
+"And this," he said, "was a present from my mother, who is dead."
+
+The three brigands crossed themselves, and expressed the regrets which
+good-breeding required of them. The one that had been the last to help
+himself to a cigarette now returned the case to Asabri, with a bow and a
+mumbling of thanks.
+
+"What a jolly life you lead," exclaimed the banker. "Tell me, you have
+had some good hauls lately? What?"
+
+The oldest of the three, a dark, taciturn youth, answered, "The
+gentleman is a great joker."
+
+"Believe me," said Asabri, "it is from habit--not from the heart. When I
+rode out from Rome to-day, it was with the intention never to return.
+When I came upon you and saw your long guns and suspected your
+profession in life, I said: 'Good! Perhaps these young men will murder
+me for my watch and cigarette case and the loose silver in my breeches
+pocket, and save me a world of trouble----'"
+
+The three brigands protested that nothing had ever been farther from
+their thoughts.
+
+"Instead of which," he went on, "you have fed me and put heart in me. I
+shall return to Rome in the morning and face whatever music my own
+infatuated foolishness has set going. Do you understand anything of
+finance?"
+
+The taciturn brigand grinned sheepishly.
+
+He said that he had had one once; but that the priest had touched it
+with a holy relic and it had gone away. "It was on the back of my neck,"
+he said.
+
+Asabri laughed.
+
+"I should have said banking," said he, "stocks and bonds."
+
+The brigands admitted that they knew nothing of these things. Asabri
+sighed.
+
+"Two months ago," he said, "I was a rich man. To-day I have nothing. In
+a few days it will be known that I have nothing; and then, my
+friends--the deluge. Such is finance. From great beginnings, lame
+endings. And yet the converse may be true. I have seen great endings
+come of small beginnings. Even now there is a chance for a man with a
+little capital...."
+
+He raised his eyes and hands to heaven.
+
+"Oh," he cried, "if I could touch even five thousand lire I could
+retrieve my own fortunes and make the fortunes of whomsoever advanced me
+the money."
+
+The sullen brigand had been doing a sum on his fingers.
+
+"How so, excellency?" he asked.
+
+"Oh," said Asabri, "it is very simple! I should buy certain stocks,
+which owing to certain conditions are very cheap, and I should sell them
+very dear. You have heard of America?"
+
+They smiled and nodded eagerly.
+
+"Of Wall Street?"
+
+They looked blank.
+
+"Doubtless," said the banker, "you have been taught by your priests to
+believe that the great church of St. Peter, in Rome, is the actual
+centre of the universe. Is it not so?"
+
+They assented, not without wonder, since the fact was well known.
+
+"Recent geographers," said Asabri, "unwilling to take any statement for
+granted, have, after prolonged and scientific investigation, discovered
+that this idea is hocus pocus. The centre of the universe is in the
+United States, in the city of New York, in Wall Street. The number in
+the street, to be precise, is fifty-nine. From fifty-nine Wall Street,
+the word goes out to the extremities of the world: 'Let prices be low.'
+Or: 'Let them be high.' And so they become, according to the word. But
+unless I can find five thousand lire with which to take advantage of
+this fact, why to-morrow----"
+
+"To-morrow?" asked the brigand who had been first to smile.
+
+"Two months ago," said Asabri, "I was perhaps the most envied man in
+Italy. To-morrow I shall be laughed at." He shrugged his powerful
+shoulders.
+
+"But if five thousand lire could be found?"
+
+It was the sullen brigand who spoke, and his companions eyed him with
+some misgiving.
+
+"In that case," said Asabri, "I should rehabilitate my fortune and that
+of the man, or men, who came to my assistance."
+
+"Suppose," said the sullen one, "that I were in a position to offer you
+the loan of five thousand lire, or four thousand eight hundred and
+ninety-two, to be exact, what surety should I receive that my fortunes
+and those of my associates would be mended thereby?"
+
+"My word," said Asabri simply, and he turned his face of a Roman emperor
+and looked the sullen brigand directly in the eye.
+
+"Words," said this one, although his eyes fell before the steadiness of
+the banker's, "are of all kinds and conditions, according to whoso gives
+them."
+
+Asabri smiled, and sure of his notoriety: "I am Asabri," said he.
+
+They examined him anew with a great awe. The youngest said:
+
+"And _you_ have fallen upon evil days! I should have been less
+astonished if some one were to tell me that the late pope had received
+employment in hell."
+
+"Beppo," said the sullen brigand, "whatever the state of his fortunes,
+the word of Asabri is sufficient. Go into the tomb of Attulius and fetch
+out the money."
+
+The money--silver, copper, and notes of small denominations--was in a
+dirty leather bag.
+
+"Will you count it, sir?"
+
+With the palms of his hands Asabri answered that he would not. Inwardly,
+it was as if he had been made of smiles; but he showed them a stern
+countenance when he said:
+
+"One thing! Before I touch this money, is there blood on it?"
+
+"High hands only," said the sullen brigand; but the youngest protested.
+
+"Indeed, yes," he said, "there is blood upon it. Look, see, and behold!"
+
+He bared a breast on which the skin was fine and satiny like a woman's,
+and they saw in the firelight the cicatrice of a newly healed wound.
+
+"A few drops of mine," he said proudly. "May they bring the money luck."
+
+"One thing more," said Asabri; "I have said that I will mend your
+fortunes. What sum apiece would make you comfortable for the rest of
+your days and teach you to see the evil in your present manner of life?"
+
+"If the money were to be doubled," said the sullen brigand, "then each
+of us could have what he most desires."
+
+"And what is that?" asked the banker.
+
+"For me," said the sullen brigand, "there is a certain piece of land
+upon which are grapes, figs, and olives."
+
+The second brigand said: "I am a waterman by birth and by longing. If I
+could purchase a certain barge upon which I have long had an eye, I
+should do well and honestly in the world, and happily."
+
+"And you? What do you want?" Asabri smiled paternally in the face of
+the youngest brigand.
+
+This one showed his beautiful teeth a moment, and drew the rags together
+over his scarred breast.
+
+"I am nineteen years of age," he said, and his eyes glistened. "There is
+a girl, sir, in my village. Her eyes are like velvet; her skin is smooth
+as custard. She is very beautiful. If I could go to her father with a
+certain sum of money, he would not ask where I had gotten it--that is
+why I have robbed on the highway. He would merely stretch forth his
+hands and roll his fat eyes heavenward, and say: 'Bless you, my
+children.'"
+
+"But the girl," said Asabri.
+
+"It is wonderful," said the youngest brigand, "how she loves me. And
+when I told her that I was going upon the road to earn the moneys
+necessary for our happiness, she said that she would climb down from her
+window at night and come with me. But," he concluded unctuously, "I
+pointed out to her that from sin springs nothing but unhappiness."
+
+"We formed a fellowship, we three," said the second brigand, "and swore
+an oath: to take from the world so much as would make us happy, and no
+more."
+
+"My friends," said Asabri, "there are worse brigands than yourselves
+living in palaces."
+
+The fog had lifted, and it was beginning to grow light. Asabri gathered
+up the heavy bag of money and prepared to depart.
+
+"How long," said the sullen brigand, "with all respect, before your own
+fortunes will be mended, sir, and ours?"
+
+"You are quite sure you know nothing of stocks?"
+
+"Nothing, excellency."
+
+"Then listen. They shall be mended to-day. To-morrow come to my
+bank----"
+
+"Oh, sir, we dare not show our faces in Rome."
+
+"Very well, then; to-morrow at ten sharp I shall leave Rome in a
+motor-car. Watch for me along the Appian Way."
+
+He shook them by their brown, grimy hands, mounted the impatient Biddy,
+and was gone--blissfully smiling.
+
+Upon reaching Rome he rode to his palace and assured Luigi the valet
+that all was well. Then he bathed, changed, breakfasted, napped, and
+drove to the hospital of Our Lady in Emergencies. He saw the superior
+and gave her the leather bag containing the brigands' savings.
+
+"For my sins," he said. "I have told lies half the night."
+
+Then he drove to his great banking house and sent for the cashier.
+
+"Make me up," said he, "three portable parcels of fifty thousand lire
+each."
+
+The next day at ten he left Rome in a black and beauteous motor-car,
+and drove slowly along the Appian Way. He had left his mechanic behind,
+and was prepared to renew his tires and his youth. Packed away, he had
+luncheon and champagne enough for four; and he had not forgotten to
+bring along the three parcels of money.
+
+The three brigands stepped into the Appian Way from behind a mass of
+fallen masonry. They had found the means to shave cleanly, and perhaps
+to wash. They were adorned with what were evidently their very best
+clothes. The youngest, whose ambition was the girl he loved, even wore a
+necktie.
+
+Asabri brought the motor to a swift, oily, and polished halt.
+
+"Well met," he said, "since all is well. If you," he smiled into the
+face of the sullen brigand, "will be so good as to sit beside me!... The
+others shall sit in behind.... We shall go first," he continued, when
+all were comfortably seated, "to have a look at that little piece of
+land on which grow figs, olives, and grapes. We shall buy it, and break
+our fast in the shade of the oldest fig tree. It is going to be a hot
+day."
+
+"It is below Rome, and far," said the sullen brigand; "but since the
+barge upon which my friend has set his heart belongs to a near neighbor,
+we shall be killing two birds with one stone. But with all deference,
+excellency, have you really retrieved your fortunes?"
+
+"And yours," said Asabri. "Indeed, I am to-day as rich as ever I was,
+with the exception"--his eyes twinkled behind his goggles--"of about a
+hundred and fifty thousand lire."
+
+The sullen brigand whistled; and although the roads were rough, they
+proceeded, thanks to the shock-absorbers on Asabri's car, in complete
+comfort, at a great pace.
+
+In the village nearest to the property upon which the sullen brigand had
+cast his eye, they picked up a notary through whom to effect the
+purchase.
+
+The little farm was rather stony, but sweet to the eye as a bouquet of
+flowers, with the deep greens of the figs and grapes and the silvery
+greens of the olives. Furthermore, there were roses in the door-yard,
+and the young and childless widow to whom the homestead belonged stood
+among the roses. She was brown and scarlet, and her eyes were black and
+merry.
+
+Yes, yes, she agreed, she would sell! There was a mortgage on the place.
+She intended to pay that off and have a little over. True, the place
+paid. But, Good Lord, she lived all alone, and she didn't enjoy that!
+
+They invited the pretty widow to luncheon, and she helped them spread
+the cloth under a fig tree that had thrown shade for five hundred
+years. Asabri passed the champagne, and they all became very merry
+together. Indeed, the sullen brigand became so merry and happy that he
+no longer addressed Asabri respectfully as "excellency," but gratefully
+and affectionately as "my father."
+
+This one became more and more delighted with the term, until finally he
+said:
+
+"It is true, that in a sense I am this young man's father, since I
+believe that if I were to advise him to do a certain thing he would do
+it."
+
+"That is God's truth," cried the sullen brigand; "if he advised me to
+advance single-handed against the hosts of hell, I should do so."
+
+"My son," said Asabri, "our fair guest affirms that upon this beautiful
+little farm she has had everything that she could wish except
+companionship. Are you not afraid that you, in your turn, will here
+suffer from loneliness?" He turned to the pretty widow. "I wish," said
+he, "to address myself to you in behalf of this young man."
+
+The others became very silent. The notary lifted his glass to his lips.
+The widow blushed. Said she:
+
+"I like his looks well enough; but I know nothing about him."
+
+"I can tell you this," said Asabri, "that he has been a man of exemplary
+honesty since--yesterday, and that under the seat of my automobile he
+has, in a leather bag, a fortune of fifty thousand lire."
+
+The three brigands gasped.
+
+"He is determined, in any case," the banker continued, "to purchase your
+little farm; but it seems to me that it would be a beautiful end to a
+story that has not been without a certain aroma of romance if you, my
+fair guest, were, so to speak, to throw yourself into the bargain. Think
+it over. The mortgage lifted, a handsome husband, and plenty of money in
+the bank.... Think it over. And in any case--the pleasure of a glass of
+wine with you!"
+
+They touched glasses. Across the golden bubbling, smiles leapt.
+
+"Let us," said the second brigand, "leave the pair in question to talk
+the matter over, while the rest of us go and attend to the purchase of
+my barge."
+
+"Well thought," said Asabri. "My children, we shall be gone about an
+hour. See if, in that time, you cannot grow fond of each other. Perhaps,
+if you took the bag of money into the house and pretended that it
+already belonged to both of you, and counted it over, something might be
+accomplished."
+
+The youngest brigand caught the sullen one by the sleeve and whispered
+in his ear.
+
+"If you want her, let her count the money. If you don't, count it
+yourself."
+
+The second brigand turned to Asabri. "Excellency," he whispered, "you
+are as much my father as his."
+
+"True," said Asabri, "what of it?"
+
+"Nothing! Only, the man who owns the barge which I desire to purchase
+has a very beautiful daughter."
+
+Asabri laughed so that for a moment he could not bend over to crank his
+car. And he cried aloud:
+
+"France, France, I thank thee for thy champagne! And I thank thee, O
+Italy, for thy merry hearts and thy suggestive climate!... My son, if
+the bargeman's daughter is to be had for the asking, she is yours. But
+we must tell the father that until recently you have been a very naughty
+fellow."
+
+They remained with the second brigand long enough to see him exchange a
+kiss of betrothal with the bargeman's daughter, while the bargeman
+busied himself counting the money; and then they returned to see how the
+sullen brigand and the pretty widow were getting on.
+
+The sullen brigand was cutting dead-wood out of a fig tree with a saw.
+His face was supremely happy. The widow stood beneath and directed him.
+
+"Closer to the tree, stupid," she said, "else the wound will not heal
+properly."
+
+The youngest brigand laid a hand that trembled upon Asabri's arm.
+
+"Oh, my father," he said, "these doves are already cooing! And it is
+very far to the place where I would be."
+
+But Asabri went first to the fig tree, and he said to the widow:
+
+"Is all well?"
+
+"Yes," she said, "we have agreed to differ for the rest of our lives. It
+seems that this stupid fellow needs somebody to look after him. And it
+seems to be God's will that that somebody should be I."
+
+"Bless you then, my children," said Asabri; "and farewell! I shall come
+to the wedding."
+
+They returned the notary to his little home in the village; and the fees
+which he was to receive for the documents which he was to draw up made
+him so happy that he flung his arms about his wife, who was rather a
+prim person, and fell to kissing her with the most boisterous good will.
+
+It was dusk when they reached the village in which the sweetheart of the
+youngest brigand lived. Asabri thought that he had never seen a girl
+more exquisite.
+
+"And we have loved each other," said the youngest brigand, his arm about
+her firm, round waist, "since we were children.... I think I am dying, I
+am so happy."
+
+"Shall you buy a farm, a barge, a business?" asked the banker.
+
+"Whatever is decided," said the girl, "it will be a paradise."
+
+Her old father came out of the house.
+
+"I have counted the money. It is correct."
+
+Then he rolled his fat eyes heavenward, just as the youngest brigand had
+prophesied, and said: "Bless you, my children!"
+
+"I must be going," said Asabri; "but there is one thing."
+
+Four dark luminous eyes looked into his.
+
+"You have not kissed," said Asabri; "let it be now, so that I may
+remember."
+
+Without embarrassment, the young brigand and his sweetheart folded their
+arms closely about each other, and kissed each other, once, slowly, with
+infinite tenderness.
+
+"I am nineteen," said the youngest brigand; then, and he looked
+heavenward: "God help us to forget the years that have been wasted!"
+
+Asabri drove toward Rome, his headlights piercing the darkness. The
+champagne was no longer in his blood. He was in a calm, judicial mood.
+
+"To think," he said to himself, "that for a mere matter of a hundred and
+fifty thousand lire, a rich old man can be young again for a day or
+two!"
+
+It was nearly one o'clock when he reached his palace in Rome. Luigi,
+the valet, was sitting up for him, as usual.
+
+"This is the second time in three days," said Luigi, "that you have been
+out all night.... A telegram," he threatened, "would bring the mistress
+back to Rome."
+
+"Forgive me, old friend," said Asabri, and he leaned on Luigi's
+shoulder; "but I have fallen in love...."
+
+"What!" screamed the valet. "At your age?"
+
+"It is quite true," said Asabri, a little sadly, "that at my age a man
+most easily falls in love--with life."
+
+"You shall go to bed at once," said Luigi sternly. "I shall prepare a
+hot lemonade, and you shall take five grains of quinine.... You are
+damp.... The mist from the Campagna...."
+
+Asabri yawned in the ancient servitor's face.
+
+"Luigi," he said, "I think I shall buy you a farm and a wife; or a barge
+and a wife...."
+
+"You do, do you?" said Luigi. "And I think you'll take your quinine like
+a Trojan, or I'll know the reason why."
+
+"Everybody regards me as rather an important person," complained Asabri,
+"except you."
+
+"You were seven years old," said Luigi, "when I came to serve you. I
+have aged. But you haven't. You didn't know enough then to come in when
+it rained, as the Americans say. You don't now. I would not speak of
+this to others. But to you--yes--for your own good."
+
+Asabri smiled blissfully.
+
+"In all the world," he said, "there is only one thing for a man to fear,
+that he will learn to take the world seriously; in other words, that he
+will grow up.... You may bring the hot lemonade and the quinine when
+they are ready."
+
+And then he blew his nose of a Roman emperor; for he had indeed
+contracted a slight cold.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's IT and Other Stories, by Gouverneur Morris
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IT AND OTHER STORIES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 27934.txt or 27934.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
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+
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+
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